Early house concepts

Well, this would have been pretty cool.  Also, about double our budget.  :)

We started out this house-building journey by contracting for design work with one of the biggest and best known green builders in the Ann Arbor area.

It was pretty quickly clear that our budget did not meet our dreams.  Ok, that's not a surprise.  But we spent several months investigating design strategies and continually downsizing our plans until something much more modest was on paper.  Unfortunately, their first budget draft still came in way above what we could afford, and we had to take a break and re-think things.

Our township limits minimum new house size to 1200 sq ft ground-floor area.  So this was our size target.

Other important design strategies, beside the efficiency concepts outlined earlier, were:

• Aging in place:  We want to live here forever!  What if one of us becomes injured/disabled someday?  It would suck to have to rip out doors and walls to make things wheelchair friendly.  This mostly means wide hallways (if any) and 3 foot doorways.
• (Mostly) Single floor living:  This is part of the aging in place idea.  No sense walking up and down stairs just to get to and from the bedroom.
• 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms and laundry on the ground floor.
• Open concept living area:  Kitchen, dining, and living room will all be open in one great room.
• Modern aesthetic:  no colonial box house for us.  This thing is gonna be modern, and maybe kinda funky & weird.  Right up our alley.
• Attached Screen Porch:  Suuuper important one.  Bugs out here in the woods are kind of a problem sometimes.  Want to bring the outside in, but without the critters.
• Provisions for an attached greenhouse: for 3/4 season gardening.  Hopefully with an avocado and a lemon tree?  By keeping the greenhouse insulated and attached to the house, can we keep it from freezing?  I sure hope so!

So how do we leave space for a greenhouse and screen porch, and good views out the windows, but also earth-shelter the backside of the house, and keep it to 1200 sq ft?  Not such an easy task.

We spent a lot of time with graph paper trying out different layouts to achieve these goals.  And then I dove into sketchup (free design app, very cool!) making it look somewhat official.

Nope, still too big.  Think smaller!

This would have been a good house.  But when things didn't work out with our first builder, this design kind of got put on the shelf.  No regrets though, as it was a great exercise and really helped us identify what features were mandatory.