Sense of Ownership

This morning as I watched the sun rise over the lake, the thought struck me that I owned the view, at least at that moment the view was all mine from the perspective of my vantage point. The advantage of siting the new house in such a way that we cannot see any other houses close bye gives a sense of owning more space. I wonder if this is a common mindset , that when we percieve a vista in which we are the only person we are aware of, whether it is common to feel a sense that we own the view?

The Impact of Style

One of the things that were important to me during the design phase of our new house relates to the style. Why is style so important to us, or perhaps I should say some of us. Many people around the world do things and build things in a traditional way, the same way that these things have been done for centuries.

When I was young I didn't think about style much, my world was not completely inundated with advertising and electronic blasts about what I should wear, eat or live in. The first home that I remember was a brick semi detached Victorian two story house in West London. There was a small brick wall at the pavement (sidewalk) and no plantings other than a bit of worn down grass for the front garden and the gate was missing. At the curb which was formed with long rectangular bars of granite, stood a huge elm tree that the United Dairies horse would munch on the suckers of at the bottom. In this country there seems to have developed over the last 30 years or so a style of housing that is mostly auto centric. Basically in many newer areas what we have is a large garage with a living quarters stuck on the side and back of it. The front garden for the most part completely subservient to the driveway of the double wide garage door. It seems to me that this "Style" of house is possibly the ugliest that we could possibly have devised. The style of homes that appealed to me were the ones in the older often pre-world war two neighbourhoods. These homes had back lanes and the garage was out of sight of the street.

Our new home would follow the example of these much earlier and mostly smaller homes. So getting back to the issue of style, I recall reading somewhere that "form follows function". I chose to follow this thought as a guiding principle in tackling the design of the house. How do we live? what do we do when we arrive home? what is our climate like during the different times of the year? What do we want to use to heat our house? what about light? access? I suppose had we been buying a ready made house we would have had these thoughts in the back of our minds when looking at potential candidates for our purchase. I suspect though that the look of the house (style) would have been a very big part of the choice.

At the moment the outside of our new house is simply sheeted with plywood, we have been discussing types of finishes and their durability, How will the outside fit into the surrounding environment. How will our new home look in the winter versus the summer? We cannot see our house from the main road, and we have to pass up a small hill and turn a corner at the top of the driveway. The driveway is basically like a cart track two gravelly paths separated by a strip of grass down the middle. a push mower keeps the grass in check.

The layout of the spaces that we wanted were the stating point, the home is sited so that we can take advantage of the sun's energy, the longest wall runs east west along the south side of the house. The largest room in the house is the full width and faces the south. To take advantage of the sun we needed to include a fair area of windows, these were fabricated on site using recycled sliding patio doors. The largest window is formed from four doors, the old wooden frames were removed from the doors and the thermopane glass cleaned of all the caulking then fitted into a new frame. The rest of the south windows were fabricated in a similar manner. We chose to combine the living room and dining room as one inclusive space with the kitchen area at the west end separated from the dining area by a high counter. Our lifestyle is casual so we did not think it was necessary to incorporate a formal living room or dining room into the house.

This task of building my house is a solitary one for the most part. Today I am working on the kitchen infrastructure, the sink and work surfaces. One decision I made early regarding the kitchen was not to purchase the normal sets of kitchen cabinets. The variety of kitchen cabinets has more to do with the building and marketing of storage space than much to do with the function of the kitchen in my opinion.

The choice of sinks is another one that I find interesting, our local hardware chains, All the big box store types, basically carry anywhere from six to twelve different designs of double stainless steel sinks, ones for corners, ones with low divider walls, ones with big or small sections, the list goes on. The cost to take one away from the store varies from $100 plus to $3-500 and some get way more expensive than that. A goodly portion of the inhabitants of this planet have never even seen a kitchen sink! and we are inundated with a variety that makes the mind boggle.

At our local transfer station, (a neat euphemism for the sorting of rubbish that mostly ends up in a landfill somewhere else) I collected an assortment of double and single kitchen sinks, all of them in perfectly good condition. Stainless steel is a remarkably stable and durable material. I can only surmise that style changes or the sizes were the reason for their being discarded. We have a progresive attendant at our transfer station, one that allows users to remove things that might be of use and get a repreive from the crusher or burial.

A little work with some cleaner and then making the choice of which sink best fit our space. A new tap set was installed and the drains hooked up the our plumbing, and we were able to get the basics for a much lower cost. The counters that the sink fits into are another area that I have saved a fair number of dollars on. During a visit to the transfer station at a nearby larger town a year ago, I saw a couple of people throwing sheets of plastic laminate onto the landfill pile. The sizes of these sheets were not little but some were almost full sheets most were over twenty four inches by seventy two inches. My mind did a quick calculation of the cost of all that laminate, I calculated at least $500 worth. I collected most of the laminate that was not damaged by the act of throwing it onto the pile. Some creative layout and colour coordinating have provided us laminated counter tops that cost the time to collect, cut and glue down.

Perhaps the current state of affairs regarding the economy, will cause more people to think about the value of the materials that we waste on a daily basis.

Living on the Edge (of self sufficiency)

This is the first post of a commentary on designing and building my own home, that has consumed much of my time and many dollars over the past several years.

In 1977 I purchased a piece of land by a lake with three other people, since then the people have changed and I am still on the title. Three years ago I began to design the home that now ocupies a place withing the boundary of that land.

My goal all along has been to use as much of the material that was present on the land as possible, and that I would also try and use as much recycled material as I could while staying within the boundaries of the Alberta Building Code. The home is close to completion and is a combination of passive solar and radiant in floor heating. The walls are insulated with R42 on the west and north sides and R35 on the east and south sides. The ceiling is a work in progress with some at R63 and other areas still at R28.

I have been building this house for the most part by myself, this is a luxury that most of the animal kingdom chooses of neccessity and we humans choose as an exception, most of us do not build our own homes, and if we do it is often only a token build.

I hope that sharing some of my experiences might inspire more people to think about building their own homes, by looking at the possibilites for using unconventional sources of materials.