So many decisions for something clear...

This will be short and to the point. As I stated earlier, I think window placement and design should take place from the interior point of view; ignoring the exterior aesthetics for the most point. While windows can “dress up” the exterior of the house, I do not believe they should be placed just by looking at the exterior elevations. I also do not agree with the traditional designs that standardize the number of windows per room. The windows should compliment the views from the room. If the room has great views, then add extra windows, if it faces an unattractive view, don’t add a window unless code dictates or you need extra lighting/ventilation. Also, some care should be taken on where to place a window. For example, in our current house for this floor plan, it was standard to place 1-5’x3’ slider window in the master bedroom. While it does let enough light in, it does not have the best placement. Our bedroom is in the corner of the house with walls facing the east and the north. To the east of us is another house, and to the north is our back yard. The builder/designer elected to place the 1 and only window facing …you guessed it… the neighbor’s house. I will never understand why they did not place it facing the back yard. Since we have been in this house, we have corrected this problem. We cut an opening through the brick facing the back yard and installed a set of French doors. Problem solved.

When originally planning for our house, we had intended on using commercial windows mainly for the clean lines. After much research, we discovered this was not the best way to go. Commercial window manufactures are not as concerned with energy efficiency as most residential window manufactures. This is due in part to their use. If you think about it, the majority of the energy usage of businesses is not contributed to the fact that their windows are not energy efficient; it is their lighting, electronics, computers, heating/cooling, and the entry doors opening and closing all day letting the warm air out/in. Therefore, most commercial window manufactures do not focus on extremely energy efficient windows. If they do then you will pay a premium for them.

To get the best bang for our buck, we have decided to go with a residential window manufacture. But how do you know what type of window to purchase? After all, you can get wood, aluminum, thermally broken aluminum, wood-clad, vinyl, composite, or fiberglass. And that is just the frame. From there you still must decide on the glazing, tinting, and insulating gas. A couple of websites I discovered to help make this process a bit easier are:

http://www.efficientwindows.org/index.cfm

http://www.energy.gov/

I have literally spent hours at each one of these websites learning as much as I could about windows. After we weighed all our options and decided on which type of window to buy, we had to begin searching for a manufacture. We were going to use one of the big name companies but decided against it. While most of them offer great warranties on their product, I have heard many stories on the difficulty to get them to honor it. We have ultimately decided to go with a local manufacturer that has been in business for the past 24 years and is a member of the BBB.

The bottom line of what we have learned so far: Don’t skimp on the windows, they can save you a lot of $$ in the long run.

Next:

The envelope of a building. There is more to it than you might think.

Progress...maybe

I am going to deviate from the scheduled posting about windows and instead post an update of our progress with the property replat. We finally received our hearing date of November 9^th late last week. Today, the legal ad was published in the Houston Chronicle, and the notification sign went up at the property. Flyers will be sent out, as well, to everyone in a 200’ radius to the property. All of this comes at a great price. Not only hours upon hours of our time trying to get our civil engineer moving with the rather small project, but also the constant stress and frustration brought on by the incompetence of the individual(s) hired to carry out this relatively minuscule task. Regardless of past frustrations and headaches, today we celebrate because it seems we are making ever so slight progress! Because as tomorrow comes, there will inevitably be another hurdle for us to pass.

About the house

My wife and I have dreamt about building a house for about 6 years. Basically, ever since we have purchased our first house. If you would have asked us then what style house we were going to build, the answer would have been unanimously Mediterranean. That was until we stared seriously looking into the detail that goes into those types of houses. And that type of detail comes at a nice price as well. The tile roof alone can run 10K and up. Then you have all the elaborate molding inside and out, art niches, columns, and expensive travertine flooring. While the houses themselves are quite a dramatic statement of style and architecture, for us, the price did not justify it.

We then ran across a different style of house. This style was much different than most things we have seen in the Houston area. It is more commonly seen in places like California or Florida or even Arizona now. It is a style that can be partially contributed (residential anyways) to the well know architect Frank Lloyd Wright and the infamous Fallingwater, which can be seen here. Defined by its clean lines and its rejection of traditional historical style, modern architecture pushes the boundaries of design through the use of innovative material and a simplistic approach to everyday living. The idea is to design something around its functionality first; not its looks.

This is the thing we had to keep in mind when designing our house. It is often difficult to ignore the overall looks of something you are designing and put the functionality first. This is probably why it took us so long to get to this point. Once I was able to get this into my head, the design went fairly easy. Especially with the windows. The only true reasons a house has windows is:

-Light

-Ventilation

-Egress

-View

Not in any particular order. All of which are important for the people inside not outside. So why not design the windows around the people inside the house? Most windows themselves are not very energy efficient; as compared to the walls around them. So instead of putting an equal number of windows in each room or the same size windows everywhere whether it needs it or not, we decided to strategically place each window so it maximizes the view, provides plenty of light and ventilation (if needed), and meet the requirements of code.

Design:

Our house is going to be a modern 2 story, 3 bedroom, 3 ½ bath, 3 car garage around 2700 sq ft. There are a few cantilevered second floor and roof areas extending from 2’ up to 6’ out. The interior of the house is fairly simple. On the first floor is the utility room, kitchen, dining, living, and half bath. All of which will have a polished concrete floor. The kitchen will have stainless cabinets and a cobalt blue quartz countertop. Leading to the second floor are 4’ wide cantilevered stairs made from 1/8” raw steel plate. On the second floor are 3 bedrooms including the master, 3 baths, and a small office area. There are also 2 exterior balconies, one off the MB and the other off the set of stairs. Flooring for the second floor is still unknown at this time. The bathrooms will have concrete countertops and glass tile surrounding the shower/baths (master for sure, depending on costs and budget, possibly the other 2 as well). I tend to be drawn to more of the industrial look such as raw honed concrete floors, exposed bar joist and I beams, lots of steel, much less drywall, and raw plywood and OSB (even for the flooring). My wife, on the other hand, tends to be drawn to a cleaner modern such as polished concrete floors, less steel and more drywall, bamboo floors, ect…At least we agree on one thing…we want our house to be different than all others. It has been a challenge to find the middle ground on our style differences, but I think the end result will be a nice balance between our two tastes.

Construction Materials:

As you already know, the frame is going to be SS with light gauge filler walls. While steel studs are stronger, straighter, termite proof, and greener than stick framing, they are inherently energy inefficient so extra steps have to be taken to ensure heat/cold does not get transferred into the house. So to prevent the thermal bridging that occurs with steel studs, each stud will be fitted with a foam cap. From there, the entire outside will be wrapped in 7/16” OSB and Tyvek house wrap. Double glazed, Low-E, argon filled vinyl windows will then be installed. We are not 100% sure as to the siding material as of yet. It is looking to be a rainscreen design with Hardipanel and corrugated galvalume. The exterior entry doors and garage doors are going to be custom design and built. The entire house will be insulated with cellulose, both damp spray and blown dry. I learned a great deal about building technology and energy efficiency for the different climates by spending a lot of time on this website: http://www.buildingscience.com/. The roof decking with utilize a radiant barrier product such as TechShield to help reflect the heat. The roof will be standard composite shingles with the majority being a 2-12 slope. This is the minimum allowed by shingle manufactures. They do recommend using 2 layers of 30lb felt under this slope for extra protection. For the plumbing system we decided to do something a little different that the standard copper or pvc/cpvc. We are going to try a newer technology called PEX or cross-linked high-density polyethylene tubing. It is probably more commonly used for radiant heating than anything. One thing that absolutely set my mind on PEX was seeing crew on This Old House using this product when plumbing a house they were working on. It installs in a fraction of the time than traditional methods because it is flexible. There is no need to cut and glue/sweat a fitting when changing direction. We are eliminating baseboards and door casing by using products manufactured by these people http://www.trimtexinc.com/ .

We expect the house to take about 12 months to be livable and possibly an extra 6 to 12 months to put the finishing touches on everything. To save on costs while building, we are probably not going to finish the 3^rd bedroom and bath, and probably just leave that as unfinished attic space. Once we need the extra space and are in the house, it will be an easy project to finish those areas out.

Next: Windows, clearly not an easy decision.

The house plans

We are drawing up the house plans ourselves. Fortunately, I am somewhat familiar with Autocad or else I do not know if we could do this part of the process. Our floorplan and elevations have changed about 50 times since we first began. We started off the process by making a list of what we like and dislike about our current residence. We also made a separate wish list of things we would like the house to contain or how we would the house to be designed. From there we did some rough sketches on notebook paper of the basic floor plan. Once we got the rooms arranged how we wanted, then came the tedious process of laying out everything to scale. For this I used ¼” graph paper. It worked great. After what seemed like years drawing and erasing and then drawing again , it was finally time to get everything entered in to Autocad. I would have drawn this up in cad from the beginning, but it would have taken me too long. I found it easier to first draw it on paper and then enter it into autocad. We have been through the drawing/AutoCad process about 5 times now. Hopefully we got it just how we want it this time. We also constructed a couple of model houses to make sure we got everything right. At one point we even steaked out a life size floor plan to see how big the rooms would be.

I have found the bathroom layout and window placement to be the two most difficult things in this process. Not to mention finding a window manufacturer. I will probably dedicate a posting later on describing all we have learned about windows. Thursday of last week received our quote back from the window manufacturer we are going to use. We were quite surprised to find they came back about 4K under budget. They were not our first choice (appearance wise), but they manufacturer is a long time member of the BBB and the windows are very energy efficient. The manufacturer really seems to stand behind their product.

Back to the house plans. After we got the plans just about how we wanted them, we needed to get some estimates on how much it would cost to build. Most materials you can pretty much figure out for yourself and get a rough estimate. However, seeing we were building our house with steel, changed things a bit. If the entire house was to be constructed with light gauge steel, I could have ball parked the materials needed and then made a quick call to a light gauge steel stud manufacturer and got some pricing. But since we decided to use SS to support the house, this complicated things a bit. If anyone is curious to learn about SS, I encourage you to visit the AISC website. Recognizing I was completely unable to even come close to engineering the structure myself, I turned to a structural engineer. With their help (and a nice fee), we were able to determine what size columns and beams we would need to support our house. Having this information allowed me to get some material quotes on the correct size steel we needed.

Up to this point we knew exactly how much house we could afford. That being said, we also new how much we actually wanted to spend on the house. Being a realistic person, just because the bank says we qualified for a loan for X amount, did not mean we wanted to spend X amount. You have to leave room in your monthly budget for unexpected expenses, retirement, and kids (if we ever have any). So we took the number the bank(s) gave us and divided it by 2…almost. I like to live well below my means. From this point, we could begin to add up the material and labor costs. Of course there will be things we will accidentally leave out of the budget, some that will go over budget due to the material estimate being a bit short, and the cost of some materials will increase between now and then. Even will all this factored in, we are still forecasted to come in under budget. I probably just jinxed us by saying that. I think I can handle 5 or 10%... I will be pretty mad if it ends up being 20% or more…

Next – A little info about the house we have been so diligently planning.

The beginning

We have decided to build a custom house for many different reasons. I would be here all day describing all of them, so I will hit just a few of the main reasons. For anyone familiar with Houston, you may know that most suburban neighborhoods are all the same. Most are developed and only have a few house builders (or just one) building houses in that neighborhood. The problem we have with this is variety. You only have a few different models of homes to choose from and they only allow so much “customizing” with them. This leaves you with a neighborhood of houses that all look alike…we tend to like things that are different or out of the ordinary.

The next reason is lot size. Developers want to make as much money as they can so they typically try to fit the maximum number of houses per acre as they can. This leaves most new neighborhoods with a 6,000 to 8,000 sq ft lot per house. In some neighborhoods you can literally reach out your window and touch then neighbor’s house. While this may be fine when you live in the city or in a retirement community where yard size is not as important to some, what I am referring to is about 30 miles outside of Houston in a normal community. We wanted enough room around us where we did not have to look out our window and see the neighbor’s house…not just on the side, but also in the front and the back.

The next reason: Quality. There, I said it. I saved the most important, in my opinion, for last. By going custom, it can be built with my choice of materials and to my specifications. Houses today are not built to last 50+ years. Some might say, “Who cares! I am not going to live there for that long!” The problem with this way of thinking is simple. With the population continually growing, we are using up more and more of our natural resources leaving us with less and less trees, oil, rock, ect… All the things we need to build a house. Yes the trees will grow back…but not as fast as we are cutting them down to build houses. Same with the rest of the materials. My point being, the houses built today are not built with the same quality of materials, the same craftsmanship, or in the same amount of time as the ones built by our ancestors. It is true that the technology of building materials has increased dramatically in the past century, same with tools to make the job go faster. One problem with the new materials is the training of some installers/builders or lack thereof. The newer products of today are only going to function properly if they are installed correctly. Money is the other problem. If you have ever had a contractor come into your home to do any type of remodeling or repair, you typically pay them a fixed price for the entire job, not by the hour. This can be good and bad. By paying them a fixed price for the entire job, they are motivated to finish on time so they can move on to the next job – Good. You can get what you pay for faster. On the other hand, by paying them a fixed price for the job, some contractors are only concerned about making more money so they finish as fast as they can by doing sub-par work or cutting corners in order to move on faster to the next job. There is not a problem with paying a contractor by the job by any means (this is normally how it is done anyways), but you must be able to supervise and inspect every stage of their work in order to make sure they are doing it to your specifications and also code. Please do not take this the wrong way. Not all contractors work like this. It is actually probably very few considering how may are out there. But if you have my luck, you will get the crappy, dishonest one. This leads into a BIG problem. We live just outside the city limits of Houston in Harris County. While building/remodeling in the city requires permits and periodic inspections by the building inspector to insure everything is being done correctly, safely, and to code, building outside the city limits only requires a building permit – no inspections! To my knowledge, it is this way not only for residential, but also for commercial as well. While this may be much easier and less of a hassle for the builder, it is not good for the new homeowner. Unless you hire your own inspector while building a tract home, you really have no idea if everything inside your walls is done properly or not. New homes often come with a home warranty, but I would hate to be the one to fight the battle with the builder to try and get them to come out and fix a warranty related issue.

After saying all this, I can now begin telling you a bit more about our house. We spent about 6 months discussing pros and cons of the different house framing materials. We looked at traditional stick framing, SIPs, ICFs, and steel. Ultimately we have decided on steel for our house. Our first choice would probably be ICFs, but we have to consider our budget. While insulated concrete walls would be nice, strong, and very well insulated, we would have wound up spending about 50% more on just the exterior walls than using steel. We are using a combination of structural steel (wide flange beams) and light gauge cold rolled studs as filler. This combination will give us a very strong, termite proof, straight wall, long lasting, green house. Some benefits of steel are: 75% less waste that traditional framing methods, minimum 25% recycled content, 100% recyclable, easier to erect, cost effective, larger open spans, minimal shrinkage, and no nail pops. It also will work out well for us because we have a welder in the family…My Dad! I do not know if it would be as cost effective to do this if it were not for him. I can weld, but I do not know if I trust my welding ability enough to build a house. The welding is only done on the structural steel columns and beams…mainly the column bases. The rest of the SS is bolted together. As for the cold rolled, it is all screwed together. All the light rolled steel is delivered to me cut to the exact length I need. This is done by the manufacture as he rolls the steel. He simply follows my cut list and delivers exactly what I specify. This step saves a lot of time on the jobsite since only minimal cutting is required.

Next...the house design process.

First Post

Hello everyone. This blog will follow the homebuilding journey of a custom home in Houston, TX. My wife and I have been in the planning stages of this house for 2 1/2 years.

Currently we are attempting to re-plat a 15 acre tract of land owned by my parents to extract a 2.45 acre tract out of it. This process began back in March 2006. It is now the middle of October and we are barely 20% done with it. It was originally expected to take 3 months, but the individual we hired to submit the re-plat with the City of Houston and Harris County has turned out to be consistently unreliable…

We had originally planned on breaking ground around Sept. or Oct. 2006. At this point we will be lucky if we begin in Jan. 2007. We are waiting on the city to set the public hearing date for the re-plat. We have been at this stage for about 2 months. The problem has been a combination of a mix-up at the city and our incompetent civil engineer not being able to submit the correct paperwork. It is looking like our hearing date is going to be Nov. 9th if we are lucky. I should find our for sure tomorrow.

Over the next few posts, I will attempt to describe more about our design process, construction materials, and things we have learned along the way. At this point we are just anxious to get started....