low winter sun

We have had a few sunny days this December and it's been exciting to see the play of light coming in.  The overhangs were designed to block the high summer sun while allowing the low winter sun to come right in and allow for some passive solar gain.

The Ram Board was installed to protect our finished hardwood floors during the rest of construction. 

electrical install

The electrician has started. Above is the view in the living room of the apartment looking towards the front door and kitchen.  A protective board now covers the concrete floor.

The renderings are very basic...we have not chosen cabinet material or colors yet nor light fixtures, but I wanted to show a bit of the process.  It is extremely helpful to have the 3D model to continuously go back to.

The apartment will have it's own subpanel which is located in it's laundry room. Ours is also located in our laundry room below.

I love Neil's cardboard lists that are tacked up in different rooms.  Here they list what wires have been run and below is a to do list. 

The picture below shows our bedroom to the right and the enclosed space to the left is our bathroom  with the conditioned attic above.  One of our challenges is that I did not want actual walls between the living room and bedroom/ closet area.  These will be walls of bookcases, which makes installing electrical outlets and switches more difficult.  The outlets will eventually be in the bookcases and we are doing remote control switches for the living room.  

introducing CHAPUCAS

This is probably the most daunting design project I have ever worked on…the design of our own home. Having my husband and myself as clients is a lot harder than one would think. How do I get all those cool ideas I have been wanting in a house into a cohesive design and within budget? All of our decisions are based on balancing our, at times, conflicting priorities.

PRIORITIES

• A home we will love - cool, beautiful and comfortable
• Lots of natural light
• Stay within our budget
• Energy Efficient
• Healthy, Low Maintenance & Environmentally Responsible interiors and exteriors
• A house that fits into the neighborhood

 

DESIGN PARAMETERS

• The lot size is 40’x120’ with alley access, 20’ front yard set back and 16’ rear yard with 5’ side yard setbacks. 
• Open up to the southern exposure along the long side of the lot.
• Attached ADU (accessory dwelling unit, aka mother-in-law unit)
• Main living space on the second floor with separate bedroom
• Connection to the outside on the second floor
• Garage big enough for the Mini Cooper, motorcycle and all of Neil’s tools and work materials. 
• Home offices for both of us

DESIGN CHALLENGES

• Display my extensive book collection without overwhelming Neil’s minimalistic sensibilities.
• A large enough home to entertain in, but small enough to be intimate for just the 2 of us.  The right size home.
• Maintaining privacy within a city environment while bringing in lots of natural light
• Create 2 dwelling units that are separate, but have an indoor connection

The main space is really what the whole house is designed around. I wanted lots of natural light and ventilation. A room that is both intimate and spacious. A room where the bookshelves and cabinets are built in and become the walls and the TV can be hidden with moveable panels. The house is designed around how we live and want to live.

FOR CURRENT CONSTRUCTION

 PHOTOS CLICK HERE

kitchen bar top

The kitchen bar top is a major feature of the design of the Karina kitchen and one of the trickiest to pull off cohesively because there are many different materials coming together as well as it being a part of 3 rooms. We chose Lyptus butcher block for the counter top because of it's warmth and similar richness as the floor.
We could have continued the drywall onto the 1/2 wall from the living room side, but I wanted to continue the front paneling of the peninsula around the side.

To keep costs down and to make it more simple to build, we did not wrap the Lyptus top into a L shape, but changed materials to a painted trim top. The 1" trim top dies into the 1-1/2" thick Lyptus, while allowing the skirt trim directly below to wrap and be continuous to become like a window sill detail as it goes into the living room.

That same skirt trim turns the corner and then dies into the backsplash. The backsplash is the Chroma countertop material. We changed the outlet color to black and used stainless steel covers to better go with the counter & appliances.


Getting the right height was important...one for perch-ability (see the last photo), but also mechanically so that outlets could be included in the backsplash. Neil built a 41" high wall + the 1-1/2" counter. This is the right height to lean against. Even though there is enough overhang to pull a bar stool up to it, we thought of it more as a lean-against counter and buffet. It also hides dishes and the counter when sitting in the dining area and living.

built green - insulation

Many of the points we received for Built Green are for items not seen now that the house is finished. One of the big things that makes this house energy efficient and comfortable is the extra insulation we used as well as the air sealing. We used BIBS (Blown-In-Blanket-System) which is much more effective than push-in batt insulation in the walls and provides for a higher level of insulation (R23). It is far superior to batt in the walls because it fills in all around the electrical wiring and plumbing pipes. "Tests show that a mere 4% void area from a poorly installed batt causes a 50% increase in heat loss. The Blow-In-Blanket® System eliminates voids and does not settle." It also provides better sound control. Looking at this picture you can see how Neil used some advanced framing techniques. Simple things like insulated headers and ladder framing at interior to exterior wall intersections, increases the insulation area of the wall. The blocking to the right of the window is for the convection heater and there is insulation behind it. Also if you look closely you will see caulking along the plates and wood intersections. This seals the wall cavity from air leaks from the exterior to the interior of the house and is one reason we did so well on our blower door test.

We used scissor trusses for the roof structure and because of this had extra depth to increase the roof insulation up to R-49. Here we used EcoBatts. Since the cavities were not filled with mechanical items like the walls, it was fairly straight forward to use Batts. We had Chris of the O'Brien Company out to inspect before we put the gypsum wallboard.

it's all about the light

Good morning! What a beautiful day we had yesterday. The light was just streaming in the windows and filled the house. It was hard not to walk around with a huge smile on my face. The character of this house is traditional but the amount of light that comes in, makes it stand out from older homes. (well that and it's energy efficiency.)


Siting the long side of the house to face south was the first step in bringing the light in. I chose to modify this plan (originally the GoodFit Kaleah) because of how much it opened up this way with the tall windows facing south. In our gray Seattle weather one needs to bring in as much light as possible.




This counter was a remnant from our tiler. Supposedly it is a very expensive slab...I need to find out the name of it, because it's beautiful. Love all the texture in it.

We looked at the numbers here and out on the post. I liked them under the light and going horizontally versus vertically.

The Karina - front porch

Neil continues working outside this week, completing the front porch and the back deck as well as some work on the yard. The front porch is a key design feature of the house. It's 8'x 15' which is room-size. Plenty usable instead of just a tack on. Many new homes today do not incorporate a front porch or if there is one, it's not deep enough to use. The front porch is an important transition between the public realm of the street and the private realm of the home. It's a place to sit and read the mail, to wait for friends or just watch the world go by. With our Seattle weather, it's also key to have a place to sit outside that has a roof over it. Because our house is so close to Madison Avenue, we have a lot of people walking by each day. Having the front porch is friendly gesture to the community and will provide opportunities to meet our neighbors.