DOGTROT DESIGN FOR YOUR COMMENTS

[Mark_Chenail]

Kathleen:  My blushes ma'am.  Such praise.  IM glad you like the design so much.  It sounds like your life is mighty busy and you obviously know all about life off the grid.  You sure dont need any lessons from me.  Your household sounds wonderful.   I will try and find a picture or plans for the 18th c copper wash boiler set in bricks.   The library where I work has a fine book on Jane Austens house at Chawton and I know there is a picture of such a setup in the book, but for the life of me I cant remember the books title.  I will dig it out of the catalog and scan the pic some time this week and post the pic for you and Ailsa to see.  Tried searching for a pic on the net but had no luck.  Lots of pics of copper wash boilers that you set on the stove but not the older built in setup.    You will always get a big bathroom from me.   Living in a wheelchair, the standard skinny 5 foot by 9 foot bathroom has been the bane of my existance.  Gald you found the plan useful.

[Ailsa C. Ek]

Kathleen:  My blushes ma'am.  Such praise.  IM glad you like the design so much.  It sounds like your life is mighty busy and you obviously know all about life off the grid.  You sure dont need any lessons from me.  Your household sounds wonderful.

I'm sure impressed.  Kathleen, you're doing more or less exactly what I aspire to (and I have a son with Down Syndrome, so there's even a parallel there).

I will try and find a picture or plans for the 18th c copper wash boiler set in bricks.   The library where I work has a fine book on Jane Austens house at Chawton and I know there is a picture of such a setup in the book, but for the life of me I cant remember the books title.  I will dig it out of the catalog and scan the pic some time this week and post the pic for you and Ailsa to see.  Tried searching for a pic on the net but had no luck.  Lots of pics of copper wash boilers that you set on the stove but not the older built in setup.

I'm really looking forward to seeing that.  It sounds like just what the doctor ordered!

You will always get a big bathroom from me.   Living in a wheelchair, the standard skinny 5 foot by 9 foot bathroom has been the bane of my existance.  Glad you found the plan useful.

Wheelchair accessability is a necessity for us, too, so I really appreciate the fact that you design for it.

I was awestruck by the design & want to run out & build it tomorrow (factoring in a basement and a gable-end roof).  DH wants to eliminate the small hallway by the bedrooms.  *sigh*  I may be forced to kill him.

Kathleen, are you planning on having retractable clotheslines in the dogtrot as well?  I'm thinking it would be a great place to hang out laundry in the winter and early spring.

Question for everyone - would it be possible to do the foundation as a rectangle and do the floor as one huge slab of concrete over it?  Any idea how much heat one would lose having the outdoor veranda and the rest of the floor indoors as part of one sheet?  Or are there code reasons why you can't do that in the first place?

[glenn kangiser]

Question for everyone - would it be possible to do the foundation as a rectangle and do the floor as one huge slab of concrete over it?  Any idea how much heat one would lose having the outdoor veranda and the rest of the floor indoors as part of one sheet?  Or are there code reasons why you can't do that in the first place?

That is common.  The house basement I'm working on now is 2 rectangles under a larger slab.

[John Raabe]

Where you have a heated (indoor) slab you will use foam insulation to insulate the edges and for a foot or two under the bottom around the perimeter. In cold climates you might do more insulation. The patio or outdoor slabs are poured without the insulation and somewhat lower than the indoor slab so that wind driven water is not pumped inside. The outdoor slabs are usually poured after the house is essentially complete and all the heavy equipment has left.

[Mark_Chenail]

Ailsa:  I don't see why you couldnt do the basement that way.  You could build a rectangle inside the basement as big as the terrace and use that colder area as a root cellar, which was on Kathleens original wish list.  If you went with a conventional furnace in the basement, it would heat the rest of the basement comfortably but still leave you with the cold larder.  

I will keep looking for that wash boiler.   They were pretty much a standard feature of English houses right through the end of the 19th c., but I cant seem to find a picture on the net.  I will look for the Austen book this morning.

Tell your husband to leave that little hallway alone.  If you add the space to the bathroom, you only gain about 36 sq ft  about the size of a double bed mattress, but you lose the isolation between the main rooms and the bedrooms and between the bedrooms themselves.  That hall is there so the kiddies dont hear mom and dad in the morning when they are doing.......their exercises.  
Didnt we give that man a little getaway of his own. Tell him not to be so greedy.

[Amanda_931]

I'm thinking that for me--and a kind of long narrow house with the long ways going down a hill, a root cellar with a double foundation would be wonderful on the hill end, leave the middle open for the dogs, partly close, and partly fill in the other end because then there could be a rocket mass stove there--and it could heat the bathroom before it went out of doors.  OK, it might work better if it were backwards, actually in several ways, turning the house around so that there was more headroom in the root cellar, less fill to do under the rocket mass heater.  Wood floors except in under heater--kitchen and bathroom.

Which, if made a bit bigger, could be a dogtrot house--bedroom/study at one end, kitchen at the other, dogtrot in the middle--none over 10 feet long.  And an all-but-the-coldest-weather bedroom out on a porch.  

Books are in storage, right now, but doesn't Ken Kern have a picture of a wash boiler setup in one of his?

I'm enjoying looking at these, thinking about how they would work, even if I don't think they'd quite be for me.

[Mark_Chenail]

Took me awhile to find the boiler pics, but here they are.  Basically the boiler was a copy kettle set into a brick firebox.  You lit a fire in the firebox and it heated the water.  Then you could stuff in the washing and boil it before scrubbing.  You can see the wooden agitator in the background of one of the pics.  Sometimes the copper kettle was permanently fixed which must have made emptying it and cleaning it a real chore.  Sometimes they could be removed, but lifting a kettle of boiling water must have been a pain in the [neck as well.   Eventually someone thought to provide them with a tap, which made it simpler.  When cast iron set ranges and stoves came on the seen this form of boiler was replaced by the hot water tank with a tap you know see on most wood cookstoves.  Ive seem similar setups done with an old bathtub and a pulley and winch over it used to scald hogs for home butchering  and the steam kettles in commercial kitchens are distant cousins to the old wash boiler.  Heres the pictures for what they are worth.

Jane Austens laundry room at Chawton, circa 1790.



This picture pretty much shows the whole range of late 18th/early19th c laundry and cooking options.   Cooking on that skinny little grate must have been lots of fun, but I really like the look of that tall narrow fireplace.   Nice big boiler to the side   and in the left background, the big step up to a coal fired range with hot water tank.  Note the wash agitator in the background.

[Freeholdfarm]

Mark, thanks for finding and posting those pictures -- I'm a Jane Austen fan, and it's pretty neat to see pictures of her house!

I like the idea of pouring a big slab (with thermal breaks at the house walls, so you don't lose heat) and having a root cellar OR a cistern under that big back patio.   It might be best to put a cistern under it, and have the root cellar above-ground in the back yard, with earth berming around it.  That way you don't have to worry about stairs.

I was also thinking about having one big roof over the whole thing, with the roof decking left off over the patio so it would be a shade roof.  Do you know what I mean?  It would make the roof simpler to build, and probably be a little less costly, too.

Yes, a place to dry clothes indoors is an excellent idea.  I've used those wooden racks in the past (though you have to be careful to get a good quality one, because if the dowels weren't cut with good straight grain, they will break under a load), but would like to have an indoor clothesline.  We did have one in the basement of one house we lived in, but it seemed to take forever for things to dry down there, perhaps a combination of low temps and high humidity (that house was in Tacoma, WA).  I've thought that a sunspace would make a nice place to dry laundry in the winter.  

If I get time later (I'm trying to finish up the homework for a class I'm taking, which ends this weekend), I'll play with the design on Google Sketch-up.

Mark, if you don't sell your designs, you ought to think about selling this one.

Kathleen

[John_C]

Jump right in here folks,

If you were going to do the dogtrot or something else with large opening doors on the N & S sides what would you use?

Parameters: Air but not bugs in the summer, weather tight in the winter, sunlight through the S door in the winter for passive heating.  

French doors? sliding glass doors?  Go ahead and be specific with mfg names of suitable doors you have had good or bad experiences with.

[fourx]

I haunted building salvage yards - took a while, but for the Eastern end I found a 1920's 6 ftx 4'6"" four-pane window with squares of coloured glass in the top two panes, which open up, and across the bottom of the large bottom panes, which open out, and  1890'2, I think, 8 ftx 5 ft french doors for the Western end- both cost less than a hundred bucks, but getting shutters made up for the french doors was $400. In the summer, the prevailing wind is easterly from the coast 30 miles away- it blows through the Eastern end, the up-tilting top panes direct the wind to the cieling and blow the hot air out the (closed) shutters.
In the winter, the sun shines through the closed french doors from lunchtime on and heats the house up like a greenhouse.
I thinkold windows and doors, aside from being cheap, add a great deal of charm to a home.
There are some pics posted here somewhere.

[JRR]

Nice layout, Mark.

I agree with Freeholdfarm, a simpler two-plane Gable (sp?) roof would suit my tastes ... and budget.  I'd extent the roof over the current terrace and connect the terrace to the dogtrot ... possibly all being over earth.  This would make for a nice open "garden" ... possibly the roofing over the garden would be translucent corrugated.

We have mild winters.