Legacy building
I found this video on a Portland builder's site. It resonates. Because no matter how green or well-built you make your building, if it's not beautiful and functional, it will end up getting torn down like the rest of 'em.
This is what comfort looks like
Mark has been doing ‘thermal bridge calculations’ on our house. With Passivhaus, the goal is to make the building as air-tight and insulated as possible. Weaknesses often lie in the details —where differing materials connect or gaps occur. Obviously we don’t want any weaknesses. We want a fortress of thermal resistance, which is exactly what Mark’s models are showing.
The image above is a thermal bridge calculation on where our walls meet the slab. By all accounts, it looks excellent. Uniform heat distribution throughout. The inside sits at a comfortable 20•C and the outside at 0•C. If we had any gaps or weaknesses you’d see the warmer colours leaching their way out to the exterior. Instead, we have magical, rainbow coloured walls :)
Working with an architect
Hey meow. I'm an architect.
When considering your options for building a new home, make sure working with an architect is one of them. In Ontario, a building under 3 stories does not require an architect’s stamp. That means you can download your own house plans off the internet or hire a draftsperson to draw them up for you. Both of these seem so incredibly inadequate to me after working with them on our house.
There is a bit of a stigma surrounding architects: they either cost too much or the build ends up costing too much because there's a disconnect between the design (architects) and the build (contractors). Do your due diligence and neither will be the case. Whether its a basement reno or a new build, consider talking to an architect. Doesn't cost anything to ask and, if they're any good, they'll help you define a beautiful space you never knew you wanted and couldn't imagine living without.
Choose the right architect and the money spent on their services will more than balance out the value and enjoyment you will get out of your house. Don’t be put off by the copious amounts of black in their wardrobes. These fine professionals are incredibly smart and generally under appreciated. They will get to know you and how you live intimately. They’ll practically become family, or in my case, will be family.
Grant over at PNP wrote a post on this very topic (architects, not fashion). Have a read.
The functional program
Defining your functional program is step one when working with an architect. It outlines what you need, or think you need, in your home. That is, the building blocks required for your particular use – how many bedrooms, bathrooms, etc. Square footage is often included as well. Most North Americans think super-size, because it’s the norm – remnants of the American dream – who knows. According a report by the CHBA, in 2011, the average size of a new, single-detached house in Ontario was 2,000 square feet. This is the number I had in my mind for our house. I don’t think I questioned or understood why. Was it because it was imbedded in my psyche from browsing MLS listings? After learning how much it costs to build (usually calculated as a cost per square foot price), that’s when I started to really question what my preconceived notions were of what I required in a home.
The first thing to bear in mind is this: there’s a big difference between space and well-designed space. If a space has been thoughtfully considered, 1,500 square feet can easily feel like 2,000 square feet. The smaller the footprint, the less it costs to build, the less it costs to operate and the less time is required to clean. Yes, yes and yes.
The functional program we came up with for our house was fairly conventional: all the usual suspects — with three bedrooms and two and a half bathrooms. The floorpan the architects developed is so very efficient that they’ve managed to comfortably fit it all within approximately 1,400* square feet. That’s a 1,400 with an asterisk because we’ll also have the basement, with our backdoor entry, and the loft space on the third floor, which includes a bonus rooftop patio. The large window in the main floor living room will open up to the outside, extending the house even further in the summer months. We've also included a garage in the grand design, which we'll tackle down the road. (OK, so really it's probably about 1,700 sq ft –– is that right Mark?)
It’s no Tiny House. But as minimal as we like to think we are, we are not. We have two kids and plenty of hobbies. That is to say: we have stuff. There will loads of clever storage solutions built in to this house for our stuff in the hopes that we can abide-by/aspire-to a minimal aesthetic. Needless to say, storage was part of our program as well. Oh, and there was one last thing that was part of the brief: zero maintenance. Maybe I'm lazy, but I can think of a whole lot of other things I'd rather be doing than tinkering with our house. So materials and finishes must abide by this principle. And that is what the architects (Mark) had to work from, from a technical standpoint. Combine all those with a concept, or parti (architect lingo), and you've got a house that is more than just a house — it's our house.
Almost-er
Almost a year ago now, over the course of a weekend, Mark and I (who am I kidding: just Mark) designed our hypothetical house. The design was to be appraised as one of the conditions on our construction mortgage. This is a ridiculous time frame to design a home. However, it only needed to be rough as we would be able to revise once we were approved for financing. The initial design appraisal came in where we needed it to be, and so to keep the project moving along (with the hopes of breaking ground in fall 2014) we revised.
Mark developed the design into something we were both fairly excited about (see previous post Almost). He prepared working drawings, submitted them to the city for permit and to various general contractors for tender. With the thermometer dropping, we were starting to feel pressure to make decisions before the ground started to freeze. We didn’t like it. This would potentially be our forever home. We had to get it right.
That’s when we decided to take a step back. Why were we so driven to break ground in the fall? What were the implications of waiting? Waiting meant we would be living in-between for a while longer and have to pay more interest on our land. In the grand scheme of things, however, those repercussions were fairly minor.
With a little more breathing room, and an intervention staged by Mark’s partners at plotnonplot, we realized that our initial design was not going to cut it for us. Because of the rushed timeline, we never truly followed a proper creative process. And it showed. We designed a lovely home. But it wasn’t our home. And so we tore up the old design and began round 2 – the redesign – which led us to our current much-improved (x infinity) design. I am beyond thrilled with it. Working more as a team this time around, they nailed it.
Almost
The land is now officially ours. The design is near-complete. We are both very much in love with it. Mark is now working out the labour-intensive, but oh so important, details. Afterall, God is in the details – isn't that right Mies? He has been working around the clock on the drawings to get them ready to submit to the City for permit. (I dare say, he just might be more sleep-deprived than I am. And I have a two-month old baby to take care of around the clock. But don't tell him I said so.) At the same time, he'll be going over the project with a couple different contractors to see what's feasible and to find a good fit.
Our goal is to break ground asap. We still have loads of time right? Right.
As soon as the design is complete, we'll be ready to share it, and this blog, with the world. Until then, almost...
Collaboration
We've all been working hard on the design. It's coming along nicely.
This mornings brainstorming session.
Why can’t we be friends? Good design and Passivhaus
Can a Passivhaus building also win over architecture fans? Are good design principals and Passivhaus principals mutually exclusive? We certainly hope not. But as we are in the throws of designing our home, we are discovering that it ain’t easy being green.
Mark and I finally arrived at a design we loved. We went over to the lot, staked it out, and were generally feeling pretty fantastic about what we had come up with. *Pat on back* That is, until Mark started the energy modelling. The numbers weren’t looking as good as we had hoped. If we increase the thickness of our walls (from 18” to 24”), put in top-of-the-line triple-glazed windows, and added a sources of heat (radiant floors/ducting), we’d still be borderline for Passivhaus.
If we had a large lot, with great exposure and few neighbours – building a Passivhaus that met our architectural/design snobbery requirements would be no promlemo. Our lot, however, poses several large challenges in terms of Passivhaus design:
- It’s narrow. The narrow shape of our lot wills a narrow house plan. Plus we need to push the house as far over to the North side of the lot as possible, to allow for better exposure on the South-facing windows – further increasing the need for a narrow house plan. However, for best energy performance, a more square shape is preferable. How do we create more of a square plan while maximizing solar gain on those South windows?
- Limiting distance. Limiting distance in the building code restricts the number of windows we are allowed to have on a side facade facing neighbours. Our South facade just so happens to be along the side of the house, facing the orange neighbours. So depending on the area of our south facade, we’re only allowed a small fraction of it to be windowed. We’re looking at 10–12% window coverage. This is pretty piddly compared to the area of window we would like to have.
Never to back down from a challenge, we are readdressing the design to see what changes we might be able to make. Hopefully just tweaks, and not a major overhaul. We may feel slightly deflated by this set back, but are still determined to make friends out of these two…without breaking the bank…