Catching up to the 21st century, part 8...home design continued

January, 2007: I am thinking of doing the home design myself because of my 3D CAD experience. I tried demos of the following programs:

• Chief Architect
  
• Envisioneer
• Sketchup
• Softplan
• Vectorworks

My preference for a decent program focused on home design is Chief Architect.

I modeled a 2 story loft in more detail and started solving problems such as the spiral staircase location. It wants to be centered on the EW width of the house and split 50/50 on the south edge of the balcony. But the upper bedroom closet extends beyond the centerline of the EW width. The bedroom closet will be modified to allow the staircase 25% pie slice to be cut out of either the E or W quadrant of the balcony.

I have been thinking more about water systems and black/grey water systems. I want a pond and a constructed wetland. A consultation with Rana Creek (an ecological design company) on site in late January confirmed my worries about cost and permits. It looks like these design elements will not be included in our plans. We will go with a standard septic and plumb for grey/black water split. We will use low flow or composting toilets to reduce black water output.

January 27, 2007: Met Michele Landegger of Boa Constructor at the Sullivan home tour. She seemed to be the truly wonderful person we heard from everyone. At the Sullivan house she showed pictures of some of her work and told a few stories of her experiences. We went to a local Mexican restaurant to discuss our project. She only had ½ hour, so we quickly ran through our list of questions.

• organic straw, she would love to work with it, but hasn’t yet, hard to find, she prefers 2 string
• she will work $/hour as a consultant or GC, whatever we need, shift along the way is OK
• she is OK with our 2 year design time, she plans to be away for 2 months in the winters by then, so we need to plan around that
• her crew uses Vectorworks CAD
• she has her construction details on paper only and says they are constantly being updated because the state of the art keeps changing
  
• her crew does electric, paint and carpentry, plaster, subs out remainder and has an A-team of people in mind
• her subs have a good long-term relationship and work together well.
• her crew has what she says is "a great earth plaster guy"
• Pat Split and Sharron Block are title 24 people Michele said I should talk to
• She had reclaimed/recycled timber stamped on site for structural reuse or uses sustainably harvested lumber. Issues with reclaimed are knots and straightness. Can increase cost of labor because the crew takes more time to deal with these issues.
• her crew works time & material
• she builds post & beam frame
• 2 story home will cost more to meet the engineering requirements, X bracing etc.
• a 6” wall allowance has precedent in the county and doorways and window seats do not count. There is a new person in the county that she will talk to about posture towards strawbale before we commit.
  

1/27/07: I tested our well water with pool test strips. It's mid range hard, and the pH is near 7. I took a sample and mailed to a system provider at Home Depot for free testing and likely marketing materials for water systems. I never received results.