Grama's House | Passive Solar

 

We are actually in the process of building this one! It started out as a barn to house our RV and has gone through so many revisions! For a while there I was tweaking it 2 or 3 times a week. Had the friends who are helping us build this heads spinning!

This is a passive solar pole barn home. The deck across the front is actually a greenhouse. The whole house has a concrete floor with in-floor hot water heat. 

The kitchen is huge! We plan to have bench seating along the L shaped island with storage underneath. There will be plenty of room to store homeschooling supplies and teach a bunch of grandkids. :)

There is also a loft above the hall/closet/bath and laundry room area that will be accessible by a steep ladder/staircase. It is 4ft. high at the center and goes down to 2ft. on the north side. It sticks out over the garage a bit. Lots of room for the grandkids to hang and sleep!

There is a tiny second bedroom on the northwest corner. At first, it will probably be used as a bedroom for my grandkid who wets the bed so Grama doesn't have to navigate those loft stairs with wet sheets every day, but later on, we will probably use it for storage. 

The smaller bath is a shower room with a toilet in it which will double as a storm shelter. 

If I wasn't so adamant about my hubby having a mancave to retreat to, I'd build another bedroom or two in the garage area and leave the entire south side as one big room, but he really needs a place to escape from the grandkids! He recently decided to put in a glass patio door instead of a garage door just because it will be warmer, but we went ahead and put in a frame for a garage door in case we ever decide we want one there. The patio door will be big enough to get the tractor into on really cold snowy nights and that is really all we need right now. He is putting in a hoist, a floor drain, a stainless steel sink, and a stainless steel table so he can butcher there. He also wants to use it as a summer kitchen for canning with the doors open when it is hot.

All doors are 36 inches wide so the main floor will be fully handicap accessible. We also have double doors between the great room and the mancave so we can open it up to have more space to entertain. 

The greenhouse will have a black block wall along the house side with insulation between the blocks and the house proper and a 2-foot deep gravel/sand/patio block floor for heat sinks. 

Under the roof, we put a layer of reflective foil insulation, then 1 1/2 inch foam board insulation and we are still going to add 16-inch thick roll insulation. That will give us a 48.5 R-value in the ceiling. The walls will be the same, except without the reflective foil. 

We plan to have a mini-split system for air conditioning. But we are also putting in a whole house fan. We think if we open the windows at night and use the fan to pull the cool night air in and close the windows during the day, we shouldn't have to use the air very much.  

Here's a picture of the house today. Stop back by! I will be updating this as we go along.

Here's the east wall with the patio doors to Grampa Tom's workshop.

1/23/21

OH MY! It looks like I haven't updated this in quite a while! We have been living in our house since September 1st. We didn't get the boiler installed and working until just a few days ago so we have been heating water on the stove and running space heaters. Today, we are redoing the roof insulation. A few days ago, we discovered that the pink board above the bat insulation was wet with condensation. In researching how to fix it, we found that we absolutely had to have spray foam insulation on it. So we are pulling down all the batt insulation and foaming it. We will put the batt insulation back up after it is dried. By the time we get all this done, our roof will have an R50 insulation value! 

Here are some pictures from the week before we moved in.  Apparently, my old film-oriented mind shut down on taking pictures once we moved in. When I can get back in there, I will try to remember to do a walkthrough for you!

Recycled Pole Building Home With Greenhouse

This blog continues to amaze me! It's been a very busy summer and I haven't posted since June 9th, but I still get an average of 30 hits a day! And most of those have been from legitimate sources, not spammers :)

What I've posted so far is the result of sitting around and dreaming about stuff I'd like to build. Today, I want to show you a project Grampa Tom and I are planning to actually do!

The 16'x72', 4 bedroom portion in the middle is our current trailer. The roof and some of the windows are leaking, so we've got to do something. We decided the most practical solution would be to just put a pole building roof over it and then enclose it.

We've been talking about doing something like this for years, but a few weeks ago Grampa Tom was talking to a couple of friends of ours. They thought it was a great idea and offered to help us with it. That is a very good thing, because Grampa Tom and I remodeled a 5'x6' bathroom one time and nearly got a divorce :) Neither of us are carpenters, but our friends are very talented carpenters! Anyway, they came up with all kinds of neat ideas about using recycled materials and we are thinking we can get it done for under $10,000. 

Our trailer sits at an angle, so there is no true south side, but that's going to work out fine, because that means we have two south sides to make into a huge green house. Our plan is to build raised beds just outside the pole roof line and place cattle panels at an angle so they reach from the beds to the inside of the roof line. We will have retractable green house plastic that we can cover these with during the winter and during the summer we can grow vines up them to shade the house. We are planning to find used brick to cover the inside of this area and we'd like to build a rocket fired thermal-mass wood stove for supplemental heat on cold nights or cloudy days. 

On the north-west side we will have an 8' wide shed. We need a place to store fresh vegetables during the market season, so our friend Dan suggested that we partition part of it off, insulate it and put a window air-conditioner in it. Sounds good to us! Grampa Tom thought we ought to close in the north-east wall to provide a wind break. We hope to find a whole lot of used windows to frame into it. We also want to put a mudroom/entry at the back door. 

We were also thinking we need to put large tanks at each corner to collect rainwater for our gardens. A summer kitchen out in the green house would be nice too!

Between the utility bill savings, the additional income we will be able to earn from the greenhouse and the ability to keep our produce fresher on hot summer days, this project should more than pay for itself in a few years.

Here's our list of stuff to scavenge for this project. If you know of someone who is tearing down an old house or a barn in our area, please let us know!

Used electric poles

roof or siding metal sheets

2"x6" or larger lumber

large beams

old windows

bricks

concrete blocks

cattle panels

fire brick

an old water heater

6 inch diameter stainless stove pipe

large tanks for rainwater collection

nice oak pallets for the front deck and steps

Styrofoam sheet insulation

Thanks!

God Bless You All!

~Grama Sue

Carol's Court Yard

The #1 floor plan on this blog so far has been  Olivia's Court Yard. A couple of weeks ago, I asked my mom which was her favorite and it was her's too. So I decided to do a couple more court yard plans. This one is named for her.

If you want to see a bigger version of the plan, all you have to do is hold down your Ctrl button and push the + button!

This plan is a little smaller and I've tried to incorporate some alternative energy into it too. The court yard has a rocket thermal mass stove with a hot tub providing the thermal mass. The court yard would have a translucent retractable roof and a large ceiling fan to circulate air. It opens into the great room, the formal living room and both bedrooms. 

The master suite has a large dressing room, a garden tub and separate his and hers sinks that can be custom designed to suit each person's height. It is also close to the mud/laundry room which features a large walk in shower and a large walk in closet.

The second bedroom, the guest bath and formal living room are grouped together and separated from the main family area. This way they could easily form a second designated living area for an inter-generational family. 

Off great room is a green house which maximizes the passive solar and food production potential of this home. It also provides a delightful walk way from the garage to the great room and the mud room.

What do you think?

What changes would you make to this plan?

God Bless You All!

~Grama Sue

Wrap Around Sun Fun

This weeks 2025 square foot home wraps around a huge 4 season sun room for maximum light and winter passive solar heat.

This house is much more the size that I think Grampa Tom and I need. It's about 75% bigger than the trailer we live in now and it has at least a partial basement under the kitchen living room area that houses a root cellar and a large storage room.

The guest entry is a small enclosed porch on the north side. It comes into the light filled great room that consists of a large kitchen and a cozy living room area. We used to live in a huge farm house that had a gigantic kitchen. I really miss that kitchen! This kitchen has tons of counter space, room for both a refrigerator and a full size upright freezer, a professional range, an island, a large bank of floor to ceiling pantry cabinets and room for a kitchen table as well. I really like the corner bench style like the one below. It would  look great in this kitchen, but my program doesn't have any images of it :( The kitchen has wide doors opening into both the family room and the sun room so that I don't have to feel exiled when I'm cooking.

The sun room  not only opens into the kitchen, but into the master bedroom, the mud room and the family room. A large bank of windows opens it up to the living room as well. It has a hot tub and the rocket fire stove  that I talked about in my last post and an out door shower to rinse off before and after your soaking massage. 

The utility room for the hot water heater and the supplemental heat pump is located next to the hot tub so heat from the thermal mass can help heat the home's hot water and heat pump. During the summer, heat pumped out of the house will help keep the hot tub warm. The walls of this room only go up about 6 foot so the green house ceiling covers the entire area between the wings. 

I envision some sort of thermal awning that can be rolled out  under the greenhouse style roof of the sun room to keep the heat in at night and the sun off in the summer. The south wall windows would open during the summer, converting it into a screened in porch with vines climbing out of the garden bed just inside.

And then there's the basement steps. I placed them just outside the kitchen door so I could take all of my home canned goodies down there!

The mud room has a large walk-in closet, a locker style shower and a half bath. It is connected to the family room so I have half a chance at keeping the dirt contained in the west wing of the house :) 

In the east wing there is a private master bedroom, a guest bedroom and two full baths. There is a closet between the bed and the master bath so those middle of the night flushes aren't quite so loud. I thought about putting the closet in the second bedroom on the east side so the door could be closer to the bathroom and I could put another closet at the end of the hall, but natural light in the hall and east-west airflow through the house during the warmer months.

What would you change?

Got any suggestions for a good name for this house?

God Bless You All!

~Grama Sue