Almost twenty years ago, my husband, Tim, and I began the
process of designing and building anew home, our dream home. We designed it
ourselves and built most of it ourselves. The project has taken me places I
never intended to go and had I known some of the challenges of the journey, I
may not have gone there! But that is life, right? And in retrospect, it was,
and continues to be, quite amazingly perfect for me.
To truly appreciate my story, you have to know a bit about
my background. I grew up in
the Chicago
suburbs. I loved living near and going into the city. I used to dream of living
downtown near the lake shore. The “near the lake shore” was
the closest I got to nature. I
did not relate to the back-to-the-earth movement. Growing up
my family had ‘camped’
in an Airstream travel trailer that had air conditioning and
a microwave, a shower and
a flush toilet. Gardening to me meant weed-free grass and a
few meaningfully placed
shrubs. I never thought about where my food came from,
beyond the grocery store, that
is. I was a firm believer in turning up the heat in the
winter and turning up the AC in the
summer. The latter is still the case, I do admit
So, move forward thirty years, through college, graduate
school, more graduate school,
work, marriage. After my husband and I had worked together
transforming our plain
little 1920’s house into a jewel box of a home, we had many
leftover ideas that couldn’t
be squeezed in. We decided to build new. We are fortunate in
that we are both designers
and have compatible aesthetics, so this was a fun
undertaking for us. We decided right off
we needed more space.The two of us had been living in 1200
square feet so we decided
on 2500 square feet. It was a beautiful place, on paper. We
took inspiration from French
chateaus and Tim jokingly referred to it as the mini Versailles. Then we
figured out what
it would take financially to build this new house and
decided to put it on hold for a while.
We were close to paying off our current mortgage and the
thought of getting into a new
mortgage seemed a bit daunting. So, the plans gathered a bit
of dust…
That next winter something changed. I started seeing things
differently. Not visually, my eyes were fine. There was a sense as I approaching
midlife that I had a finite amount of time. I didn’t see an endless vista in front
of me, but at the same time, I saw new possibilities. The first time I remember
this change was during one of our Iowa
ice storms, when the power lines were down. Within an alarmingly short period
of time, our charming, but conventionally insulated, home was reduced to an
icebox. The vulnerability and fragility of my lifestyle hit me as a very strange
way to live. I decided then and there that I wanted to live in a home that was comfortable,
efficient, and designed for the climate I lived in. Our new home design got buried
under old magazines as I started reading, dreaming, and drawing.
The following summer I had another insight into my life
choices while mowing the yard.
The heat and humidity were levels were intense. As I stopped
to catch my breath and wipe the perspiration out of my eyes, all I could think
was, “Why am I mowing this sea of grass instead of tending a garden that can
feed us?” I soon converted a third of the yard into vegetable and herb gardens.
As I gardened and researched energy-efficient house building
I began to feel more
connected to life and began to think of living as a sort of
art. This was a welcome, but surprising consequence to me. I began eagerly
examining every aspect of living. This naturally led to a desire to live more lightly
and responsibly on the planet. Tim and I visited some local homes that were producing
their own electricity from the wind and sun. The possibilities were inspiring
and it felt like another piece of the puzzle was falling into place. It was something
I felt I could do about global warming, about wars over fuel supplies. It was a
small thing, just a drop in the global bucket, but it felt very big on the
inside.
As our ideas about our home were getting revised, I felt
driven to re-examine every
aspect of my life. Everywhere I looked I found pockets of
belongings we hardly ever
used and our cars hadn’t been able to squeeze into the
garage for a couple years. Two
years before we even started building, I began ruthlessly
sorting through our belongings.
As I freed up external space, I found I was also freeing up
internal space. Old outdated
ways of thinking seemed to fall away as I cleared closets
and storage areas. I began to feel lighter, freer, and new life possibilities
appeared for me.
We finally threw out the plans for the mini Versailles and started designing anew,
tailoring a space for ourselves that was elegant, interesting, and playful. We
re-examined and challenged our ideas of living spaces, asking how did we
actually use each room and how many people really occupied each of those spaces
at a time? We experimented with how living areas felt at different sizes and
proportions, with different light sources, traffic patterns, air circulation,
heat sources, and ceiling heights. We considered where and how a space went
from cozy and intimate to small and cramped or from comfortable and spacious to
ungainly and exposed.
We mocked up spaces in our home using furniture and sheets
of plywood and took
measurements whenever we visited a space that felt good. We
sought to make every
square inch useful and have no dead space anywhere. At the
same time we wanted our home to feel spacious, welcoming, and charming. We found
inspiration in boat, gypsy wagon, and RV designs. We visited examples of rural architecture
of early America,
Scandinavia, and China.
With several of our inspirational sources being mobile structures, we felt
inspired to include this element also. We had thought of relocating, and how
great it would be to take our home with us! For more economical heating and
cooling, we designed for about three times the conventional amount of
insulation. We wanted passive solar for additional heat and light in winter months.
We wanted correct house orientation and wide eave construction for summer shade
and cooling. It was a tall order that stimulated our creativity to a new level.
In the end, our ‘dream’ home ended up being two-thirds the
size of our original home, yet it feels more spacious, has more storage, an
additional bathroom sink, is easier to maintain, and is more comfortable to
live, work, and entertain in. With our added insulation, a small window air
conditioner can keep the entire house cool in summer and a pickup load of wood
keeps us warm all winter. For winter out of town days, we have a small electric
baseboard heater that allows us to come home to a cozy house. In addition to
all that, we have the pleasure of not having a lot of debt in our home.
It has been eight and a half years as of January 2013 since
we moved into our little home. We have both felt very comfortable in this house.
We attribute a large part of our success to starting with a carefully thought
out design.
After Michelle Beschen and her “B” Organic television crew
shot an episode of her show at our home, I decided the time had come to write
up what we had learned. And not only what we learned from research, but what we
learned living in our research and design for eight plus years. In addition to
sharing our house design, we also designed and built a 330 square foot studio
for me, a freestanding 220 square foot greenhouse, a woodshed and a gypsy wagon
inspired chicken house. I will be sharing our design thoughts on these
structures also. My thought in starting this blog is that it will be a place I
can actively share our findings as I write for those with similar interests.
Please feel free to share your thoughts and/or any questions you might have.
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