Last week I shared in a blog post how we’re building a ‘barn’ home on our property rather than our healthy and sustainable, beautiful ‘forever’ home that I painstakingly designed over the past year and a half. (If you sense the tension, it’s because I’m still not quite over the fact that we aren’t building that house right now.)
And I should say, we’re building the barn first, then building the forever house later. Because we WILL build the house we plan to grow old in, and hopefully not too far into the future.
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But just because we aren’t building the house now, doesn’t mean we’re skipping out on building a healthy and sustainable place for us to live in the meantime. Meaning, the barn is going to meet (almost) all of my criteria for a wellness-focused home.
And we’re meeting them on a budget! We need the barn to include cost-effective sustainable and healthy design strategies because we can’t spend a ton of money on this temporary home.
Here’s what I’m doing with the barn to make sure it’s going to be a safe, healthy and comfortable place for us to live and a good steward to the environment.
South view of barn
Sustainable Design Features of the Barn:
Orientation:
Though the long side of the barn doesn’t face south (which is one thing I always stress the importance of), we still have plenty of windows on the south face to bring in as much winter light as we can given its location. Free heating!
I prioritized putting the windows on the east and south faces of the barn to bring in morning and midday light, and avoided putting rooms that need lots of windows on the west so we wouldn’t bring in all the late afternoon summer heat.
I also avoided north facing windows as much as possible since they don’t bring in much light in my climate and it’s more energy efficient and comfortable to have a solid wall rather than a window on the north walls.
Simple design:
The barn is a small rectangle. Its footprint is 24’ x 32’ and there are no jogs around the perimeter. Just a simple, little rectangle. This makes it easy to build and easy to get a nice air tight seal.
And the more air tight we can make our homes, the more comfortable and energy efficient they’ll be.
The roof is also a simple gable. Again, easy it’s to build, and it’s the most durable roof design since it’s going to shed water on both sides. And with a large overhang, it’ll protect the exterior walls on all four sides.
Simple also saves money since it’s quicker and more straightforward to build.
The simple rectangle along with using an overall dimension that’s in a 4’ increment means there will be less material waste during construction. For example, a piece of plywood is 4’x8’, so the plywood won’t need to be cut before being hung up. This means there’s no waste from that piece of plywood. It’s also quicker to build if you don’t have to cut every piece of wood (saving money).
Less Materials:
The small house size cuts down on the overall amount of materials we use, which is great for the planet and our budget.
Plus, we’re only using materials where we absolutely need them. For example, we are not going to use exterior insulation because the environmental impact of making the insulation outweighs the energy savings we’d get by putting it on the barn since we’re only living in it for a few years (before it becomes a workshop). So we’re being strategic about where we put materials.
Passive heating and cooling through window placement.
Windows:
I put the majority of the windows on the east and south faces of the house, which is where our living spaces are. I grouped the windows together to make it feel like we have a ton of windows and natural light where we need it (in the living areas) and completely avoided windows where we don’t need them (in the stair for example).
Overall we don’t have a ton of windows in the barn because they are expensive, and no matter what, they are less energy efficient than a solid wall.
All windows are strategically placed to maximize daylighting and comfort and allow winter sun to warm the rooms and summer breezes to cool the rooms (cross ventilation).
Cross ventilation:
All of the living spaces and bedrooms are designed to allow for cross ventilation. Cross ventilation is when you have windows on opposite sides of a room, creating a pathway for air to travel through the room when you have both windows open. Feeling the breeze on your skin helps you feel cooler. It’s a wonderful passive cooling strategy. Free cooling!
All electric house:
Just like our future ‘forever’ house, the barn will be all-electric.
- We’re using mini-split air source heat pumps for cooling and heating. Since we’re only installing three interior mini-split heads, we’re going to experiment to see how well these warm the whole house in the winter. If need be, we’ll add electric baseboard heaters to the bedrooms for comfort. I HATE cold bathrooms, so I’m installing an electric radiant mat heater in the upstairs bathroom. (Comfort wins.)
- We’ll install an induction stove, which will join us in the future house whenever we build that.
- The water heater will be a heat pump water heater. It’ll go in the basement, which is a great place for heat pump water heaters since they make the area around them a bit chilly, and they’re a little noisy.
- All lighting will be LEDs.
- We’ll install our electric car charger on the outside of the house.
- All appliances will be Energy Star certified.
No Wood Stove:
Much to my husband's chagrin, will won't be putting a woodstove in this house, and I'm so excited. Wood stoves, even the more efficient ones, create poor air quality in the house. We'll have a fire pit right outside, so we can still be mesmerized by the fire whenever we want.
Insulation:
This is the biggest place where I’m breaking my typical approach to building a healthy and sustainable home. We are going with code minimum insulation.
The reasons:
- We are only going to be living in the barn for a few years. Once we build the main house, the barn will become a workshop, which doesn’t need a super amount of insulation.
- If we bulk up on insulation for the barn, the embodied carbon within the insulation will be higher than the energy savings we create by operating the barn as a home for a few years.
- It’s more expensive. Adding extra insulation beyond what fits in between the wall studs is always going to be an added cost. We could have opted to spray foam the walls and roof for a better R-value, but spray foam is terrible for the planet, especially its immediate impact on carbon emissions, and the carbon offset of high R-value spray foam would never be worth it. And spray foam is much more expensive than the wood fiber batts we’re installing.
However! We are using a wood fiber insulation from TimberHP that has about the same r-value as fiberglass but it has other properties that help regulate temperature swings and provide a more comfortable environment than a synthetic or paper type insulation.
Please note: If this was going to stay a home for more than a couple years, I would be putting exterior wood fiber insulation on the house to provide the insulation value that a house really needs. If you're looking for ways to save when building a home, I don't recommend cutting back on insulation. It pays off in the long run.
Water:
The plumbing is super simple in the barn, and all fixtures are stacked together. The laundry and water heater is in the basement, and stacked above those is the powder room and kitchen sink, and above those is the upstairs bathroom.
Stacking everything keeps things simple to install with less material for plumbing runs (saving money), and it means the hot water has a shorter run to get to the fixtures, so less water is wasted by waiting for the water out of the faucet to get warm.
The fixtures will all have the WaterSense label.
Radon System:
We’re installing a passive radon system preemptively since the easiest time to install one is when the foundation is poured. I have no idea if there will be radon under our basement slab, but installing a passive system (essentially some 3” piping) is pretty cheap, and 100% worth it to do upfront rather than later.
Healthy and Sustainable Materials
This post is getting long, so I’m going to quickly run through some materials I’ll be using. But I’ll continue to do more blog posts about our material selections, and dive deeper into some of the choices we made.
Exterior:
The wall assembly (from inside to outside)
- Drywall - Gold bond ½”
- Wood stud framing
- 5.5” Wood Fiber Batt Insulation by TimberHP
- Zip sheathing
- 1x3 wood strapping for a rainscreen and siding attachment
- 1x8 Vertical Pine Boards, clear coat finish
Tru Exterior Trim - This is a durable poly-ash composite trim. It’ll last a long time, and it’s not PVC
Windows - Marvin Elevate - fiberglass with wood interior, double pane, casement
Doors - Marvin Elevate patio doors and Therma Tru fiberglass doors
Asphalt shingle roofing - this is a sad cost decision. Standing seam metal is twice as much. Screw down metal roofing is not durable. They are bound to leak eventually, so that wasn’t an option here.
Interior:
Kitchen cabinets - either reclaimed or IKEA
Countertops - Paperstone
Flooring - Tile and Marmoleum linoleum
Trim - Drywall returns at windows with wood sill. 1x4 wood base trim.
Paint - Mineral based. I’m not sure which brand yet.
Final Thoughts:
We've incorporated almost all of my typical sustainable and healthy features in the barn while keeping the budget as low as we could. The barn is coming in at about the same SF cost as other conventional builds in the area. (And technically this is a conventional build because it is code minimally insulated, but adding extra insulation wouldn't change the SF price by that much.)
Hopefully this helps to keep you optimistic! There are plenty of ways to design a healthy and sustainable, wellness-focused home without going above the average cost of home construction!