house lessons
Now that I have it in my head that I want to build a house (someday), I'm always noticing details about buildings, and filing them away for future use. The house that I'm living in now is a particularly valuable source for inspiration… and caution. It's a snug little house with an open layout and lots of light. It was built by the previous owner, a carpenter. Living here has made me appreciate what a huge impact good insulation, good windows, and good solar gain can make. Here, we burn maybe six or seven pieces of wood per day, and the house is never below 72 degrees. Contrast with the room I was living in at the creamery, where I used the same amount of wood to heat a single room for a few hours in the evening. Once the fire died out, the heat quickly left, and I had to use an electric heater to keep the temperature above 50 degrees during the night.
The three bedrooms in this house are all on the second floor, nestled up against the roof so that each room has a section of slanted ceiling. My room has only one window, facing East. If there were dormer windows, I could have light from the South. I like dormer windows--I think they look nice from the inside and out, and I generally feel like more light is always a good thing. But they do add complexity and expense, and I wonder whether in this case they would make the upstairs room unpleasantly hot in the summer.
Most of the houses that I've ever lived in have been designed and built by professionals, so I'm enjoying being in this house and seeing what this non-architect builder did differently (and sometimes, wrong). There are some mistakes that seem inexcusable, like building the house on a floating slab foundation, with no protection from frost. Other mistakes are things that I could easily imagine myself doing. For example, this house has two doors, neither of which is on a gable end of the house. The house also has a metal roof. There has been a lot of snow this winter, and when snow slides off a metal roof, it slides off dramatically. And lands in large mountains right in front of the doors. Luckily one of the doors is a sliding glass door, or we might have to climb out the window to shovel a path. And if the door isn't blocked, you still have to be careful when shutting it from the outside, because you could be knocked down by a poorly timed avalanche. So! Things to think about when designing my little dream home.
The three bedrooms in this house are all on the second floor, nestled up against the roof so that each room has a section of slanted ceiling. My room has only one window, facing East. If there were dormer windows, I could have light from the South. I like dormer windows--I think they look nice from the inside and out, and I generally feel like more light is always a good thing. But they do add complexity and expense, and I wonder whether in this case they would make the upstairs room unpleasantly hot in the summer.
Most of the houses that I've ever lived in have been designed and built by professionals, so I'm enjoying being in this house and seeing what this non-architect builder did differently (and sometimes, wrong). There are some mistakes that seem inexcusable, like building the house on a floating slab foundation, with no protection from frost. Other mistakes are things that I could easily imagine myself doing. For example, this house has two doors, neither of which is on a gable end of the house. The house also has a metal roof. There has been a lot of snow this winter, and when snow slides off a metal roof, it slides off dramatically. And lands in large mountains right in front of the doors. Luckily one of the doors is a sliding glass door, or we might have to climb out the window to shovel a path. And if the door isn't blocked, you still have to be careful when shutting it from the outside, because you could be knocked down by a poorly timed avalanche. So! Things to think about when designing my little dream home.
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