Where should we put the house on the lot?
Posted on | August 30, 2008 |
Lot Survey
This is a huge issue for us. When we bought the lot, we had every intention of building the house up on top of the ridge to the right, assuming that we had more than enough space to do so. As it turns out from the survey, we own the entire ridge, so it looks like we’ve got more than enough space to site the house up there. This has some enormous positives, For one thing, putting the house up on the ridge all but guarantees lake views from the second and third floors, and perhaps even the first floor when there are no leaves on the trees. It also provides better access to true south for passive solar gain.
There are several potential issues with putting the house up on the hill though. For one thing, the hill appears to be made almost entirely of granite boulders, so any excavation on it would be very costly, and we’ll need a nice level platform for the engineered slab. I can picture quite a bit of blasting being required, and the second you break out the dynamite, you’re in for a whole host of other costs, environmental issues (such as potential contamination of the neighbour’s well) and the ridge is quite close to the neighbour’s house too, which could mean broken windows if anything goes wrong. The other problem with being up on the ridge is that we would be very close to the house next door. Since we really value our privacy, this is something of an issue for us. The other issue is that we don’t intend to take the driveway up onto the ridge since it’s quite steep and I’d rather not deal with that in the winter. So, that means that when we get old, we’d need to negotiate a set of stairs just to get into the house. Although this isn’t a huge concern now (after all, there could be jetpacks available in 30 years!), it’s still something we’re thinking about.
Monica presented another alternative for locating the house, and it’s one that we hadn’t really considered. It would position the house further back on the lot, more in the middle of the property. It’s still about 10-15 feet higher elevation than the road, but it wouldn’t put us up nearly as high–although the current house plan would allow the kids to see the lake from the third floor.
House location further back on the lot
This location has some great positives too. It would be easier to add a garage/addition someday, it’s still private with all the trees, would require limited excavation and it would allow us to keep some of the more mature trees at the front of the lot. One of the only negatives is that the driveway might need to be longer, but at least it’s pretty flat in through there.
What do you think? Where would you want to be? Up high in the sky, or nestled down in the trees? Of course, the location of the septic may determine some of this, but it won’t affect everything.
Comments
2 Responses to “Where should we put the house on the lot?”
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August 31st, 2008 @ 9:14 am
First off, congrats on this exciting process. We built our house after buying a lot four years ago and it is amazing. We have a lot that is highly elevated to the back right side and built on that ridge. The view is great, nice breeze in the summer. We are happy. However, the wind in the fall and winter is unreal, the driveway is 250′ of uphill winter fun and we don’t really have a flat are for our son to play. I would use the lower, flatter area for the house. The area indicated looks great. Good luck and have fun.
September 1st, 2008 @ 7:59 am
Thanks for your comments, Darren. If we built the house up on the ridge, I think we’ll still have lots of space for the kids to play. The ridge isn’t that high, and there’s plenty of flat area on the lower section that we can use for an area of grass or something like it.