Getting ready (and ready...and ready...)

I had this romantic image of just dropping off a set of floor plans at the township office with my $300 fee and happily picking up trowel and square and getting started. By now I thought we'd be well onto finishing the 1st floor platform over the crawl space. Instead we've spent the month refining our drawings, employing an engineer to help us with certain structural concerns, and getting bids on everything from windows, to excavation of the shallow hole I thought we'd have filled with house by now. We've dropped copies of the plans to several lumber yards for designs/estimates on roofing trusses, and we had a septic engineer out to stake our sand mound. (I could go on.)

Sheesh! And this is a relatively simple house, not like the multi-bathroom McMansions referred to earlier.

Julie and I have some similar reasons for this project, like wanting to save money. We are. It is costing more than we expected in some areas, though. The engineering, the building permit (estimated we'll be charged about $1300), and other permits...I can see why people are generally angry and why movements like the Tea Party sprung up. The particulars of today's political viewpoints aside, I am more interested in what drives political moods, and in this project we are experiencing a "bureaucracy of common sense": the township, codes enforcement, good building practices...these are all things that will protect me from myself and perhaps prevent the public eyesore if a house constructed by amateurs were to collapse.

Once upon a time in America a family could go westward with shovel, saw and hammer build a house. Of course some of those houses collapsed too, I'd bet. All of our ancestors couldn't have been talented carpenters and masons. There is no more "west"--there are too many of us. And too many of us leads to all sorts of complicated regulation, social and economic structures, and bother. I suppose there are a few places in the world where we can go forth and just build, but those places are far away from everything else we love here, so I guess we will go through "the process". The house will be better for it, but I can understand why it leaves a bad taste.

We're still having fun, but I'll sure be glad when we have "legal permission" to stick a shovel in the ground.

"Scaping" the Land

One of the things we shared was how much our landscaping skills have been challenged since we started. Our acre is in alfalfa hay, and was cut periodically by a neighboring farmer. Many people in our area have lawns, but we just couldn't see ourselves living on  what would amount to a golf fairway. Trees provide shade and windbreaks, as well as homes for songbirds. Letting grasses grow, cultivating wildflowers, and planting hedgerows also provide similar benefits, as well as create a diverse ecology that resists disease spread.

We're amateurs at this, and in talking to people, we learned a lot about native plants, plants that have been subject to diseases, and those that are invasive. And on the latter point: after 18 years of trimming yew and privet hedge, we've had enough. So we made the decision to "wildscape"--let the land return to its natural state. Well, more or less.

But we can't just let it go. So my wife's sister and brother-in-law kindly gave us a "landwarming" gift of a consultation with Ann Bodling, whose specialty is helping people to guide their land back to a more natural state. She told us about native plants, about plant species such as silver maple, that are invasive, and those like kousa dogwood, which are currently subject to disease. Lawn? Well, we'll have a patch. Lawn is nice, but as a feature, not a focus. The county conservation district had a plant sale, and we got over 35 trees for less than $30.

Now some of those seedlings are struggling, but that's what happens in nature. We'll add a few select larger saplings shortly. Pines & spruces to the north and northwest as wind screen. Poplar in the future hedgerows for some southwest shade in the summer. Silky dogwoods in the front yard for their pretty blooms, and some screening from the lane, as well as shade. The hedgerows will include berry bushes, and draw birds, as well as afford us some additional privacy. To the southeast, wildflowers and grasses opening toward the view.

We like the rolling, grassy-hedgey-forested look of The Shire in The Lord of the Rings, and we're on our way to restoring some of that to what was once an open field.

The Space You're In

I had said in the previous post that we were told how to start planning, especially how much space and how we'd use it. As we've been thinking about this, we started to really pay attention to how we use the space we're in now. This is critical, as a lot of people think about what they don't like, and what they'll do to change that. In our view, this is what led to the profusion of "McMansions" that have grown up in our area (and now sit ownerless in this economy).

We wanted a bit more space. Our existing house has 2000 sq. ft. of useable space, including the semi-finished basement, which we use for laundry, workshop and storage. The new place is only about 2200 minus the garage (we currently park on the street). We noticed that we use the dining table a lot, especially for working on stuff. We also like that our work rooms, Julie's studio and my home office, are conveniently separated by a floor level and several yards of intervening structure. Julie likes it quiet. I like to play music while I work. So one example is this: much of the first floor would be an open plan (entertaining) with the dining area open but central (for our frequent debriefings, meals, and work piles). Julie's studio is large enough for two pianos and all of her piles of projects, and separated from the main area. My office is on the opposite side of the house on the second floor--separation is good for a relationship!

I shifted from the software to full-size drafting vellum (a kind of thick tracing paper) and made pencil drawings with tools you can buy at an office store. (I could have sent the program files to a professional copy place, but they might not be able to open it.) Now I had architectural drafting in high school, so I had an idea of what was needed. Mary complemented my pencil drawings and dubbed the design "efficient" and the drawings are understandable by any professional. If you don't have that experience, try an extension course at your local vo-tech school or community college. With the vellum, I am now able to tape a fresh piece onto the board over my pencil drawing and "ink in" for the final drawings that will be submitted to the lumber supplier for roof trusses, the building codes inspector for the permit, the window people for their estimates, etc.

Anyone you talk to, outside of the well driller, will want plans. The nice thing about the hand-drafting I found is that--in the "pencil stage"--it's super-easy to make small changes, and we made our most recent change just a few days ago when Julie said she liked the little alcove over the bed in our current home. But we're done now, and will be distributing plans this week to all those folks listed above (and some I didn't list).

Buy some White-out. You can make changes to the ink drawings as needed, but make sure they're small changes. Get the pencil version as close to perfect as you can. (And make copies of the ink version! Keep the originals safely off-site.)

You might think "efficient" sounds cold and bland. Efficent design makes the most use of materials, and keeps the tech expertise that will be demanded of us owner-builders to a minimum. We can suggest Sarah Susanka's Not So Big House books for ideas. I like her ideas, but you'll see the homes are showpieces, often with lots of expensive details. But the great thing about her books is that they'll give you ideas about little things like drop-ceilings, maintaining a theme, and how to make the most of details, etc. If you want to tackle this (or even just a renovation/addition), we recommend her books, as well as surfing for home ideas in other places like magazines and websites. Like our theme throughout: make the design yours but learn from other experts as well.
 
In Buddhism, we're asked to be mindful, be present, and appreciate what we have. We wanted to keep the good in what we have now and add to it the things we want and need. Next time, we'll say a little bit about landscaping with that theme in mind.

Land Management

Or "How to Tame an Acre of Hay"
So this is Spring, and this is how things have grown since the first photo in our previous entry. Over the winter we spent most of our time planning what our house would be. This has taken many, many hours. I (Eric) started with a program called Instant Architect which which has been fancied up a bit since I bought it a couple of years ago. Pretty easy to use (hope it stayed that way), but this only gave us 8-1/2 x 11" sketches. We employed a consulting architect, Mary Caufield, who advised us to start by thinking about floor space and what we wanted in a house.

Having lived in the north side of a townhouse in the city for 18 years, light and a sense of bringing the outside in were foremost. The view in the picture above is how we're orienting the long axis of the house, so the living room and Julie's music studio face this direction. The "front" of the house--the side facing the lane--actually has the kitchen and a laundry/storage room with connection to the garage. One of the things to think about is how will you use the house. We have found that when we entertain, people tend to gather in the kitchen anyway. In addition, it's recommended that the colder side of the house, northwest through northeast, have the heat-generating stuff, like the stove, and that glass area be minimized to make good use of the local environment and climate. So this works for us. The "glassy sides" will face southeast through southwest.

So we marked off this orientation with stakes in March, and that allowed us to make further changes to the plan. This photo was taken in April, and as you can see, the little seedling center-shot beyond the wild mustard, is almost overtaken by the hay growing around it. The stakes were swallowed up, and so we wondered what to do.

Fortunately, a local farmer wanted the hay for his cows, so we pulled the stakes, marked the seedlings with flags, and we're back in business, but it was May until the hay was worth mowing and the weather stayed dry enough for the cutting and gathering. Even then, owing to our enthusiastic (and apparently premature) planting of numerous white pines and Norway spruce to someday screen the northwest winds in winter, we had to rope off some areas which didn't get cut. Tried a swingblade. Hard work on tough 4' grass! Then a gas powered string-type weed whacker. Slow going and not done yet. Now a neighbor with a bush hog is going to come in and finish the job in the tight areas. But we have been learning: plan for what's going to happen in nature while you're drawing plans.

We'll either have to pay people to mow, or somehow borrow or buy a tractor, as the hay is already coming back. All this is necessary because it is impossible to do anything in the thick grass. So it will add a bit to our costs. Everything is so much smaller and more manageable in the city!

Next: The Plans