Category: Plans and Permits

Developing floor plans, getting permits, working with our architect, and figuring out timelines

Chicago Green Home

March 3, 2012 / / 1 Comment

House Model

I’ve been working on my 3D SketchUp model of the house for quite a while. This isn’t finished by any stretch, but it’s starting to look rather presentable, so I’m sharing it now. I have a laundry list of things to add to the design, like the spiral stair down from the second floor on the back porch and slew of minor tweaks here and there. That said, this is what I hope the house looks like from the outside. It may not happen: there are zoning setback requirements that may prevent us from having the front porch span the whole house. If that winds up being an insurmountable permit challenge, we’ll have to revise the porch to only be on the side with the door, and not protrude out as far.

Some of our design decisions may help for unintended reasons. We removed the windows from the North side on the plan because they just overlook the neighbors house and don’t bring in a lot of light. As it happens, because our house is on the property line that may help us for fire code reasons. Apparently houses are no longer permitted to be so close to the line, but we can get a waiver because it’s an existing structure.

The other thing I’ve been working on (aside from scheduling architects as Sarah posted about) is working on our Chicago Green Homes plan. We want to apply for the city’s Green Permit Program, which would save us a lot of money on permits for things we’re planning to do all ready. However, in order to qualify, the plans you submit have to reach a variety of criteria, including a minimum of a two star rating on the Chicago Green Homes guide, as well as two items from their “menu” of green design elements. My thinking is that by figuring all of this out now, I’ll  save a lot of work (and money) for our architect.

I went through 162 pages of guide fun, selecting items and tallying up their point total. I mostly picked items that we were already planning to do and things that wouldn’t cost us a ton of extra money, since spending money on air pressure tests to save money on permits doesn’t make a ton of sense. I’m not in this for the certification itself. The energy efficiency is its own reward, and I doubt the resale value of the home would go up dramatically just because of the certification, though I could be mistaken. Since we’re not planning to sell anytime soon anyway, it’s not a strong motivator. The two required menu items for the Green Permit program could be accomplished with additional points from the Green Homes guide, so I elected for the three star rating, along with 200 points from the Energy Efficiency category. The majority of these we need to include as a specification on our submitted plans and we’re good to go. Some of them will require some calculations and software. Chicago already has a whole list of requirements for Energy Efficiency that’s required by normal code, so we’ll need to do a lot of it regardless. Then we just need to make sure the elements we’re adding, like highly insulated walls, high-efficiency windows, heating, and cooling exceed those requirements. Whichever architect we wind up with we’ll need to go through all of this I’m sure, but having done a once over ahead of time will probably help a lot.

The Next Step…

February 29, 2012 / / 1 Comment

So, the next step in this process (now that we have the basement mostly cleared out) is getting an architect and having a blueprint made.  At one point we debated either trying to skip this or do it later, but with the possibility that the structure work would be changed by the blueprints we decided to do this first.  It was just the logical choice when we sat down and went over the big picture.

Below we have a rough sketch of what the backyard and garage will look like when it is done.  Matt did this all from scratch and you can see that he’s very talented.  If he had decided to finish his degree in architecture, I am sure that he would have made a great architect.

Back Yard Model

With Derek needing a little less maintenance these days, we plan on finishing the demo in the basement shortly and possibly starting the next project (which hasn’t been determined yet).  We are both super excited to be going onto the next step/project, especially after seeing Marcus’s renovation progress at his Open House this last weekend.   We were glad that he hosted it, as he’s much further along in his renovation.  We were able to see what ours will similarly look like in the future (in terms of the guts of the walls and some of the utility setup).  You can see Matt, Derek, and I in the video on Marcus’s post about the Open House.   I can’t wait until our house is looking that good!

Floor Plan Update

December 28, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Floor Plans

I’ve made progress on the floor plans. I haven’t made a fancy 3D model of all of them like I did for the first floor, but here they are in a rough model of the house. I’ll get around to a more comprehensive version eventually, but  having the floor plans themselves is the more important part. It incorporates some minor changes to the first floor plan, including pushing the stairs back toward the center of the house and adding a landing to the stairs with a 90° turn. That puts the hallway into the center of the house so that it takes up as little space as possible.

The second floor gets two good-size bedrooms at the front, a full bath in the middle with a laundry closet off of the hallway, and a large master suite at the back with vaulted ceilings and a big walk-in closet. Up in the attic is another bedroom and a large storage closet. The basement gets an open area for pool table and bar, a theater room, a half-bath, utility closet, and space for storage and a workout area.

With the exception of a possible sink in the bar, all of the water supply and drain will use the existing wet wall, which will simplify plumbing since we’re living in the house and can’t take it all out at once. The plan also calls for removing the overhang on the second floor. It’s a nice way to bring in sunlight but we’re concerned about it’s structural integrity as well as properly weather sealing it. Instead we’ll incorporate tube-style skylights into the second floor to bring natural light into the interior of the house. There are a number of other details that aren’t revealed or included. We’ll probably need to have a lower ceiling in the office on the first floor to accommodate some of the drainage from the master bathroom, there will be some bulkheads along the south wall of the first floor for HVAC, the existing load bearing walls will be replaced by structural beams, with columns integrated into walls carrying the load to the new footings we’ll put in the basement.

Despite doing all of this work, I’ll still need an architect. I’ve been doing some “light reading” of the Chicago Building Code. While I think with enough time and energy (and more than a few flashbacks to Drafting class in high school) I could learn all of the requirements for a proper set of plans , ultimately the plans need to be signed by a licensed architect anyway. Given that, why not take advantage of the fact they already know the code and requirements far better than I ever will, plus can bring new ideas to the table that we may not have considered? Cost is the only reason I’ve avoided it so far, but realistically it’s a bad place to try to scrimp. Having scale drawings showing what we’re looking to do will hopefully make it less expensive if nothing else.

Floor Planning

November 26, 2011 / / 2 Comments

I’ve been working on the first floor plan. Getting a floor plan that we like is the first step toward getting our permits, estimating what all this will cost, and even determining how we do the structural repair in the basement. After the post I made about floor joists, we decided to come up with a floor plan that keeps the existing load bearing wall in place, but replaces the full stud wall with long span beams to support the existing 2×6 floor joists. We’ll reinforce those either by sistering or adding cross bracing. Because of this, we need a floor plan that keeps the span lengths short enough to use LVL headers or wooden I-Joists. Every four feet in span increase cuts the load bearing ability in half, so I came up with a floor plan that keeps the spans less than sixteen feet.

The next design constraint was keeping the existing wet wall, where the plumbing lines, drains, and vents are. This is important for a couple of reasons. One, keeping the plumbing consolidated will lower costs and simplify the project. More importantly, though, is the fact that we’re living on the second floor, so the wet wall needs to stay where it is so that we can keep flushing the toilet, taking showers, and washing dishes while the first floor remodel is ongoing.

The house is very narrow, with an interior width of only twenty feet. The load bearing wall runs along the length, but instead of being in the center it’s about eight feet from one wall. Right now the rooms on the small side of that wall are only 7 1/2 feet wide, which is pretty small by today’s standards. In order to work around that we’ll wind up having a beam sticking down from the ceiling, but since the ceilings are ten feet high, it shouldn’t be too bad.

Sarah loves to cook, and most entertaining these days winds up in the kitchen. Because of that we decided to make the kitchen big, and to forgo a formal dining room that would probably only be used a few times a year. Instead the plan calls for a big, counter-height table in the kitchen that serves as both work space and dining table. While meals are being prepared or just during parties, people can congregate in the kitchen with plenty of room to move around and sit without getting in the way of the cooking. We’re going to splurge on the stove. Instead of getting a cooktop or a range with a double wall oven, we’re going to get a big 48″ range with griddle, grill, and two ovens. That will be the centerpiece of the kitchen with the rest of the prep area to either side and a big buffet counter on the far side of the table.

We also wanted to fit an office onto the first floor, partly because we spend a lot of time by the computers and partly because we’ll need a bedroom to sleep in while we’re redoing the second floor. The plan calls for a powder room instead of a full bath. That was a tricky point, because as I said, we’re going to be redoing the second floor once this is all finished. Without a full bath on the first floor we’ll need to redo the second floor in stages, keeping the existing bathroom until we’ve finished the master bathroom. Finally, there’s a small den at the back of the house to connect the entertaining space to the screened deck we’ll eventually be building on the back.

The plan is still subject to further revision, especially once we start going through permitting and have to get all of this approved. There may be structural and code requirements I haven’t accounted for. However, this is the direction we’re looking at.

Thinking About Joists

November 9, 2011 / / 2 Comments

One of the challenges I’ve been mulling over in my brain for quite some time is how we’ll tackle the floor joists. The good news is that we’re not there yet, so we have time to figure it out. First, let me explain a bit how the floors are built and why I’m thinking about it.

Balloon Framing

Balloon Framing

The house is balloon construction. If you don’t know what that is, check out the link for details, but in short we have studs running the entire height of the house. A ribbon is notched into the inside perimeter of the studs at the height of the floor joists, which then rest on top of it and are nailed to the studs. The floor joists for the first floor are 2x10s, so they’re decently strong and the floor is nice and stable. The second floor, on the other hand, has 2x6s. Being so much smaller means two things: the floor has a lot of bounce (known in engineering terms as deflection) and it can’t span as far. Both of those are issues because we want to make the floor plan on the first floor more open and we want to have stable floors upstairs, especially since we’re planning a second floor laundry.

So what to do about it? Well there are a few options. The simplest option is to sister additional 2×6 joists to the existing ones. That means we can’t increase any spans, though, so we’d need to define a floor plans that is either more enclosed or has support beams below the joists to carry the load. I’m not a fan of support beams visually, but we could integrate them into a coffered ceiling or archways between rooms.

A more involved option is to add new joists that are either I Joists or Open Web Trusses. These could be installed throughout the floor or only in areas with larger spans. They would lower the ceiling by at least six inches. The I Joists in particular are capable of spanning the full width of the house with minimal deflection. Installing these isn’t a simple matter, though. For one, we’d have to do a lot of load calculations to ensure the structure was stable. More importantly, we’d have to cut out the walls that were still holding up the existing floor joists in order to fit the new, taller joists in. We’d also have to build new framing structure into the outside walls to carry the increased load to the foundation. All of this gets very complicated and guarantees we have to bring in a structural engineer.

This is pushing me back toward the simpler option, but there’s an added wrinkle: HVAC. Even if we have radiant floor heating, we still need ducts for air conditioning or even just air circulation. We want to have a whole house air filter, especially once we’ve sealed all the walls, windows, and doors up tight. Without forced air heat, there still needs to be a system to bring in fresh air from outside or at least filter the indoor air. How we run the duct work depends on the system we get. One of the reasons we’re looking at high velocity forced air is that it uses smaller diameter ducts, but even so we need a main trunk, plus we can’t exactly cut big holes through the 2x6s when they’re already so small.

The plan is to run the HVAC from above and below, meaning the first floor ducts will be in the basement and the second floor ducts will be in the attic. Unfortunately, with the ceiling in the basement being so low I can’t help but think this isn’t the best plan. We hope to lower the basement floor to gain some inches, but even so it won’t be all that high. I’m wondering if some creative ceiling designs might solve these problems. If we can use a combination of coffers in the living room and strategically placed bulkheads in the kitchen and dining room, we may be able to work out a solution that lets us keep the joist height as it is and still reinforce the floor.