dream home
I currently live in a 1,000 sqft home with my four kids and wife. We have three bedrooms and one bathroom. If you calculate out the square footage per person, it comes to almost 167 sqft/person. That is a little crowded. The one bathroom scenario is challenging at times as well. One of our ambitions is to build our next home. It probably is not going to happen for a while. There are a few things that we need to get in order before then, including our finances. It’s crowded, but we are making due in the meantime. My wife (the other blaw), is working towards a degree in respiratory therapy and in a few years after she graduates, we’ll be in a much better position to move and build a new house.I find it interesting to read what others are doing with the homes they build. My wife and I have definite plans of things we would like to include in the home we build.
We would like to have more than a handkerchief-sized lot of land. Ideally, I would like an estate-sized lot (many wooded acres) but close to the city and its amenities. I would like to leave most of the lot wooded and have a clearing near the house where I can landscape and have a nice yard that the family and I can work. It would be nice to be able to take walks on my own property. If it’s adjacent to a park or forest of some sort, all the better.
Energy efficiency is very important, if for no other reason than to help us better afford it. I want to build the home using insulated concrete forms (or ICFs). ICFs provide a number of other benefits besides energy efficiency, including durability against catastrophic events (fires, tornadoes, earthquakes), security, lower-cost insurance, and sound-proofing, but probably a more important feature of ICFs is that they offer this without funky hard-to-sell designs (like geodesic domes or underground homes). That is a major selling point for my wife. I also like the fact that I can put ICFs up myself. I’m still debating about whether or not I want to do that or not. I don’t know that I can rely on others to help me. Generally, I don’t think it’s a good idea to put too much stock in others helping you build your house. In fact, I think you are better off planning on building the house yourself (if you go that route) along with any hired help. www.ownerbuilderbook.com offers some good insight regarding this.
The people at www.arit.com seem to have a good grasp on the building the entire ICF home with appropriate heating and cooling. They incorporate the technologies that I would like to incorporate in my home including geothermal heating/cooling coupled with radiant floor heating and an air exchange system to ensure the home has adequate fresh air. They also have some other features that I find interesting including speed floors (floors are poured from concrete) and a variation on the speed floors to create concrete roofs so the entire house is a concrete structure.
My wife and I have had our house design and floor plan for quite some time and we tweak it on occasion. There are two floors, plus a basement and an attic. Given that the house would be an enclosed envelope, we see no reason not to utilize the attic space for living area. With just the two floors, we have about 3000+ sqft of living area, but when you throw in the basement and the attic, the living area jumps to 5000+ sqft. It’s the same home that many others build out at 3000 sqft, but with a few modifications to the way it’s built, we increase the living space by 66%.
The floor plan is designed so that the house is divvied up by usage types. The basement serves as a recreation area. All noisy activities take place at that level. The main floor serves for entertaining and general family activity. With my wife's large family and my smaller, but still large family, lots of space to accommodate entertaining is important. The second floor is where the living area is. All the bedrooms are on that floor. There is also a recreation room on that floor where the children can play and where the laundry are will most likely go. My wife likes the idea of having the laundry area on the same floor as the living area. I am still trying to figure out how the dryer is going to get vented, but I am sure there is a solution to the problem somewhere. The attic will most likely be a crafts area/project room, although it could easily be turned into a bedroom as well. Those that want to engage in noisy activity have their area in the basement, while those that need solitude and quiet can enjoy it in one of the upper areas.
I would like the house to be wired for sound and video so we could monitor the children from anywhere. We would also wire the house for networking, cable and other amenities needed for a smart home. I have read ideas to include outlets on the eaves for Christmas lights, and I like that idea. An even better idea, if it exists, is to have Christmas lights that can retract into a cavity in the eaves with the flip of a switch. It would be nice to not have to climb the ladder each year to hang lights, but in lieu of that, outlets in the eaves would do just as well.
One of the tweaks we have added to our house plan is to include a wrap-around porch to the design. Originally, we were looking at cladding our home with brick or stone, but if we have a wrap-around porch, fiber cement siding might make more sense (not to mention how much cheaper it would be). We also moved the entrance of the garage from the front to the side to better accommodate the wrap-around porch. The whole design will incorporate handicap accessible features where possible. I would like to have an elevator, but we will most likely have to do without one, given their high cost.
In the important areas of the house (i.e. the kitchen and the bathroom), my wife wants them tricked out – Cambria countertops, top of the line faucets, under-mounted sinks, nice appliances, cherry cabinets, walk-in showers, dual sinks in the bathroom, garden tub. I may splurge for a lighting designer, not just for these areas, but also for the entire house, since I detest poor lighting.
I also want the house to be low/easy maintenance, so where I can incorporate an item that will prevent me from having to work I will - things like no-clog gutters, sloped landscape curbing for edging with a mower, steel roofing, no-paint siding, etc.
A couple of other features that would be nice but are not high on the priority list (i.e. they probably won’t make it in the house) include: a rockwork/waterfall feature in the foyer, an attached indoor swimming pool (with another waterfall – I like waterfalls), a slide going from the second floor to the swimming pool, an alpine slide (if the topography allows for it), a heated driveway (so I don’t have to clear any snow), a long driveway that winds through the wooded area of the estate, concrete stamping to give the driveway pattern, a pond or fountain in the front, a detached workshop, and solar panels or windmills. Some of these features may eventually make it in as we add to the house after it’s built, but they probably won’t be there initially.
We obviously have champagne tastes and a cheap beer budget, but I think there’s a smart way to approach this where you can get a ton more value out of your efforts than conventional means allow. Patience is important. It’s also the thing I am going to find most challenging.
posted by bylaw @ 9:32 PM
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