Building Our First House: Floor Plan & Elevations Tour

comments (0) March 7th, 2009 in Project Gallery

sjdehner, member

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Beneath the lean-to utility room sits a handy cold-storage for over-wintering produce and keeping canned goods.

A comparison of the original plan with the completed house shows that we made alterations while building.
One of these changes was the addition of a step-down foundation to provide a wonderfully bright basement.
Flexibility proved to be an asset to us during the building process!

Our Southwest elevation makes for excellent passive-solar gain which reduces our heating needs.

The hearth is situated where the left chair sits in the living room on the floor plan.
The layout is strongly influenced by the traditional center-chimney New Englander houses that are common in Maine.

The second floor is comprised of three bedrooms and a comfortably sized bathroom.
Theres also an attic stairway - a disguised ships ladder - with a built-in closet underneath located in the hall.

Beneath the lean-to utility room sits a handy cold-storage for over-wintering produce and keeping canned goods.

Photo: Shawn & Jamie Dehner

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Since our house was featured on the Fine Homebuilding website in February we've had requests to see our floor plan. For those interested this page shows the original working plan (minus dimensions & notes) from which we built.

While self-building was certainly a challenging project, figuring out just what to build offered its own set of challenges long before we sank the first nail.

After a year of working on a simple architecture program* we finally struck gold on a house design that we thought we could afford to build with minimal help.

Two years later the result is a traditional looking house that incorporates a few modern features such as Icynene spray-foam insulation and a passive solar window layout.

A few of the major considerations we made during the designing process include:

We should have a straightforward design. That is, in terms of construction we wanted a house that would be simple and efficient to build.

The finished house should suggest that it has been standing for generations (while having been built well enough to last at least at least as long).

A passive-solar design would reduce both our carbon requirements and heating costs during winter.

Windows should provide natural light in every corner of the house - including the attic.

The hearth should be situated near the center of the house to maximize radiant heat.

The main floor rooms should be connected by comfortably sized openings (4'-6') to provide a circulation of heat from the wood stove during the winter.

Building a wide-open stairwell would encourage strong convection moving heat upstairs so that the entire house can be easily heated from a single source.

Now finished, the house is settling in comfortably with the surrounding classic architecture of our town. It was simple to build and has (to our delight) proven itself to be all of the things noted above, particularly, and most importantly, energy-efficient.

*Better Homes & Gardens Home Design Suite 7.0

Design or Plan used: My own design