We've been thinking about architecture, and houses, and design. Apparently, I'm not the only one who's been thinking that it would be nice to build a new house rather than retrofit this one.
Insert usual 'grown up' caveats about finance, planning, need to be practical, and so forth.
I love the word 'praxis'.
Anyway...
What we talked about this morning was a combination of practical and fanciful.
The practical was a device known as a gravity film exchanger. Despite the name, it's not something from Star Trek, but a real plumbing technique. What you do is wrap a coil of tubing around the line bringing cold water into the water heater. The coil of tubing is connected to the waste waster drain from the shower, washing machine, or other hot water using appliance. The heat from the waste water warms the cold water before it hits the water heater, which means that the water heater doesn't have to work as hard, or cost as much to operate.
When I first heard of the concept, I thought they were describing another technique, where you preheat a loop of water so that when you turn on hot water, you get it immediately (from the loop) while the main feed line was changing over from cold to warm. This isn't that.
As it happens, its also possible that we'll get a system where you don't have a water heater, but one where the water is heated as needed. I don't know much about that technique. I know that means you don't run out of hot water, but I don't know what the economics of it are.
The fanciful parts of the discussion had to do with the feel of a house. I opined that I thought a house should work with you. It should accommodate the way that you actually live. If you normally dump the mail on the first counter into the kitchen, you should understand why (ie, is it because the kitchen is the first room you go into when coming home, or because its the first public area flat surface that you encounter when home), and then design the house to accommodate that. If you tend to accumulate newspapers in the dining room, as we do because we read the bulk of them on Sunday while eating brunch, the house should accommodate the idea that we want someplace to easily stack the discarded papers (right now, on a spare dining room chair). Or just general reading -- I like to curl up in a chair with a bright light and a footstool nearby, with a place to stack magazines, or sections of the paper that I haven't got to yet, or that I want to save -- the house should allow for that. Propagate that idea through all of the areas of the house that you use -- see how you use it, and make the house support you in that, easing the problems, multiplying the pleasures.
There's a book I know of but haven't read that speaks in this style -- it's called A Pattern Language, and its by Christopher Alexander. The idea being, you come up with the concepts that describe the characteristics you want your design to have (house, community, whatever), and only then do you begin to design it. I like that idea. (Whether I'm willing to pay for that level of detail, I don't know. Well, yes I do, but I don't want to give up the fantasy quite yet.)
I think that any decent architect can do that kind of analysis without APL, but I could be wrong.
4 comments:
Yes! Yes! A thousand times YES! Thats the way to design a house. Or rather, thats the way to design a home. You take a book of graph paper, draw the patterns of moment you make through the day, and design the rooms around your movements. Do this for each room. cut out each room, and assemble it into a floor plan. Fill in the missing spots as required.
Architects rarely do this, prefering to concentrate on things like "roof-scape" and other useless features. Such designs almost never get put into public domain, so you cannot buy such an optimal plan off the shelf. But you CAN do the above part yourself, and then get the architect to figure out where all the plumbing, electricity, support beams, and such go. That is what they are good at. Knowing how you live your life, or would like to live your life is what YOU are good at. The architect doesn't know that you want a fridge right beside the computer, or an art gallery in the front hall. Heck, why waste space heating a front hall? (hey, its your home right! You can do what you want!) Or a vault for your guns, diamonds, 1950's Playboy magazines might be useful. I have NEVER seen a vault in a house design, but it might be useful! Ladies might like a bathroom off every bedroom. The standard couch-chair-coffee table gets used a lot or would a circle of easy chairs with tables beside them be better? A breakfast nook beside the front window would be nice, perhaps with reflective glass so you can look out but the stalkers can't see in. You like to cook, so a pantry would be required. Ever seen a design in the bookstore which had a pantry AND a computer screen in the kitchen? Ha!
I have done these designs for loft buildings, former warehouse space, (with variable results) and of course to industrial places like metal and electrical shops. The hard part is to reach the home owner, to let go and decide exactly how THEY want to live in a place.
Like, what would your PERFECT kitchen look like?
Oh, and I have a hot water on demand system for MY house. Because I am away a lot, it saves me plenty! I figure it paid for itself within 2 years, but it IS twice as expensive as a regular heater. A lighter footprint on the environment as well as saving money on fuel. Mine was made by Rinai.
http://www.build.com.au/plumbing/featurearticles_1.htm
http://www.foreverhotwater.com/
http://www.foreverhotwater.com/pdf/
OkaloosaGas.pdf
Thanks very much for the URLs. We hadn't gotten to doing any kind of detailed search for information yet (heck, we're not even sure we're going to build; the thoughts we're (for which read: I'm) having add up to a smaller house thats significantly more expensive per square foot than any around). The list of features is ranked 1/2/3, and I suspect that none of the 3s will make it, almost none of the 2s, and only the less expensive of the 1s. But thats what dreaming is for.
The kitchen question is an interesting one. I kid my wife that we exchanged a kitchen with shelves and cabinets for one with shelves and cabinets -- much prettier, but functionally identical. Of course, it really is a better kitchen (for one thing, there isn't a shelf being partially held up by a five pound bag of sugar) and I like it a lot. But even there, very little in the way of work flow analysis went into it -- the most was 'we want to have two work areas near the oven, with one having the tools for baking pretty much clustered around it'. From which came the vertical storage cabinet that has worked out very well. But the classic 'kitchen triangle' crosses a doorway, and in a better kitchen would not -- and thats about all we know about it. I suspect that our approach to designing the kitchen (insofar as we do) will be the same as the house -- how do we want to use it, how do we like to use it, 'make it so'.
One note that I've mentally made is that when I'm writing up the dream list of features, to include not only fixes for things I don't like, but inclusion of things I do. Thus the tray ceiling (which we lifted from a tear sheet thats twenty years old) is on the list, because we did it and we liked it, but a separate light switch for the light there, which we did not do, is also there.
It should be fun. Heck, even if we don't do it, just thinking about it is fun.
Basic principles....
site your house and insert windows to take advantage of sunlight, instead of a bylaw which says you have to make the ridgeline of the house parallel to the road.
Reduce reuse and re-cycle. It takes energy to haul wood to your building site, it takes energy to make paint, and laminate flooring. Reduce was covered in the above post, re-use involves finding multiple uses for existing spaces, and also using on-site or nearly on site materials as possible. A local brickyard instead of a chi chi brickyard a thousand miles away. Local building materials instead of wood from as far away as Canada. Natural materials instead of man made materials. (stone looks nice, and you don't have to paint it.) Recycled brick is easy to come by, and looks fantastic!
Recycling....old wood is easy to come by. It might cost the same by the time you pay some local kid to pull the nails, but then, that kid will now be able to buy gas for his car and now has invaluable job experience. Also, kept him off the streets for a few days, and out of trouble.
Recycled old windows sometime look really neat, but are not fuel efficient. On the other hand, they are often free, and they can frequently be doubled up (storm windows) for efficiency. Considering the price of new windows, you have to lose a powerful amount of heat to cover the cost of new windows. My uncle has a set of front doors which used to be the side entrance to the local church. Rounded top, required some framing work, but it looks great.
The stones which came out of the foundation to my garage now form a nice dry stone wall around my property. Hauling it all away would have cost 800 bucks. Having the local scout troupe haul the rocks over to the back yard cost much the same, and I got some exercise in the process. I cancelled my gym membership...grin!
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