#20khouse

Our site has a beautiful view down a hill and across the road to a pasture, where a curious cow likes to come investigate the bobcat.

It’s been a busy few weeks so we’ve got some catching up to do! Spring break went by in a flash, and it was a much needed rest but now we are back and excited to be on site building a house. In the week leading up to spring break, we were able to meet our client and hear her story, which inspired us to push toward finishing her home.

Our client is a sweet lady named Debra, who became paralyzed at a young age. She lives with her husband on land that she owns with her sister. Her sister Jackie also lives on the site in a house with her daughter and grandson. Since Debra is bound to a wheelchair and her current home does not have a porch, it is difficult for her to experience the outdoors. We are excited that the home we have been designing for this purpose all year will be built for someone who is looking forward to being outside and enjoying the sun.

It’s been a busy couple of months since we’ve been back, but we’re finally getting around to sharing all that we’ve been up to! Strap in and get ready for all of the excitement and adventure that February held.

At the beginning of the month, we helped disassemble the Rural Studio exhibition at Birmingham Museum of Art. The installation used the quantity of lumber required to build Dave’s House, the eighth 20K, and turned it into a beautiful sculpture. Our team had the job of cataloging all the lumber and will have the privilege of reusing them for our own project. If Madeline is any good at counting, it looks like we should have all the studs for our house!

You can find more information about the exhibition here at https://artsbma.org/visitors-view-2xs-by-rural-studio/

Last you saw us, were constructing mock-ups to study two plan variations. Those helped us to understand how the spaces would really function, and we were able to make educated decisions about which one would best achieve our goals. We concluded that the nook on Edison provided just the right amount of privacy required by our project. Once we had a scheme chosen, it came time to work out every foot and inch of the plan, pushing and pulling every space until it became just right.

Besides constantly studying every inch of the plan, we began to develop how the house would look in three dimensions. What should the shape of the roof be? How can we make it contextual? How do we want our porch to feel? What should determine the height of our windows? How would we want our foundation to be?

To determine how to reinforce our concept with details, we began to draw and discuss them at 1:1 scale. Once we had a clear idea of how each detail should look, we constructed a detail mockup to practice and learn how we would put the house together.

With the assistance from the detailing dream team--Dan wheeler, Jake LaBarre, Joe Farrugia, and Emily McGlohn--we rolled into stress test with confidence and were able to have an incredibly productive conversation during our stress test review.

Riding on the momentum of neckdowns, we have successfully crossed over another milestone. Our mockups are up and ready for more explorations! Thankfully the wind has been merciful to our hard work and left our structures grounded under the Fabrication Pavillion. We spent one day framing and one day wrapping plastic over the assembly before we were finally able to stage some helpful photos of the space to use in our presentation.

Having mockups of the living spaces and porches of both schemes was valuable to help this week’s reviewers understand them both. We appreciated the feedback from Peter Gluck and Rural Studio alumni, and enjoyed the rich discussion we were able to have. We hope the reviewers enjoyed seeing the work and had a great stay in Newbern!

Hello and welcome back from the holiday abyss! Neckdown week is in full swing and the whole team is hard at work, taking a break from our own design to help out with other projects around Hale County. Tuesday, Kuan, Ayomi, and Madeline were all helping Eric down on the Farm, moving dirt to prepare the yard of Morisette Campus to grow food for us to eat this spring. 

Jed was busy being the Bobcat Master, helping move pallets of lumber from the Fabrication Pavilion. 

We’ve enjoyed getting to know the new class of third years by working with them this week, and we were also glad to be able to present our project to them last Friday. They’ll be continuing the work on their own 20K for Mrs. Patrick, an iteration of Mac’s Home begun by the third years in the fall. Follow their progress over at https://mrspatrickhome.tumblr.com/ 

Hello!

The past few weeks have been busy with building a spatial mock-up of the porch, calculating the foundation, and getting our construction documents ready to build. 

The spatial mock-up of the porch helped use determine the size and shape of the porch. It is important to us that the porch juts out in the back so that a ramp can be added if needed to be handicap accessible. The mock-up also helped us adjust the unit size (again), but now we have finally come to a decision of a 22x12 unit. We also decided to change the ceiling of the porch to exposed trusses rather than a covered ceiling. A lot of decisions came from experiencing it in full scale!

Last week Joe Farrugia visited the Rural Studio and helped all of the teams with structural calculations and answered our questions. Since our porch has its own independent structure, we needed to calculate the three components of the house separately and figure out the extra load of the roof on the rim joists next to the porch. 

Now we’re working on final construction drawings and designing a new mock-up that would help us figure out specific details. We’ll mainly be focusing on corner details so we will know if our drawings are absolutely accurate to how it will be built. Looking forward to Pig Roast which is in about 2 weeks!

Greetings from the ECO Team! 

As you may remember, in our last post we were using REScheck and REM/Rate to rate the theoretical energy efficiency of the past 20k houses. We’ve also been out testing the actual houses with our data loggers and blower door tests. We’re also collecting, with the home owner’s consent, the electric bills from the houses. 

What did we find? For the most part, the past 20k houses are not doing too shabby... which means that it’ll be that much more difficult to improve upon them. 

 “Yeah, that’s cool. But what’s up with the design?”

We’re glad you asked. 

The ECO House will be fighting all the other 20k houses (not just Dave’s House) for the title of most energy efficient, and hopefully cost effective, home that the Rural Studio has ever built. That means that the strategies that we choose have to be very cost effective to make sense. We’re in the process of choosing those strategies right now. 

In the meantime, here are some of the trends that we’ve been finding in the 20k homes based on the foundation:

Hello all!