Structral Insulated Panels, or SIPs are touted as a great green alternative. They're thick, they're built in a factory so there's superb quality control, and they let you put the walls up quickly. There's very little thermal bridging, and they use far less wood than conventional framing. So what's even greener? SIPs with straw as insulation, or bioSIPs.
It's an intriguing idea. I'm going to tour the EcoHome in Niagara next week, to see if it's for us.
Friday, April 27, 2012
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Yeah, it's been pretty quiet around here.
Coupla reasons for that. I've been busy working, and we're not building yet. But the bigger reason is that I've run into an unexpected reality: I'm not sure I want to share everything about building our house on a public blog.
There's a lot of personal stuff that goes into planning a build -- things like finances, and family squabbles, and personal assessments of builders ("did you count your fingers after shaking that guy's hand?"). So I've opted for silence.
But now I'm rethinking the blog, and thinking about using it as a place to muse on building in Muskoka, rather than on my building in Muskoka.
See, in the past year I've had an awful lot of interesting conversations with people who want to talk about building. Architects and builders, of course, but also lawyers and photographers and writers -- people who are just interested in what's being done and what can be done.
I was toying with the idea of having a Beer n' Building party, but I figured that wouldn't be fair to the people who actually know stuff -- we'd all be glomming on to the builders and architects to pick their brains. A bit like having a What's Your Ailment party and inviting doctors and sick people to attend.
But a virtual party, on the other hand....
A chance to chat about cool projects, interesting building ideas, and maybe some disasters. (Have you seen the Muskoka airport terminal? Did nobody tell them that the window could be centred?)
So I'll start the conversation, but feel free to chime in.
Bring your own beer, though.
Coupla reasons for that. I've been busy working, and we're not building yet. But the bigger reason is that I've run into an unexpected reality: I'm not sure I want to share everything about building our house on a public blog.
There's a lot of personal stuff that goes into planning a build -- things like finances, and family squabbles, and personal assessments of builders ("did you count your fingers after shaking that guy's hand?"). So I've opted for silence.
But now I'm rethinking the blog, and thinking about using it as a place to muse on building in Muskoka, rather than on my building in Muskoka.
See, in the past year I've had an awful lot of interesting conversations with people who want to talk about building. Architects and builders, of course, but also lawyers and photographers and writers -- people who are just interested in what's being done and what can be done.
I was toying with the idea of having a Beer n' Building party, but I figured that wouldn't be fair to the people who actually know stuff -- we'd all be glomming on to the builders and architects to pick their brains. A bit like having a What's Your Ailment party and inviting doctors and sick people to attend.
But a virtual party, on the other hand....
A chance to chat about cool projects, interesting building ideas, and maybe some disasters. (Have you seen the Muskoka airport terminal? Did nobody tell them that the window could be centred?)
So I'll start the conversation, but feel free to chime in.
Bring your own beer, though.
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Yes, we're still building
Not this year, obviously, but the plans are still being kicked around.
We slowed down considerably after getting some prices in the spring and realizing we couldn't afford to build what we'd been eyeing. Since then, we've been talking, thinking... and learning to use Chief Architect software so we can express our ideas more clearly.
We also continue to read about design, construction, and energy efficiency. It's amazing how quickly some of this stuff is changing. Check out this article on the new energy efficiency code to see how much standards have changed in just a few years.
http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/musings/overview-2012-energy-code
The code hasn't been adopted everywhere (heck, apparently there are still many parts of the US where they don't have any building codes at all!), but where it's adopted it's going to require some significant changes. 75 per cent of lighting must be "high efficacy" (Compact Flourescent or equivalent); all houses must have a blower door test, and in our area must have less than 3 air changes per hour; there would need to be a continuous rigid insulation system outside the building envelope, such as rigid foam on top of a stud wall.) Interesting how a recession combined with high fuel costs is finally driving energy efficient building!
We slowed down considerably after getting some prices in the spring and realizing we couldn't afford to build what we'd been eyeing. Since then, we've been talking, thinking... and learning to use Chief Architect software so we can express our ideas more clearly.
We also continue to read about design, construction, and energy efficiency. It's amazing how quickly some of this stuff is changing. Check out this article on the new energy efficiency code to see how much standards have changed in just a few years.
http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/musings/overview-2012-energy-code
The code hasn't been adopted everywhere (heck, apparently there are still many parts of the US where they don't have any building codes at all!), but where it's adopted it's going to require some significant changes. 75 per cent of lighting must be "high efficacy" (Compact Flourescent or equivalent); all houses must have a blower door test, and in our area must have less than 3 air changes per hour; there would need to be a continuous rigid insulation system outside the building envelope, such as rigid foam on top of a stud wall.) Interesting how a recession combined with high fuel costs is finally driving energy efficient building!
Monday, December 6, 2010
Why is this stuff still new?
I was reading an article recently on something called The Advanced House. It's a pilot project by the Natural Resources Canada to build a home that uses all kinds of energy efficient systems, such as passive solar sunrooms, double wall framing, and Integrated Mechanical Systems (essentially a large hot water tank connected to heat exchangers. Any air or water leaving the house has all its heat extracted. The hot water tank then supplies not only the water but also heat via either forced air or radiant hydronics.)
It's pretty cool stuff, and not terribly complex. But here's the thing: this house was built as a demonstration project... in 1991. From all that I've read, many of these systems work well and have payback times of less than a decade. They should be standard procedure in 2010. So why aren't they?
One of the great parts of my job is that I get to interview all kinds of interesting people and pursue stories just because I find them intriguing. A couple of months ago we decided to do a story on passive solar design. We had lined up the experts, got the information on the theory, and all we needed to complete the piece was a local home that incorporated passive solar. We found a few, but they were all straw bale places. For our purposes we really wanted one that wasn't freaky; we wanted to see what passive solar looked like in a normal, ordinary home or cottage.
We finally found one... in Burk's Falls, an hour's drive north of here. I spoke to architects and builders around Muskoka and got the same answer every time: nobody does that here. If you want lots of windows, they said, you put them on the lake side regardless of what direction you're facing. Who cares about getting free heat from the sun?
When we toured the home in Burk's Falls, though, we found that they had a wall of passive solar windows on the south. They also had lots of windows on the north, where the lake is. It's not the ideal as far as passive solar goes, but as the owner said, what are you going to do? Block off the view?
They had all kinds of really cool technology, including an integrated mechanical system that took hot air from the third floor sunroom and ran it through a heat exchanger to heat the water. They had woodstoves, just like any other cottage, but they had water jackets in the chimneys to reduce the amount of heat going up the stack. The walls were double thick construction with blown cellulose insulation, and they had a double layer of drywall on all walls and ceiling which acts as a very effective form of thermal mass. (The designer told me that doubling the drywall had the same effect as they would have got by putting a three inch thick concrete slab on all floors, except that with a concrete slab they would have had to reinforce all the floors.)
The overall effect was to make a 3500 square foot cottage that will stay above freezing all winter with no outside heat at all. Pretty cutting edge, right? Uh-uh: this was built in 1998. Which brings me back to my earlier question: why is this stuff not standard?
I think part of the answer comes from my friend Joe. He's recently finished building his own house and used non-standard framing (double 2 x 4 walls, 24" on centre). He said the 16-inch standard for framing originated with builders using lath and plaster for the walls -- the wood they used for laths in England wouldn't hold the plaster if the studs were spaced more than 16 inches apart. In other words, we're still building walls in 2010 to accommodate technology that was outmoded in 1950.
There's good reason to be conservative when building, to not leap into every new idea that comes along. After all, mistakes have to be lived with for a long time, or can be expensive to fix. (Urea formaldehyde, anyone?) But some technologies are ideas whose time has come.
I'll post a link to the passive home article when we run it, likely in the spring.
(Update: here's the article: It starts on page 24.)
It's pretty cool stuff, and not terribly complex. But here's the thing: this house was built as a demonstration project... in 1991. From all that I've read, many of these systems work well and have payback times of less than a decade. They should be standard procedure in 2010. So why aren't they?
One of the great parts of my job is that I get to interview all kinds of interesting people and pursue stories just because I find them intriguing. A couple of months ago we decided to do a story on passive solar design. We had lined up the experts, got the information on the theory, and all we needed to complete the piece was a local home that incorporated passive solar. We found a few, but they were all straw bale places. For our purposes we really wanted one that wasn't freaky; we wanted to see what passive solar looked like in a normal, ordinary home or cottage.
We finally found one... in Burk's Falls, an hour's drive north of here. I spoke to architects and builders around Muskoka and got the same answer every time: nobody does that here. If you want lots of windows, they said, you put them on the lake side regardless of what direction you're facing. Who cares about getting free heat from the sun?
When we toured the home in Burk's Falls, though, we found that they had a wall of passive solar windows on the south. They also had lots of windows on the north, where the lake is. It's not the ideal as far as passive solar goes, but as the owner said, what are you going to do? Block off the view?
They had all kinds of really cool technology, including an integrated mechanical system that took hot air from the third floor sunroom and ran it through a heat exchanger to heat the water. They had woodstoves, just like any other cottage, but they had water jackets in the chimneys to reduce the amount of heat going up the stack. The walls were double thick construction with blown cellulose insulation, and they had a double layer of drywall on all walls and ceiling which acts as a very effective form of thermal mass. (The designer told me that doubling the drywall had the same effect as they would have got by putting a three inch thick concrete slab on all floors, except that with a concrete slab they would have had to reinforce all the floors.)
The overall effect was to make a 3500 square foot cottage that will stay above freezing all winter with no outside heat at all. Pretty cutting edge, right? Uh-uh: this was built in 1998. Which brings me back to my earlier question: why is this stuff not standard?
I think part of the answer comes from my friend Joe. He's recently finished building his own house and used non-standard framing (double 2 x 4 walls, 24" on centre). He said the 16-inch standard for framing originated with builders using lath and plaster for the walls -- the wood they used for laths in England wouldn't hold the plaster if the studs were spaced more than 16 inches apart. In other words, we're still building walls in 2010 to accommodate technology that was outmoded in 1950.
There's good reason to be conservative when building, to not leap into every new idea that comes along. After all, mistakes have to be lived with for a long time, or can be expensive to fix. (Urea formaldehyde, anyone?) But some technologies are ideas whose time has come.
I'll post a link to the passive home article when we run it, likely in the spring.
(Update: here's the article: It starts on page 24.)
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
What if we turned it 90 degrees....
It's funny how one simple starting fact can affect the entire plan. You start with one step that seems obvious, and before you know it you've got a plan that makes sense. But what if your initial step is wrong?
For the past few months, every house plan we've drawn up has had a couple of common features. Among them is the orientation. This is step one.
Our lot has a substantial slope in the area we want to build -- roughly 4 in 1, dropping from the road side (east) to the river (west). That's not a problem, because we want to build a place with a walkout basement. In fact, it's just about perfect: if the house is 40 feet long, and each floor is roughly ten feet high, then a 4:1 slope means that there's very little earth moving required to have a front door at ground level on one side of the house, and a basement door at ground level on the opposite side.
Step two: Because we have a sort-of view through the trees toward the river (that is, we think we might be able to see the river with some selective pruning, and even if we can't we've got a nice view down the wooded hillside), we've naturally been thinking of putting most of our windows on the west side.
Step three: We want a simple roofline (to save money) and we like the "wall of windows" look, particularly if we have a cathedral ceiling in the living room. Therefore, the roof ridge should run east-west, with most of the windows on the western end.
Step four: We'd like to have a deep porch on the entry side. Kind of like this home from Beaver Homes. Now we're getting somewhere. Picture this place sitting on a sloped lot. The porch would be on the south side, and the land slopes down from the east (right side of the picture) to the west. The wall of windows you can see in this picture would be moved so it's on the opposite end of the house -- that is, on the west side. Looking good?
Not so fast, there, homebuilder. Now we come to step five: the problems.
As I've mentioned before, it makes sense to incorporate a lot of passive solar elements in the house, which means windows on the south side. We need an overhang to block the summer sun, but a six- or eight-foot overhang that you get from a deep porch is too much: we'd still get sun in December, when it's really low, but we'd lose it by February.
There's also the question of what this house would look like on a slope. You don't see too many homes that sit across the slope: usually the're oriented so that the land falls away to the back or the front. Is there a reason for this? Quite likely, and I don't want to discover that reason by building the house wrong.
A third problem is what we do about a screen porch. We eat outside a lot, and when you're building on a wooded lot in Muskoka a screen porch is pretty much a necessity. They don't call 'em Muskoka rooms for nothing. On this plan the natural way to build one is to screen in one end of that nice deep porch, but that blocks off even more of the southern light. Or we could put it on the west end, but then it's right in front of that lovely wall of windows, and raises some serious roofline questions.
We've been wrestling with this for weeks now and getting nowhere. And then we visited friends and had a look at their house. And suddenly thought: "what if we took this design and turned it 90 degrees?" What if we, in effect, went back to step one and changed our assumptions?
Now we've got a gable end wall of windows facing the south, allowing plenty of solar gain. The land slopes away from the front of the house, in a more conventional arrangement. And the screen porch can go on the west side.
There are still some issues. We've got a lot of windows facing south, where the view isn't as grand. But perhaps we don't put quite as many windows there as we had initially planned, and add more windows on the west, balancing that out. We'll need to calculate the overhang on the south side carefully to ensure we're not bringing in too much sunshine in the warm season.
We'll also need to do a bit more land-shaping to make the walkout basement work. But since the footprint we're looking at is 32 by 40, it's not that big a difference.
Is this the solution? Perhaps. We've got to live with the idea for a little longer and see if we can spot the flaws. But I know one thing for sure: it was a lot easier to turn the house 90 degrees now than it will be in a year or so.
For the past few months, every house plan we've drawn up has had a couple of common features. Among them is the orientation. This is step one.
Our lot has a substantial slope in the area we want to build -- roughly 4 in 1, dropping from the road side (east) to the river (west). That's not a problem, because we want to build a place with a walkout basement. In fact, it's just about perfect: if the house is 40 feet long, and each floor is roughly ten feet high, then a 4:1 slope means that there's very little earth moving required to have a front door at ground level on one side of the house, and a basement door at ground level on the opposite side.
Step two: Because we have a sort-of view through the trees toward the river (that is, we think we might be able to see the river with some selective pruning, and even if we can't we've got a nice view down the wooded hillside), we've naturally been thinking of putting most of our windows on the west side.
Step three: We want a simple roofline (to save money) and we like the "wall of windows" look, particularly if we have a cathedral ceiling in the living room. Therefore, the roof ridge should run east-west, with most of the windows on the western end.
Step four: We'd like to have a deep porch on the entry side. Kind of like this home from Beaver Homes. Now we're getting somewhere. Picture this place sitting on a sloped lot. The porch would be on the south side, and the land slopes down from the east (right side of the picture) to the west. The wall of windows you can see in this picture would be moved so it's on the opposite end of the house -- that is, on the west side. Looking good?
Not so fast, there, homebuilder. Now we come to step five: the problems.
As I've mentioned before, it makes sense to incorporate a lot of passive solar elements in the house, which means windows on the south side. We need an overhang to block the summer sun, but a six- or eight-foot overhang that you get from a deep porch is too much: we'd still get sun in December, when it's really low, but we'd lose it by February.
There's also the question of what this house would look like on a slope. You don't see too many homes that sit across the slope: usually the're oriented so that the land falls away to the back or the front. Is there a reason for this? Quite likely, and I don't want to discover that reason by building the house wrong.
A third problem is what we do about a screen porch. We eat outside a lot, and when you're building on a wooded lot in Muskoka a screen porch is pretty much a necessity. They don't call 'em Muskoka rooms for nothing. On this plan the natural way to build one is to screen in one end of that nice deep porch, but that blocks off even more of the southern light. Or we could put it on the west end, but then it's right in front of that lovely wall of windows, and raises some serious roofline questions.
We've been wrestling with this for weeks now and getting nowhere. And then we visited friends and had a look at their house. And suddenly thought: "what if we took this design and turned it 90 degrees?" What if we, in effect, went back to step one and changed our assumptions?
Now we've got a gable end wall of windows facing the south, allowing plenty of solar gain. The land slopes away from the front of the house, in a more conventional arrangement. And the screen porch can go on the west side.
There are still some issues. We've got a lot of windows facing south, where the view isn't as grand. But perhaps we don't put quite as many windows there as we had initially planned, and add more windows on the west, balancing that out. We'll need to calculate the overhang on the south side carefully to ensure we're not bringing in too much sunshine in the warm season.
We'll also need to do a bit more land-shaping to make the walkout basement work. But since the footprint we're looking at is 32 by 40, it's not that big a difference.
Is this the solution? Perhaps. We've got to live with the idea for a little longer and see if we can spot the flaws. But I know one thing for sure: it was a lot easier to turn the house 90 degrees now than it will be in a year or so.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Back to round one.... again
After our meeting with the technologist, we were talking about the options we had open. And Sharon said "Does this mean we're definitely not going with log?" Since we had spent a fair bit of time looking at a local builder of log homes, we decided we needed to see for sure whether that was an option before we went any further.
And while we were being definitive, we decided we'd better make sure we had ruled out some of the other options we were considering, such as hiring French's (a large builder in our area), building a Viceroy, or buying a kit from Beaver Homes and hiring a contractor to erect it.
So we've had a couple of meetings this week, one with French's and another with True North. We still don't have a decision, but the numbers are becoming more clear.
True North can give us a clear price on their home package. It includes exterior walls, roofing, windows, etc -- the complete shell. They can also tell us how much it would cost to have them build the shell, or give us a completed, turnkey home... if we want to just pick one out of the plan package and say 'we'll take that one.' If we want to make modifications to an existing plan -- which almost everyone does and we certainly would -- we'd need to plunk down a deposit before they'll start redesigning and repricing. Fair enough: that's quite a bit of design time. But it makes it a bit tricky to price. And, if we go with log, price is a consideration because it's a given that log is more expensive than stick frame.
A bigger problem with log is the insulative value. I'm becoming increasingly convinced that the future marketability of a home will have a lot to do with its energy-efficiency. When oil is $200 a barrel, and when every new home coming on the market has an official energy-efficiency number attached to it (which they will), greener homes will be worth more. Even setting aside future sales, one of the things we both really want is a home that is warm in winter and costs little to keep that way. Log homes are great... when they're well built, well-chinked, large round log homes. Engineered log homes, on the other hand, are a little less so. The r-value of softwood is about 1.5 per inch, so an eight inch log (one firm's most popular) has just R12 in the walls. The house we're in now, with its 1970s 2x4 walls, has around R16. Modern homes with 2x6 walls are about R20, I think. If you go with a more creative framing (offset studs, or blockers to end thermal bridging) you can get R30 without too much difficulty. That's a heck of a difference.
Still, the appeal of log is strong, so we're not ruling it out yet. We need to get some solid numbers on foundation costs to pin it down.
We also met with French's. More on that later.
And while we were being definitive, we decided we'd better make sure we had ruled out some of the other options we were considering, such as hiring French's (a large builder in our area), building a Viceroy, or buying a kit from Beaver Homes and hiring a contractor to erect it.
So we've had a couple of meetings this week, one with French's and another with True North. We still don't have a decision, but the numbers are becoming more clear.
True North can give us a clear price on their home package. It includes exterior walls, roofing, windows, etc -- the complete shell. They can also tell us how much it would cost to have them build the shell, or give us a completed, turnkey home... if we want to just pick one out of the plan package and say 'we'll take that one.' If we want to make modifications to an existing plan -- which almost everyone does and we certainly would -- we'd need to plunk down a deposit before they'll start redesigning and repricing. Fair enough: that's quite a bit of design time. But it makes it a bit tricky to price. And, if we go with log, price is a consideration because it's a given that log is more expensive than stick frame.
A bigger problem with log is the insulative value. I'm becoming increasingly convinced that the future marketability of a home will have a lot to do with its energy-efficiency. When oil is $200 a barrel, and when every new home coming on the market has an official energy-efficiency number attached to it (which they will), greener homes will be worth more. Even setting aside future sales, one of the things we both really want is a home that is warm in winter and costs little to keep that way. Log homes are great... when they're well built, well-chinked, large round log homes. Engineered log homes, on the other hand, are a little less so. The r-value of softwood is about 1.5 per inch, so an eight inch log (one firm's most popular) has just R12 in the walls. The house we're in now, with its 1970s 2x4 walls, has around R16. Modern homes with 2x6 walls are about R20, I think. If you go with a more creative framing (offset studs, or blockers to end thermal bridging) you can get R30 without too much difficulty. That's a heck of a difference.
Still, the appeal of log is strong, so we're not ruling it out yet. We need to get some solid numbers on foundation costs to pin it down.
We also met with French's. More on that later.
Monday, November 1, 2010
Meeting with a designer
Had a very good meeting with a designer on the weekend. She is an architectural technologist, and she came to the house on Saturday to show us her portfolio and discuss how she works. She was recommended to us by a friend in the building trade, and she seems to know her stuff. Next step is to get some references from her and check on them.
So will the references and her portfolio tell us what we need to know? Probably not. Choosing a professional is, I'm starting to realize, as much art as science: you do the basic homework, and then you go with what your gut tells you. We both had a good feeling about her, and in our two hour meeting she offered up several tips that sounded like they would save us money (including advising us which surveyors have a reputation for being more expensive -- I would have thought that was one area in which prices didn't vary by too much. Apparently not.)
If we hire her, the next step is to tour the property with her and show her our list of wishes, wants, needs and don't wants. Then she puts together a concept drawing, we comment, it gets amended, and we keep going back and forth until we're ready for... construction drawings! Woo Hoo! Which we can then show to builders and find out that we can't afford to build what we just spend weeks designing. Or so the pessimist in me says. But one step at a time.
On the hands-on side of things, Charlotte and I drove out to the lot on Sunday afternoon, parked in the beautifully hand-crafted parking area, and walked down to the water in our wetsuits. She stayed on shore while I waded in and lost all sensation in my feet. Still, after half an hour we had the dock out, and there she stays until spring.
So will the references and her portfolio tell us what we need to know? Probably not. Choosing a professional is, I'm starting to realize, as much art as science: you do the basic homework, and then you go with what your gut tells you. We both had a good feeling about her, and in our two hour meeting she offered up several tips that sounded like they would save us money (including advising us which surveyors have a reputation for being more expensive -- I would have thought that was one area in which prices didn't vary by too much. Apparently not.)
If we hire her, the next step is to tour the property with her and show her our list of wishes, wants, needs and don't wants. Then she puts together a concept drawing, we comment, it gets amended, and we keep going back and forth until we're ready for... construction drawings! Woo Hoo! Which we can then show to builders and find out that we can't afford to build what we just spend weeks designing. Or so the pessimist in me says. But one step at a time.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)