I am often asked why I decided to design our house myself as
opposed to using an available design.
The reason I usually give is that there are very few available
houseplans with attached hangars and adding a hangar to a conventional plan
doesn’t work very well. (There are a few
houseplans with hangars available at the Living With Your Plane Association website.) An attached hangar tends to preclude an
outside view from a relatively large fraction of the perimeter of the house. Although there are a handful of rooms for
which a view to the outside is not important, conventional houseplans usually do
not locate these rooms in the location at which a hangar would make sense.
When I am being completely honest, I admit that the main
reason I designed the house myself is that I enjoy designing. I enjoy learning about the science and
practice of homebuilding. I enjoy the
challenge of manipulating the parts to try to achieve what we want subject to
the constraints. I am looking forward to
seeing something I designed become a real world structure.
Some of the things we want in our houseplan will be familiar
to most people designing a new house while other needs are specific to our
situation. My wife and I intend to live
in this house until the kids send us off to assisted living. Those kids are college age now. They will probably live in the house off and
on for the next few years. How do we
design a house to be suitable for just the two of us and also suitable for a
holiday gathering with our kids, their eventual families, our parents, and our
siblings?
For the main floor, we want a kitchen open to the family
room. When we have a family gathering,
we don’t want the cooks to be segregated from everyone else. If age or disability eventually prevents one
of us from being able to climb stairs, we want to be able to live on just the
first floor. So, we put a bedroom, office,
and laundry room on the first floor.
Although we label the bedroom as a guest bedroom, we provided a closet
and bathroom that would make it a suitable master suite.
The master suite is upstairs. We wanted to make sure to address the things
we didn’t like about our old master suite.
Although our previous bedroom had a walk-in closet, it was really too
narrow to have clothes hanging along both sides. The new house needed a bigger closet. As the design evolved, sometimes the closet
would get even bigger because there was some unused space adjacent to it. If the design evolved in the opposite
direction, Julie would protest. It seems
you can never make a closet smaller. Our
old master bathroom was also just a bit too narrow. Like the closet, the master bathroom seemed
to grow as the design evolved. Anyone
with aspirations of designing a modest home should avoid watching HGTV (except
maybe the show about tiny houses).
The hangar and garage presented some unique challenges. Obviously, we need a door on the taxiway side
large enough for the airplane and doors on the street side for the cars. We also want to store our motorhome in the
hangar. Even existing house designs that
have hangars rarely have provisions for RV storage. The motorhome (the rectangle in the image
above) dictated the height of the hangar.
We decided that it was easier to increase the height of the hangar door
to get the motorhome in and out than to have a tall enough garage door.
The hardest part of designing the house was not making
individual regions work out, but making them work together. The roof sections need to come together in a
way that is buildable and aesthetically pleasing. Sometimes, the logical places for windows
from the interior didn’t look good from the exterior. No design is without compromises, but after
many, many iterations, we have a design that we are pleased with. We have good views of the runway from the
rooms that we will spend the most time in.
We have a large south-facing section of roof that is suitable for solar
panels. I doubt if we have thought of
everything, but hopefully we have thought of all the important things.
