Mapping out the land

I've been stuck on two problems. Later I'll write about the footing details, but right now I want to look at the mapping difficulties. This isn't the first time I've written about this problem, and it probably won't be the last.

The land is a full city block, 270 feet on a side. It is split in to two equal-sized parcels. The orientation is close to North/South, but appears to be about 3 degrees askew from true north. I can accept that error for now. (It appears to be ~7 feet off when I'm 1/2-way between two marked points, calculated as 'tan(3 degrees) * 270 / 2' but my trig is weak.). The great news is that it's already surveyed, with rebar at each of the corners.

I want to cut down as few trees as possible. I love the woods, and putting trees back is hard to do quickly. I know we'll clear some to build the house, and more later, but I want to do it incrementally. So, I walk around the land looking for areas that are already pretty clear, having few trees, or trees that are very small, or short-lived trees like Alder. I want to mark these down on the above map, but that is turning out to be tricky.

I tried using a compass and measuring tape, but ran in to a few difficulties:

- Taking a bearing on a compass is hard! Siting down the needle at a landmark is highly inaccurate. Maybe I can get within 5 degrees.

- The land is full of brush, making it hard to run a tape measure in a straight line.

- The land is full of brush (still?), making it hard to get around.

- The land is full of brush (no!), so I can't put up a reference string around the borders

I tried using the GPS unit that came with my Streets and Trips software, but it seems like the accuracy too far off for my purposes. I am going to try a GPS unit with WAAS next week.

As for getting around in the brush, I tried pulling Salal by hand (it works, but it's really slow) and I tried cutting with a machete (not much luck, maybe I'm not using it right). I'm going to look in to renting a brush cutter (a weed eater but with a blade instead of a string), and possibly buy a small tractor with a loader and excavator (should be useful in the future around the homestead).

Habitat for Humanity

I signed up with Habitat for Humanity, as a way to learn more about house building, on someone else's house. It seems like a good trade: they get my help, I get to learn. Perhaps I could draw some comparisons to apprenticeships.

The first day I got to build a set of steps. They work out of a semi-truck, with a door 4' off the ground. With an experienced carpenter calling the shots, we designed & built steps (6 of them), a landing (3' x 4'), and a handrail. Now that I've been up and down on it a bunch of times, I can say that we did a good job.

They are building 3 houses at once, right next to each other. The excavation of all 3 was done by professionals, as was the concrete work on house #3. The concrete work on houses #1 and #2 are volunteer-built. Some of the volunteers are locals (like me). The last two weeks were filled by the RV Care-A-Vanners, volunteers who travel around in their RVs building houses for Habitat. They're all at least a couple decades older than me, but they can beat me around the work site. Just when I think I'm keeping pace with them, I remember that they do this 5 days / week for two weeks, while just show up when I can. Wow.

On later days I helped build footing forms, then foundation/stem wall forms, then stripped forms off the concrete. Here you can see a detail of how we braced a corner before the pour:

The last couple times it was raining all day. Rain + concrete + excavated glacial till subsoil = pretty dirty work. I still managed to convince Julie to join me one day. Here she is looking sodden:

This activity has taken me away from directly working on our own house, but I suspect that the net result is a time savings, as my skills and knowledge improve. It has been especially helpful to compare the practices of the professional on house #3 to the way the volunteers work on #2. Getting two perspectives helps me see much more of the whole picture.

Lemonade

I worked on the "ferry" floor plan a lot, but couldn't ever get something I liked. It solved some of the problems in the "straight water wall" plan, but introduced some new issues, especially around the flow of the house. If I put the kitchen sink on the south side of the water wall, then the kitchen juts out in to the living area. Then the path through the house gets long and complex; it breaks the flow. Also, I never found a good place for an entry area.

After pushing and pulling on the shapes and not feeling good about the results, I decided to table it and try something different. I went back to the straight water wall plan, and pushed and pulled. A few things started to fall in to place. Finally things started falling in to place. I now present to you the result of that effort, the "lemonade" house. (The name is pretty arbitrary; I was drinking lemonade at the time.)



 Strangely I ended up with a U-shaped water wall like the ferry house that I had discarded. I think having it only 6' deep made things work out much better.

Things that work well:

- flow from one end of the house to the other is simpler than before
- kitchen isn't crowded against the South wall, nor is it so far back that no south light comes in
- It's 1246 sq. ft. heated area, so it should qualify as an ADU, if I understand the rules correctly
- 49'8' width is what works out well if I put 8" x 8" full-dimensioned posts on 7' centers, which is pretty arbitrary

I have some ideas about how the kids room will work out. Maybe a couple alcoves for beds, so the kids have their own spaces without having separate rooms. Maybe some closets in the middle to separate things a bit. Maybe we start simple and add more later. I need to understand the code requirements better, especially around septic system sizing, before I decide.

I wish the middle space was a little bigger. Our current house (which fits us fine) has about 100 sq. ft. more dedicated to the living room / dining room / kitchen. My drawing makes better use of that space, and part of the current living room is used for kids' toys, which could move in to the kids' room. On the other hand, making the public space as attractive as possible is good for bringing the family together.

I am thinking about the main entrance on the South being through a greenhouse. Imagine French doors to the greenhouse, which are kept open much of the time. Attaching a greenhouse to a cordwood building works well, as the thermal mass of the cordwood wall will moderate the temperature of the greenhouse (something greenhouses often struggle with). The greenhouse would help us capture a little more heat in the winter, and clean the air. It could also function as a mudroom, leaving that interior space open. It would be a beautiful space that makes a transition from the outdoors to the indoors, both emotionally and thermally.

I have spent almost 0 time in greenhouses, so I don't know how it would look, or how to make it beautiful, or if they're pleasant to be in.  Even thought I don't plan to actually build the greenhouse until well after the house is complete, I'd like to make the best plans for it I can.

Also, an interesting note about post strength. I ran through the math on the weight of the roof structure + snow, and looked at how strong the posts need to be to carry it according to code. For #2 Douglas Fir, the total cross-sectional area of all posts in the whole house, put together, needs to be about 7" x 7". Yeah, that's not much. Of course, the girt/girder/rafter/joist spans to hold all that weight would be insane...

Anyway:

- How would you adjust the spaces in this floor plan?

- Where would you put some doors?

- What do you think?

A point of reference

We're comfortable in our current house, although a few small changes would make it much nicer. To give us a point of reference, I drew the floor plan in SketchUp. I present it to you here:

1287 sq. ft. on the books.

The house was built as a rectangle, and then had two additions.

First the dining area was added to the kitchen. It's nice, with 3 large windows looking out at the neighborhood, although the temperature swings are wild. The East end of the large living room was originally the eating area. For us it's a kids' play area.

Later the bedroom on the North side was added. The hallway to that room was taken out of the bedroom on the West side, as was a small hall closet. The hallway takes 60 sq. ft. but offers very little in return.

I don't know when it was built, but there's a tiny water closet in the North bedroom. Toilet only, no sink. I imagine the original owner, a G.I. who had this house built as he started a family in 1950, had a hard time making the trip to the bathroom at night, 50 years later, so he had that toilet added. It belongs to our cats today.

There is forced air heat in the original bedrooms, bathroom, and living room. The North bedroom has baseboard electric heat, which stops us from putting furniture in useful places. The dining room has baseboard heat that we never turn on, because we're only in there for a short time each day, and because the floor is uninsulated, so it would be lost quickly.  The kitchen is unheated, but when we're cooking it's not bad.

A big complaint I have here is that there's nowhere in the laundry space to leave a basket of laundry. It only needs another 10 sq. ft. to be so much nicer.

While I'm at it, there is a cold air return in the floor in a high-traffic area. It hurts to walk on barefoot, and the kids' toes get caught sometime - very painful. Also, the hardwood floor finish is in very bad shape.

Our landlord offered to sell us this house, but it's more than we wanted to spend, and refinishing the floors would mean moving out entirely anyway, so what's the point?

Anyway, there's a point of reference for ya.

The "ferry" sketch

I was riding on the ferry to Keystone and came up with an idea that led to this floorplan sketch.

It has a lot of the same features as the  previous floorplan. The main difference vs. is that the wet wall is not straight; it's U-shaped. There's a bathroom on either side, and the kitchen sink would be to the south. Plumbing distances are even shorter. That leaves a much smaller utility room on the north side, instead of a huge attached garage I had before. That makes the structure a bit smaller, making construction more doable for this amateur.

The house less square, which is good for solar gain (more insolation on the South) and good for getting light in to the kitchen (previously the kitchen was much further from the windows).

It could better fit a shed roof, which might be good. A shed roof here could come down very low on the North, even to 6' high, as bedrooms and bathrooms can tolerate a low ceiling, while being quite tall (hopefully elegant) in the daytime spaces. (In the past I've lived in rooms with low sloping ceilings and hated it, but 6' should be OK.)

Square is better for central radiant heat (round is even better). Square also requires less exterior wall building for a given square footage (round is again better). So that's a compromise.

It optimizes for sunlight in the daytime spaces more than the sleeping spaces.

Note the alcove entering the rooms (possible bedrooms) on the East side, creating a transition from public to private space. The Northwest bedroom still needs that.

More to ponder...

Utility room

Many of the house floorplans I play with include an unheated utility area. The interior walls of this area are insulated. My understanding is that its square footage doesn't count for taxes or for the 1250 sq. ft. maximum ADU size.  Also, having a cool space like that right next to the kitchen is great for food storage and fermentation.

Additionally, I usually put all the plumbing in its walls, so I don't have to plumb in exterior cordwood walls.  This will make it much easier to repair and modify plumbing over time, which otherwise is a pain in the neck.

Sometimes I think this room will also be a mud room / airlock, used as the primary entrance by the people who live in the house.

I brainstormed a list of things I could put in that space that don't need to be in heated space.

• work sink
• domestic hot water heater
• boiler for radiant floor
• washer & dryer
• table to fold clothes
• recycling bins
• litter box
• server & wiring closet
• shoes & jackets

I also thought of stuff that we currently store inside the house or in the garage that would be better stored in this kind of space.

• spare rugs
• sofa cover
• off-season clothes
• art supplies
• files
• photos in boxes
• food (canned, fermented, dry)
• idle toys
• sewing machine
• spare litter
• soaps, shampoos, and other cleaning products
• broom, mop, bucket
• spare computer parts
• spare light bulbs
• vacuum cleaner
• basic toolset
• toilet paper
• sawdust for composting toilets
• laundry waiting to be washed or folded
• ironing board

The growing house

What if you don't want to build too big, but lots of small houses are too small? Another option is to build a small house that grows in time.

For example, a kitchen with an open space. At first you sleep in the open space and eat standing up. Then you add an addition with a couple sleeping rooms, and the open space becomes the dining area and social space. Maybe you add a den.

It has many of the advantages of the small houses approach, without requiring nearly as many walls. You have to get a lot of the planning right up front, though, or you end up with a very awkward layout. You also end up with huge exterior walls taking up interior square footage.

I think that an addition has to big enough to justify good construction. A tiny add-on space won't be worth the time, materials, and money of good insulation and foundation.

I suspect that we'll build the house in one go, but there are a few add-ons that might make sense.

An attached greenhouse is interesting. It can extend the growing season and sprout seeds. It can capture solar energy to heat the house more. It can act as an airlock to the main entrance of the house. It sounds nice to enter the house through greenery, year-round.

I'm toying with the idea of making the the greenhouse be a sitting room / enclosed porch, too. Somewhere that adults go to socialize or read. TV-watching and kids toys are in a different room, which could eventually become the 3rd bedroom. Not sure where this goes, just pondering it right now.