Architect's Guide for Buying a Home - Part 3

Cont. Site Features-

King of the hills? Is the site on relatively flat land, is it on slope, or are you on a cliff? Grades (as in slopes) often adds interests to a site, depending on the location of the house it can also obscure sight lines and create more privacy for the home. The direction the slope face also can make a dramatic difference, a South facing slope will receive significantly more sun light then a north facing slope. This can either be a positive or negative attribute depending on your local climate. Any change in grades is generally expensive to do due to the amount of labor and equipment involved, so often time with most site it is “what you see is what you get”. Also are there any rock formation on the site? Large rocks tend to generate visual interest and provide variety to landscaping but does present potential hazard to younger children. Many home shoppers I have spoken to often attribute large flat expense of lawn as children friendly, I on the other hand feel that a more varied less open landscape. Is a lot more interesting to a child and leave much more room for imaginations.

Over the river, and through the lake? Unless you live in a desert (even there you have the occasion flash floods) water will have a major presence on your site either as a permanent feature such as ponds, streams and wetland, or as temporary runoff from rain storm. Even temporary runoff can have a major impact on your home depending on its location. A house that is located in the path of a drainage channel will have a much higher chance of having moisture related foundation issue.
So what exactly is a runoff, you don’t mean like an election right? Water always seek the lowest point, so whenever it rains, water travel both above and below ground along the slope in the shortest path. If your house happens to be located in this path then you’ll need to make sure that the proper precaution is taken so that the flow is diverted around the house and not into your basement. This can be done via properly designed drains on the surface and footing drains next to your foundation. But no system is perfect and its best to simply avoid this problem by finding a properly sited house away from the drainage path.

Rivers, stream, lake or if you’re lucky an ocean frontage all can be a major feature to a site. Aside from visual interest and opportunities for recreational activities, bodies of water also serve functional purposes. Bodies of water tends to help regulate temperature in the surrounding areas, natural evaporation and air flow cools the surrounding area during the summer and in the winter water also retain more heat than ground. Sounds of flowing water aside from pleasant to hear is also a natural white noise and does a great job masking unpleasant noises from off site. Pool and man-made water feature also falls in this category but with them also comes maintenance issues as well as potential insurance liabilities. Make sure that you have their related mechanical system carefully checked out.

Architect's Guide for Buying a Home - Part 2

So you got your pre-approval letter from the bank and hook up with a buyer's agent that your brother in law had a good experience with. After some digging through the MLS you and him came up with a short list of property to see, scheduled the appointment and before you know it, you are standing in front of prospect house #1. Now what?

In today's post I'll start by talking about the first thing you should check when it comes to shopping for a home; the lay of the land. Now when you are purchasing a home, you are actually buying the land that it is sitting on, and the house (which is known as an improvement) just happen to come with it. You should carefully consider the positive and negative aspect of each site before you contemplate the house itself. After all, you can always make improvement to a home but it is difficult if not impossible to improve features of a site, such as a view or its location.

Location, Location and LOCATION!
The old adages still stands true, location of a site is just about the most important aspect of a home. How long does it take for you to get to work? What about public transportation or shopping areas? Take a map and draw a 5 miles radius circle around the site, this will be your circle of convenience. This is about how far you would be willing to travel if you found out that you just happen to ran out of milk in the morning. You can perform a simple online map based search to find out what exactly is located inside this circle.

Where the schools are located, and how are the schools? You don’t want to be too far but it also might get a bit noisy if you are right across the street.

Is there any high traffic road, or even highway nearby? It might both be a source of background noise as well as hazards for younger children.

A lot of personal preferences are involved with it comes to the selection of a site location, but that’s not why you are reading a guide from an Architect since you know those things already. “tell me something I don’t know!” you say? On to the show then.

Site Features:

There are both positive and negative site features, there are no perfect sites and there are always negative features to off balance the positive. But the more you know how to identify them, the better you will be able to make a accurate assessment of how good a “fit” it is for you.

Shut up and listen! No really, when you get off the car at the prospective site. Turn the car off and tell everyone to be quiet for a few minutes. Listen and see what you hear, do you hear high way 87 back behind the house, what about the sound of rushing water from the small stream at the back of your site? People often miss this as the excitement of open houses renders the noises less perceptible, but do remember that what might seem acceptable now will not when you are lying on your bed 2 in the morning trying to sleep. And don’t believe the hype with sound insulation, most residential home are not build to filter out traffic noises, for that you’ll need solid concrete walls.

This land is my land! Always request for a lot survey before the actual visit. And when you get there, walk the entire perimeter of the lot (or drive if you are rich and is buying a 100 acre) but it is important that you get a sense of where the property starts and where it ends. Are there any area where the lot delineation is not clearly marked up? Is your neighbor’s fence (or your neighbor for that matter) sitting on your lot? Do you share a driveway, and if so is there a clear agreement as to who does the maintenance and how bills are shared? Oh and last thing while you are taking your stroll, check out the views.

Flexible Sliding House

I just came across to a really interesting article about an special house. This is a very flexible house that change its form when it is need it, having more shade and protection in winter, or it can be open to the light and visuals in summer. How could this house prepare to do that?

The whole concept of this house is to be able to be open when it need it, and close when it is required. This flexibility was created by a sophisticated but simple sliding mechanism of the roof’s house. In other words, the house has the ability to slides open.

The owner of this house, Ross Russell of Suffolk, England, decided to meet with the architects and plan for this special quality. The architect was De Rijke Marsh Morgan.

When it is slid closed you likely wouldn’t notice anything unusual about Russell’s house. With its timber-clad exterior and 45-degree angle roof it resembles so many barn-like structures in the English country side.

When the house slides open, however, it is an unusual sight to behold. Four electric motors silently slide the 20 ton outer house shell back to reveal the inner glass and steel structure. The motors that power this sliding run on car batteries automatically recharged through solar power.

Currently the house shell slides back 28 meters (92 feet), a trip that takes about 6 minutes. In the “back” position the shell shades a patio. It was planned to allowed for the possibly of extending the track further to allow the roof shell to cover a garden or swimming pool.

When Russell sat down with his architects to first conceive of his house’s design they started with the mantra “We are prepared to be radical.” That radical approach is the one that we like and appreciate in EZarchitecture.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxmvRDTELy8

Architect's Guide for Buying a Home - Part 1

Shopping for a home? During this time of financial uncertainties I find that even those people who are doing the shopping is somewhat surprised that they are looking. But at the same time you have to live somewhere, and the one bedroom rental you are living in now is hardly a great place to raise kids!

Buying a home is probably one of the largest decisions you will make in your life. It is likely the most expensive and longest commitment you will ever make, short of death and marriage that is. So, what should you look for? Unlike buying a car or a flat screen TV, there are no 3rd party test drive reports or side by side comparison test of the home you are interested in. And last time I checked, there isn’t a consumer report home shopping guide either. Having helped a few friends with their search I found that most of the information and advices available on the web has more to do with the financial aspect of home purchase and not so much about the house itself.

A modern home is a complex machine with hundreds of parts. From the mechanical heating and cooling system to the external thermal envelope designed to keep a home properly insulated. Each part is crucial to the optimal function of the whole house, and if any one part were to fail, it will also likely impact other systems. A small leak in your roof can cause moisture accumulation in your wall and fungal growth and unhealthy condition for your family, all without you noticing any obvious signs of problem.

As an Architect I always love the opportunities to teach people more about the things that make a home a worthy investment and this post will the first in a multi-part series of posts on my recommendation of what to look for in a home.

First post

Test, test