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Building Our First House: Floor Plan & Elevations Tour
comments (0) March 7th, 2009 in Project Gallery
sjdehner, member
37 users recommend
Beneath the lean-to utility room sits a handy cold-storage for over-wintering produce and keeping canned goods.
Photo: Shawn & Jamie Dehner
After our house was featured in Fine Homebuilding (February) we've had requests to see our floor plan. For those interested this page shows the working plan - minus dimensions & notes - from which we built.
The physical work of self-building was definitely a challenging project although figuring out what to build and how to build it also offered its own set of challenges before we ever sank the first nail.
It took us a year before 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 we'd hoped it would be. It incorporates features like Icynene spray-foam insulation and a passive solar window layout.
A few of the considerations we made during the designing process include:
- We wanted a simple, classic design.
- Once finished we wanted the house to seem as if it had been standing for generations (while hopefully having been built well enough to last at least at least as long)!
- We situated the house for passive-solar gain, which reduces both our carbon requirements and heating costs during winter.
- We wanted our windows to provide natural light in every corner of the house - including the attic.
- We wanted our hearth to be situated near the center of the house to maximize radiant heat and to be made from local stone.
- We made sure our main floor rooms were connected via wideopenings (4'-6') to provide a circulation of heat from the wood stove during the winter.
- And we also made room for a wide-open stairwell that encourages a strong convection through the entire house making it possible to heat from a single central source.
Our work is now done. The house is settling in comfortably with the surrounding classic architecture of our little New England town. It was (fairly) simple to build and has to our delight proven itself to be all of the things noted above, particularly, and most importantly, energy-efficient.
Design or Plan used: My own design - THE small HOUSE CATALOG
posted in: Project Gallery, energy efficiency, green building, architecture, kitchen, deck, floor plans, foundations, site work, porch, living room, stairs, laundry room, dining room, hallway, shawn dehner, belfast maine
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Garage Progress
We're making good progress on the garage shop at the project house. Drywall is hung, carriage doors are installed and the new front facade has been painted. read more
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