Design your house plan
 

I always doodle on paper and in "Paint" and fantasise about the house i'm going to build one day.. it changes every week though from a loft in a barn to a pool house to a tree house, And then i proceed to get angry at myself for not having a deposit for land yet..hmmf.

I want to live in a really open plan home.. with a pool inside so i can just dive in at any whim. I want colourful, yet neutral tones and i'll have lots of inbuilt spots for live indoor plants. Lots of windows for natural light yet i dont mind if, from the outside, it looks kind of like a barn. a barn with nice big windows.

Cool. I've always been fond of geodesic domes and earth contact homes...

I've been grinding away at my dream home for quite a while now. Some of my house pics can be seen on the homepage. Mine evolved a lot on paper like yours Spark but we finally settled on the basic design by putting our actual limitations and must haves into the equation. We were limited to what I could actually build at the time. That forced me to keep my timber frame simple enough that I could do all the joinery. Since we wanted a small house with a central Russian fireplace, our design was limited there. I'm still sketching my sunroom etc... to build after I finish my degree so I'm not sure the project will end. If you're still at the land buying stage though, why not let your imagination run wild? :) Good luck it's great fun.

Sorry, I will post sensibly when I have stopped laughing
But in my part of the world, a pump is a fart......

I'm guessing you're not a big fan of cooking?

Dude, she's from down under. They grill everything in the back yard.:yum:

I think there's a representation of a cooktop to the right and down from the "big comfy lounge".

I've said before ... my dream home will be built underground. I haven't decided if the entrance will be in the treestump or under the doghouse.

A fart room!! of course!! - much more appropriate than doing it on the lounge :)

I do like cooking - there is a small kitchenette there but yes, if i were too cook for more than myself then it would all be done on the BBQ outside.

I think Jim and Jinx posted pics of a barn they built in their property a few months ago... i would like this kind of style from the outside, nice and big and barnie.

I think it would be good to have a seperate construction from the home as a cinema.. with lounges, a wall painted white with a projector at the rear. A popcorn machine, old movie stars on the walls, even pick up some old short intro cartoons or something to show before your movie. how fun!

post your own!!!

I've thought about different types of houses over the years. I think that the most important thing for the future is that houses be built to last, be low maintenance, cheap to build, and cheap to live in (heat/cool.) Wait, that's four things. OK, well, they are all important. Wolf's comment about living in the ground is the obvious answer to all of these concerns. The problem with living in the ground is that water wants to get in, and there is no light.

One interesting building concept I read about is a Passive Annual Heat Storage building that absorbs heat in the summer, and uses it in the winter. In theory, such a house would have zero heating and cooling costs, and would maintain a constant temperature year round. Problem is, they don't look too nice to live in. However, one house in the hills of western Virginia has achieved a nice balance. They use the PAHS idea to reduce the house's seasonal temperature change to only 13 degrees Fahrenheit, without heating or cooling. That's amazing when you consider the summers sometimes get up to 105 degrees, and the winters usually get down to the teens. My own home, which I spend an arm and a leg alternately heating and cooling has an internal temperature swing of about 15 degrees during the year. I just can't afford to moderate it more than that. Besides the energy benefits, the house above actually looks pretty nice to live in. They have plenty of light, with large windows on three sides. The place was built for less than a "normal" house. It's stronger, is more storm resistant, the copper panel exterior is virtually maintenance free, and it's much more energy efficient.

There's a good discussion about it here . (I think you may need to register, they just recently changed the Taunton webpage.) VaTom is the poster who built the house, and he talks a lot about it in this thread.

Just imagine, a house that stays at room temperature year round for free!

I understand the appeal of not having to pay for heating and cooling costs in a PAHS house, but isn't a design that uses that much concrete rather eco-unfriendly? Unless of course the house lasts long enough to offset the negative impact?

I admit I doubt I'd ever build my own house - I'm far too lazy in practical matters like that. If I had the money I'd simply search until I found one that ticked enough boxes. BUT, if by some strange quirk of fate I was looking to build my own...

I'd like to have solar panels in the roof, and I know you can adjust the pitch of the roof to allow minimum penetration of the sun in the summer and maximum penetration in the winter. If the house is also well insulated, heating can be provided solely by wood-burning stoves - which is an idea which appeals to me for aesthetic reasons too.

I'd also like to collect rainwater for the washing machine and watering the garden, and I believe "grey" water from household use can be recylced at home too. Water isn't generally metered in the UK so there'd be no cost saving, but I just think the less I waste the better.

I must admit i am longing for man made luxuries in my next house. My current home is over 80 years old, an origional big old farmhouse on our sheep property and has been locally dubbed "the house from hell". Its haunted by at least 3 different ghosts,no air conditioner, a colapsed fireplace so in winter if you light a fire more smoke comes into the house than heat, It has no insulation and a tin roof spanning 40 sq metres so if its 40degrees celcius outside... its 53 inside!!! it has room after rambling room and i have to pass through 5 rooms to get from bedroom to bathroom! my candles actually melt during the day its that hot inside, and in winter it gets so damn cold that our pillows freeze!

Sometimes I just cant wait for air conditioning, a sparkling swimming pool, insulation, walls without gaps and a tiled roof!

Um, Sun Sparkz, don't you work in real estate? Why are you waiting?

BTW, with steel beams and copper siding, that PAHS house must be real interesting in lightning storms.

Yeah i do, but i'm bad with money and love the social life, and going on extravagant holidays. The House From Hell is the 2nd house on our family property, so theres no point in doing any renovaions or anything, I just have to smarten my act and buy my own one, at least living in hell it is some motivation to save.

Also am finding tank water a problem the last few weeks, all our pipes are gravity fed from our 2 tanks, but i think something has died or something in the tank that feeds our laundry, the water in the laundry tub this morning was retched!! oh for town water, how ever chlourinated and flourided it may be!!

Here's one I cut from newspaper back in 79. It'll never be built. Have the rest of article if anyone is interested.