a year in review (what's good and what could have been better...)

Wow. A year already? Time just flies... But it's been a good year!

First off, we have absolutely no regrets on building this house. It's truly been wonderful. It's well designed, gorgeous, and incredibly comfy. I think my favorite part of the house is the windows. I love looking in any direction and seeing outside, especially the clerestory windows that show green trees and blue skies as well as the window wall in the living room. The cat would agree. The bride's favorite bit is the kitchen, with it's openness, ample storage, and mucho workspace. But choosing the favorite part of the house is like choosing your favorite child: There are so many favorites that there ain't just one.

Having said that, we do have some regrets and some things we would have done differently if we had to do it all over again. We list them here so perhaps someone can learn from them (and perhaps us as well at some point; as a friend's builder once said "You have to build at least two houses so you can benefit from what you learned building the first one!").

In the grand scheme of things, our regrets are minor compared to the glory of the good. But they are, indeed, learning moments.

what happened to our foam?

We really wanted a layer of foam around the outside of the house to minimize thermal bridging via the two by sixes. Spray foam is great, but the wood between the foam is the weak link. To scratch this itch, the architects specified EIFS (exterior insulated finish systems), but the builder balked (EIFS has a bad reputation due to its early misuse). At a meeting to find a resolution, the builder noted that ZIP, the maker of the builder's preferred sheathing, had just come out with a version with foam sandwiched between the boards. Perfect! Except the change didm;t make it into the specs and therefore didn't get installed (and we didn't notice until it was WAY too late to do anything about it).

lesson learned: Make sure changes get reflected in the specs (and everyone is reminded of them). The builder should have made this change, but we should have made sure it made it into the specs before we signed the contract.

thermally broken storefront

The bride (and I, to be frank) adore storefront doors, so we spec'd 'em (and got 'em) for the house. However, amidst wading (drowning?) in all the details of the house, the ones we got are not thermally broken. Not fatal, but a minor "sigh...." moment nonetheless. It could have been worse: the giant window in the living room was originally spec'd to be storefront before the "regular" window company made a successful power play to get that job (and installed thermally-broken windows).

lesson learned: Chase those details...

thermally broken slab

This is an after-the-fact regret since we didn't think about this at all. The thermal losses (and gains) through the edges of the slab are quite noticeable in the sense that you can readily feel the temperature difference of the slab as you approach an edge. In retrospect, this is not surprising: after all, concrete is a thermal mass, but it's amazing how noticeable it is. Not sure how this is dealt with in a slab (a cursory glance about the interwebs show foam on top of the slab with more concrete poured on top as well as insulating the side of the slab) or if it would have even been possible, both sub-wise and budget-wise, but I wish we'd looked into it a wee bit more...

lesson learned: Drinking fewer beers would have killed fewer brain cells thus increasing the odds of thinking about thermally broken slabs.

postnote: Here's an article that discusses how to foam up a slab. But would a sub ever do this?

the one-foot eave

I've often wondered why the architects spec'd a one-foot eave on the east-facing side of the living room. Not that an extra foot would have added that much more shade, but it looks a little stunted to my eyes. And then one day I realized why: We asked for our living and dining rooms to be a foot wider because of circulation concerns. That foot had to come from somewhere (given the length of ceiling support), and so it came from the eastern eave.

Now that we're in the house, I see that we didn't need the extra foot in the living and dining rooms. If we had to choose between the extra foot versus the wider eave, we would have opted for the wider eave.

lesson learned: When asking for a change to the plans, always ask the architects what the implications of those changes are. What are you "losing" when a change is made.

the loss of a suite air trunk

As designed, the house had three awesomely linear air handling trunks: A trunk to the living room, a trunk in the attic space to the upstairs bedrooms, and a trunk down the hallway to the master suite. The straighter and smoother the trunk, the more efficient the air flow. The more efficient the airflow, the less energy is used to heat and cool the house. Unfortunately, that ain't what we got in the end.

The glitch here occurred when the engineer spec'd the trusses and support for the house. In the plans, he spec'd a lot of solid beams across the trunkways, especially the trunk to the master suite. There are three solid-wood beams between the air handling unit and comfort in the suite.

In the end, we had to cut two giant holes in the beam and subsequently support them with steel to get air to the living room. For the master suite, we had to run smallish, snake-ish flex tube above, around, and about to get air to the master suite. Not even close to ideal, and a solution that continues to cause issues with climate control in the house (don't worry: we're comfortable! but the system is very touchy. if we select a temperature too cool or too warm too fast for the master suite, things go awry temp-wise upstairs where all the extra air is dumped).

Who's to blame?

Ultimately no one. The builder builds, so that's not his fault. The HVAC installer inherited the beams, so it's not his fault. The engineer was simply doing his job, so it's not his fault (an ultimately we want a structurally safe house). One could point to the architects, but the budget of the house (and the architectural fees) wasn't at the level of the architects helicopter-momming the project. And I wasn't able to understand the engineering plans enough such that I could have recognized the issue up front. And even if we had recognized the issue, there might not have been an economically attainable solution at that time in the process. This is a double bummer because we were attentive on our side on having simple trunks and did "what we were supposed to do" in terms of getting everyone (architect, builder, HVAC installer) on the same page. Someone needs to add "engineer" to that list as well.

We're seeing how it goes, but we're talking about putting in a mini-split in the master bedroom. Keeping the master suite comfortable is causing the rest of the house, particularly upstairs, to be extra cooled or heated (depending on the season) than it ideally should. This is costing us in energy efficiency.

lesson learned: Have the architects draw out a conceptual HVAC trunk plan and make sure the engineer is aware of the importance of that plan. At the very least, there's a discussion of options before the engineer (and the builder) sets the plans in stone.

hot water circulator

One surprising (and frustrating) thing about the house is how long we seem to have to wait for the hot water to get to a faucet. Being a water conservationist, it kills me to stand there and seemingly wait (and wait) for the water to warm up. I suppose it could have been worse: the architects spec'd the water heater for a central location to the faucets (with the exception of the powder room, but no big deal). What if the water heater was at a more distant location?

Not sure what the solution would have been. Are the supply lines too big? Should they have been smaller? Another option would have been to have had a hot water circulator: a system that, once you press the button, circulates the cool water in the lines back into and through the water heater. Not sure if that would work with an on-demand water heater or if we would have had to get a tanked water heater (or somehow hooked up a tank). Nevertheless, we'd a done it differently knowing what we know now.

lesson learned: Probably would have gone with a tanked system and a recirculator. Didn't realize I would be this affected by it!

some design regrets...

Chalk these all up to hindsight is 20-20. All minor, but I wonder about them from time to time...

If we had to do it all over again, we would have asked for the window and door on the rear entry to have been spec'd to go all the way to the ceiling (and then carried the cypress into the house on the ceiling). The cypress here was a change-order on our part, and I suspect the original plan was this way to save money, but it would have been nice to have this entry be a full mini-me version of the front entry. Don't get me wrong: It's still nice! It's just one of those detaily things that would have been nicer...

Love this detail: The wall carrying out smoothly to the edge of the window on the right. Strikes me as de Stijl, an emphasis on the planes. This detail shows up in other parts of the house, but then there are others where it doesn't, and I'm not sure why...

Window in the office: So close!

Windows's in the stairwell: Sooooo cloooose!!! I think the issue here was transitioning from two by sixes for exterior walls to two by fours for interior walls. 

Master shower: Light (centered), vent (not). Also a victim of the ductwork issues (couldn't center the vent due to the unexpected running of ductwork into the master suite).

Wish this was centered... Because there's a stud right in the middle of the closet door, the doorbell is slightly off-center.

Not sure what happened here...

Love, love, love the pocket doors and wish we had put more in. One thing we didn't realize is that regular doors cover up a sizable chunk of the wall when open such that they cover up a lot of prime real estate for art. There's at least three more we would have spec'd if possible (office, pantry, and master suite [although the latter wouldn't have worked since there isn't a receiving wall]). 

simple yet articulated

For various reasons (touring Schindlers, interviews, general wondering...), I've been pondering the design of our house. Inside, the house is amazingly efficient. It's so easy to move through it. When we give a friend a tour, it's like "Whelp, there it is. That was fast, wasn't it?!?!!" On the other hand, the outside appears complex: There's a lot of articulation and volumes somewhat protruding from the house.

The other night, while thinking it over, it occurred to me why: The floor plan is organized about a perfect "L". Every room, space, or entry is accessed from this "L". The rooms that protrude from the "L" are the sizes needed to meet their purpose, with some (but really not a lot) of alignment and "squaring of space" to meet some aesthetic and construction purposes.

Pretty simple, right? This differs from what Schindler did in that he intersected volumes into each other. Here, the volumes protrude from "access corridors".

different housing:different power usage

Check out this graph. It shows BTUs per square-foot of conditioned space per month for our living situation over the past 10 years. Yep, that's right: I've been inputting our monthly energy bills into a spreadsheet since 2004 just for this moment. This plot encompasses three different living arrangements:

old haus: An old house built in 1886 and 1910 with no insulation in the walls and (mostly) single pane windows. Note that the biggest BTU spikes are for the winter when we use a lot of gas to keep the house warm.

apartment: A green built apartment in a high-rise; BTUs are artificially low because of cooling provided via a service that didn't allow us to include the energy costs.

new haus: The place we are in now!

Not surprisingly our new place is much more energy efficient, and perhaps maybe on par with the apartment? It will be interesting to see how this summer and winter go now that we have the HVAC working better...

we're gonna get decked....

Our landscaping grand plan includes a stage in the back yard:

"Stage?" you ask. Why yes: A stage! All of life is one, you know.

We built a stage at our previous house, which was great fun for poetry readings, speeches, and musical performances. We were even married on that stage. Given the enjoyment we had with that stage, we're determined to have one at this house as well.

For this stage, we plan all those functions and more! Here's the grand plan:

• We want the stage to be minimal (surprise, surprise...) and to evoke the house. We plan to do that evoking in several ways: 
• keeping it a simple geometric shape (that is, a rectangle [approaching a square]);
• building it in such a way that the stage "floats" above the ground (that is, the edges cantilever out a distance, maybe a foot or so; we plan to run LEDs under there to hi-light the flatness at night);
• choosing decking materials that matches the house somehow, either grey composite to match the gray on the house or sealed cedar that approximates the cypress in the ceiling and eaves [leaning this way...]; and 
• facing the sides of the stage with 12-inch Hardie plank to match the facing on the eaves of the house. Although the eaves are painted gray, I'm thinking that we'd paint them white. We shall see...

• On either side of the stage toward its front, we plan to install posts that are the same girth and finish of the Judd picnic table. This evokes the picnic table and the eaves (ties things together...) and allows the stage to serve several purposes:
• hold lights pointed toward the stage (we already have electric run out to the stage area to powers light and amps),
• hold a screen between the two posts so if we ever buy a projector we can show movies in the back yard,
• hold a clothesline, and
• hold a hammock [not all at the same time....].

Sweet! 

I'm not exactly sure where to place the "picnic" posts. Flush with the posts? Slightly behind? Slightly ahead?

The architects were out a few days ago for a magazine interview (stay tuned...) so I was able to get their quick feedback on the stage situation. It's doubly helpful that one's a musician (and one at least looks like a poet...).

So here's where I'm at with the design:

The dark green area at the bottom is the existing lawn of Aggie Zoysia (14 feet wide) and the brownish square (10 feet wide, 9 feet deep) is the proposed stage, which is shown to hang over the lawn by 6 inches (maybe it needs to be more?). The darker brown behind and to the right of the stage is the existing mulch area with the four planned Texas Mountain Laurels. The light brown background is the existing pea gravel. The two small squares are the proposed placements of the 6-inch square cedar posts, the inside corner offset from the lawn and the stage by 2 feet. The medium-sized square in the upper right is a step up to the stage, 3 feet by 3 feet with six inches under the stage (needs to be 1 foot?).

I think this just might work...

Based on their work and reviews on Angie's list, we're looking at Austin Deck Company as the potential contractor.

We want the deck to "float". For example:

via here.

Some info on floating decks:

Floating decks.

Floating a step.

Island deck.

The Depot on decks.

As well as this hilarious piece written by a code-bot on how to build a floating deck.

Stay tuned...

haiku for the book "Schindler and the Small House" by the Boston Architectural research Center (and interview with Bill Boehm!)

out in the dark woods

a cabin made of hewn logs

this ain't Abe's cabin...

I have a deep fascination with R.M. Schindler's log cabin. After trying to con(vince) Steve Wallet into generating a three-dimensional model of the cabin (he only does realized projects...), he turned me on to this little publication where the authors, Bill Boehm, Daniel Johnson, and Julia Nudent, built a half scale model of the structure.  Bill Boehm, who is now the lead at Boehm Architecture, was kind enough to hook me up with a copy.

As the title suggests, this 56-page book is focused on Schindler's small houses, dividing his homes into different typologies:

 - compact (essentially a square)
 - rectangle (wide)
 - cranked (non-orthogonal angles)
 - rectangle (narrow)
 - stepped
 - winged

Boehm notes that about one-third of the 180 single-family and duplexes Schindler designed were less than 1,400 square feet. He also summarizes Schindler's space architecture as integration with the landscape, interlocking spaces, light and lightness, and a limited palette of natural materials.

Boehm notes that Schindler's career was focused on houses. Schindler sadly missed out on larger commissions, but that miss allowed him to focus almost exclusively on houses his entire career. In addition to era photos and floor plans of various houses, the book includes photos of scale models made at the research Center. However, the real treat in the book is Schindler's cabin.

Schindler designed the cabin in 1916 and then finished up the drawings at Taliesen the following year. As the Boehm notes, the log cabin predates his later focus on small affordable houses. The 14-foot by 36-foot cabin has two rooms and used simple materials. According to Boehm, Schindler addressed affordability, construction technology, Modernist formal principles, and vernacular influences with the cabin.

The book also includes David Gedhard's observations about the cabin:

• the cabin is work that places Schindler in the Prairie School
• “Wrightian in flavor”
• “much more sculptural than most of Wright’s designs of the Prairie years”
• “Schindler makes the building float” something that is non-Wrightian
• Schindler used a two-foot module, both horizontally and vertically, in the design of the cabin. These dimensions are clearly expressed in the design with numbering and lettering. [Gebhard wrote "four-foot module", but the plans are clearly marked in two-foot increments]
• “Also non-Wrightian in its intensity is the self-concious declaration of the log structure. Schindler not only thrusts the end of the logs far out beyond the corners, he makes the floor and ceiling rafters plainly visible.”

Boehm and company built Schindler's cabin at half scale using styrofoam for masonry, Sonopost protective packaging supports for timber, and honey-combed craft board for the roof and floor. The cabin was shown in Boston, Massachusetts; Northfield, Vermont; and Buffalo, New York. There are many photos of the construction and display of the cabin (in addition to the full plans for the cabin as well). 

(photo from the book of the half-scale model of Schindler's log cabin)

Bill Boehm was also kind enough to agree to an interview from yours truly.

Whatever happened to the model of the log cabin?

It was re-assembled once at Norwich University in Vermont, and then recycled.

There doesn't seem to be much backstory on the log cabin except dates for when Schindler designed it and drew up the plans. I've read that it was a purely speculative, theoretical design. However, his site plan seems to suggest an actual site ("old fence", "old hedge"). Do you think the cabin was designed for a real space?

It's a good question, and a good mystery, which an ambitious scholar could dig into in the Schindler archives at the University of California at Santa Barbara. The site plan is a bit odd for a rustic retreat - it is  very controlled - with prim shrubbery and paths (as well as the 'old fence' and 'old hedge') all following his 2'x2' grid.

There are photos of (balsawood?) models of various houses presented in the book. Are these models y'all put together? 

Yes. We built four models for the exhibition. Two of them still exist in my office.

How has Schindler influenced your work?

I am a believer of modestly scaled homes and "right-sized" spaces. BecauseI work in the Boston area, which is already built up, most of my work is either renovations of older homes or new affordable housing. In both cases, space is at a premium. Schindler made small houses that work brilliantly, and are sculptural at the same time.

What's your favorite Schindler project?

I love his own home, AKA the Schindler-Chase home. It is minimal and sculptural. It integrates the landscape with the interior beautifully for an urban home without a lot of land. It is also idealistic, an experiment in cooperative living (that ultimately didn't work out); a demonstration of how architecture can be in service of a social concept.

Why is "research" not capitalized for the name of the Boston Architectural research Center? 

Because I was inserting research in to the Boston Architectural Center!

And there you have it. I hope to post more soon about the cabin.

it was a dark and stormy night...

Scary storm blew through a week ago Thursday night, knocking out power at our house for a couple hours (the bride: "We need an emergency generator."). We were fortunate: Some folks lost power for several days.

As the storm blew in, it was flashing more than a dirty old man at the playground, so I pulled out the camera to try and capture a lightening shot. After 50 some photos, I got one!

Interesting how the mix of white lightening and warmish household lights changed the color response of the camera. Shocking!

the best houses of all time in L.A.

and coming in at No. 1......

The Schindler-Chase House!!!

Read all about it!

Thanks to PrairieMod for the tip on the article.