Building house

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Re: Building house

Post by doodle » Sun Mar 30, 2014 11:31 am

On the subject of design, this is one of the more interesting ones I have come across in a while: http://m.imgur.com/a/Ps7Ta
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Re: Building house

Post by Pointedstick » Sun Mar 30, 2014 3:49 pm

This is really exciting, doodle. I'm so happy for you!

One thing I really want to stress is that when you do construction-related activities yourself as a DIYer, it will take 500% more time and effort than you think and plan for, pretty much guaranteed, irrespective of how much planning you do. I too took the "volunteer at HFH to get experience" approach and am now a proud new homeowner tacking renovation projects on my own, and this has been my experience. I can actually do everything (awesome) but it takes a long time. And I don't even have a commute anymore; I work from home now. So depending on your work situation, you might not have many hours per day to do this work, and you also need to plan for physical and mental exhaustion, too. Don't expect to want to mortar a course of cinder blocks after a tough workday.

I'm not saying you can't do it yourself, you CAN! It'll just take you a really long time, and you have to plan for that. How will you protect your in-progress house from the rain? What will you do if a work emergency comes up in the middle of a concrete pour? Do you have the physical abilities or specialized equipment necessary to move bulky and heavy objects all by yourself?
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Re: Building house

Post by Pointedstick » Sun Mar 30, 2014 3:59 pm

You can get trusses that permit a loft or room; they're called (sensibly enough) "room in attic" trusses.

If you like CMU, there's always dry-stack. You can do the whole house that way and then cover the surfaces with surface-bonding cement. Then just screw two inches of EPS foam to the surface and stucco it. Check out http://drystacked.com/

As for the $9,000 dream home, I believe that guy did it in Thailand or somewhere like that. Labor and materials are a lot cheaper in southeast Asia. ;) Without cold temperatures or building codes (or just simple bribes to get officials to look the other way), that's going to save a lot of money too. Those are simply unavoidable differences when you start talking about building in the USA or any developed country.
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Re: Building house

Post by I Shrugged » Wed Apr 02, 2014 5:18 pm

I'd say build what you want.  The resale market might not be as big but you will still sell it.  If you have some land, as it sounds, I think buyers would be more flexible on the house anyway.
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Re: Building house

Post by doodle » Sat Apr 26, 2014 11:37 am

Ok...philosophical question here....what is the point of a bedroom or sleeping space that is much larger than the mattress? It seems that if the purpose of a bedroom is a place where you go to lay down and close your eyes it is pretty inefficient to design a space that is large enough to hold a large family gathering in. Watching HGTV though I'm flabbergasted by the number of people that want 400 square foot bedrooms. It seems like that space would be better utilized in common areas where people gather like the kitchen or family room. Any agree that small bedrooms make much more sense?
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Re: Building house

Post by Pointedstick » Sat Apr 26, 2014 11:44 am

doodle wrote: Ok...philosophical question here....what is the point of a bedroom or sleeping space that is much larger than the mattress? It seems that if the purpose of a bedroom is a place where you go to lay down and close your eyes it is pretty inefficient to design a space that is large enough to hold a large family gathering in. Watching HGTV though I'm flabbergasted by the number of people that want 400 square foot bedrooms. It seems like that space would be better utilized in common areas where people gather like the kitchen or family room. Any agree that small bedrooms make much more sense?
I completely agree. Can't tell what the point is. Most large bedrooms that I've seen have simply had huge unused areas. Increases heating and cooling loads required to maintain nighttime comfort, too. If the bedroom can fit a mattress big enough for the number of people sleeping in it, plus their end tables, and maybe a bureau and a bookshelf, it's big enough!

And if you're going to turn it into an office, you're replacing  the biggest piece of furniture (the bed) with a smaller one (desk and chair). No reason why it needs to be huge.

My favorite HGTV insanity is bedrooms as big as living rooms and walk-in closets and dedicated master bathrooms as big as sensibly-sized bedrooms. A modern master suite can be like 700 square feet. Madness, I tell you! Madness!
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Re: Building house

Post by doodle » Sun Apr 27, 2014 11:09 am

Another thing that makes no sense to me is the five or six burner stove and large oven.....especially for people who live in smaller houses and don't cook thanksgiving size feasts. I think it would make more sense to regain counter space lost to stove top and then simply buy a couple of these: http://www.amazon.com/Max-Burton-6000-1 ... ion+burner

Honestly, when was the last time you used more than two burners at the same time?

To replace the oven I Think a cabinet mounted microwave / oven combo would do the trick nicely: http://www.amazon.com/Cuisinart-CMW-200 ... wave+combo
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Re: Building house

Post by l82start » Sun Apr 27, 2014 12:31 pm

those look awesome. if i ever take up simple living they will be on the list.   
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Re: Building house

Post by Pointedstick » Sun Apr 27, 2014 1:51 pm

My wife and I bake and frequently cook with more than two burners. Never more than four, though, and for that reason, we got the simplest gas oven we could find. Those five burner ovens are nothing more than status symbols. We were at a family member's house for thanksgiving, and THEY had one of those Viking stoves with like 6 burners. I don't think more than 4 were ever in use at once.

Keep in mind the cost of electricity when you think about those induction burners. 1800 watts = about $0.20/hour, depending on electricity prices. By contrast, the hottest burner on my gas oven is 9,000 BTUs, which is 9% of a therm, which is about $1.00, for a grand total of $0.09 an hour.

Of course, if you're not plumbing the house for gas, it won't be worth it because with no heating appliance, modest use, and a small house, the base charge will undoubtedly be higher than your usage fees.
Last edited by Pointedstick on Sun Apr 27, 2014 3:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Building house

Post by Pointedstick » Mon Apr 28, 2014 9:46 am

doodle wrote: Not a big fan of gas....it kind of scares me actually. Besides I want to run a lot of this off of solar panels.

As far as cooking goes though induction seems like the best way to go. You can program precise temperatures, set them to timers, they respond to adjustments immediately like gas, and because the heating element doesn't get hot they should heat the house less (of particular benefit in Florida)
I totally get being scared of gas. It scares me too. And I also don't like how you kind of can't do it yourself, because you really can blow yourself up. You're in a good situation being in Florida; your needs are mostly cooling which is going to be electricity no matter what for a mechanical system. But anywhere it gets cold, electric heating is outrageously expensive. Gas just makes more financial sense when you want to heat things. And unless you're planning to have a solar hot water preheater (which would be awesome, but complicated), an electric storage water heater is going to be about three or four times as expensive to run on an annual basis as gas for the same quantity of heat produced.
Last edited by Pointedstick on Mon Apr 28, 2014 11:19 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Building house

Post by doodle » Mon Apr 28, 2014 11:21 pm

I don't live up north but it seems like there are many types of home heating that could be better incorporated into homes than gas furnaces.

If i was building a house up north i would be looking at passive solar using window placement and thermalmass and one of these babies built onto some structure that could hold and radiate the stored heat for hours. url]http://jotul.com/us/home[/url]

That combined with good insulation and windows should do the trick.
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Re: Building house

Post by Pointedstick » Tue Apr 29, 2014 10:56 am

doodle wrote: I don't live up north but it seems like there are many types of home heating that could be better incorporated into homes than gas furnaces.

If i was building a house up north i would be looking at passive solar using window placement and thermalmass and one of these babies built onto some structure that could hold and radiate the stored heat for hours. url]http://jotul.com/us/home[/url]

That combined with good insulation and windows should do the trick.
It's a lot more complicated than that. Passive solar does not work well in cold climates without an enormous amount of design work. It usually winds up being "active solar" with fans and blowers and heat pumps, and at that point, you pretty much have a solar-assisted HVAC system, which is a fancy way of saying that you have what everyone else has, only worse since the interior thermal mass takes longer to heat and cool compared to houses with low mass but high insulation. If you're freezing in your mass house with a heating system that's small (e.g. ductless mini-split heat pump) or difficult to fine-tune (e.g. wood stove), it will take hours for the mass to absorb the heat you're trying to fill the house with because convection and conduction will cause the hotter air to be robbed of its heat when it touches the cold thermal mass until the thermal mass has absorbed enough heat from the air that the two are roughly in equilibrium.

This actually makes passive solar houses well-suited to being equipped with conventional HVAC systems that would otherwise be grossly oversized for a low-mass-high-insulation Passivehaus-type structure. If you're cold, you turn on your 60,000 BTU furnace and it can rapidly heat the thermal masses the way a 20,000 BTU heat pump could rapidly heat a massless superinsulated interior space. But the difference is that once the thermal mass is charged with this heat, it will retain it far longer compared to the only superinsulated space because in addition to insulation, it also has storage capacity. So maybe you'll only have to run your large conventional heater once every two days, and such equipment itself will be far cheaper and easier to purchase and have serviced than the more esoteric small heaters and coolers that superinsulated houses typically require. Ductless mini-split heat pump systems can cost like $5,000! By contrast, you can get a 60,000 BTU 98% efficient gas furnace for half that.

My ideal in a cold northern climate would be a high-mass house with about R-40+ insulation on all sides (including under the slab, and more in the ceiling) that's sized and situated so that solar irradiance can directly heat it right up to the point where any more would make it overheat on hot days. Then for the small number of days where the sun isn't enough, it would have a conventional gas furnace. In climates like the desert southwest where you can count on a lot of sun year-round, the gas furnace would be supplemented or replaced by a solar thermal radiant heat system with the collection panels located elsewhere on the property so they could be as big as required. If designed properly, such a house could have heating bills that were practically zero.

Of course, all of this can simply be bypassed by rolling back your standards of comfort 100 years or so.  ;)
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Re: Building house

Post by Pointedstick » Fri May 02, 2014 9:33 am

I thought about posting this in the "Peak Oil" thread but thought it made more sense here.
doodle wrote:
Pointedstick wrote: Wouldn't prices rise if production was down, given the same demand? If both prices and production are falling, wouldn't that point to a collapse in demand?

It probably doesn't help their financials that they were just forced to pay a fine equal to twice last year's net income!
I wondered the same thing. Im curious though how efficient the market is at pricing a finite nonrenewable resource. It seems like oil could be one of those scenarios where the price could jump substantially as soon as it dawns on our lizard brains that we are burning through this limited treasure with reckless abandon and the oil production growth curve turns south. Then again, I am a pessimist by nature....

I think that an oil price/ supply shock is probably going to be the economic event that most severely impacts me in my lifetime.
I assume that you're not having your house plumbed with gas, then! Here's an idea for hot water heating  in your new house that I think you'll really like:

A solar hot water pre-heater warms the water in the hot water plumbing (which should all be insulated PEX with no hard 90 degree elbows, with pipes as small as you can manage) and sits right where the mechanical water heater would be. Then, you install electric resistance point-of-use water heaters at each fixture to raise the temperature the rest of the way. Because you live in sunny, warm Florida, the solar hot water preheater can be an extremely simple open loop design that doesn't have to resist freezing temperatures. And it can be expected to be working much of the time as well.

Compared to an electric resistance storage or tankless whole-house water heater, this system would be extremely reliable and inexpensive, and deliver truly endless, instantaneous hot water. The only downside I can think of is that your house's electric system would need to be beefy enough to support the extremely large loads resulting from turning a few of these heaters on at once. They likely won't be on for more than a few minutes a day, but during that time, they'll be drawing like 50 amps!

Of course it's likely none of this meets building codes so you might have to install a cheap tank heater and then swap it out later after the inspector's left.
Last edited by Pointedstick on Fri May 02, 2014 9:35 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Building house

Post by dualstow » Mon Sep 01, 2014 9:49 am

naive question: why don't they use more poured concrete in the U.S. like they do in Europe? Does it have more to do with cost, difficulty, or the assumption that the house will be torn down and replaced in a few decades?
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Re: Building house

Post by Libertarian666 » Wed Sep 03, 2014 1:55 pm

dualstow wrote: naive question: why don't they use more poured concrete in the U.S. like they do in Europe? Does it have more to do with cost, difficulty, or the assumption that the house will be torn down and replaced in a few decades?
It's because US consumers and building codes are moronic.
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Re: Building house

Post by dualstow » Wed Sep 03, 2014 2:18 pm

Libertarian666 wrote:
dualstow wrote: naive question: why don't they use more poured concrete in the U.S. like they do in Europe? Does it have more to do with cost, difficulty, or the assumption that the house will be torn down and replaced in a few decades?
It's because US consumers and building codes are moronic.
I wish we could be more doric and ionic with our building codes.
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Re: Building house

Post by Mountaineer » Wed Sep 03, 2014 2:37 pm

dualstow wrote:
Libertarian666 wrote:
dualstow wrote: naive question: why don't they use more poured concrete in the U.S. like they do in Europe? Does it have more to do with cost, difficulty, or the assumption that the house will be torn down and replaced in a few decades?
It's because US consumers and building codes are moronic.
I wish we could be more doric and ionic with our building codes.
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Re: Building house

Post by dualstow » Wed Sep 03, 2014 3:07 pm

Mountaineer wrote:
dualstow wrote:
Libertarian666 wrote: It's because US consumers and building codes are moronic.
I wish we could be more doric and ionic with our building codes.
Have you lost your marble?
I suppose I just don't want to take our building codes for granite.
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Re: Building house

Post by l82start » Wed Sep 03, 2014 3:41 pm

dualstow wrote:
Mountaineer wrote:
dualstow wrote: I wish we could be more doric and ionic with our building codes.
Have you lost your marble?
I suppose I just don't want to take our building codes for granite.
if you really care, you could submit a column to an architectural magazine.
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Re: Building house

Post by Pointedstick » Wed Sep 03, 2014 3:46 pm

l82start wrote: if you really care, you could submit a column to an architectural magazine.
I would adore that!
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