4 Settling on a design
October 2023
Once we wound up our summer travel, we emailed our architect, Anne, with our thoughts about the 5 options she presented us with back in June. Carolyn expressed it well:
As you know from our meeting, we are favorably impressed by each of your plans. I think both Carl and I have come to the conclusion that an elevator would probably be the most practical (and perhaps least invasive) solution for us. I’m not sure we need to make the house that much bigger by adding another bedroom, but we do want accessibility. In that regard, we think Plan B and Plan D would be the most suitable. Our desire is also to upgrade all three baths and the kitchen.
At the same time though, we threw in a new wrinkle: we had contracted for our a new Trane whole home heat pump to replace our old air conditioner. In the process, we relocated the main pump to the south side of the garage below our primary bedroom.
When I was researching heat pumps, our nigh-unto-30-year HVAC vendor, Chaves HVAC reminded me that I’d have to shovel out our heat pump in the winter time. It’s obvious once you think about it – heat pumps need to pull air through them to extract heat.
That said, we live in New England, and our air conditioner had been located on the west side of our house. If we’d put our new heat pump there, I’d have been stuck wading through snow drifts around the deck to shovel out the pump every time it snowed. Given our desire for aging in place, we decided to relocate the heat pump to the south side of the garage where it would be close to the driveway and therefore easier to keep clear.
By the way, that new heat pump now sits right where Anne’s sketches proposed building a new first floor bedroom.
We met with Anne again the other day to talk about the options and the new challenge of the heat pump, and this is what she responded with.
I was mulling over our talk about Carl’s current use of the balcony off the bedroom and also about the heat pump… and came up with the attached idea. Basically it is to put a small balcony off of the back of the primary bedroom… so you would have a triple slider door looking out to the view…space for a chair or two out there as well as antennae etc… and then there would also be a protected area below for the heat pump which might reduce the need for shovelling…. Just a thought.
Anne’s new design is pretty much exactly what we are looking for. Here are the plans for the ground and primary bedroom floors:
The ground level design reshapes the kitchen and adds the elevator.
The second floor design adds a shed dormer with a balcony to the bedroom
We like the new design because it:
- Adds an elevator for accessibility. Anne thinks we can install a 6-stop elevator which will give us access to all the levels of our house except for the very top one.
- Rethinks our bathroom for aging in place. The new design for the primary bath incorporates a curbless shower, a bathtub with grab bars, and a toilet with a bidet seat. All those features should make it easier for us to stay clean as we get older. The design also relocates the bathroom so that it will have natural light from two skylights; our old bathroom never had any natural light.
- Enhances our bedroom suite. This new design replaces the skylights in our bedroom with sliding glass doors out to a balcony that has a stunning southern view. That balcony is functional too; it will shield the heat pump below it from snow.
- Retains our existing footprint. Not doing an addition eliminates the risk of having to recertify or replace our existing septic system to service an additional bathroom.
While we still have some tweaks we’d like to see made, I think we’ve made amazing progress with this design. We’ll meet again and assuming that goes well, we should be ready to finalize the design.