Hello all,
Well, you’d think one time through the house building adventure might be enough…
But here’s the thing. We were not even done with the first house when the kids started heading off on their own life adventures. Now we are empty nesters in a 4 bedroom house. And our eldest, with a growing family, is in a 2 bedroom unit in a duplex. So hatched the idea of a retirement cottage for the 2 of us and let the growing family move into our current house. If that works out we’d be right next door, which we consider great for extended family connections.
The new place would go where the old double-wide was that we finally had hauled away in dumpsters. It’s shaping up as a 2-sotry, ~1500 sq ft, 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom house with attached shop and garage. The main living space is a simple 22 x 36 ft 2-story on a crawl space, and the shop and garage are a wrap-around lean to on the E and S sides, on a slab.
I’ve updated some of the preamble kind of info from last time, and below that, get into specifics about the design, hoping we’ll get some feedback and be able to tweak the design and come up with a great retirement “cottage.” We welcome any feedback.
Feel free to skip all the verbiage and scroll down to get to the sketches and floor plans.
Lifestyle priorities
- Family togetherness and gathering spaces
- Frequent outdoor activities
- Time and space for hobbies, crafts/sewing, music, including shop space
- Accommodation for guests and returning family (but with the larger house next door this currently just means a guest room and a large sitting room upstairs).
Design goals
- Efficient use of space
- Open “great” room concept with lots of natural light. I put “great” in quotes because it’s pretty modest in size. To make it feel bigger I plan to leave the ceiling open over the living room area (ie exposed joists, which will be 4x6s on 24 inches, so headroom will be about 8’4″ to the bottoms of the joists and 8’10” to the actual ceiling. There will be a beam between the living and dining areas and the ceiling will switch to a usual sheetrocked 8′ one there. At least this is the current plan.
- Good sized kitchen — we like to cook!
- Mud room. Here we have to be efficient since there’s just not a bunch of room right at the main entry. Extra coats and boots etc can go in the garage. There will be some room under the stairs straight ahead when you come in the front door.
- Accessibility: We’re wanting to be ready for possible ground floor-only living. Using top flange hangers for floor joist we can have the first floor only one step up from grade. This would allow easy installation of a ramp if needed. Inside, we’ll keep halls and doorways, bathroom, etc sized for accessibility and start right off with at least some grab bars in the bathroom. The upper bed/bath would be our first choice to stay in, though.
- There is space upstairs for 2 bedrooms plus a modest area at the front of the house for a sitting room or such. At this point we are inclined to have just one bedroom upstairs (in the back) and leave the front area as a large room, which we feel would good for a grandkid play room, a rec-room kind of room (even ping pong?), space for larger gatherings or space for crafts or whatever. We’ll make sure that another bedroom could easily be added later if desired.
- Access to daylight/outside
- We really like the amount of natural light in our current place, especially in the south facing great room. We have a fair number of windows, and some up fairly high near the 15-ft-high peak. The positive psychological effects are enormous. You have to understand the light/dark dynamics of living in Alaska to fully appreciate this. It’s worth the energy penalty. We also get a certain amount of passive solar heating at certain times of the year. Case in point, today, 1st of March, was 6F (-14 C) this morning and topped out at 12F (-11 C). We postponed our usual brunch fire in the woodstove because the temperature inside was just right even though the Toyo heater was off most of the day. When the sun dropped behind the ridge (about 3 pm) we had our fire. And no, we don’t get too much glare or heat in the spring or summer. OK, maybe for part of 3-5 days per year in a hot summer. OK, back to the new house: It’s situated next to a tall stand of trees so can’t get much sun except maybe for a month either side of the summer solstice when it’s hardly needed. So the light gathering orientations will be north and west. We’ll want more windows on those walls and want them as tall as possible, especially on the west wall where there is a view of Mt. Ripinsky. That view explains the orientation of the house. There is some risk of reduced privacy with the two houses kind of facing each other, but we hope current and future trees mitigate that well enough.
- We like to feel connected to the great outdoors and be able to easily go out to check the garden or have a cookout, or go for a walk or bike ride. So, besides the front door we’ve planned a sliding glass door off the north side of the living room which would open onto a narrow covered deck then the “yard” which abuts the garden/barn area. Hopefully the bump out octagonal gazebo-like part of the deck can be built too.
- Attached garage and shop. This one might need to explaining. In the past I’ve not been a fan of attached garages. You have the potential for exhaust or other fumes from stored volatile liquids etc to leak into the house. You also preclude windows where the garage abuts. Then there’s the suburban look. However, an attached garage can meet a need for above-freezing storage of things you should not have in the house or simply don’t want to dedicate space to in the house. Examples are paints, adhesives, etc that should not be allowed to freeze, but are not good to have in your living space. Things like camping gear and extra clothing won’t be harmed by the cold per say but they don’t do well in unheated buildings in our climate due to humidity issues. And bring tools or such from the cold into your house to fix something and you’re going to have a bunch of condensation on them before you can say jack be nimble. Then perhaps you might even want to keep a vehicle in the garage, which could save seemingly hundreds of hours of sweeping and scraping of snow and ice and allow you to service it during bad weather. Of course you could build a heated detached garage/shop, but the cost to build and heat it would be considerably more than an attached. In our case the attached shop area would also be low cost space for mechanicals, storage, and projects and could be heated to just 50F or so most of the time (could be bumped up when needed), and the garage would be more storage and vehicle needs and be just kept above freezing, which should take very little added heat with the small amount of heat from the house able to do it most of the time, I’m predicting. So careful attention to air sealing between house and garage and a motion-detecting exhaust only fan would be in order for safety.
- Energy efficiency/Low maintenance of course. From what I’ve learned building the current house and since, I think the new can be very economical to heat and low maintenance. Heat strategy will be small wood stove and heat pump.
- Please ask if there re any questions.
The plans
Peruse as you like, you probably don’t need to look at all of them to get the idea. Click on a graphic for a larger version, then use your back button to get back. Let me know if you’re wanting to see something more or different. Keep in mind there are a few obvious details not in the drawings that I am aware of, such as weird roof extensions that have not been trimmed off, etc.
If you use Sketchup or want to learn it, you can download the 6 MB .skp file and look it over and bypass most of the the screenshots. I’m using the old desktop version of Sketchup, but it should open in the online version.
First, plan views of the lot. Existing house and existing barn are placed over Google terrain, with the new house (white) going in where the old trailer was.
Next some perspective views: The first, white one is an earlier model, very similar to the more recent green/red ones, but it shows the desired gazebo not yet on the newer ones. I hope someone has ideas on the look/placement/configuration of the windows, still not super settled in my mind. BTW, we’re planning on using scissor trusses in the large 2nd floor open room to allow for windows to go up a little higher.
First floor
2nd floor views
Now the shop and garage. There are two exterior doors going out of the back part of the 1st floor, one into the garage and one into the shop. Double exterior doors provide a pass through from the shop to or through the garage.
