My scribblings on the plans.....

I am continuing to fulfill my tasks for the architect, even though I am not sure how much is being done at the other end.

She requested that I send her over my thoughts for how things should be (as you will have seen in a blog post a week ago) and I have finished doing my sketches and marking my scribblings onto her excellently produced plans. These were emailed this morning (a nice 15MB email; isn't it funny that for email you STILL worry about the size of files, but no where else...)

So, you lucky people, I am going to record here my thinkings and let you see and comment on my plans. Many people have asked me questions and hopefully this will provide more information than the probably lacking answers I gave previously.

So, without any further poncing around....

Scribblings on the Ground Floor

Scribblings on the First Floor

These have been posted before but they were a dodgy photograph of them and now I have nicely scanned in all my sketches so here they are again. This is the "what are you going to DO with all that room?" plan, and also a summarisation of the changes which I want to make and which I have detailed in the following drawings. One big thing is the layout of the guest suite, with thanks to my friend for her advice, where I am putting a shower and toilet (humanure, obviously) in a small room between the two larger bedrooms.

Bedroom access to the balcony

I want to change this window into a door with a window above and next to it.

Interior window into Bedroom

To ensure plenty of light gets into the top corridor, and so that I can put my sofa at the end of said corridor on the landing and see right through to the balcony, I want to fill in the current gap not fully, but with an internal window. I can then draw the curtains should I have guests, and open the windows in the summer for a full draft through.

Access to bottom corridor

This door is really really narrow. The bottom corridor is dark and dinghy. To fix this I want to widen the doorway and make it into an arch, with a display shelf knocked to the side; this will bring the entrance hall and back corridor into one space and improve the light and movement of air. It is hard to explain so hopefully this diagram helps?

End of Living Room wall

Lastly for my awful sketches, I want to have windows and a door in this wall. This sketch is not accurate, though, and I will have to redo it. The door will not reach to the top of the windows (See the door in the Bedroom with windows) so I will probably bring the windows in on each side to butt up against the door, and have a pane across the top. Plenty of light. I will be putting wooden shutters on the outside so I can lock it down for winter, and leave just the door un-shuttered for access to clean snow off the balcony.

Water plan - ground floor

Water plan - first floor

One thing which I wanted to make really clear to the Architect was the simplicity of my water requirements. I want one spur running down the front of the building, feeding the upstairs bathroom and then carrying on along that wall and past the kitchen to my wet rooms. The rest of the building does not need access to water. Hopefully this will make things easier for my build, and for her water planning survey thing.

Warmed zone - ground floor

Warmed zone - first floor

Finally for those who have asked me (very sensibly) about heating and staying warm, the red-hashed areas are the only ones which i foresee as being "warmed". As I want to use a Rocket Mass Stove and this will be an interesting experiment regarding heating a back boiler and radiators, I don't know at this stage how successful this will be. I may end up with a Rocket Mass Stove in both Kitchen and Living Room and then pipes taking the heat into the associated spaces but this will be something I will work out when I get there. Fortunately I don't think I need to provide this detail to get the permission to build so yeah, just my thoughts and imaginings about this right now.

So there you are, lots of diagrams and drawings and hopefully you have a slightly better insight into what I am planning on achieving with this amazing building.

A quick update; tomorrow (today as you are reading this) I have the camper van man coming to look at removing the fridge, and sorting all the electrics in Julian. Very excited about this, it'll be nice to have a fully operational camper van and hopefully it can be done before my next camping trip; the tweet up on November 23rd.