Garage Entry Design

The flow of people between the garage and the front door calls for careful design. We wanted a single entry sequence for everyone, whether they arrived from the street, the driveway, or the garage. To support this, we chose to forego an opening from the garage to the house. Instead, the garage will exit into the main exterior entry space.

A happy side effect of this design is that it is more green. A garage opening into heated living space tends to cause heat loss and has a small detrimental affect on indoor air quality.

However, the original design for this sequence had a fatal flaw, at least in Seattle — it was not fully covered! As shown in the diagram above, the sequence of stairs required that you join the main path, and follow the main entry steps down to the front door. The roof (indicated by the grey dotted line in the above image) does not cover the entire entry sequence, leaving you vulnerable to the elements as you go down the steps.

We considered two solutions:

1. Extend the entry roof to cover the steps all the way to the top, covering the existing path from the garage to the entry.
2. Create a shortcut path heading west, directly from the garage landing to the main entry, and put a short roof along the side of the garage to cover this new path.

Adding a larger roof has the disadvantage that it would require a post on the south-east corner, and it would make the entry darker. The second option adds more complexity to an otherwise clean design — a second set of stairs, a possible railing, a different run/rise ratio of the treads. However, our architect avoided those problems and made choosing the second option an easy choice:

Instead of just using the flat eyebrow used over the entry, we wanted to make this new section of roof a feature. A few metal supports extruding from the garage will be sandwiched with wood and support a semi-translucent polycarbonate sheet. This will allow light to filter through, while keeping off the rain. It also allows us to avoid the awkward visual that would result from the difference in height between these two surfaces. We'll use the same design of roof over the lower door to the backyard to provide some more consistency.

Here's a similar roof design from another YS Development home:

This satisfied the design problem nicely, and was finished just in time for the garage framing changes that were required to support the newly-added roof.

Mechanical and Windows

This was an exciting week for work on the house, and a couple new stages are starting.

Plumbing wrapped up this week, but the inspection was delayed due to scheduling and payment issues. There's plenty of time, though, so a delay on that is not a big deal. The natural gas pipe in the kitchen was installed. The upstairs bathtub was filled with water to test for any leaks.

Various framing modifications were done this week: the fireplace was lowered to bench height, framing for a soffit was put in over the kitchen (this ended up being just for aesthetics; there is no functional need for it), the door to the dressing room was moved, the closets in the second bedrooms were shortened to provide desk nooks, the entry closet was taken out to prepare for built-ins, and interior framing against the foundation in the lower part of the house was done. Here's the interior of the dressing room, showing the corner we have for closet space now:



The exciting rough-in work this week was the mechanical system. We're getting a mini-split system, a.k.a. a heat pump, a.k.a. a ductless system, which, as one of the names describes, does not use ducts for pushing heated or cooled air around. Instead, it uses a series of tubes. We want to explain this system in detail sometime soon, but the short version is that these tubes carry heat via refrigerant and move it between the interior and exterior of the house — one direction gives you heating inside, the opposite direction gives you cooling. On the inside, we'll have units in the living room, the office, the media room, the master dressing room, and each of the second bedrooms. These all aggregate to two units outside the house:



On Friday morning, our windows were delivered! A few have already been installed, and the rest should go in fairly quickly. We can finally see what the exterior charcoal frame looks like at full scale. We were surprised at how large the windows are. The framed glass panels certainly provide a sense of scale that the rough openings don't. Also, we have a lot of windows in the living room:



The timelapse is fairly boring this week; the end shows a couple of the master bath windows popping into place.



Most or all of the windows should be installed next week, and the mechanical rough-in should continue. It looks like the next step is to wrap all the tubes with insulation.

Foam and Hose Bibs

This last week saw more progress on the exterior, and a bit of smaller progress inside.

The vapor shield wrapping was finished this week. Since we decided orange wasn't the color we preferred, they started adding foam panels over the top, giving it a more Mondrian look.



Inside, blocking was added and some framing changes made. This picture shows the blocking in the entry for the bench that will go in.



A bit more work was done on plumbing to bring it near completion. Hose bibs were added around the exterior:



and the Power-Pipe was installed:



This drains the hot water from the shower, and pushes the cold water up the copper spiral to absorb the heat from the waste water, giving you much more hot water for showers.

The timelapse shows the foam panels going up on the exterior.



The plumbing inspection is scheduled for early this coming week, so that portion should be wrapped up soon. The windows have been shipped, and should be delivered sometime this week. We finalized our HVAC choice, so work on that should start this week, too.

Rough-In and Exterior

It's been a hectic several weeks for us, and we've fallen behind here. But construction has still been (mostly) happening.

The week after our last post, the Seattle area had one of the largest snowstorms in a few years. We were stuck at home most of the week, and not a lot was accomplished on the house, either.

Since then, things have been progressing nicely. Plumbing rough-in is finished, besides any later fix-ups or changes we or the inspectors need. This picture shows the laundry room: copper pipes for water in, washer/dryer on left and sink on the right, and the black pipes for waste water. Right behind it, you can see a bit of the master shower; and the back wall will support the master sinks.



Outside, the roofing was installed as soon as the snow cleared. It is a gray membrane called VersiWeld TPO, and covers the main roof, the mid-level eyebrow, and the rooftop deck. On the deck, it will be later covered by decking and the green roofing modules.



After that, work on the rest of the exterior house started. The first step was to wrap it in a vapor shield to protect the interior from moisture. You can see the white wood around the windows on top of the shield. This allows the windows to be securely mounted — they can't be mounted on the foam that will come next.



More concrete was added. The slab at the very bottom of our stairs was poured, along with a short retaining wall extending from the north-east corner of the garage, and the foundation for our entry stairs. The wall on the left of the picture is level because it will support the flat landing from the garage, while the main stairs step down to the entry.



Changes captured by the camera slowed down in the middle of January, but you can see a nice bit of framing going up at the beginning of the month, and the orange vapor shield going on at the end.



We've been working on a lot of design stuff that we should discuss. The big things are electrical/lighting/data plans, and mechanical (HVAC) systems, both of which are up next for rough-in work. The exterior will continue to progress, with the windows on schedule to be delivered next week!

Framing Mostly Complete

We've had quite the exciting weather (for Seattle) lately, so I only got a brief look at the house yesterday. Framing looks to be substantially complete. The roof and the rest of the stair tower are sheathed with plywood, the garage is framed, and the rear deck is in progress.



More and more of the work is going to be in the interior, but hopefully there will still be some things to see outside. A day or so was covered up this week due to snow.



The framers are still at work with some blocking and other details. Rough-in plumbing is being worked on this week. Roofing is ready to go as soon as the snow lets up. In general, there is exterior work and interior work happening now. Externally, the house is being wrapped, and it will be sealed once the windows are in (still a few weeks away). Internally, all the rough-in work is being done — plumbing, mechanical (HVAC), and electrical/data. Any blocking for other penetrations (for example, fans) or internal support (for example, shelving, art, etc.) also needs to be completed before the rough-in stage is finished.

Greywater practicalities: Receiving

To finish up our introduction to greywater, we’ll cover the receiving system. This is my favorite part of the system. We get to think about gardens and trees!

Greywater should not be used to water above the surface (leaves, grass, etc.) nor should it be used to water food. Greywater should be used to apply below-surface watering to non-food plants. Food producing trees are an exception to the “don’t water food rule” as long as the water is applied only to the roots.

Non-pressurized distribution systems are generally well suited for sending a fairly large amount of water to a fairly small number of end points. This makes trees great candidates for greywater receivers. Trees need large amounts of water, and they can handle getting significant doses at one time.

To be most effective, trees receiving greywater should be planted in mulch basins (actually, mulch basins are generally a good idea for trees). Mulch basins allow water to be purified much more effectively than a tree just planted in the ground. A mulch basin starts with a basin with an island in the middle. The tree is planted on the island so that it does not sit in the water. The basin is filled with mulch which both prevents the greywater from being exposed to the surface and slows the flow of water, allowing better infiltration into the soil.

When greywater transitions from the distribution system to the receiving site, it should either flow into an underground chamber or directly into a mulch basin which can quickly prevent it from being above ground. This part of the system must be designed to avoid clogs, both from the greywater itself and from the material that the water is being let into (or slugs, as apparently they sometimes like to crawl up pipes).

I hope that you enjoyed this introduction to greywater. Greywater systems are not for everyone, but I hope that in the future, new homes will default to having separate collection plumbing so that more people can at least have the option of saving water.

In this post and throughout the rest of this series, I use Art Ludwig’s The New Create an Oasis with Greywater as my primary source; it’s considered one of the best resources on residential greywater for the lay reader. Other bits and pieces are mostly pulled from my memory of other books and websites I’ve read. Any mistakes are, of course, my own.

Greywater practicalities: Distribution

Once greywater is collected, it needs to be moved into the landscape. At its simplest, the distribution system could be a bucket that you manually lug to the relevant part of the landscape. However, such a distribution system is hard to use and has health concerns.

Given concerns about ease of use, ease of maintenance, health, and efficiency, the distribution system is probably the most technically challenging aspect of a greywater design system. As such, I'll just cover the bare bone basics.

Most greywater distribution systems involve a series of pipes. The simplest systems take advantage of gravity to help water flow from the collection point to the receivers. These systems require the pipes to slope. The exact configuration can be finicky. If the slope is too shallow, the water will not flow. If it is too steep, the water will run ahead of the solids (lint, hair, food particles) leading to an eventual clog.

More complicated systems can be pressurized, although some pressurized systems require filtering to get rid of any solids in the greywater. Pressurized systems can move water uphill or along areas with too shallow a slope at the cost of energy and complexity. Some pressurized systems can safely water lawns by providing water underground. However, pressurized systems tend to break more easily and are significantly more expensive.

Whether pressurized or gravity driven, the distribution system should be designed with maintenance in mind. There are lots of good tips for maintainable distribution, but there are a couple key points. First, make sure you know where your pipes are (they’ll be hard to find after they’re buried). Second, make sure that you have access points for inspections, clog removal, and other maintenance tasks. Depending on how you’re using the greywater, it may also be worth designing the system to be reconfigurable in full or in part.

In this post and throughout the rest of this series, I use Art Ludwig’s The New Create an Oasis with Greywater as my primary source; it’s considered one of the best resources on residential greywater for the lay reader. Other bits and pieces are mostly pulled from my memory of other books and websites I’ve read. Any mistakes are, of course, my own.