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The Lawrence Street House – Plumbing

One way to save energy is through a compact plumbing design. One of our goals as we laid out the design was to keep the plumbing — especially the hot water runs — as short as possible.

I shared that goal with a friend in the design community who said we wouldn’t be able to do it. And I’ll have to admit, this was one area where we had some struggles.
It wasn’t that easy. We could group the bathrooms and the utility room, but the kitchen sink seemed to be the sticking point. And, we had thought about a sink in the garage for clean up when working out in the yard.
Well, after many iterations of the layout, we came up with the design you see above. I think we’ll be able to get all hot water plumbing runs within 20 feet of pipe from the water heater. This will reduce pipe heat loss and also reduce water use because we won’t be waiting and waiting and waiting for the hot water to hit the faucet or shower head. Plus, we have grouped the major hot water uses, the washer, shower and tub all very close to the water heater.
Couple that all with low flow faucets and shower heads and you can see why this will save energy and water. So about the sink in the garage… You’ll notice there isn’t one. By designing the layout so we can come into the utility room from the garage, we can use the sink in there. Plus, if we need to remove dirty clothes, we have a private place to do that without tracking dirt throughout the house.
We’ve saved the cost of a sink (and the associated plumbing), doubled up on use (utility room doubles as a clothes changing area) and kept the plan even more compact. We took a similar design track in the kitchen for my espresso maker and bar sink: no bar sink. We grouped the espresso maker location close to the main sink and I’ll simply use that one. Again, we saved a sink.
And, by the way, we’ve been appreciating your comments about the design. We are compiling them and will respond as we go through some of these details. For Sue, on connecting the master bath to the utility room, we thought about that; but our lifestyle is such that it isn’t a major thing for us and the clean clothes. We do have the double-rolling hamper from the utility to the master bath (It’s between the ironing board and the utility sink).
Bryan commented about the master sinks on the exterior wall and the venting, etc. In response to Bryan, with our exterior wall system (I’ll go into more detail later), we will actually be building two 2×4 walls with a 1″ space, then foaming it all with insulation. This keeps all the plumbing on the warm side, completely seals it with insulation and still keeps the sinks close to the hot water heater. I plan on running the vent up the interior wall by the shower.
This is one area where we kept the dual sinks. Brenda and I “need” two sinks… 🙂
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The Lawrence Street House – Site Analysis

I know this wasn’t a one word title; sorry. Before we start designing (and the excitement of getting started builds, so there’s still that temptation. Resist!), we take a really good look at the site. We call this our site analysis. Yeah, not very creative, but accurate.

We look at a number of things. The topography of the land (it’s mostly flat, with a depression where the previous house was), the immediately surrounding features: neighboring houses, the big overgrown apple tree, power lines, utilities, and the gravel alley to name a few. How the house would relate to the surrounding neighborhood.
As I’ve mentioned, we live in a society of garage door openers and not knowing our neighbors. Our lot is unique since it’s on 15th. I talked in an earlier post how 15th is also a major bike street. In fact, we’ve noticed there is probably more bike traffic on 15th than cars. We like that. There are also more pedestrians along 15th than many suburban streets. We like that, too.
So we’re filing away the desire to not turn our backs on the street. We are going to be faced with wanting an outdoor living area for our home that has some privacy, but doesn’t turn our back on the rest of the neighborhood. We have this philosophy that our entire society would be just a little better if we related to our neighbors a little more. For us, it’s that spiritual aspect of “loving your neighbor”.
We also have a relatively non-descript four-plex to the west, across Lawrence, some nicer houses across 15th to the south and a still-vacant lot across the alley to the east. Uly’s Tamale Cart parks right along 15th (we’d like to meet Uly: anyone know him?). We want to downplay the garage, so we will be taking access to the garage off the alley. We absolutely want to take advantage of solar (patio, photovoltaic and hot water). Since we’re on the corner, we’d kind of like it if our front door related to the corner. And we have the ability to increase density on our urban lot by building what’s called an accessory dwelling unit (ADU).
ADUs are a secondary house on the same lot that could be a place for elderly parents to live or a rental house. An ADU can be no larger than 800 square feet and we want to take advantage of that for a several reasons: our lot is large (9,000 sq ft) and this is a better use of land, we’ll have a place for elderly parents if needed, and if not, we’ll have the ability for rental income as we head into retirement.
You can see it’s important to think through and evaluate these things BEFORE you start designing. It saves changes (or mistakes) later.
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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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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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Our Lot – circa 1948

Just found out a friend of ours lived in the house that was on our lot when she was in high school in 1948. She was gracious enough to scan some of her old pictures.

This is the original front porch.

Small world.