Category Archives: house construction

House rules

Posted on by

First of all, Leah and I want to wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving. We hope you can spend it with people you care about, and we hope you get plenty of good food to eat.

(Updated) I’m certainly not an expert in home design, floor planning or house construction, but after looking for my first house in Alabama, building our current house and planning for our next house, I have some opinions. Some are consistent with standard home design, and some are just my personal view, so take them for what they’re worth. The rules are oriented towards designing a house, but I think you should keep them in mind if you’re looking for an existing house

The first rule is to design your house for the next owner. Quirkiness, eccentricity or even just out-of-the-ordinary taste may suit you, but it’s unlikely to be anyone else’s idea of what a house should be. It doesn’t matter if you think the next house will be your last, because it’s impossible to predict what the future holds.

When I was looking for a house outside Huntsville, Al, my real estate agent showed me a house that a retired couple built. It was an earth-sheltered, passive-solar house with a linear floor plan, like an old roadside motel. There was no central heating or air conditioning. Apparently the owners had read too many enthusiast articles about the virtues of earth sheltering and passive solar heating. As great as they may be, neither works particularly well in Alabama. They had installed a window air conditioner through a wall so that it stuck out into the garage, and then cut holes and put fans in the walls to try to pass the cool air or heat from the wood stove from the living room to the bedrooms. It was their own, personal vision, and it was supposed to be their final home, until they decided to move to Florida to be close to family. It was still for sale years later.

Build the house you want, but make sure it suits the needs of other buyers in your area. If every house in your area has a basement, your house needs a basement. If every house has three bedrooms, your house needs three bedrooms. If every house has central air conditioning, your house needs central air conditioning. If every house has an attached garage, your house needs an attached garage. If every potential home buyer is not a kooky hippie, don’t build a house that only kooky hippies will want.

The second rule is an extension of the first: building a workable house plan from scratch requires hard, thoughtful, informed work. The requirements for practicality tend to control floor plan layout, and every single requirement has to be remembered and met in some way. That’s why if you look at many house plans, they start to look alike.

The third rule is that a house design should meet certain standards for appearance and utility. For example, the tops of windows and the tops of doors on a given side of a house should all be at the same level. If you see a house that happens to violate that rule, you will probably think something looks odd even if you aren’t consciously aware of what the problem is. Ignore that rule and the next buyer swill probably feel some level of discomfort when they look at the house, and discomfort doesn’t sell houses.

The next rule is that a house should be designed for its location. (This is actually such an important rule that it should probably be No. 1.) A house on a slope should probably have a basement. If the slope is steep, the house should probably have a linear layout with the short axis aligned with the slope. If it’s in a hot climate, the roof overhang should be deep enough to provide shade for windows and the sides of the house. If it’s in a cold or even moderate climate, windows should be concentrated on the south-facing side. If there’s a view, put some windows so you can see it.

As a result of Robin’s comment, I came back here to add an important rule as a corollary to the preceding rule. In a climate that requires some heating, taking advantage of the sun’s energy just makes sense. There’s something really satisfying about sitting in a sunny room and being nice and warm when it’s freezing and the wind is blowing outside — and the heat never comes on. Even if a house is not specifically designed as a passive solar house, if the site conditions allow it, there should be windows that can gather some of the sun’s heat in the winter. The slope on our new property prevent having the house face due south as I would prefer. Doing so would introduce features that we’re trying to eliminate, like very high eaves. But we’re going to put deep windows on the southeast and southwest sides to get as much sunlight as we can.

The next rule is that every plumbing fixture should be as close as possible to a water heater. Many (most?) house plans I have looked at ignore this rule because it’s just so convenient to scatter bathrooms all around the house. Put the master bath at one end and the guest bath (or kids’ bath) at the other end, with the kitchen somewhere in between. If the floor plan does that, some provision must be made to get hot water to every outlet quickly, or someone ends up waiting too long for hot water. There are ways to get around it, like recirculating pumps and on-demand heaters, but they tend to cost more. The best plans have a plumbing core, with kitchen, bathrooms and laundry room centered close to the water heater.

The next one is tricky. If you want a 1500-square-foot house, and you want rooms that add up to 1500 square feet, you can’t just draw a rectangle that’s 30 feet by 50 feet.Walls have thickness. Exterior walls are at least six inches thick, and interior walls are around five inches thick. You can either have a 1500-square-foot footprint and smaller rooms, or rooms that add up to 1500 square feet and a larger footprint, not both.

I have some personal rules, or at least inclinations. One is that I don’t like halls; they waste space that could otherwise be used for rooms. Unfortunately, it’s really hard to avoid halls, and I haven’t figured out a way to get around using them. Another is that bathroom walls should be sound-proofed or the bathroom should be located so that the walls don’t adjoin living spaces, especially living rooms, dining rooms and kitchens.

There are so many rules that it’s hard to list them. You know some of them, but you might not be aware of them. For example, every time you enter a room, you expect to find a light switch at a certain height and location next to the entry. If there are two exits for a room, like a living room or kitchen, you’re going to expect to be able to turn off lights at each exit so you don’t have to feel your way through a dark room. When you walk into the house and take your coat off, you’re going to look for some place to hang it up. Vacuum cleaners, sheets and towels need storage.

It’s hard to meet all the requirements even if you know about them. Our current house doesn’t meet all of them. For example, we don’t have a plumbing core. The guest bathroom is out in Siberia, so I end up washing my hands with cold water when I use it. I don’t like a plan that makes it look like you live in a garage with a house attached as an afterthought. Our house looks exactly like that; the first thing you see when you pull into the driveway is the garage.

I have tried to keep the rules in mind while designing our next house. The garage in our next house will be hidden at the back. Our next house will have the plumbing fixtures closer to the water heater, although we won’t quite have a plumbing core. I changed the placement of the master bedroom and living room to take advantage of a view that I didn’t realize we would have.

Last night I thought I was finished with all but the details and was in the process of making a model of the house with foamcore boards. And then when I was taking a shower and thinking about this post, I realized that I had violated my first rule. I had planned for a deck on the front of the house that would have no ground access, which had necessitated putting the main entry on the least accessible side of the house. I realized that layout would look ridiculous, if not crazy, to anyone else. And Leah didn’t like it either.

So now we’re going to have access to the ground from the front deck, and a front door that is actually on the front of the house. Once I got to that point, several problems I was working with suddenly disappeared.

It seems that the rules actually have a reason behind them.

New house update

Posted on by

This is an update on our new house construction project. We have been working on a house plan for some time now, since not much work can be done on the property until all the permits are issued, and most of those depend on approval of a house plan.

We have certain criteria based on desires and the requirements of the lot. We had thought that the view, if there is one, would be downslope facing Lavender Trail. Due south would be about a quarter turn to the right, as seen from the house site facing Lavender Trail. We want a covered deck on the view side, which we will call the front, but no steps to ground level so Leah will feel more comfortable leaving a window or door open on the deck at night. We also want a sunroom on the right side of the house so that it will get as much sun as possible.

Our working plan had the living room on the right and the master bedroom on the left, both opening to the covered deck, and a sunroom to the right of the living room with doors into the room and onto the deck. And then Saturday as I was trying to lay out a line marked in ten-foot increments so we can measure the slope, I wandered away towards the Fouche Gap side of the lot and realized we could probably get a view in that direction along the ridge of Lavender Mountain and possibly down into part of Little Texas Valley. There are lots of trees in that direction, some quite large, but I think judicious clearing would allow a nice view. So now the logical place for the living room is on the corner where the master bedroom had been. Flipping the plan solves that problem but creates a new one. Since we won’t have access from ground level to the front of the house, the main entrance needs to be on the side where the living room is. Before we flipped the plan, it would have been easy to bring a walk from the rear of the house, where the garage will be, to a door on that side. Now, with the living room on the other side, guests will have to walk in a counter-intuitive direction around the garage and then along the side of the house. We may need a sign, but since we almost never get guests, it shouldn’t be too big a problem.

Most of the smaller house plans we have looked at have compromises in things like bathroom size. Some of them actually have a smaller master bath than guest bath, and neither of us will be happy with that. The master bedrooms are also much smaller than our current bedroom. So we are stretching plans to expand bathroom and bedroom size. The good news is that we have now managed to get a reasonable first cut of a floor plan with only a few of our own compromises, like needing a map to find the front door.

The next step will be to measure the slope at the house site. That is going to have an impact on another requirement, which is a way to turn around our travel trailer so we (and by “we” I mean “I”) don’t have to back down a long, sloped, curving driveway. I’m afraid it’s going to mean significant excavation. But we’ll know more in a few days.

I wrote the preceding on Saturday night. After I wrote that we had a “reasonable first cut” for our house plan, I thought more about how the garage roof would fit onto the roof of the house, and I concluded that we had a problem. I’m sure a good framing crew and a good roofing crew could solve the problem, but one of my aims is to keep things as simple as possible, so all Sunday afternoon I worked on a different floor plan, one that would resolve that issue and, at the same time, cut the square footage a little. Now I think I have managed it. There are some compromises; you will still need a map to find the “front” door. But if there’s one thing I have learned from studying house plans, looking at houses, and designing and building our current house, it’s that the entire process is one of compromise. Even if we had an unlimited budget, which, of course, we don’t, there would still be compromises. I’ll eventually build a model of the house, which will let us visualize the layout and how it will work. There may be changes after that. But another thing I have learned is that house plans often change during the construction process. Our current house lost a second story as we built it, and that’s a pretty drastic change.

House construction, part 1

Posted on by

I’m going to start posting our progress on the new house we intend to build. This will help us keep track of when and what we’re doing.

So far, I have walked the back property line, which is about 700 feet. All of the corners are marked, but the back line is thickly wooded, so it’s not possible to get a good sight line from one marker to the other. From the approximate center of the rear line, I measured to the approximate center of the property, where we want to locate the house. I also cut branches and a few small trees to make a walkable path up to the center of the lot.

This is the property map from the Floyd County GIS site. Our new property is in blue. It totals about five acres. The map is oriented so north is up.

new lot map This is the area with satellite imagery instead of line maps. The arrow is pointing to our current house.

new lot sat image

The two southerly lots slope generally along the property lines from the back line towards Lavender Trail, the curving road in this image. The upper lot slopes down towards Lavender Trail and towards Fouche Gap Road, the road at the upper right of the image. On a sloping lot, the short axis of a house should generally be aligned with the slope. On our lot, the slope is about 40 degrees east of south. That means if we align the house with the slope, we won’t have a south-facing wall.

I have mentioned before my efforts to have south-facing glass in our current house to get the maximum solar gain in the winter. With sliding glass doors in the living room and two bedrooms, we get nice and toasty on a sunny winter day, even if the temperature is below freezing outside. We both want that in our new house, and that presents a problem.

We might get something close to what we want by making sure we have windows on the southeast-facing side and the southwest-facing side. Or we might orient the house somewhere between due south and 40 degrees east of south. But orienting the house more towards south means pushing the southeast corner further downslope. That’s what I did with our current house, and I don’t want to end up with the southeast corner of the house as far above grade as the southeast corner of our current house; that would defeat at least one of our purposes in building a new house.

Back when I was planning our current house, more than 15 years ago, you could buy books of house plans at the grocery store. I had 15 to 20 of them. These days, house plans are mostly online. Leah and I spent a while Saturday looking at some. None were exactly what we wanted, and only a few (so far) were even close. We are almost certainly going to have to modify a plan, or have a local drafter draw up plans to our specifications, as I did with our current house.

The next step for us is to map the slope. That will tell us how critical it is to keep the house oriented along the slope of the land. We won’t do anything more, including clearing for the drive and the house site, until the buyers of my mother’s house can actually get to closing.

Here is one more restriction on house location.

twisted tree

Leah and I both had the same reaction when we saw this: we have to keep this tree. Leah thinks the picture doesn’t quite capture the spirit of this tree, with two twisted main trunks and one wild trunk heading off towards who-knows-where. I haven’t decided whether it’s spooky, but I haven’t been there at night yet.

Here’s a special, bonus, trick question.

As everyone probably knows, the Earth’s axis is tilted by 23.4 degrees from “up”. That’s why we have seasons. The tropics are south of 23.4 degrees (for us in the northern hemisphere). If you go south of that, the sun will go north of straight up (the zenith) at noon in the summer. If you live north of that, the sun never gets north of the zenith at noon. If you live north of 66.6 degrees (the arctic circle), you will have some days in the winter where the sun never gets above the horizon.

So here’s the trick question: how far north do you have to go so that the sun never shines on the north side of a house oriented exactly north and south, and east and west? (Assuming the house is on flat land with nothing to provide shade anywhere near it)

Catching up

Posted on by

A few things have happened in the last week, so this is a catch-up post.

First, we had to call an ambulance last Friday, October 17, because Leah was having severe abdominal pain and vomiting. This is the second time we’ve had to do that. The first time was in 2011. That resulted in surgery to fix an intestinal blockage. The blockage was the caused by adhesions and scarring from the colon cancer surgery she had back in 1999.

Leah has had relatively minor episodes several times this year. An x-ray in July had shown what was characterized as a chronic, partial blockage. A colonoscopy in early September (Leah’s second this year) did not show anything in the colon, so we (and presumably the doctors) were left not really knowing what was going on.

This time there was no question that something bad was happening. Fortunately, Leah began feeling better fairly quickly and the blockage, if that is, indeed what it was, resolved with no surgery. She had one CT scan and an x-ray while she was in the ER, and at least two x-rays after she was admitted. The first scans they took during this stay seemed consistent with the July x-ray, but a later scan where they followed an x-ray opaque liquid through her small intestine showed quick passage, indicating no blockage in the small intestine. At one time her surgeon thought it might be gastroenteritis, but that did not seem to be the case.

In any event, Leah came home on Tuesday and has been on a liquid/soft diet since. They told her at the hospital that it might take two weeks to get back to normal.

That means two weeks without huevos rancheros.

Once Leah made it home, I started tramping over our new property to find the middle of the lot, which is where we plan to build. The most work I did was clearing a wide enough path to drive our side-by-side 4-wheeler (a Kawasaki Mule) up to the site with a chainsaw and other tools. There are lots and lots of trees, ranging from small enough to cut with large lopping shears to large enough to require a lot of planning before cutting with a chainsaw. Clearing for construction will take a bulldozer, and the operator said he wants the trees uncut so he can uproot them with his dozer. That’s fine with me.

And, finally, on Thursday I performed an experiment with a free-range dog. Leah has been telling me to take Zeke with me and let him roam freely while I work. She thinks it will let him get all his wandering urges out of his system. So I put him up in the front of the Mule and we rode up to the lot.

Zeke wandered around while I worked, and gradually left orbit. I didn’t see him again for about two hours, when he plodded up my newly-made path to greet me. One a scale of one to 10 (with one being perfectly clean and 10 being completely covered with mud and cow manure) he was about a three. Not too bad, but he needed a bath.

He was tired. Here he is resting after Leah and I went back up so I could show her what I had been doing. The tree with the yellow ribbon around it is the approximate center of the lot.

zeke_at_the_lot

Later in the evening we began hearing some noises from Zeke’s direction. He was lying on his bed at the end of the sofa. And then a revolting odor wafted up in my direction. I wasn’t sure which end of the dog it came from, but eventually we figured out that he was burping. That continued through the evening. I had to keep a box of matches nearby. He woke Leah up at about 5:30, and Leah woke me from a dream (I didn’t mind; I was dreaming about writing reports at work.) I had to take Zeke outside to relieve himself. He has been having intestinal disturbances of his own all day today (Friday), and his burps can still cause paint to peel. I’m hoping he can work this out of his system.

The good news is that he came back to me. That’s encouraging. But I don’t think the wanderlust is over, and when he wanders, it seems he’s living up to the omnivore name. I’ll try this experiment again. Maybe Leah’s prediction will be right.