Hi All, Any thoughts on my draft plans? I'm looking for ways to simplify the design to lower costs, save energy, and build sustainably. Ironic - we started out wanting to build "Not So Big" and now we have about 1000 sq ft more than we had hoped. I should mention that we are building for the long term (until they have to cart us out). We're on 1-acre in an old ('73) suburban development. Solar, wind, and geothermal are all "doable" on our property. Our top two goals are sustainability and cost (even ranking), with build time a little lower on the priority scale, and material finishes a distant fourth (we intend to invest in the building envelope and energy efficiency up front). Feel free to be critical and send me some feedback. In the immortal words of Pat Benatar - "Hit me with your best shot..."

Sorry,
My eyes aren't as good as they once were, I'm having trouble picking up the details.
But if you have a wife, and that closet in the master bedroom is not any bigger than it looks,
Your going to have to keep your clothes in one of the upstairs closets.
Seriously, if you email me your plans in an attachment that I can enlarge, I'll look them over
and give you my 2 cents worth.

My thoughts from a cold climate perspective:
It can be very tricky to insulate and maintain an envelope on an inset 2nd floor, your framing costs will be higher because of the additional carrying beams and the cut up roof. You seem to have alot of glazing, windows are nice but expensive and inefficient.

If you plan on dying there why do you need 4 bedrooms, 2 dining rooms and a gigantic upstairs bath unless your a long way off from being buried in the ground or you plan on having your kids live with you permanently? Guest bedrooms do not need walk in closets, double up a room to act as a guest room and an office, or to look at it another way look at your plan and try to consolodate rooms by multitasking spaces, if it were my plan and my kids were nearing leaving the nest I would get rid of all the upstairs walk ins and make them standard 2-0 deep, look at getting rid of the odd L shape bedroom, try to make the upstairs landing smaller (wasted space), make the upstairs bath smaller, reduce 2nd floor glazing. Depending on amount of people living there I would get rid of 2 upstairs bedrooms and if necessary locate them in the basement with egress. Dump the space on the front formal dining and get rid of the office room, use a bedroom or a nook somewhere. Reduce glazing in the family room.

Maybe none of these suggestions will work for you, maybe some will apply maybe all will, but I'd like to see some elevations if you could, just curious what the roof plans are.

Thanks for the comments. Here's a better look at the plans: Draft Home Plans I should have mentioned that we have three young girls, so the second floor is their domain. Hopefully, this explains the need for the bigger bathroom and WIC's. The comment about the landing is correct - wasted space there. The L-shaped bedroom is mostly a result of our desire for a Craftsman-style home (the front dormer and roof line create the odd shape). The room in the front left corner of the house is not a formal dining room, but a craft/laundry room. My wife and daughters are very "crafty" and we have long yearned for a dedicated space to store materials, work on projects, and tackle homework. It also functions as a laundry center. With counter space for folding, vertical bins for laundry sorting, and a fold-down iron board. Mike

mapnerd;

 

Nice plan

Good plan, but here is my $0.02.

Upstairs bedroom/closet are too big, tone them down. Instead of one big bathroom, two 6'*8's would work better. Move the craft room upstairs into the space vacated by the bedrooms, which becomes the guest bedroom if need be. Move the utility into the mudroom, the washer/dryer are way to far from the kitchen. Move the master bath, the 1/2 bath, and closets to take up the space given up by the utility, making everything below the stairs and office the master suite except the little bathroom. Using a half spiral stair design instead of a landing will take up less room. Eliminate the seat bumpout in the office, and make the office wider into the space vacated by the stairs. The way you have planned the couches makes the great room look like most of it will be empty. I'm not saying make it smaller, I'm just saying spend some more design time with the furniture. As is, with your wife and daughters you can only seat one guest in the living room.

Also, I know where you are at right now. I started drawing on me and my wifes new houseplans well over a year ago, and only in the past two months have we actually got our plan to something buildable on our budget. My dad and my friends helped me get from 3000sf/floor to 1350sf/floor without really giving up anything, just organizing the space better. Trust me, a little bit of work and a few pads of paper can make all the difference. Heres one last tip, if you start out designing with the rooms smaller, then once you get the basic layout you like, you can add back in room to each room a little at a time until you get to the size you want. Trust me, it is much easier to go from small to big than from big to small.

You might think about getting some sheep to take care of that lawn!

I was actually thinking of pygmy goats...

Most important question for both green and construction, what climate will this house live in? General location?

We are in Omaha, NE - harsh, cold winters & hot, humid summers. Lots of wind.

Aesthetically the house looks good.  Practically I don’t think is such a good design. 

1. complicated roofline.  Harder to build = more expensive.

2.  Do you have north and south backwards?   This design seems to be very passive solar unfriendly.  8 windows on the south side 15 on the north?  Little solar gain and lots of windows on the north and west side cold windy wicked heat lose.

3  Solar gain on the east and west sides will kill you  in the summer because there are a lot of windows and little shading from overhangs, even with low heat gain windows.  Need more shading and less windows
4. Move  the chimney to the inside of the building envelope so you get better draft (unless the chimney and fireplace are ornamental only.  Change fireplace to high efficiency wood stove with glass front  (Vermont Castings or similar)

5. Change the long axis of the house to face south for better solar gain. 

6. Run the roofline rafters on the short axis of the house not the long cheaper and easier to frame

7.  Too much of the house is hallways= inefficient layout.  Lots of duplication.  Try to make every room serve 2 purposes.

8. Upstairs rooms much bigger then necessary and the closets are huge for kids or adults

9.  Why 2 dining rooms? 

10.  the clear span in kitchen and dining room is very long.  This means the second floor will be very bouncy in that area without massive engineered floor system.  It is doable by  turning the ceiling/floor joists 90 deg onto the short access and making the wall along the stairwell load bearing supporting a big header

11.  Kitchen exhaust fan is on an interior wall and will have to side vent a  good ways

12.  The plumbing in the bathrooms are  sort of centralized, but the kitchen plumbing is a ways away and the laundry is separate also.  Requires 3 separate plumbing stacks.  Can you put the laundry near the bathrooms and save a stack?  The bathrooms on the first and second floor don’t quite line up. This will also make plumbing stacks more difficult.  Doable, but more difficult.

13.   Basement is shown with no central beam.  If you plan to do this the first floor will be bouncy and you can forget about tile floors anywhere because of too much deflection.

 

Basically I see this as very expensive to frame, plumb,  heat, cool, hard to insulate well and not that efficient. 

Whatever you do, don’t get discouraged.  It took me about a year to get a house layout I was happy with.  Think long and hard about  centralized plumbing and  how to maintain stuff for the long haul.  I bet you could reduce the size of this house by about 1/3 with the same functionality.

Cheers,
Eric Anderson 

 

There's way to much N-aspect glazing as a percentage of wall area. Cut it at least in half (or use R20 aerogel daylighting if your wallet can take the pain. :-) )

The S-aspect glazing on the head-banger dormer is gonna cook the place in summer too- cut it in half as well (first story is probably OK, might be bumped a bit if you put enough thermal mass inside to temper the solar gain.)

E-glazing ratio is probably a bit high- might be a mid-summer roaster in NE if left unshaded from the outside. W-aspect glazing OK, but go for low solar gain windows and external shading there too.

Wall depth & insulation detail==> ???

Foundation insulation detail==> ??

Parking the car in an under-house garage creates an insulation & air-barrier problem. Can't you park it outside (or in a breezeway attached garage)?

Super-insulating can be relatively-cheap in new construction (google Larsen Truss, or Passivehouse), as is foundation insulation (under slab as well as walls.) A 12-14" thick Larsen Truss wall with dense-packed cellulose insulation can hit true R40+ clear-wall & whole wall R-values (as opposed to R16-R17 for 2x6" 24" oc with R19 fiberglass batting.) Cellulose that thick & dense (3lbs/cubic-foot or higher is the working definition of "dense packed cellulose") offers significant thermal-mass benefit too. (if only ~1/4-1/3 the thermal mass of a 6" concrete wall with 6" of iso or 2lb foam on the outside, no insulation on the inside). For the money you're likey to get more perfomance out of the Larsen Truss or Passivehouse approach than with insulated concrete forms (ICF) or structural insulated panels (SIP).

Frame out the roofing for R70+ too- there's a lot of area there. You might cost-out using 3" fiber-faced iso-board or EPS above the roof deck (maybe multiple layers) for finishing out the R value with low thermal bridging from rafters. The WEIGHT of doing it all with cellulose or 2lb foam gets to be considerable, and may need some structural engineering. (ISO & EPS are very light by comparison.) The long low-angle S-facing pitch of the roof it ripe for very high summertime solar gain that needs to be insulated against too. (Looks about right for loading up with solar-thermal panels for your swimming pool though! :-) )

The added cost of superinsulating should be balanced against the cost savings of the much smaller HVAC systems required to support the heating & cooling loads. Then, when all else equal from an operating cost between high/low efficiency HVAC, consider the relative lifespan and maintenance costs of going with superinsulation vs. higher cost high efficiency systems. With very high performance building envelopes you can probably skip air conditioning altogether (a heat-recovery ventilation system aka "HRV" is mandatory in very tight houses, and you can control it for excess nighttime ventilation when the temperatures are favorable. With sufficient thermal mass on the inside of the building (concrete slabs or internal walls), it should be sufficient. Excess thermal mass will also moderate daily swings and allow your heating system to run at optimally long burns/run times without overheating the place. Thermal mass is good- better if you keep it totally inside the thermal boundary (insulation) of the envelope. (A deficiency of ICF construction is that it typically puts R10-R12 between the living space and the thermal mass of all that concrete.)

The PassiveHouse in Urbana IL using 12" I-beam trusses for studs uses a 1kw (about a toaster's worth) electric heating element in an oversized HRV as the heating system. As a heating system it has very low source-fuel efficiency, yet, the entire electric bill for January is under 400kwh, and that's including all other loads and the total annual electric use (all loads) is under 5000kwh (the national average for residential accounts is over twice that!). If a high-performance building envelope can reduce the loads to those levels, you don't NEED much of a heating or cooling system- just good ventilation control strategies. And even when you DO need a heating system, the relative efficiency thereof is inconsequential- it uses less energy than just the electricity requirement of furnaces & hydronic boilers of more conventional buildings. You can easily heat such a place with a heat-exchanger isolated hydronic (forced hot water) loop off your hot water heater, but even that is probably overkill- using the HRV is probably the right way to go (since you need ventilation air anyway, using it as your heat distribution adds little or no cost. Doubling or tripling the size of the HRV to deliver night-time summertime cooling doesn't come close to doubling the cost of the HRV, which is less than central AC in the first place.)

Hi,
It's hard for me to see the plans very closely as well. One thing you might want to keep in mind that hasn't been mentioned yet. With an energy efficient ("tight") building envelope, your finishes become that much more important. Finishes with high VOC content will outgas in your living space and can make you ill. Fortunately, you have a lot of alternatives now with so many green options. You can also make adjustments such as narrower hallways (adding more space to the bedrooms) and built in storage to eliminate the need for massive closets. A combo of geothermal and passive or active solar would be awesome. Plus, you're likely to get government rebates on those items.

Hope this helps.
Li
http://www.building-your-green-home.com