Decisions at last!

So many options, so many possibilities, it's been more than a bit overwhelming. But we've made some key decisions in the past couple of months, and we're moving forward.
Like 95 per cent of home builders in North America, we're going with standard stick framing. It's cheap, it's proven, it's efficient. Tempting as it was to go all funky with bio sips or rammed earth, this is just too big an investment to play with. I'll build a straw bunkie or a rammed earth shed sometime, maybe a hand-hewn log cottage, but the house will be 2x6 on 16 inch centres.
We've signed on with Rolston Home Building Centre in Huntsville. Their lead designer is an engineer with tons of experience, and he really enjoys helping first home buyers through the process. And he lives four doors down from our new home, so he's really familiar with the property. We handed over a deposit last week, and are hoping to have quarter drawings from him within a week or so.
Once we've got that done, we go back and forth with him to finalize the design, file the site plan with the town, and await blueprints. With blueprints we can then get final bids from contractors and get our building permit (after we pay gajillions of dollars for it! Honestly, the fees are an unbelievable cash grab. Permits and development fees will cost more than the well and septic!)
The plan is to start building around the end of September and hopefully get it closed in before winter sets in. I'm acting as general contractor and hiring our framing contractor to also be the siteman and coordinate the trades. Once it's closed in, I'll take some time off work (been banking a lot of holidays and time in lieu!) to do a lot of the interior work -- flooring, trim, baths, closets, kitchen, fireplace surround, painting, etc. I ain't doin' drywall, though -- you need to know your limits.
In the meantime we've been prepping our current house for sale (the upstairs bathroom is now unrecognizeable.... in a good way). I'm taking a week off next week, and will spend much of that time either working on this house or cutting trees and prepping the site on Cedar Lane. Will a change be as good as a rest? Ask me this time next week.

Ecohome

So last Friday I got a chance to tour the Niagara EcoHome with Ian Weir. Ian is the president of NatureBuilt, a company which makes Structural Insulated Panels using straw as an insulating material.
The technology is pretty cool: rather than building a straw wall and then plastering it when it's upright, you pour the plaster into a horizontal mold, then pack the bales in place, then smush more plaster on top. Once it's dry, you stand the panel upright, and hey presto, a section of wall. Panels can be as big as 8 x 10, and they're 16" thick. With an inch of plaster on either side, and a wooden frame, they're fully structural.
Like all SIPs, one of the advantages is that they're built in a controlled environment and then brought to the site en masse, so when you start building the house goes up very quickly -- just a few days and you're ready to put the roof on.
Unlike many green technologies, these walls also claim to be cheap -- comparable to stick frame but achieving R35+ with no thermal bridging and considerable thermal mass.
I'd looked into them a few months ago, and was intrigued but really didn't feel like driving to Welland to see the model home. But I had to go to Vaughan on Friday, which was halfway there, so I figured I may as well take the opportunity to have a look.
I was quite impressed. The system has many of the pros and cons of straw bale builds -- among the positives, thick walls make for impressive sound barriers; plaster tends to give a room a nice acoustic warmth; and air quality feels good. Thick walls can also make a house feel dark, particularly if the windows are undersized. In this home they've used good-sized windows, and expanded the flow of light by shaping the walls away from the windows. Unfortunately, the rounding gives it a bit of a Hobbit house effect, something we've disliked in other straw bale homes we've seen. Ian assured me that they can achieve a squared off look, or do an angled cut on the sides of the windows.
Because the panels aren't able to contain windows, window and door sections are framed conventionally. This is one of the potential downsides of this system, it seems to me: you're going back and forth between different wall types, between straw bales and conventional framing. The problem with that -- and here I'm wading into territory where I'm a bit murky -- is moisture. Straw bale walls, as I understand it, are meant to be vapour permeable (some call them breathable, but that seems to imply they're porous. It's not that air passes through them, but moisture can, very slowly.) That's why there's no vapour barrier, just an inch of plaster on either side. A conventional wall, though, has a vapour barrier. So you now have a six foot section of wall with no vapour barrier and straw insulation, adjacent to a few feet of wall with vapour barrier and window. So what happens to the moisture? Seems like there's the potential for problems there.
There are also issues with the look of the wall where SIP meets conventional framing. There's going to be a seam visible, which means you either have to plaster over both SIP and conventional wall (adding another step that requires skilled labour) or find some other way to bridge the gap. Ian said you can actually drywall over the entire interior wall, but I wonder if that doesn't work against the whole breathability issue. Then again, it would add more thermal mass to the interior, at a fairly low cost (you're bringing in a drywaller anyway to do all the interior walls.)

Exterior of the house. The walls have been treated with a skin of stucco. Note that they've decided to use the transition from SIP to conventional wall sections as a design feature, emphasizing the transitions with slightly different wall thicknesses.

Interior. The window ledges are deep but not outrageous. The rounded effect of the walls is something I'd prefer to avoid. This was one of the first houses built with this system, even though it's just opening as a model home now (delays in other aspects of the build, I believe). Ian said they've learned a lot about interior finishing since this one.

There are still a few questions to answer, but it does seem interesting.
There's much more information at the Naturebuilt site. CBC also did a piece on the overall project -- ignore some of the "gee whiz" tone of the reporter!

Update: Ian responded to some of my questions. See his response in the comments section, below.

BioSIPs

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.

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.

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!

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.)

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.