It’s not official yet but I met with a realtor over the weekend and it looks like I have enough equity in my condo to buy a piece of land I’ve got my eye on and build a home. We’ve been very unstable over the last 8 years so it feels a little surreal to be looking at moving into a home in the next year that we’ll live in for the next 20. We currently have two small kids and the idea is to at least stay here until we can kick them out the door, if not longer.
I’ve put together about 80% of the building plan and while I could stamp and submit it I’m thinking of bringing in a design/build team to carry the liability as well and have more experience in the residential build market on the team. I’m looking at a 2,500 sqft 4 bedroom, 4 bath home net zero home with 1850 sqft on the first floor and 650 sqft in a walk out basement with a drive-out 3 car garage making up the rest of the basement. Since we’re looking at living here for the long term I think our primary focus will be on the exterior of the building, then we’ll build the interior to a lower standard to make sure we can afford the house easily and upgrade the inside over time.
The two primary design drivers are; net zero energy, so the house will produce as much energy as it consumes on an annual basis and we can save the $1,500/year we’re spending now on power bills. The energy models I’ve been playing with BEopt show that even with the cost of the needed upgrades to the house we can make about $50/month. Second is that this 2.5 acres is up in the Colorado foothills so I want the exterior to be prepared for fire; metal roof with a stucco and stone facade and then we’ll be mitigating the land around us as well.
I’ve spent about 2 months planning the home and I think I’ve gotten everything accounted for but I’m wondering what features you wish your home had or that you love that I should consider adding to this plan. I’ve got a handicapped accessible bathroom (not that we need it today) and I’m soundproofing the interior walls as fun upgrades. Anything else? I keep reading about a central vacuum system but I don’t have any experience with them.
I live in the mountains of Colorado. Passive solar house. You’ll get plenty of sunshine. Snow too. Consider a mudroom/entry way.
If you can, I recommend in floor heat for whatever active heat you are going to use. Also, throw in a woodstove.
Steel roof and stucco is a VERY good idea.
On two and a half acres? Outdoor lighting. Make sure to have plenty of lights on the exterior of the home. You just need them when you need them. But when you do, you do. Counting everything, I have 10 exterior lights surrounding my home that hold… 15 bulbs/flood lights. Some are automatic, some are switched independently. Some just accent/porch lights. Sounds like a lot, but really isn’t. We generally only use one set in the mornings. The dogs have a motion sensor set for their yard. Very helpful when you’re ass deep in snowballs.
I’ll respond to the central vacuum aspect. Don’t do it. When I built my place I installed a central vac because it was important to me to exhaust the air outside the structure. That aspect works fine, but after 20 years I find the hassle of plugging the hose into wall ports, plugging in power, and then dragging the 20+ foot hose around to be a huge pain. I still use my central vac but if I had it to do over, no way.
Some tips if you decide to install one.
(1) You need power to turn the central unit on and off. The switch is on the hose. So every port requires an electrical receptacle pretty close by. If the nearest receptacle is ten feet away, or behind furniture, setting up just became painful. I was fortunate that someone mentioned this to me; my ports have receptacles within three feet.
(2) Too many connection ports is way better than too few. Upstairs and in the basement. I wish I had installed two ports downstairs in my garage. A bonus of many ports is that you can cut the hose down so you are not dragging a long hose. But then, more port changes mean you spend more time setting up. You can’t really win. (But more is better.)
(3) Consider installing a port on the outside of the building where you might be doing exterior chores needing a vacuum. But only if it’s easy and likely to be used.
A neighbor worked for a company that relocated him five times; three of those five he bought into a development where builders were still building houses. Over a beer, he told me the secret of building a house.
"Be 100% happy with your house; don’t scrimp, don’t cut things out to meet some imaginary cost ceiling. Work is hard enough, and you’ll always work hard… but when you get done with work… when you drive home… when you pull into that driveway and look up… you need to be 100% happy with what you’ve built to justify working your fingers to the bone all day.
If a skylight in your bedroom over your bed makes you happy, put it in. If your garage needs to not only fit two cars but a tool bench also, put it in. If you enjoy BBQ dinners with your spouse on a deck out back in the summer, put it in. I say this because I’ve built three houses from the foundation up… and if you aren’t absolutely happy when you pull into your driveway at the end of a hard day, you are going to be Miserable living there."
Make sure you have good flooring that is durable and easy to clean. We skimped a little on floors to save money on our build. I was sorry about it in less than 6mos. We replaced it within 2 years. I have since replaced it, again with bamboo flooring. Love it. It’s pretty and easy to keep. Out in the country floors take a beating. It’s nice to not have to worry about it anymore.
Another thing would be water and septic systems. Don’t skimp there.
I guess one thing to mention is I won’t really be in the country. just a non HOA large lot neighborhood so no septic or well water for us.
I’ve already got a large mudroom on the plans with one of the bathrooms next to it for the garage/outdoor entry. So hopefully the’ll keep things from getting to the house too much.
I’ve been planning on hydronic in floor heat it’s the best way to heat a home I’ve ever had.
I had been thinking about exterior outlets but I hadn’t though too much out flood lights and exterior lighting in general. There aren’t any street lights in the neighborhood so that makes a lot of sense.
The good flooring in one of the interior upgrades we’ve been debating. I had great commercial cork flooring put in 6 homes ago and it was great stood up to the dogs, was easy to clean and looked great. We’re thinking about doing it again this one is kind of a bubble item depending on how the project cost overruns are going.
I’ll second the advice on the central vacuum. Never seen one that was worth the trouble or expense. OTOH, I’ve seen quite a few houses where the owner simply switched to an upright vac after a few years. Almost impossible to remove one after installation, too.
My main advice would be to consider EVERYTHING you might want to put in the walls before they are finished. This not only means complete data infrastructure, but receptacles where you want to locate equipment. For example, receptacles in storage areas where you might want to locate wireless access points. Consider, too, cabling for exterior cameras, even if you don’t have any planned for the near future. I built an addition on our house and actually installed empty raceway from boxes located throughout the addition. (Place a double-gang box in the wall and stub raceway up to the attic or down to the crawlspace. It costs virtually nothing to do as long as the walls are open. Need CAT 17z cable ten years from now? No problem removing old cable and installing new.)
You say you have a handicap accessible bathroom on your plans, good start. With that being said, it’s worth looking hard at your plans to see what you can do now to keep as much of your house accessible to those with restricted mobility. 42" wide interior doorways can be a massive bonus to the mobility impaired and it’s HUGELY cheaper to install them from the start rather than retrofitting them. Extra blocking between the studs in the bathroom walls can be made with scrap lumber so they cost basically nothing but they can make installing extra grab bars much easier. Wide, straight stairwells that can easily support a stairlift chair can be very helpful. A large, wheelchair friendly, roll-in shower on each level can be nice.
A basic Google search will turn up any number of hint lists for making your home accessible. That plus some common sense will give you a list of options that you may wish to investigate.
All of the hallways in the house are at least 48" so I’ve got that part of accessibility covered. The real problem is that due to topography you’ll have to go upstairs to get to the main floor unless the driveway is 100’ longer. I haven’t looked into chair lifts but generally, straight stairs are recommended against so that if you fall down the stairs you can’t fall all of the way down. The outside decks to the main entrance have 8’ wide stairways with 8’ x 8’ landings and the stairs up from the garage are 4’ wide with a 4 x 4 landing. I’ll have to do a bit more work to make sure we’re capable of adding a chair lift later. We don’t have any roll in showers upstairs but the bathroom in the basement will be. I should probably make that one accessible as well as the one upstairs.
I’ve had a wired house before and the switch box cause so much static I had to pull it out of circuit and disconnect every room except for two on a new splitter so I’m reluctant to put whole house wiring in from the mechanical room. It seems that everything now is wireless any how. What wires would you look to pull besides a coax into the rooms with TV and honestly, we haven’t had cable in years so I was just planning on a cable line into the basement mech room and then going wireless from there to the rest of the house.
I get to deal with code officials for my day job so I agree about getting a relationship off on a good foot early. Luckily, I’m technically in the unincorporated county and they don’t seem to give a crap. The full build team will be sitting down with them prior to permit submittal though just to make sure.
Make sure you keep at least a couple of thousand dollars in reserve. When we built our house we went from one bathroom to two and a half, bigger this, more that. It was the little things that I found added up. More bathrooms means you need to buy another waste basket for the additional ones, plus soap dishes and so on. Our new house had bigger windows than our old one, so we had to buy different window treatments. While it was a few dollars here and there for little things, I found that there were A LOT of little things and it added up. If you want to move in and have that “finished feel” keep some money back for those types of things.
Also, stand your ground with the contractor/designer. We let our contractor talk us out of the wall colors we wanted, as he said that the colors we picked weren’t “in style”. Within months of moving in, we were painting the walls the colors we wanted, when we should have just insisted on them to begin with.
My house has the following features, which I would never put in if I were building the house of my dreams:
Torch-down, low-pitch roof with mopped-in gutters
Hydronic heating
Cinder-block basement
Big fireplace in the center of the house
Goofy big-beams (not joists) floor construction
Skylights
The mopped-in gutters are bad; they start to leak and all of a sudden your eaves are rotten. The hydronic heat adds the complications of pumping water all around your house to the complications of running a furnace; every winter I’m calling in the furnace repair guy or replacing a bad zone valve or the pump shaft seal or some damned thing. The cinder-block basement is nowhere near watertight, and there’s lots of efflorescence. The chimney stack for the central fireplace blocks wifi to one end of the house, and constricts traffic past it. The floor sags. And the skylights leak.
I would also put in about twice as many electrical outlets as I thought I needed, and absolutely minimize roof penetrations. And 12-foot wide garage doors. In fact, I’d take whatever size you’re planning for your garage, and add 2 feet onto every side.
I’ve never actually tried one of these sliding stair grab rails but it seems like a cool, effective and not stunningly expensive option to assist those who might be unsteady on stairs.
Wireless is definitely going to be the way to go, but I’ve had to install WAPs to extend range, hard-cabled NAS units (1Gb/s transfers), cable speakers (much cheaper than wireless and much better sound), POE cameras, and install other equipment after the fact. You may not have any of these needs initially, but it really does cost virtually nothing (maybe $10 of materials for a drop and $50 for a receptacle) if you do it at the right time. Heck, I’ve got permanently installed chases from my crawlspace to my attic and cable tray in both so I can add cabling at anytime. I also made sure I had receptacles in the attic and unfinished areas.
I don’t think anyone has suggested a whole-house generator, so I’ll do so. Even better if it can be powered by utility natural gas. My parents are aging so that my father is dependent on a wheelchair or a walker to get around the house (and my brother’s father-in-law has been a quadriplegic for several years after a slip-and-fall on ice from a standing position) so I’m a big fan of an accessible house. Rather than a stairlift to get from the garage to the living area, you might leave space for a small elevator. And a shower with no lip so you can just roll right in would be nice.
Since energy efficiency and fire resistance are priorities, look into rammed earth construction. High R factor–33, in fact, and about as fire resistant as you can get. Bonus, can be really cheap to build too depending on the availability of suitable building material and how far you have to truck it. If you’re doing a big basement, you might actually have a large percentage of what you need right on the site and won’t have to truck it out. Another bonus is that it’s a very carbon light method of construction.
Where is the laundry room going to be located? I would want it near the bedroom area, sharing plumbing with the bathrooms. I’ve seen many houses with the laundry near the garage or kitchen, in one house the laundry was as far as possible from the bedrooms (where all the dirty laundry is generated). Unless you like carrying laundry around, put the laundry near the bedrooms. And make the laundry room big enough for ironing, folding, hampers for dirty laundry, and to be a closet for linens, winter blankets, etc.
If you go with forced air heating or cooling, use metal ducts. With insulation on the outside of the ducts and good jacketing. Both flexible ducts and duct liner are crap. And the same for the return air.
If the water heater is far from the bathrooms, install a circulation pump and insulate all the piping. Speaking of water, install a manifold that has a valve for the water to each area of the house. If you need to shut off the water for a repair, you can isolate the pipe so the entire house doesn’t lose water while you make the repair.
A couple more laundry room issues. Make sure that you can easily reach the shut off valves to the washing machine. If you go on vacation, you can shut the water off. A floor drain in the laundry room is also a good idea, as well as a good large laundry sink. And consider how the dryer exhaust hose will be routed, you’ll want to be able to install it with no kinks, and be able to clean it easily.
My advice is to visit the building site often. My office mate had a house built. He had an electrical contractor’s license so he knew what he was doing. And he found all sorts of problems early. “Uh, the door is supposed to go there and the window over therer.” That kind of stuff.
I think the shut-off valves have to be accessible by code. And on This Old House they showed a gizmo that automatically shut off water to the washing machine except when the machine was running. That sounds like a worthwhile addition.
And depending on how you choose individual elements, you can really blow up the budget. For example, you can get cabinet door and drawer pulls for a dollar or so each, or you can get fancy ones for ten or twenty bucks each. That adds up.
I’m a lazy bum, so if I ever built a house, I’d go for materials and finishes that are easy to clean and don’t need maintenance.