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The Pretty Good House

prettygoodhouse.org

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Re: The Pretty Good House

#291

Post by brabel »

xattt wrote: post #205
brabel wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Sweden, because of the crazy electricity prices, everyone is discussing right now how warm they should keep their houses. The idea is that a good citizen should save energy and therefore let the house get colder (also, to be "green" of course - but nothing like 5x more expensive energy to get people saving). They asked some politicians, most of them were saying between 19C and 21C.. one guy even said 15C, which ev…

Discussion of what temperature a house should be is preposterous. A well-insulated home would obviously use less energy to keep a comfortable temperature than one with drafts all over. Discussion should focus on energy budgets or total energy use, but that may be hard to conceptualize for the average Sven.

It's all about appearances. Everyone is now driving Teslas and electric Volvos. It's easy to make "efforts" when it shows your "virtuousity" or at least in your head, makes others admire you. You're never going to see rich people moving into much smaller homes that require 1/10th the electricity, which would actually contribute much more significantly to avoiding climate doom.

Re: The Pretty Good House

#292

Post by m463 »

hansjorg wrote: post #158
uggwar wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We just refurbished our house here in Norway. New windows and 10 cm extra insulation. I am shocked how well the windows perform! Ice on the outside, but nice and warm on the inside. Amazing!

It's a bit annoying with new windows that they perform so well that you'll get dew or ice on the outside a lot of the time. Supposedly, windows with an outer self cleaning layer get less condensation, but they're quite expensive.

That sounds like the problems that happened when they switched traffic signal lights from incandescent to LED. The incandescent lights put off enough heat to keep all the lights defrosted and visible, while the LED versions could be blocked by heavy snow/ice.

Re: The Pretty Good House

#293

Post by runamok »

toast0 wrote: post #66
carabiner wrote: post #11

I'm looking at building a home as a first time home owner in the next few years. One thing I'm wondering is how many headaches can I avoid if I just choose an expensive builder and not try to haggle or save a buck at every turn? I just want a 2-bedroom, 1,000 sq ft bungalow and am willing to pay 60-70% more than the average $/sqft in my city if they do a good job. I'd rather have a nice small place rather than a huge…

Unfortunately, if you want it done right, you really have to be involved. Frequent checking on the work and hounding the people to fix it. Which also means you need to know enough about construction to ask the right questions to figure out what's right or not. It's very hard to effectively contract that out. If you can date/marry someone in construction/architecture, and let them supervise, it helps. You can just pay…

> If you can date/marry someone in construction/architecture, and let them supervise, it helps.

That might result in much more than the 60 to 70% premium they are willing to pay! ;-)

Re: The Pretty Good House

#294

Post by antisthenes »

darau1 wrote: post #260
toast0 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, if you want it done right, you really have to be involved. Frequent checking on the work and hounding the people to fix it. Which also means you need to know enough about construction to ask the right questions to figure out what's right or not. It's very hard to effectively contract that out. If you can date/marry someone in construction/architecture, and let them supervise, it helps. You can just pay…

> If you can date/marry someone in construction/architecture, and let them supervise Shit

With the caveat that the poor relationship will end up costing you far, far more than a poorly built house.

Re: The Pretty Good House

#295

Post by function_seven »

anthomtb wrote: post #274
Scoundreller wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except that the old one will be, at its core, still an old house Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I like the idea of the core of my house being true 2x4s made of hardwood, instead of scam “2x4s” where they say it’s because of their sawblades but I’d say it’s because the mills squeeze too many “2x4s” out of a log.

Are you saying that if you remove the wall surface of an older house the studs would actually measure 2 inches by 4 inches and be made of something other than pine? How old of a house would have this type of framing?

My house was built in the 1920s, and has 2.0" by 4.0" wall studs. They're still pine, but the grain on them is super straight and tight.

Re: The Pretty Good House

#296

Post by simeonf »

jonasdegendt wrote: post #102
toast0 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, if you want it done right, you really have to be involved. Frequent checking on the work and hounding the people to fix it. Which also means you need to know enough about construction to ask the right questions to figure out what's right or not. It's very hard to effectively contract that out. If you can date/marry someone in construction/architecture, and let them supervise, it helps. You can just pay…

> Frequent checking on the work and hounding the people to fix it. Isn't this partially what you pay your architect for? If you're willing to pay top dollar you should be able to find one that's very hands on and coordinates the whole building process as your representative.

>Isn't this partially what you pay your architect for? If you're willing to pay top dollar you should be able to find one that's very hands on and coordinates the whole building process as your representative.

It is amazing how separate most architects are from the actual implementation. I sort of wish architects were required to apprentice as builders before doing design.

I recently built a custom house with a long time friend as the architect and have a family member I could talk to who is an architect. Additionally there was a structural engineer involved in the project for things like truss design and sheer calculations I could talk. That's a lot of talent and experience in residential and commercial design!

On the other hand my father is a general contractor and I have some construction experience and grew up around roofers, framers, etc.

All the architects I talked to frequently had very low visibility into the difficulty and cost factors of their design proposals.

For example: flush baseboards make the wall super clean and don't get dinged up. But no indie contractors in our area can install them.

Curves on drywall interior walls will match the curves in the plastered exterior walls - but while wetted 1/4 inch drywall will bend a pretty tight inside curve it can't be attached to an outside curve because it pulls through the fasteners - I ended up kerf cutting plywood to make the bend, priming it for adhesion and plastering the curves with help from a high end plaster specialist.

High windows downstairs go all the way to the ceiling inside which looks more balanced on the outside... but would require a small "vault" in the otherwise flat ceiling... Which would have affected the framing of the wall, required at least one custom floor truss instead of a standard TJI, made for super complicated trim in the affected rooms, required a very non-standard window size, and an expensive plaster detail at each such window. On my investigation it was going to be at least $25K to make 4 windows 8" taller!

In my experience custom home building architects generally were not very construction aware. Talking about installation practices or costs usually resulted in advice to "get a bid"! Despite being very pleased with my architectural collaboration I don't think hands-on supervision of actual building practice is likely a realistic expectation from a typical architect.

Re: The Pretty Good House

#297

Post by CogitoCogito »

Gravityloss wrote: post #236

Here double pane has been the standard for about a century and triple pane after the eighties. No problems whatsoever. I don't even know what's the standard nowadays. Newer windows also quiet down traffic well and reduce the drafty feeling. So there are really very few excuses to not use them. But I don't know what's the name of the phenomenon when someone who uses some primitive technology comes out with all kinds o…

> But I don't know what's the name of the phenomenon when someone who uses some primitive technology comes out with all kinds of esoteric reasons why they would not like to use these. Can't use an electric car. Can't use fluorescent or led lights. Can't use a heat pump. Can't use induction stoves. Can't put insulation into walls. Can't use double or triple or quadruple pane windows.

I don't know a term for that concept, but another term comes to mind that you might consider: empathy. More specifically, you should try understand the reasons someone might choose a more "primitive" technology a newer one. Your inability to understand why someone makes certain decisions is more a failing of yours than theirs.

Re: The Pretty Good House

#298

Post by wazoox »

jonasdegendt wrote: post #102
toast0 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, if you want it done right, you really have to be involved. Frequent checking on the work and hounding the people to fix it. Which also means you need to know enough about construction to ask the right questions to figure out what's right or not. It's very hard to effectively contract that out. If you can date/marry someone in construction/architecture, and let them supervise, it helps. You can just pay…

> Frequent checking on the work and hounding the people to fix it. Isn't this partially what you pay your architect for? If you're willing to pay top dollar you should be able to find one that's very hands on and coordinates the whole building process as your representative.

The architect isn't present at all times. When I paid a company to put some new flooring, paints, etc a few years ago, the interior architect told the guys "the floorboards must always be placed in the direction of light, from the window wall towards the opposite wall". The following morning, I came early into the room, and the guy was dutifully aligning floorboards in the wrong direction. "What are you doing? You're supposed to lay them this way, not that way" "Oh, just testing". My ass. The guy had already forgotten the instructions he received the night before.

In the toilets, the painter dutifully painted shut the plumbing and valves access panel ("you must open the panel before painting everything. And please don't paint the valves"). The electrician was about to pierce a hole between floors 1 foot away from the walls to pass cables through as I stopped him. Etc.

When having an house built, you (or the architect, or some other responsible person with a working brain) must be there looking at everything all the time. And even with that, they will fuck up. They'll lay alternating tiles in the wrong pattern. They'll build stairs of uneven height. They'll put a window in the kitchen that won't open because it hits the faucet. They'll set up doors that open on the wrong side (all of these happened to my in-laws when getting their home built, and they were there watching every day). They'll fuck up every time you don't watch, every single time.

Re: The Pretty Good House

#299

Post by Gravityloss »

dkarl wrote: post #263
Gravityloss wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If energy was predictably more expensive, that would be one way to sort it out. You wouldn't buy a house or an apartment without analyzing living costs. Contractors would suddenly get very interested in building more energy efficient housing. I've also heard that in Russia, pensioners get a free amount of energy per month. That leads to a lot of wastage. For example if the pensions could be in cash, then the person w…

You can measure the air-tightness of a house, and in the U.S, it has become more common to do so. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of anything else you can do to measure the quality of a build after the fact. The best way to monitor quality is for somebody knowledgable to keep an eye on construction.

All apartments and houses by law must have an energy certificate here. There's a high level EU directive but the details are by country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Performance_of_Building...

However, it has its pitfalls and critics. Anyway, there the energy consumption is calculated from areas and insulation U values and so forth.

Don't know what would be the actual biggest problems against launching something similar elsewhere like in USA.

Probably one could build a software product to estimate these things. Especially easy during construction if the drawing data can be used directly. If things are drawn with CAD that is. But it might be relatively easy to estimate even from photos of paper drawings...

Re: The Pretty Good House

#300

Post by kleiba »

Scoundreller wrote: post #179
kleiba wrote: post #174

My wife and I have entertained the idea of a bigger house for quite some time. Well, that boat has sailed. Building has pretty much become unaffordable for us, unless we'd move way out to the country side. And I mean WAY out - we would spend a lot more time every day driving everywhere). We'd also have to build a rather modestly-sized home to fit it into our budget. The thing is, the only reason we've started thinkin…

> Except that the old one will be, at its core, still an old house Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I like the idea of the core of my house being true 2x4s made of hardwood, instead of scam “2x4s” where they say it’s because of their sawblades but I’d say it’s because the mills squeeze too many “2x4s” out of a log.

Think e.g. old utility lines or questionable workmanship by today's standards.
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