Since the cold is one of our biggest concerns, we've been looking at home designs that have few peninsulas. If a room sticks out, it's a source of cold. That's a negative.
The best shape is a dome - but I think they're ugly. The next best shape is a cube. However, when building on a hillside, cubes involve the removal or addition of a LOT of dirt in order to make a large enough building surface. We've therefore decided on a shoebox-shaped house.
We want a single story house with a basement since we've heard too many stories of elderly people with weak knees who can no longer handle the stairs.
We want a basement-level garage. We do not intend that the garage provide access to the basement since that would approximately double the taxable size of our home. (Walk-out basements count as part of the house for tax purposes. Basements with no external exit do not.)
But . . . *ahem* . . . if, at some future date, a hole were to appear between the basement and the garage . . . who would know??
We need a large master bedroom - 13.5 x 18 is what we've got in the vacation house and it's not large enough for our armoire, dresser, night stands and bed. So the armoire has resided in our garage for the last twelve years.
And I want a Trumbe wall. That means that there should be a good long stretch that does not require windows.
IMO, this plan is almost perfect. The house is a little small, especially the Master Bedroom and the kitchen, but that's fixable. I'll show how in a subsequent post. We'd want to build the mirror image of this in order to have the Trumbe wall where it needs to be, on the South while still having the house look downhill. And the garage entrance would have to be at the front of the house, not the side of the house. However, when we enlarge the Master Bedroom, the garage beneath it will also be made bigger and we should then be able to drive into it from the house's front.
Then we'll need an architect to draw up the plan. Fortunately, I've already got someone in mind. If he'll do it for under a thousand dollars, that's what purchasing the plan would have cost us anyway.
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