house plans
Emilie Phillips
These aren’t complete or necessarily in agreement, but here‘s what we have now. The .dxf files are CAD files. I’ve been using qcad on linux to edit them.
There’s a patio door onto the porch that’s not well drawn. The floor of the bottom floor is a concrete slab with radiant heat tubing. The concrete slab for mass. The radiant heat so we can later add solar hot water panels. The garage may need to get reduced for price reasons, and then we’ll have to do seasonal shuffles in and out of it. Ventilation and summer window shading have not yet been figured out. The south windows are in the ballpark of correct for winter heating, and the floor provides enough mass. We’re thinking SIP construction because it is more airtight, and one of the contractors we’re talking to has a history of making really airtight houses. But we still need to go talk to a conventional stick frame contractor to see if his prices are any cheaper.
Oh and the intended lot is H-32-1.
Oooh.
I might be having trouble parsing the blueprints, because I usually do. Plus, your blueprints are magenta, which is linguistically difficult to accept.
So, questions/comments:
1. The lower floor BRs have only East or West windows, which I find surprising, since they’re on a corner. Am I missing something obvious?
2. Laundry room is next to a bedroom, which limits when you can wash without waking the guest / kid.
3. I’m a huge fan of having the laundry on the same floor as the MBR. My mother mentioned this as a “shoulda” a while ago, and now that I’m living in that situation, I am loving it. The MBR will be inhabited sooner and longer than your lower-floor bedrooms.
4. There’s an issue to warn you about with super-airtight construction, like my parents’ place once was: potty smells (and kitchen smells). Eliminating them requires ventilation, which kind of defeats the purpose of being totally airtight. Another issue is that the house settles, so the windows need to be redone within 5 years, but that’s probably mostly unavoidable.
Your house design has almost no sharp angles. I bet I could mesh it… Now to figure out how to convert qcad into something usable. (Actually, I bet I can’t, because I bet the design isn’t actually clean CAD.)