About this site
Hello, and welcome to BuildingTheWhiteHouse.com. My name is Jeff White, and I’m planning to use this site to chronicle the design and construction of a new home for our family.
My family and I live in Hammonds Plains, which is about 20 minutes outside of Halifax, Nova Scotia in a beautiful area of Canada. I own a small graphic design and web development firm and my wife is a teacher. We have three children, two girls who are aged four and three and a ten month old baby boy.
We’ve lived in our present home for over three years. It’s our second house. It’s a traditional Salt Box style home, built by a local company with a penchant for this sort of cookie-cutter home. While it’s certainly very nice, it has a number of issues that detract from it for us. For one thing, the interior is very cut up. For example, the 900 square foot downstairs has no less than four rooms plus a hall and 5 closets, two very small front rooms that are supposed to serve as dual living rooms, a big kitchen across the back, and a bathroom/laundry closet. The big problem with this layout is that whenever there are more than a handful of people here, the rooms feel claustrophobic. Plus, the lack of an open layout means that we can’t watch and talk with our kids while they play and we make meals, and this really isn’t how we like to interact.
This is what we live in now. It's ok, if generic.
On top of that, despite the fact that the house was purchased new, it’s a highly-inefficient house in terms of heating and cooling. The house is heated with oil-fired hot water baseboard heat from the same boiler that does the domestic hot water. This is all well and good, but with oil prices the way they are, we spent over $5,000 last year in oil. This is insane. In addition, when the outdoor temperature hits 20°C+, the inside heats up like crazy, even if we close all of the blinds and windows during the day. The house is well built, it just doesn’t fit our needs in this way.
This past winter, we were having dinner with friends who live a little closer to Halifax than we do, in a house designed by Nova Scotia passive solar home expert Don Roscoe. We talked about our heating woes and they told us how they paid about $400 a year for a few cords of wood as a secondary heating source. Then they mentioned how there was a lot available a few hundred feet down the street. We laughed it off. But once the wine wore off, we started to think about it. The lot was a reasonable price ($50,000), within walking distance of a beautiful private resident’s beach. It was also full of mature hardwoods, huge boulders and had (in our opinion) enormous potential. I’ll save the dreadful purchasing process for another post, but in the end, we went ahead and bought it.
This blog will chronicle our adventures from working with our architect, to finding contractors to meeting the neighbours and finally moving into the house, hopefully in about a year from now. I hope you’ll join us on this journey and share in what we learn, the decisions and mistakes we make and the successes we have.
If you have any comments or suggestions, don’t hesitate to email me at jeff (at) brightwhite (dot) ca. Thanks.