Early Decisions

Once we had the lot, it was time to make some decisions about the house itself. Our research yielded lots of resources for green building in California, but... we don't live there anymore. We learned that if we wanted to be progressive and build a house with lots of green features, we would be breaking very new ground around here. I've often joked that builders in East Tennessee don't know how to spell "green". Our first task, then was to find someone around here who did know about green building. We issued a Request for Qualifications (RFQ) to all of the members of the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). in the fall of 2007 we invited any AIA "...parties interested and experienced in design of new 'green' single family residential construction..." to contact us. To our dismay, we got merely three responses, only two of which were responsive to our request for designers with multiple green projects and references. We interviewed both Smee + Busby Architects and Elizabeth Eason Architects. Although Smee + Busby had a very attractive team and made a great proposal, we leaned toward Beth Eason's more extensive green experience. We checked her references and got extremely high praise from everyone.



We put together a Program Plan for the house using an Excel spreadsheet. The Program Plan was the heart of our communication with the Architects. It gave us great confidence that we effectively recorded our thoughts and delivered the message to Beth. I'm trying to figure out how to post the program plan as an example, but havn't gotten it done yet. We'll press on for now & edit the file back in later. The plan consisted of columns headed: description, features,existing, comments, sq ft finished, and sq ft unfinished. We went room by room through our hopes and dreams (and existing home) to write down what rooms, features and finishes we KNEW we wanted. At the end, the plan called for 2082 sq ft finished rooms, add 10% for circulation (hallways, etc) and we needed 2290 sq ft of finished living space to meet our "needs". Of course, our "wants" were still out there too. We called out another 3936 of unfinished space, including an unfinished basement, lots of porches, a garage/work-room, bonus room over the garage and a mechanical room.