kitchen in walkout basement

[wncramsey]

We are considering building an 'enertia' style home (enertia.com) but are wondering if there would be any reason why we couldn't put the kitchen / dining / living room areas in the walk out basement area and leave the ground floor for the bedrooms / office area.

Any thoughts?


Diane

[AngieM2]

Is the walk out basement facing the front or back of the house?
If front, what difference would that be from having a walkout basement fixed to be a small apartment with reg house above?

Angie

[wncramsey]

The walk out basement would be southern facing, generally to more to the side than the front.

We realize that it is not a standard floorplan and therefore may be harder to sell when the time comes, but it would seem more energy efficient.

[Common Tator]

I would want the path to the kitchen to be a short one from the car, for bringing in groceries. and I certainly wouldn't want to carry them down stairs.

[Callieslamb]

right now my kitchen is downstairs and the bedrooms up - the only difference is that it is not in a basement. As long as the other rooms associated with the kitchen are on the same floor, I don't see any problem. But if the kitchen ios down and the living room up....I see a problem. And with living and kitchen down, would the living room get enough lighting?

It would also depend on where you park the car. The kitchen needs to be on the same level as the car.

[agmantoo]

IMO you cannot have what you are proposing and have it in an Enertia house. There has to be an air path under the lower floor and you would be too deep into the ground to put a crawl space under the walk out basement. Pose this question to the Enertia people to get more than an opinion.

[ErinP]

If it were a standard walkout basement, it would make perfect sense to have your living areas in the basement, the sleeping/office areas above. Afterall, the living areas are traditionally on the ground floor...
So far as an enertia home, I couldn't say as i haven't researched this particular style...

[Maura]

My inlaws house is near the lake (great lake), so contend with alluvial plains. Their house was built so that the top floor is level with the front yard and road. It looks like a one story from the road. You walk into a little foyer, if you go up two steps you are in a hallway with bedrooms and bath. If you go downstairs, you walk into the dining room. Downstairs also is the living room with a wall of windows on the lake side and a regular glass door to the outside. The kitchen and laundry room are also on the ground floor. They have a two story garage at one end, the upstairs garage accessible from the road, the downstairs garage accessible from the back yard. This house was built forty years ago and was ahead of it's time. In the past ten years, more and more houses are being built this way along the ridge.

[Rowena]

We built a daylight basement here in the desert, but it consists of my office, gym, guest room, rec room, more traditional, but I agree that it could work, but number one would be access to parking and entrance, especially depending on where you are located, heavy snow?

One of the issues we came across were with wood heating, pipe has to be run upstairs or you can do as we did and put in pellet stove and the pipe runs horizontally out the wall, but I do not like because it depends on electricity.

The other was the water heater down there is beneath the upper story so thus had to be electric due to venting.

It is very warm in the morning due to the southern exposure, ours is about 80%; 100% direct would be better of course. It does chill down and settled at about 58 degrees here, we drop only into the 20s here and can have nice days in the high 40s and 50s a lot during winter.

Lighting in the back rooms is 100% dependent, but if I did things differently I would have run Sola-Tube lighting, which I understand you can do out the side of the wall now just above ground level and bring in natural light.

Have fun!!

[wncramsey]

Thanks for the thoughts and ideas.


Diane

[tiogacounty]

I've been involved with residential construction for decades now, and started in the early eighties with a year in a local college's experimental "alternative energy" program. I checked the web site you refer to and got a bit of a chuckle. It looks like it's a Mother Earth News article from 1979. There are far cheaper, far less material intensive ways to build then building an envelope home. I have worked on super-insulated homes that are far less complicated and much more energy efficient than these. More importantly, they can be built for a lot less money. There are many reasons that solar envelope homes never caught on, reasons like fire safety, epensive redundant construction and the biggest one of all.....it just isn't the best way to get the job done. Any website that lists "data", nearly thirty years old, proclaiming that solid wood walls are the superior way to build, should be taken with a GIANT dose of skepticism. A passive solar oriented home, using any common super-insulation technique like SIPS panels or double wall construction, will perform better, have greater acceptance with any contractors or building code officials involved, have a lot more resale potential, and cost less. Good luck.