1,800 (Not-Yet-Finished) Square Feet for $50,000

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One of MOTHER's staffers trade his typewriter for a tool belt.

Two summers ago, my editor at THE MOTHER EARTH NEWS graciously let me take a onetime "housebuilding sabbatical." I hired a contractor/designer/carpenter and his two-man crew . . . asked MOM's technical experts—and anyone else I could find—lots of questions . . . borrowed ideas from solar houses, consultants, and computer programs . . . and then pitched in to help design and build the passive solar home you see pictured here. It has 1,818 square feet of enclosed floor area, provides solar hot water, burned one and a third cords of wood its first winter (my family's prior residence needed five), and cost $50,000 to build (not including the cost of the property).

Now, let me admit two things right off the bat. First, nobody can rightly say that I built this house. You know the term owner-builder? Well, I was more of an owner-bungler. The three experienced carpenters I worked with are really responsible for the home's clean looks and basic soundness. Me, I spent the summer fetching boards, cleaning up, and making errors typical of a greenhorn carpenter. Still, I did learn a lot—enough that I now feel confident about tackling most of the remaining work myself.

And that statement leads to my second admission: The house isn't complete. Actually, the first floor looks fine (if you ignore the missing baseboards and the scrap-lumber stairs). The upper story, though, has a few shortcomings—in fact, when we moved in, it didn't even have interior walls! (They were framed, wired, and plumbed, but not covered: We called it "the visible house.") I've since nailed up 110 sheets of drywall upstairs, but those gypsum backbreakers still need taping, spackling, sanding, and painting. From there I'll move on to hanging the bedroom doors . . . installing the vinyl floor in the upper bathroom . . . stoning the first-floor chimney . . . converting part of the porch into a mudroom . . . and, well, you get the idea.

Still, it's a good home, even now. All five members of my family love it. And we think it looks attractive, as well.

May I take you on a tour?

KEEP ON THE SUNNY SIDE

Naturally, the Stone home faces south, as do the majority of its windows (114 square feet out of a total of 192). Most of those solar-oriented openings are on the first story. In winter, light streams through these windows and strikes a concrete floor. That thermal sink—consisting of a six-inch slab underlaid with an insulated gravel bed—absorbs solar gain during the day and releases it at night. For aesthetic reasons (and increased heatstoring efficiency), we had the crew that poured the floor work a dark red dye into the top of the wet concrete. Once that slab had cured, we rented a powerful-and initially terrifying-four-wheeled concrete saw and cut shallow grooves in the slab to give the floor the look of 2' X 4' stone tiles. (It's fooled some people, too!)

Actually, we have a "hybrid" floor on the ground level—the back half is of conventional wood construction with a crawl space to provide storage room and access to plumbing. On the winter solstice (December 21), midday sunlight reaches exactly to the bay k of the concrete front section.

Of course, we didn't want sunlight heating the slab in the summer months, so we planned to construct a two-foot overhang to provide summertime shading. Bill McCurdy, my contractor-codesigner (his business is Sunshine Construction, P.O. Box 515, Fairview, NC 28730), suggested that we might as well enclose this overhang by cantilevering the second story, thereby adding 76 square feet of living area to the upstairs—a grand idea.

Other than that, the structure is fairly conventional. We used a simple rectangular design with dimensions in multiples of four feet to save on labor and materials. (The one exception to this rule was the protruding firstfloor study.) The R-25 walls consist of 2 X 6 pine framing faced with insulation board and plywood board-and-batten siding. All junctions were carefully caulked, and a continuous 6-mil polyethylene vapor barrier a as installed.

To give the first floor its open layout, we ran a post-and-beam assembly (of rough-saun, sandblasted 6" X 6" posts and 6" X 12" beams) across the length of the house where the slab and wood floor meet. The open space thus created contains a living room (with walls of 1 X 6 shiplapped cypress paneling), a kitchen (with Sheetrock walls), and a dining room (wainscoted: half paneling and half Sheetrock). Overhead, 4 X 8 joists-spaced every two feet and resting on the front wall, back wall, and central beam-support the 2 X 6 tongue-andgroove boards that serve as both the first-story ceiling and second-story floor.

The windows in the house are doubleglazed casement, crank-operated units made by Hurd Millwork Company (520 S. Whelan Ave., Medford, WI 54451). All but one of these contain Heat Mirror, an interior Mylar-coated film that, by greatly reducing radiant heat loss, gives the windows an R-value of 4.35 (which is about twice as high as conventional double-glazed windows and a third better than even triple-glazed units) . These windows were expensive, but they did save us the cost (and hassle) of using movable window insulation. The first-floor southeast unit does not contain Heat Mirror, since it will be connected to a still-to-be-built solar greenhouse (which will be entered from that still-to-be-built mudroom on the east porch), and we'll want heat to exchange freely between the greenhouse and the main home.

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