Guest Post: Jen from Jen on the Edge

I feel a little guilty that I’m here in Cali getting ready for a day of fun, while Ryan is back home preparing for the hurricane, and I’m trying to  see if I can change my flight which is currently scheduled to land during the middle of the storm.

In the mean time, we’ve got one more fabulous guest post to cap off Jen Week! Jen from Jen on the Edge is here to talk about the super awesome eco-friendly house that she and her husband built!

 

Hi everyone. I’m Jen and I blog primarily at Jen on the Edge.  For over a year, though, I also blogged at EconoMod, which was the blog my husband Pete and I used to talk about the house we built three years ago.

We live in Charlottesville, Virginia, which is the home of Monticello and the University of Virginia.  Consequently, a lot of the architecture here in our town looks like these landmarks:

 

Those are lovely buildings, to be sure, but living amongst all that red brick can be boring. And, in fact, our last house was a lovely red brick Colonial. We admire classical architecture, but longed to see something different in a sea of red brick, white columns, and black doors and shutters.

We adored our old house, but it was lacking in a few key areas — from the teeny kitchen to the non-existent hall closet — so about eight years ago, we started talking about designing and building a new house.  For the first two years, we were planning on our “empty nester house” but then we decided that we wanted a house that our daughters (two girls who are now in middle school) would enjoy too, so we shifted our focus and spent another year talking about what that house would include.  Finally, after three years of thinking and talking, we started looking for land.  It took another two years, but we finally found an empty lot near Charlottesville’s downtown that would enable us to walk and bike as much as possible.

Our design influences were very contemporary in nature, in that we really like clean lines and unadorned architecture. We’re also fans of mid-century modern architecture and furniture and ultimately ended up with this:

We know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but we’re delighted with it.

Another major consideration in our planning was that we wanted a house that was as environmentally friendly as possible. We’re not naïve enough to think that our house wouldn’t have an impact on Planet Earth, but we wanted to minimize it as much as possible.

To start with, our house is well under 3,000 s.f. for a two story house with a full basement that includes a drive-in garage. Here are some specific details:

• a large kitchen with a walk-in pantry
• a comfortable living room that we enjoy daily
• three bedrooms
• 2.5 bathrooms
• a toy room for our girls (will later be converted to some other space when they grow up)
• a home office that all four of us use (I work at home and my husband sometimes does)
• a ‘man cave’ in the basement that includes an eight-seat movie theater
• a 2 car / six bike / 1 kayak garage

We put the square footage in the public rooms that get a lot of use by all of us, but kept the bedrooms and bathrooms very small since we don’t spend much time in those spaces. Oh, and we even have a “secret attic”  for our girls to play in and have sleepovers with their friends. In short, we squeezed a lot of stuff into modest square footage.

We also designed our house for the lot we built on and sited it so as to make the most use of the sun’s rays. In the winter, the sunlight pours into the huge windows that are on the eastern, southern, and western sides of the house, which warms the house nicely. We also chose construction techniques that created a solid, well-insulated house, including solid concrete walls in the basement and eco-friendly insulation (we went with recycled denim). The upshot of this is that our heating and cooling bills are pretty low. We’ve lost power in the winter and the house stayed warm the whole time.

One final note:  We built our house on a pretty tight budget. Even though we live in an area where new construction can easily cost $200/s.f. or more – and in fact, one builder quoted us $300/s.f. – we kept ours to around $125/s.f., not including the land. We juggled the budget repeatedly and cut costs in some places (e.g. using Ikea cabinets) and splurged in a few other areas (e.g. bathroom tile). Our builder brought the house in on schedule and on budget, which is an impressive feat.

We’ve been in our house for over two years now and are delighted with it. There are a few things we’d change if we could, including giving ourselves just a smidge more square footage, as a couple of rooms could use a little more elbow space. But, the fact is, in just seven years, we’ll be empty nesters and the house will actually be a bit too big for just the two of us. But that’s okay, we’ve already starting talking about our retirement house. Yes, that’s right, we had so much fun building this house that we’d like to do it again one day.

Many thanks to Jane for allowing me to tell the story of our house. If anyone has any specific questions, feel free to ask them in the comments or email me at jenontheedge (at) embarqmail (dot) com.