Entries Tagged 'design' ↓

You’ve all been patient with our decreased posting the past few weeks so ISA decided to reward you all with the first interior renderings of the home. I’ll save my thoughts for later an let you guys comment first. If you’ve always wanted to comment but never have, now’s your chance. Also, before someone mentions […]

Last week I was getting nervous about our ability to incorporate all of the energy efficient features of the home in the most cost effective manner possible. I have also been pouring over other case study’s that contain very nice energy modeling data that I craved on our homes. I finally bit the bullet and […]

Over the course of this project I have found that there are three elements to true construction costs:

The cost of the material being used.
The quantity of the material being used.
The difficulty or labor involved to build an item.

I have often heard that labor makes up 60%-70% of the cost of any constructed item from cabinets […]

…the point of this post is the plywood stairs proposed by ISA. They have gained inspiration from the plywood stairs built in the Chicken Point Cabin by OSKA Architects. Their project uses a lot simple materials such as plywood and concrete in the same theme as our project.

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The basic idea of a Passive House is to reduce the energy usage of a home by 90% over traditional code built homes. I grabbed this definition off of a site which will hopefully become clearer later in the post: “A Passive House is a building for which thermal comfort can be achieved solely by post-heating or post-cooling of the fresh air mass, which is required to fulfill sufficient indoor air quality conditions without a need for recirculated air.” […]

After our last kitchen design meeting, we narrowed down our inspirational kitchen pieces to a few choices. Here are the inspirational images we liked the most to create a kitchen with the main strip along a wall with open shelving above and an island with seating.
Wall section 

- OR -

Island

with seating like this

Storage & Range Hood […]

For the past few weeks the team has been kicking around the idea of an affordable green wall or green facade in the back of the homes. Yesterday, ISA forwarded me a bit of research on various methods for accomplishing a green facade using ivy for what seems to be a very low cost.

Green facades […]

This post started in response to a friend of mine, Matt Pappajohn, who happens to be a custom cabinet maker and wanted to have a go at building a modern and green kitchen for our project. He wanted me to give him a general idea of what we would be trying to design prior to […]

I noticed today that it’s been a while since I’ve posted any pretty pics so here are the latest renderings from ISA. We have been discussing how to create an interesting, modern and affordable facade for weeks and this is what we’ve gravitated towards.

You can see that we have a bit of a vertical theme […]

So I just returned from today’s LEED Design Charrette and everything went very well. The bottom line is that we found out that reaching Platinum is possible with our design, but we have a few issues to clarify and iron out. Rob from MaGrann was extremely knowledgeable and taught us all a lot about the […]