Category Archives: House
House Design
If you ever decide to design and build a house, think very carefully before deciding not to have a crawlspace or an attic and with minimal covered space between floors. Electrical and plumbing take a lot longer when you have to continually drill holes in studs.
House Blog
I just setup a new House Blog where we’ll be tracking progress and info specifically about the house.
Dropping Trees on the Property
If you ever get the opportunity to see a professional lumberjack at work, don’t pass it up.
We have quite a few trees on our property. Some of them were growing in the place we’d designated for our house, others blocking the southern exposure we needed for good passive solar and others were where we want [...]
House Update: Professional Help
Our original plan was to do all the design work ourselves, draw up the plans and submit them to the county to get our building permit.
Then we decided that maybe we could pay someone to do the structural drawings, but that I could do the sectionals and electrical drawings.
Now, given the paucity of time around [...]
Now! With Elevations!
Added Elevations and notes to the plans online.
House Plan Update
I’ve been going back and forth on house stuff. We’ve got a floor plan we’re pretty happy with and I’ve been working on beams and joist arrangements and it just felt too complicated. I needed lots of beams to get everything working and then needed some tie beams to create a support for the ridge [...]
Revised Timber Schedule (Redux)
As I mentioned in my last post, iteration is good…
Posts
• 8″x8″x8′2″ (2)
• 8″x8″x22′ (1) – rises from floor to roof
First Floor Beams
• 8″x10″x19′ (1) – spans kitchen and dining space
• 8″x10″x10′ (1) – spans hearth room to stairs
• 8″x10″x15′4″ (1) – spans space after entryway
• 4″x10″x14′4″ (1) – parallel [...]
The Iterative Design Process
We’ve been working on our house plans for several weeks now. I think that we’re slowly getting closer to the final plan, but it’s interesting seeing how it changes. Every time I talk to someone involved in the design/construction industry or read more about building materials and techniques, I get more information and it influences [...]
Yurt Yurt Yurt Yurt
So, one of my Uncles is forever telling us that we should get a Yurt and live in the Yurt while we build our house. A part of me thinks that he just likes saying the word (c’mon admit it – it is a fun word to say) and I’ve generally been just discarding it [...]
Revised Timber Schedule
The previous schedule was a reduction from our original planning but it still required a whole lot of timber. I’ve been thinking more about it and I think I can get it down even more by using the interior walls as load-bearing walls, supporting beams with the SIP walls, closing in some ceilings so I [...]