Perhaps a thing I could add is that Part 2 [1] is available, which wasn't immediately obvious to me.
[1] https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/designing-a-new-old-home-pa...
It seems to me that done right, a cupola would also make a great source of indirect natural light.
Average home ownership duration is ten years. So yeah, you kinda have to make some considerations for the next person. No AC and wood heating are going to be a hard sell.
(I am the author) Sorry I don't make it super clear in Part 1: I have a 500 gallon propane tank and a propane furnace as backup heat. I leave downstairs at 58F so it can't go below that at night. (I have no idea why I decided on that number). It rarely does unless I let the fire die around 7-8pm.
From October to Feb I averaged 1.8 gallons/day of propane use, which I suspect was 90% hot water and propane cooking (we bake bread 2x a week and cook for 1-2 hours almost every single day because we're somewhat obsessed with food. This is also why the downstairs is very kicthen oriented)
> No closets? If that's what you're into...but its going to be hard to sell.
Why? People can easily frame in closets on any of the bedrooms if they wanted to. They all have 2 walls they could do it against. Or if they want bigger bedrooms, they can keep them big.
The counterfactual in "hard to sell" is that there are 900000 houses out there unlike this one, and they all compete against each other. This competes with historic houses. The historic houses here (without AC, with terrible insulation, damp crawlspace basements, etc) command a huge premium. I don't think a traditional-looking house with none of the accumulated problems of real historic houses would be difficult to sell at all.
Wood burning is basically carbon neutral as it just releases the CO2 that the trees have captured back into the cycle.
Me, I agree to your decisions and love how it turned out. Also, congrats on becoming (being?) a father! :-)
That is exactly what they are trying to avoid. It is _their_ family home. They built the house for themselves–for their life. That is why the total square footage isn't as important–each of their rooms is built around their life style for better space efficiency. People focusing so strongly the selling a house they haven't even purchased yet.
It severely limits the scope of what people are willing to do to basically what is trendy on HGTV, etc. that year.
And resale value calculations don’t take into account the joy and utility the changes afford you. Again, I value those highly.
Real estate agents and HGTV shows have distorted people's view on the importance of small details on resale value. I promise you that the choices the author made in designing their house will find an equally enthusiastic buyer if they do decide to sell.
Of course there will be some potential buyers who have "no closets" as a deal breaker. But there will be others who fall in love with a unique house that exists literally nowhere else in the market.
If you're going to limit your design choices to appease a potential buyer decades in the future, you might as well buy an existing house in the first place rather than striking out on your own build. The whole point of a custom home is to customize it to your liking.
Yup. I have heard way too many times on those shows, "You spent $50K on renovations so that increased your value $100K", without any form of critical thought. Yes, improvements can have an intrinsic value, but these shows make it seem automatic and huge, without fail.
Try selling a custom bicycle and you'll see how lovingly-picked components add up into a resale value, at a much lower price.
And then you remember that most of their income comes from the show itself.
I remember drama around 16 And Pregnant, and glamorizing teenage pregnancy. Says MTV, "Oh no, we only cover costs, we don't pay them for this". Fell apart when one of the girls, living in her trailer, working minimum wage at McDonalds, started appearing on the show in a brand new Saleen Mustang.
My parents have lived in the same house for 35 years. On that scale, what is good for resale value doesn't really matter.
Things that were trendy in 1990 are severely dated at this point.
Conversation pits are back in vogue from the 70s, so I'd say they have another 20 years!
https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/trend-alert-conversation-pi...
First you have to chop and stack cords of wood in the fall (a thankless, back-breaking task), then go out into the snow to bring in loads of wood every other day all winter to heat the house. You can't store enough wood indoors to last months, so it's always piled up outside. Dealing with the wood is a never ending shitty job that nobody likes or wants to do. It's not a "chore", it's full on work - with cuts, splinters, bruises or worse injuries. Slipping on the ice with an armload of cordwood is a great way to break a bone or get a concussion, let me assure you. I cannot tell you how much I hated it, and how many family arguments were caused as a result.
Since all wood stoves leak, no matter what, you end up smelling like a campfire all winter. And I still wonder if the secondhand smoke effects will rear it's ugly head in the future. I've never smoked, but won't be at all surprised if someday I have lung cancer from years of breathing all that crappy air filled with soot particles.
Oof. So many horrible memories. Thank heaven I live in California now.
But then again, it probably wouldn't win any "new old home" or other design awards.
Once they stopped homeschooling, the desire to heat the house with wood dried up pretty quickly. These days I think they have a fire maybe a couple times a month on Winter evenings.
One great thing her family introduced me to though: The in home sauna. They are Finnish by way of Northern Minnesota. I dream of one day having a sauna in my own home.
Firewood is certainly a PITA and I can't stand the smell of woodsmoke, but I still feel that fireplaces produce much more pleasant heat than any modern system.
Plus there's much to be said for the ambience of a flickering fire.
OTOH, a lot of the old coal boilers were converted to heating oil, and more recently I think people have been converting some of them to NG.
Basically you are going to install something that you can easily get an HVAC person in your area to do maintenance on if it breaks.
Blinds on the outside keep heat away from the glass and avoid turning your house into a greenhouse.
Anything south of upstate NY is already pretty unbearable in the summer. Another added benefit of AC is the dehumidification of your interior, which means less mold.
Take a look at windcatchers. Even better if you combine them with a quanat. Lots of stuff like this we don't use anymore.
Mind you, being in the backwoods of Canada means it's not going to be all that hard to sell when the time comes to settle my estate. Most of my neighbours are in similar situations. At least, the few that I can see from the road when I head into town.
Insulation/air-sealing can get you pretty comfortable in New Hampshire.
When it's in the high 50s/low 60s evey night, and you have some thoughtful design so the house can be ventilated well with just the windows, the cool night air sticks around well into the next day, a cold shower or a little portable a/c unit can get you through the handful of hot nights each summer.
I live in NYC now, where a/c is necessary most nights in July and August, and find it kind of funny to see New Yorkers buying summer houses in my hometown and immediately spending thousands retrofitting central air. For me one of the great pleasures of going home to visit my family is sleeping with the windows open to the chilly night air!
For some buyers, yeah, No Ac and wood heat are going to be a "Nope!". But I disagree that such is going to be the case for all buyers. There are going to be some people who actually want a house with no AC and wood heat.
My wife and I moved into an adobe home in rural NM last year, and we had to wait until our new air-source heat pumps were running in February before we could leave. Working with wood heat only for most of the winter was (1) a lot of work (2) very nice heat (3) a lot of work.
Yes, you could maybe get a housesitter but then we're into a whole new game.
I talked to a guy once that had a big corn hopper installed next to his outdoor boiler. And then another corn hopper under that one to feed the stove. Go go farm subsidies.