It looks like I'm building a house, advise?

In My Humble Opinion
21

I second this, on a major remodel I did pre-wiring for Ethernet and surround sound. I should have used conduit more (and large enough for HDMI) and I missed speaker wiring for second rooms and patio. With all the video streaming, think about Ethernet where you want TV. Many builders will sub this out to expensive custom AV vendors so try to do as much as you can yourself.

I did build a stereo rack facing into family room but at the back it has a door adjacent to a hallway coat closet so I can do all the wiring from the back.

I also missed a few outlets - kitchen needs more along counters and on island when I often sit with a laptop. Also at ends of hallways and stairwells where we have small accent tables that would benefit from small lamps.

22

Several ideas that you should consider :

a. SIPs for the walls and roof. The foam insulation between the sheets of the SIP are better than anything you can stuff in the walls, and you avoid a ton of problems with rammed earth. A SIP roof means :

b. Delete the attic. The design I would go for is a large open structure, with high ceilings. How to subdivide it is a design exercise.

c. Avoid in-slab sewer and water lines if possible. Elevate the bathrooms 6 inches instead.

d. The most efficient form of heating and cooling is actually heat pump mini splits. If you design the house to have large open spaces where air can flow by convection, it minimizes how many splits you need. These have much higher efficiencies than anything else - the Fujitsu brand ones have 29-33 SEER, there are Carrier brand ones with 42 SEER. Another side benefit is it lets occupants in different zone fine tune the temperature in that zone to their comfort, and if one fails, you won’t be shivering or sweltering, the rest of the house will be habitable still.

Don’t install a mini split in a small isolated bedroom, the temperature swings will be too much.

Consider a utility corridor or trunk where you put all of the plumbing and all of the electrical and all of the network wiring, somewhere inside the structure. This makes all this stuff inspectable and maintainable without much hassle.

e. One way to do the hot water is an on demand tankless heater in the middle. Another way would be to use a gas-fired storage heater, and use a hydronics coil so that you can run a backup heater if the temperature outside ever gets below what the mini splits can handle. This backup furnace need not have a full set of ducting, especially if you design the place with lots of open space and airflow, it could only have a couple of vents and you let convection handle the rest.

f. Naturally you want a garage with a separate air space (and separate mini split) if you want one and a location that’s fairly fire resistant for your main electrical panel and whole house battery. (when you get one). It will be a lot easier to install an electric car charger if the main electrical panel is right next to where the cars park.

g. Bathtubs are stupid and waste space. Showers instead.

h. Dining rooms are a waste of space. Put that same square footage into a bigger living room you actually use, or a storage room for all the stuff a typical family ends up accumulating.

i. For exterior water lines, consider heat tape and insulation right from the start so they will never freeze.

j. Design your lighting now. Since LEDs basically will last the life of the house, choose the fixtures and light color temperatures carefully.

k. Make sure all the electrical outlets are 20 amp, and don’t cram the entire house’s lighting and outlets on one breaker. Maybe run the light circuits different from the wall outlets so that when you blow a breaker you aren’t left in the dark.

l. Depending on the location, a propane tank (buried underground of course) might be needed for a fuel supply. If that’s what you use, supply the tankless heater and some backup wall heaters with propane fuel lines that stay outside the dwelling. No gas lines inside. (there are exterior wall mount propane heaters)

Your main roof segment needs to of course face the optimal direction for solar in your area. Generally this is “South”. With no trees planted on that side. If your neighbors are causing shading, this needs to be accounted for.

23

Here’s a few considerations. Some I’m glad I thought of in advance, and some I wish I would have.

Consider very, very, very carefully the orientation of the house on the lot you choose.
The same house on four different lots will look the same but the way the sun moves around each house is completely different and changes a lot of the way you live in the house.
I chose to have the front of our house face south for a bunch of reasons. My neighbor with the identical model whom I share a backyard property line with has his home face north of course.
All winter long on sunny days the low south sun shines directly on my driveway and melts snow and ice away. His driveway sits in the shadow of his house all winter and accumulates lots of ice that stays there until spring.
Since most of our living spaces face the backyard I pretty much never have to draw shades or close blinds to keep sunlight out. On a sunny summer or winter day I can look out my back windows over my yard. My neighbor has his curtains and blinds closed pretty much all the time since direct sunlight just pours in those windows. A beautiful back yard and he rarely can view it sitting in his own living room.
My back patio sits nicely half in a shadow cast by the house and half in the sun. On hot summer days I can go out and sit in the shade on the patio after work and have a beer. My neighbors patio cooks in the direct sun all day. With the south side of his house reflecting the heat. It’s not very habitable mid summer even when he tries to combat the sun with a patio umbrella.

Under cabinet kitchen lighting. Splurge and do it. Makes the kitchen work space more functional, looks great, not something that can easily be added later.

Can lighting. We have plenty but I should have paid more attention to some of the placements. Make sure they’re directly above where they’re needed. We have a hall closet with lights in the hall but none in front of the closet. Can never see what I’m looking for in there. We also have a full length mirror in the bedroom. But no light above it. Would be nice to be able to see your outfit in good lighting before going to work each day.

We opted for an exterior natural gas line. I use it interchangeably for my gas grill and our fire table. Too convenient not to have to lug LP tanks around.

Something I learned from our old house. If you want to plant trees try to keep them as far from the house as possible. They will grow. Leaves will fall right onto the roof and gutters if they’re too close. Roots grow too. Roots push on foundations, patios, and sidewalks.

24

Not only no, but hell no! You want wired as well. Make sure every room is wired for 10 Gb Ethernet. 2 - 4 sockets in every room. And have wireless on top.

25

That’s probably overkill, but you want each bedroom and office and living room to have 1 ethernet jack. And yes, you might as well use cat 7 cables and jacks. And then all these jacks can be multiplexed through a single 8-16 port gigabit switch in a utility closet/in the utility corridor I suggested.

Oh, and if you do want security cameras, they need to be wired this way as well. Wired cameras will have substantially better quality and thus will collect much better evidence if it’s ever needed. As security cameras can deter burglars and save you from false accusations they are probably a worthwhile investment.

26

I’ll have to check that out. I’ve been planning staggered 2x4 walls with 1" of xps on the outside for R-40 walls but if i can get it cheaper I’m all for it.

27

I think you’ll probably want 2x6 walls, rather than 2x4 walls, just for the increase in insulation. (But I also like the idea of structural insulated panels.)

28

Face your house south. North faces are never used.
Skip skylights, they glare and they leak. There are much more sophisticated ways to let light in from high up.
I love cork flooring.
If you can afford it built it just a bit bigger than what you think you’ll need. Room for your life/interests to change.

Unless you live in a certified desert, never put in a flat roof.

A classic of house design: A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. How to build a house with soul and life. However he cannot be trusted at all about actual construction.

29

The best things I ever installed in my two houses were “Sola Tube” type light pipes. They make a HUGE difference in dark hallways, bathrooms, and kitchens. They are also inexpensive, and unlike the larger skylights I’ve never had one leak.

The other favorite thing I did was put a cover over the deck. It’s almost like having another room.

Sent from my SM-T350 using Tapatalk

30

Another space waster, other than dining rooms, are hallways. You can eliminate that by having all the bedrooms and storage room and kitchen all open on the same common living area.

If you have to share a bathroom between 2 bedrooms, it could be accessed by the in-suite way with a second internal door. This avoids the embarrassment of someone stepping into the living room area wearing only a towel.

31

YMMV. We love having a bathtub and a dining room. There’s very little new construction where we live (a suburb with homes 70-90 years old) and when we were house-hunting and looking at existing homes, we crossed off our list houses with no dining rooms and no bathtub or no space to put in a tub. If we were building we would absolutely insist on both of those.

32

It’s certainly perfectly fine for you to prefer those things. I just see most American suburban households basically don’t use their dining rooms. They have them, and there’s often a nice table in there and some china on display, but it doesn’t have any functional purpose. The rare times it is used, it’s not doing anything you couldn’t do at the regular table in the kitchen, or by pulling another table out of storage and putting it in the living room, if you have more guests than will fit at one table.

Or take your guests out to a nice white tablecloth restaurant with wine service.

If the room is 15x15 feet, and the construction cost is $120 a square foot, that means you are spending $27,000 upfront for a space that you will almost never use. Going out to eat with a party of 10 to a nice restaurant might cost, say, $300-$400, right? A bargain compared to hosting at your own dining room, unless you are doing this extremely often.

33

That’s assuming you build a separate dining room. Based on what I see on HGTV shows like Property Brothers, the big thing seems to be an open plan arrangement, with no walls between the living room, dining room and kitchen. Who knows, though? Perhaps in a few years, the trend will return to having walls.

34

Well that’s definitely the most efficient. You can then repurpose the big open space as needed. Similarly, if you have all the bedrooms, bathrooms, offices, and storage rooms (the rooms other than the living room basically) open on this large living room, you avoid losing square footage to a hallway.

Hallways don’t just waste space, they are the worst when you need to move furniture and appliances in and out.

Interestingly, all these design constraints do nudge towards a particular design for a house.

35

While I agree that skipping a bathtub in the master bath is a personal preference, I wouldn’t leave one out of the house entirely if it’s a muliple bedroom home. Anybody with children or planning on starting a family that’s looking for a home consider a bathtub a necessity.

36

There has been mention of open floorplan homes. Given your location in Colorado, and a presumed icy cold winter period, you might consider a closed floorplan. This is one in which most rooms can be physically isolated (with doors). My house is this way and in winter I can close off unused rooms. Saves scads of heating money by (a) not heating rooms; (b) allows what sunlight gets in (in my case, a lot) to warm up remaining rooms.

Many do not like closed plans, but a house is expensive to heat. And for those of you that say “all you have to do is close the forced-air vents,” I’ll say “those vents better be really convenient to reach and easy to operate.” Doors are always convenient and easy to operate.

37

The laundry room is technically in the master bedroom. I’m not a huge fan of that but it was the only way to make it centrally located to the bed rooms. I’ve tried rotating to the hallway and it ends up costing the master ~10% so for the extra room I’ll live with it.

I haven’t used wired anything in 5 years since I had a gaming desktop. Why would I want 10 Gb Ethernet all over the house? I learned a lot in my thread last year on setting up an network for my office but I think the only wire in that net work is to the NAS. I generally get running the chases because we don’t know where technology will go in the next 20 years and that give flexibility for changes but what could you possibly use 2 Ethernet sockets in your bedroom for? If I’m going with wired internet would fiber optics be the way to go in the future? It feels like people have been talking about fiber optics being the future since the 90s when I was more into computers.

I’m actually using staggered 2x4s with a 8" top and bottom plate. There will be 7.5" of insulation to get to the R-40. The interior walls will be staggered 2x4 construction as well but there with 6" top and bottom plates. In both cases its to eliminate the transmission directly through wood of either sound or heat. The rammed earth walls I found were really pretty but it doesn’t seem like any one in the Denver area has any experience building with them at least that I could find last night looking around. It still seems like it could be a good idea though I did find some references to it being hard to get local code officials to sign off on it in Colorado though apparently New Mexico has a special earthen building code.

I can’t imagine a house without a bathtub for the kids and we need a dining room table for art projects and home work so those are absolutely requirements. We will be using a “great room” type floor plan though with the living room/dinning room and kitchen all in the same space with no walls. I don’t like bedrooms opening into public spaces directly so there will be a wide hall way that goes past 3 bed rooms and 2 bathrooms. Basically the idea is a public portion of the house and a private portion of the house.

38

As far as orientation that is the one problem with the lot the view is to the North the lots slopes north and the county road that our drive way leads to is on the north. Basically there is no way not to have the front of the house go north. The good news for solar is that we have an unobstructed south facing roof that I could put a 20 Kw system on.

The bedrooms with be on the south side so their windows will gather a lot of sun. Early on I tried a design with decks on the east/west side of the house to try and maximize the sun exposure but the cost benefit was too small so instead we’ll have a norther deck that will be partially covered with heaters built into the cover.

39

OK, the staggered wall thing is new to me but if it gives you a thick, heavily insulated wall with less material, that’s great. Of course if the house is so heavily insulated and tightly sealed, you’ll almost certainly need some sort of heat exchanger to bring in fresh air.

40

When placing your house on your lot, think about where the rainwater will flow. Think about both how the water on the lot will flow towards your house and how the water that falls on your roof will flow away from your house. You don’t want to place your house in a spot where the water will end up pooling at the foundation.

If you have gas, get gas lines run to the fireplace, laundry room, water heater, oven, and outside for a BBQ. Even if you don’t need gas right now for those things, you may want to switch over at some point.

I see some people have said not to get skylights, but I really like having mine for the passive, natural light. The only problem I ever had was them getting cracked from hail (they were plastic), but I replaced them with glass ones and they’ve been great ever since. To make maintenance easy, make sure the skylights are standard sizes like the ones sold at hardware stores like Home Depot. Then if they ever break, you can easily buy a new one and install it.

Visit the site often while the house is being built to make sure everything is going to plan. Take pictures of the interior of the walls before they are sealed up so you’ll have an idea where the plumbing and wiring is. Print out the pictures so you can easily refer to them as needed.