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The Lawrence Street House – Schematic Pt 1

We’ve started the design. After we synthesize the notebook (it’s good to organize your thoughts, even when designing your own home), we started sketching. I plotted out a scale site plan with the surrounding houses, trees, streets, etc.
Making note of the site analysis information and thinking about the factors that arise in that process, we can actually start designing the house. Finally. Most times, we as architects meet with our client and go over their notebook. We try to “get into their head” as to what they want, what the pictures and descriptions they’ve compiled actually mean. If they’ve done a good, comprehensive job on this, our job as an architect is much easier.
We have also owned this lot since last summer. So we have taken bike rides past our lot, stopped and just savored the neighborhood. We’ve eaten at our favorite restaurant (just three blocks away) and walked around the neighborhood. We’ve become intimately familiar with this piece of ground near downtown.
I’m also in a bit of a unique situation since this is my house and my wife and I are the clients. So this process is a little different. As I mentioned in my earlier “programming” post, my wife has really good ideas — some I haven’t thought of. So when the time came to sit down with pen and paper, she sat with me, too.
And, yes, this techno-geek-early-adopter still designs with pen on paper. As much as I’d like to go paperless, and I do in many areas, when it comes to the free flow of ideas in an initial design of a house, pen and paper is still the best.
We sat down for an uninterrupted afternoon, looked through our notebook again, talked about the surrounding aspects of the lot we’ve now owned for about 6 months and started.

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The Lawrence Street House – Programming

I’m trying to title each of these posts with a one-word summary. Site. Beginnings. You know, try to keep it simple. After all, this is thesimpleHOUSE.
So this next step in our process is called “programming”. I tried to look for a better word, because programming is long, sounds technical and doesn’t quite have the sexiness of a word like “beginnings”. But there really isn’t a better word, so I stayed with that.

Programming is where we take the information from a client (in this case, myself and my wife) and help them organize it into a framework where we can move into a schematic design (for starters) of their home.
You would think since I’m an architect and am designing my own home for myself and my wife (who I’ve been happily married to for almost three decades), we could dispense with the programming and just start designing. Well, that was the temptation.
But I’m so convinced of our process and the years of experience with it that we did it, too. My wife and I sat down and “programmed” our new home. The first picture above is one aspect of this process. We have a matrix where we link all the rooms and areas of our home and decide what kind of relationship we want between them. We color-code this with “direct”, “indirect” or “no relationship”. This is the first part of the process.
The second part (represented by the second picture) is going room by room and listing ideas, thoughts and dreams specific to that room. Downloading images and taking pictures of things we like are also incorporated into a page for each room. Any furniture we intend to keep (“reuse” is one of the three “R”s) is measured and listed at the bottom of the page for that room.
After all that is compiled, it creates a very comprehensive basis for starting a design. The other benefit it does is it gets the client (in this case me and my wife) talking and communicating about what we would like. It can be (and was for us) a wonderful process of thoughts, ideas and dreams. And I discovered even non-architects (my wife) often have really good ideas I haven’t thought of. And that’s how we grow and learn and get better at what we do.

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Grouping Your Trips

Depending on how you drive or get around, you might be able to “halve” your gasoline consumption. I used to think that riding my bike or the bus to work would save a majority of my gasoline consumption. But I recently learned that the majority of our VMTs (vehicle miles traveled) are NOT going to and from work. They are in the day-to-day trips to the grocery store, school, restaurants and the like.

Trips to and from work only account for about 30% to 40% of our VMTs. Now I’m not saying that riding my bike to work doesn’t have an impact or isn’t substantial, after all, 30% to 40% is still a pretty big chunk of consumption. What I’m saying is trips to and from work are kind of a given. Five days a week, same times of day and mostly incoming and outgoing with little variety or opportunity is more difficult to reduce than the trip to the grocery store, back home and, oops, I need to go here, then there.

Plan out your trips. If you need to go by the bank, try and group it with another trip in that general direction. If we only grouped two trips instead of just one, we would be well on our way to “halving” it all.

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The Lawrence Street House – Site

I know this picture is probably a bit hard for you to read and see. But that isn’t really the most relevant part of this post. As my wife and I were looking for a lot to build on, there were some factors that affected our decision.
First, we like to ride bikes. We’re not the racing bike sponsored spandex riders, but what I call casual bikers. That means we like to ride around town, to a restaurant to eat, downtown for a chocolate latte, etc. I also like to ride to work during the summer.
So one factor was bikability. And the lot we found is right on 15th Avenue, which is one of Eugene’s major bike routes.
Another factor is, in the current vernacular, walkability. LEED considers the walkability of a location and whether or not you are within a 1/4 mile or 1/2 mile of major amenities. A good resource is a website called WalkScore (http://www.walkscore.com). you can enter your address and it will give you a score on a scale of 0 to 100. The higher the better. Our lot scored an 85, or “Very Walkable”.
The reason this is important (some of you were asking that, I’m sure) is that it reduces our dependence on a car. This has numerous effects: less emissions and pollution, lower money outlay (less gas purchases, maintenance, etc), and better health (walking or biking is good exercise, so you’re healthier and will probably spend less money and time at the doctor and buying medications). You see, everything is connected. And, since this is an urban infill lot, our City won’t have to spend money extending services to the suburbs because of our home construction: it’s all already there.
Plus, if you’re out walking or biking, you have a better connect with people. You might even get into a conversation. And that can only be good. We live in a society of air-conditioned homes, sealed automobiles and garage door openers. Many of us don’t know our neighbors.
So before we even started designing our new home, we carefully considered our site location.

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Vinegar and Baking Soda

Household chemicals. Probably some of the most dangerous things we have around. Have you ever really looked at the labels on some of that stuff? My wife and I have a rule (seems like we have lots of rules, huh?) that relates to food and is making its way into many aspects of our lives. And that rule is we look at the ingredients in our food or in our cleaning supplies or household items such as toothpaste and if we can’t spell it or pronounce it, we try to avoid it.
This especially can apply to cleaning supplies. From window and countertop cleaners to scrubbing cleansers, we typically use products containing things such as ethylene glycol mono butyl ether (I think that’s just one ingredient with five words) and, here’s a good one: n-Alkyl dimethyl Benzyl ammonium chlorides. And, to top it all off, there are warning labels to seek medical attention if you get this in your eyes or on your skin.
And we’re cleaning our kitchen countertops with this stuff? The same countertop we prepare our food on? Does any of this seem even a little bit weird to you?
For several years, we have been using what I call “natural” cleaning supplies. And, no, we don’t buy the latest “green” cleaning product (although some are very good). For 99% of our cleaning, we have been using white vinegar in a 50-50 mix with water and baking soda.
We have cotton cleaning towels and we have an old spray bottle we’ve reused and filled with our vinegar solution. This works on bathroom and kitchen sinks, countertops, mirrors, pretty much everything. For scrubbing and more difficult areas (like our stainless steel sinks), we use baking soda and a little water, make a paste, get an old toothbrush and we’re set.
There have been few areas of our house that we haven’t been able to clean with these products. And the big advantages are they are cheap (A gallon of white vinegar costs just under $3 around here and a large box of baking soda is about the same), and we don’t worry using them around the kitchen counters and our food. In fact, there are some pretty good recipes using vinegar and others using baking soda. Hmmm…
But probably one of the best compliments we’ve had, though, is when my mom called me the other day and asked what we used to clean our house, because “it always looks so nice”. Oh yeah.

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The Lawrence Street House – Beginnings

I know it’s been a while since my last blog, so I’ll bring those of you who are new to thesimpleHOUSE up to date. Our kids are grown. We raised them in a 2,750 sq ft house that worked really well as they passed through their teen years and into adulthood. But now our daughter is married (they had their second anniversary in August) and our son just graduated from college and will be moving out soon. So we’re very close to being two people in what is now seeming to be a very large house. So last summer, after much searching, we found a wonderful urban infill lot in downtown Eugene, Oregon (our home town). We have the 2,750 sq ft house on the market for sale (let me know if you’re interested; it’s nice and doesn’t quite qualify as a McMansion) and are starting the design process. We recently did a LEED Platinum house (theSAGE in previous posts) that pulled out all the stops on sustainability. And you know, it wasn’t really that hard to do. So armed with a desire to be in something around 1,600 square feet, within walking distance of most amenities and that “itch” that I, as an architect, get about every decade, we’re designing another home. Stay tuned.
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CFLs and LEDs

In addition to the thirty second rule, we went through our house and replaced quite a few of our light bulbs with CFLs (compact fluorescents) ad some LED (light emitting diodes). We started with the exterior porch lights. This was because we leave our porch lights on all night for security. And, since we live in a house that sits on a corner, with three bollard lights, two porch lights and four “over the door” lights, we had some serious wattage going on.
Originally, we had 60 watt bulbs in our three bollards, 100 watt bulbs in our two porch lights and 50 watt bulbs in our over the door lights. That was a total of 580 watts going all night!
Well, we changed out the 60s and 100s for 11 watt CFLs and the 50s for 3.7 watt LEDS. That dropped our wattage from 580 to just under 70 watts. Not only do they last longer, but they put out almost as much light (except for the LEDs — they’re quite a bit dimmer and they’re expen$ive!).
But they all work fine for security. And, based on this success, I’m going through the rest of the house and replacing bulbs where I can (we have a lot of recessed can incandescents on dimmers, so it’s slow going). I’ve started with closets and am working my way through the house.
Consider CFLs or LEDs where you can.
  

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The Thirty Second Rule

I want to dedicate this blog entry to my friend Levi. In a conversation he and I had a while back, he told me they have, what he calls, a “thirty second rule.” What that means is, if they are going to leave the room for more than thirty seconds, they turn off the lights. Simple, huh?
Yet this is such an easy habit to get into and it can make a difference. While I can’t say it will cut your electric bills in half (this is “halve it all”, after all), it can make a serious dent in your energy use.
My wife and I started being more diligent in turning off lights around our house. Since we currently have gas heat, most of our electric bills are lights and appliances. In just being careful: turning off lights when we’re not in the room, not turning on lights if we don’t need them (our house has wonderful natural light in most every room), and those sorts of things, we have been able to reduce our annual electric bills every year for the last three years. That’s pretty good.
There are a few additional things we’ve done to help with this, and I’ll talk about those in future blogs. But today, in addition to employing the thirty second rule, we installed timers on our bath fans.
One of the problems faced we are faced with in the Pacific Northwest is damp air. When we shower, we need to use the exhaust fan, but it usually doesn’t pull all of the moisture out of the air before we have to go to work. So what to do? We can turn off the fan and get SOME of the moisture out, we can leave the fan on all day while we’re at work and get ALL of the moisture out, as well as a significant amount of heated air.
OR, we can install timers. I remember in our first house we had the turn-the-dial timers on our bath fans. But those don’t look very good anymore and they fell into disuse (if they even make them anymore). But Leviton makes a multitude of nice timers. The one pictured here is what we installed on our bath fans. We set the timer for 60 minutes and the fan runs while we go to work, then turns off after an hour.
Leviton also makes a 24 hour programmable timer that we used for our exterior porch lights, too. But I’ll talk about our porch lights (CFL and LED as well as the 24 hour timer) next time.

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Paper or Plastic? Neither!



I remember when I would go to the grocery store and the clerk would ask “paper or plastic?” We typically would say “paper” because it was easier to recycle. Our garbage company picks up recycles, but doesn’t do plastic bags. And we’d always forget to take our plastic bags back to the store. So they’d pile up in our recycle drawer. Paper was easier, but that bothered us, too.

So a few years ago, my wife and I decided to invest in durable, canvas bags. We bought four like the one pictured here from ECObags. They are durable, socially responsible canvas bags. About $9 each. And we love them! When we bought ours, they had a logo on the side that said “neither”. I liked that.

We’ve found it rare when four bags aren’t enough for our shopping. And we can pack them with heavy stuff and they hold up really well. The straps are sturdy and I’m amazed at the stuff we can load in them. Almost heavier than we can lift sometimes — really.

Plastic bags are convenient and cheap. But cheap isn’t always good. Worldwide, we consume and discard between 500 billion and 1 trillion plastic bags. That’s about 1 million EVERY MINUTE! About 380 billion are in the US alone, 100 billion of those are grocery bags, costing retailers $4 billion annually.

We’ve found our bags useful for carrying all sorts of things around, not just our groceries. And even after three years, they’re still going strong.