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Friday, 19 October 2007
We found it fun to draw up house plans. Eric and I measured all
of our furniture, and then cut their shapes, drawn proportionally,
out of graph paper. Then, we arranged the shapes into room groupings,
and put the rooms together to represent 2 floors. Invariably, our
plans resulted in rather weirdly-shaped bathrooms - the place where
all of our leftover space ended up. But at least our rooms fit
all of our furniture.
The first thing that we learned from this exercise was that we
have too much furniture.
Too many desks, too many bookshelves (but
then, can you really have too many bookshelves?!), too many chairs… We
also have too much junk in our basement and garage. With no basement,
and only a small amount of attic space, our new house would have
little room for storage. One of our first tasks, as we moved toward
an energy-efficient lifestyle would be to deal with our accumulations
of things over the years.
We wanted to design the main floor so that when we got old and
feeble, we would be able to function on one level. In that spirit,
we also wanted the main floor to be wheel-chair accessible. After
spending time on our building lot during the summer, I decided
that I wanted a screened-in porch _ because of the mosquitos! Eric
wanted to have a workshop connected to the garage, so that he could
build that long, cedar-strip canoe that he has always wanted to
build. With 2 kids still living at home, so we would need room
for them too.
Using the recommendations of Solar Nova Scotia, Eric and I tried
to organize all of the main living area rooms on the south side
(the sunny, warm side), and we buried the workshop, garage and
storage on the main floor north side (where there would be no windows,
and earth would be bermed against the outside wall). Early designs
resulted in homes that were very wide (for lots of solar gain),
but very shallow. We knew that the cheapest houses to build and
heat are square, so we aimed for that. We grouped rooms that were
connected functionally, and came up with what we thought were rather
innovative designs.
Finally, Don came to see us, and we shared some of our ideas with
him. I thought that it would be a short meeting _ maybe half a
day. I didn’t realize that Don's greatest love is designing homes,
rather than just building them. So, our discussions went very late,
and Don finally returned to Nova Scotia with lots of doodles and
notes to inform his work.
On his next visit, it was exciting to see what Don had done with
our ideas. Don noticed that our plans were very similar to a home
he had already built in the Annapolis Valley, and so he put our
dimensions into that design to show us. This is when Eric and I
learned the difference between amateur efforts at design and professional
efforts. Instead of a series of linked, squarish rooms (our plans),
Don produced floor plans that were more unusual, with long diagonal
view lines (something that we learned about in the Susanka books,
to help make small rooms feel larger) and limited use of hallways
(hallways being wasted space).
You will remember that a passive solar home has to have the following
qualities: orientation to make the most of southern sunshine, appropriate
windows to let sunshine in, a place to collect the sun's heat inside
the house, and some way to distribute this stored heat to the rest
of the house as needed. In Don's houses, the main floor is always
concrete, with ductwork radiating through it from a central 2-story
duct with circulating fan. The sun shines on and heats the concrete,
and then the heat from the floor is released and circulated throughout
the house using the ducts.
So, Don's plan for us included this network of ducts. He also included
his trademark interior balcony. This balcony serves to allow passage
of warm air directly upstairs on the south side of the house, to
be then re-circulated back downstairs via the 2-storey duct along
the stairs on the north side. Additionally, the balcony allows
sunshine from second-floor windows to beam down onto the concrete
main floor, to enhance the solar collection of the home.
Despite our original desire to design a home that would look just
like everyone else’s except being solar, we were generally impressed
with Don’s more unusual plans. After a few tweaks and modifications,
we looked forward to seeing the blueprints and materials list,
to put into motion what we had spent so much time just talking
about!
Next time: Some thoughts about building materials
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