Our Final House Design

Yeah, this makes sense to someone out there. To me, it looks like a dragon trapped in a box.

After many months of looking at plans, shuffling room sizes, and grappling with square feet, we finally settled on a simple cape-style house, 33 feet long by 24 feet wide. Even better, it is a do-it-yourself house kit. This design is the brainchild of David Howard, founder of First Day Cottage. I won’t go into many details right now about First Day—you can click on their link to find out about how their ideas can revolutionize your homebuilding experience. Don’t worry, plenty more will be said about them as the building actually gets underway. But I will say we are grateful that our paths have crossed with theirs, for without First Day Cottage, this process would have been improbable, if not impossible.

Back to the house itself. We toyed for many months with the idea of a very narrow, long, two-story design—16’ by 40’. It was economical, easy to build, and fast going up. The more we tried to layout the interior, however, the more problems we would come up against. Little things, like the placement of a kitchen table, to bigger things, such as the placement of a functioning staircase. Whenever we mentioned these dimensions to any one else, their brows would furrow in consternation as they tried to envision what such a long narrow house would be like to live in. We finally grew exhausted tying to make it all work, un-furrowed our own brows, and moved on to a new design. After kicking around a few other ideas—a saltbox, a ‘cape’ with a five-foot knee wall--we came around to our present little gem: a traditional cape with a two-foot knee wall. The upstairs will be funky, with angled ceilings and secret tunnel closets, not to mention soaring ceilings. A master bedroom, two small kids’ rooms and a nice bathroom will provide for all of our sleeping and showering needs quite nicely. Downstairs is more open concept, with a kitchen flowing into a dining area, which in turn flows into the living space. A woodstove is the visual divider of these two spaces, possibly with a band of slate flooring running between them. There is also an ‘away room,’ a library/study which will be separated from the living room by glass doors, so it will be private but not shut off entirely. Inside here will also be the second bathroom, which will be accessible from the front hallway as well.

The basement will be full and heated. This space will probably evolve into many things over the course of time—playroom, music studio, workshop, storage facility. For now we are trying to figure out if it is feasible to make it a walk-out basement or if we will stick with a bulkhead.
The outside will be vertical siding to start, eventually cedar shakes. The roof will be metal, either green or red. Trim will be a yet-to-be-decided color, as will the front door. We are in the process now of scouring salvage yards for that perfect entrance. Keep your fingers crossed.

Feb 12, 2012:
Most of those details actually ended up making it into the final build, except for the walk-out basement (we went with the bulkhead) the roof color (we chose a much more chill charcoal grey) and the cedar shakes (not happening, eventually will do clapboards instead). There is also no extra door into the downstairs bathroom, because a room that is less than three feet wide really can't handle more than one door. But it was interesting to read this pipe dream of a plan six years later and realize we pretty much nailed it. Huzzah for us!