Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Drawings





While the house is still a pile of timbers in front of the shop, I have finally chosen the windows, which for me feels like a big step forward. After looking into various options for wood interior and exterior windows, we are going to go with Marvin Integrity windows. The interiors of the Integrity windows are wood, while the outsides are pultruded fiberglass. While I still like the idea of stained wood on the exterior, the price point is a little high and I think fully wood windows could be a negative for a future owner of the house due to the upkeep wood requires. We looked closely at a Canadian window manufacturer called Norwood, but while I really liked them, it seems prudent to go with a clad window.
I would like to de-emphasize the non-glazing parts of the window so I think going with the dark brownish exterior finish called "bronze" will blend well with the stained pine clapboards.



Saturday, March 6, 2010

A Few Ramblings

We recently spent the weekend at a friend's family's ski house in New Hampshire that looked like this:

I really like the simplicity of the shed roofs composed in an interesting way and it made me wish we had designed a slightly less typical house. As previously discussed there are a number of reasons we went with basically a gabled rectangle (mostly cost, time, and appeal to the greatest number of potential future owners). As plans stand now this won't be the last house we design and build for ourselves and we will have opportunities in the future to go outside the box and experiment with other building methods and styles.

And in the more immediate future I am working on a little project that will give me the chance to experiment a bit. More on that as it progresses...

On a separate topic, we recently put a timber frame porch on a house near the coast that made me very excited about porches on timber frames. Without a timbered porch or some kind of timbered overhangs there is often no way that the internal structure of the timber frame shows on the exterior of the building. Here's the Brunswick entryway: