The functional program

Defining your functional program is step one when working with an architect. It outlines what you need, or think you need, in your home. That is, the building blocks required for your particular use – how many bedrooms, bathrooms, etc. Square footage is often included as well. Most North Americans think super-size, because it’s the norm – remnants of the American dream – who knows. According a report by the CHBA, in 2011, the average size of a new, single-detached house in Ontario was 2,000 square feet. This is the number I had in my mind for our house. I don’t think I questioned or understood why. Was it because it was imbedded in my psyche from browsing MLS listings? After learning how much it costs to build (usually calculated as a cost per square foot price), that’s when I started to really question what my preconceived notions were of what I required in a home.

The first thing to bear in mind is this: there’s a big difference between space and well-designed space. If a space has been thoughtfully considered, 1,500 square feet can easily feel like 2,000 square feet. The smaller the footprint, the less it costs to build, the less it costs to operate and the less time is required to clean. Yes, yes and yes.

The functional program we came up with for our house was fairly conventional: all the usual suspects — with three bedrooms and two and a half bathrooms. The floorpan the architects developed is so very efficient that they’ve managed to comfortably fit it all within approximately 1,400* square feet. That’s a 1,400 with an asterisk because we’ll also have the basement, with our backdoor entry, and the loft space on the third floor, which includes a bonus rooftop patio. The large window in the main floor living room will open up to the outside, extending the house even further in the summer months. We've also included a garage in the grand design, which we'll tackle down the road. (OK, so really it's probably about 1,700 sq ft –– is that right Mark?)

It’s no Tiny House. But as minimal as we like to think we are, we are not. We have two kids and plenty of hobbies. That is to say: we have stuff. There will loads of clever storage solutions built in to this house for our stuff in the hopes that we can abide-by/aspire-to a minimal aesthetic. Needless to say, storage was part of our program as well. Oh, and there was one last thing that was part of the brief: zero maintenance. Maybe I'm lazy, but I can think of a whole lot of other things I'd rather be doing than tinkering with our house. So materials and finishes must abide by this principle. And that is what the architects (Mark) had to work from, from a technical standpoint. Combine all those with a concept, or parti (architect lingo), and you've got a house that is more than just a house — it's our house.

Event: The Economics of Sustainability

Last night I attended an event put on by CSC (Construction Specifications Canada) with Mark. It was on “The Economics of Sustainability”. A hot topic, seeing as how the event sold out and many discussions continued to take place well beyond ending time. 

I really enjoyed what Nadine Gutz had to say. She’s from a company called Interface, which makes carpets from recycled nylon. And hearing from Economist Rob Conboy at Better, which is trying to get the ball rolling on financing sustainable building practices in the US. This is hugely important because there will be no widespread adoption unless the economics make sense.

Gunter Lang, from the Passivehaus Network in Austria also spoke. He's been building these houses for 20 years now and walked us through some European Passivhaus projects. Did you know that in Brussels, all public buildings MUST be build to Passivhaus? In Vienna, they are building Passivhaus skyscrapers? And in Heidelberg they are building a whole 7,000 unit community, including grocery stores, schools and even brothels, to Passivhaus? It's so commonplace over there. It wasn't 20 years ago. We're on the foothills of the revolution over here. 95% of the evening’s conversation ended up being about Passivhaus. Wow.

Adam Cronk, from Green Giant Design Build, introduced our house and our blog. I love this guy. His mandate is to “embarrass builders” by showing how affordable it can be to build by building pre-fab. Hip hip hooray. We are super excited to be working with Adam on our project.

So now the community knows about our blog. It's really happening. And I feel very excited by the level of enthusiasm there was at the event last night.

And now for some comic relief:

Slide from Gunter's presentation. An advert for Passive House from <can't recall where>. Apologies to those whose heads I've cut off.

Almost-er

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Almost a year ago now, over the course of a weekend, Mark and I (who am I kidding: just Mark) designed our hypothetical house. The design was to be appraised as one of the conditions on our construction mortgage. This is a ridiculous time frame to design a home. However, it only needed to be rough as we would be able to revise once we were approved for financing. The initial design appraisal came in where we needed it to be, and so to keep the project moving along (with the hopes of breaking ground in fall 2014) we revised. 

Mark developed the design into something we were both fairly excited about (see previous post Almost). He prepared working drawings, submitted them to the city for permit and to various general contractors for tender. With the thermometer dropping, we were starting to feel pressure to make decisions before the ground started to freeze. We didn’t like it. This would potentially be our forever home. We had to get it right. 

That’s when we decided to take a step back. Why were we so driven to break ground in the fall? What were the implications of waiting? Waiting meant we would be living in-between for a while longer and have to pay more interest on our land. In the grand scheme of things, however, those repercussions were fairly minor.

With a little more breathing room, and an intervention staged by Mark’s partners at plotnonplot, we realized that our initial design was not going to cut it for us. Because of the rushed timeline, we never truly followed a proper creative process. And it showed. We designed a lovely home. But it wasn’t our home. And so we tore up the old design and began round 2 – the redesign – which led us to our current much-improved (x infinity) design. I am beyond thrilled with it. Working more as a team this time around, they nailed it.

Almost

The land is now officially ours. The design is near-complete. We are both very much in love with it. Mark is now working out the labour-intensive, but oh so important, details. Afterall, God is in the details – isn't that right Mies? He has been working around the clock on the drawings to get them ready to submit to the City for permit. (I dare say, he just might be more sleep-deprived than I am. And I have a two-month old baby to take care of around the clock. But don't tell him I said so.) At the same time, he'll be going over the project with a couple different contractors to see what's feasible and to find a good fit.

Our goal is to break ground asap. We still have loads of time right? Right.

As soon as the design is complete, we'll be ready to share it, and this blog, with the world. Until then, almost...

Collaboration

We've all been working hard on the design. It's coming along nicely.

This mornings brainstorming session.

Without breaking the bank

Oh yes, there’s that. Our goal is to not only build ourselves a healthy home we will love for years and years to come, it’s also to show that there are potential monetary benefits to building in this manner. We want the construction price to be achievable for a custom modest house. Even if construction house is slightly higher than a typical custom house, the energy savings will offset those costs and pay for themselves in a short amount of time. This is what we hope and believe we will be able to show. 

Does it just come down to where we spend the money? Do we invest in the walls and windows and skimp on the finishes? Likely we will have to. And we’re totally happy to live with concrete or plywood floors, Ikea kitchens, what have you. But how far will we have to go if we want to achieve Passivhaus certification? Should we go for certification or is it enough to simply apply good Passivhaus principals to our design and build and forgo the difficult certification process? 

How far are we willing to go and where do we draw the line? 

Upgrading our windows from really good triple-glazed windows to really really good windows could cost us an extra $30,000. Building 24” thick walls instead of 18” could be another 20 thousand. Would we rather forgo the negligible window difference and install a grey water recovery system? What would improve our lives the greater? We do not have very deep pockets and not a lot of room for error. So if we go for certification and come close, but don’t get it, was it worth it? These are all questions weighing on our minds. When we have the answers, we’ll let you know. 

Why can’t we be friends? Good design and Passivhaus

Can a Passivhaus building also win over architecture fans? Are good design principals and Passivhaus principals mutually exclusive? We certainly hope not. But as we are in the throws of designing our home, we are discovering that it ain’t easy being green.

Mark and I finally arrived at a design we loved. We went over to the lot, staked it out, and were generally feeling pretty fantastic about what we had come up with. *Pat on back* That is, until Mark started the energy modelling. The numbers weren’t looking as good as we had hoped. If we increase the thickness of our walls (from 18” to 24”), put in top-of-the-line triple-glazed windows, and added a sources of heat (radiant floors/ducting), we’d still be borderline for Passivhaus. 

If we had a large lot, with great exposure and few neighbours – building a Passivhaus that met our architectural/design snobbery requirements would be no promlemo. Our lot, however, poses several large challenges in terms of Passivhaus design:

1. It’s narrow. The narrow shape of our lot wills a narrow house plan. Plus we need to push the house as far over to the North side of the lot as possible, to allow for better exposure on the South-facing windows – further increasing the need for a narrow house plan. However, for best energy performance, a more square shape is preferable. How do we create more of a square plan while maximizing solar gain on those South windows?
2. Limiting distance. Limiting distance in the building code restricts the number of windows we are allowed to have on a side facade facing neighbours. Our South facade just so happens to be along the side of the house, facing the orange neighbours. So depending on the area of our south facade, we’re only allowed a small fraction of it to be windowed. We’re looking at 10–12% window coverage. This is pretty piddly compared to the area of window we would like to have. 

Never to back down from a challenge, we are readdressing the design to see what changes we might be able to make. Hopefully just tweaks, and not a major overhaul. We may feel slightly deflated by this set back, but are still determined to make friends out of these two…without breaking the bank…

Step two: sell house

We bought the lot. Yay! Next up: sell our current house. Our little house has sold quickly in the past. But it takes a special buyer to fall in love with it. Fortunately we had Kerry to play matchmaker. It sold in only a couple weeks, even though it felt like an eternity. We've had so many special memories in the short time in our little house. We'll miss it, but take comfort in the fact that we'll be able to see it every day from across the street :)