Dometastic

Ok, so maybe not a horror show but pretty freaking frustrating. It has only become funny now that I am done and writing about it. When I was on the phone with banks.... not so funny. I read about other peoples experiences trying to get money to build their unusual houses. Horror stories of people building "green" homes like the straw bale and sand bag earthship homes using just multiple credit cards as a way to borrow money. Why did they do it? Because banks wouldn't touch them with a 10 foot pole. They kept spread sheets and were constantly playing a shell game of moving debt around to reduce their interest rates, not ruin their credit and still manage to build their unusual homes. This was something we were absolutely NOT going to do. Then again, we are also using an established construction company (building since the early 1960's) and not just stacking found materials ourselves to make an earthship house. Honestly though.... its a good thing Mr. Dometastic has a...

Grab your tinfoil hats and calculators folks and lets talk numbers.  I am NOT a numbers person but it is also hard to make me drink the cool-aide. Mr. Dometastic on the other hand is the opposite. He is a numbers guy and at times is a cool-aide guzzler. Between the two of us we should be able to navigate building this house and making it as "green" as possible without guzzling the cool-aid. At least that is what I am telling myself now. We are at the point of involving the building engineer and getting our official architectural plans drawn up. Time to really think about the internal workings of the house.  Ok, put on those shiny hats for just a moment. At first, our plan was to go completely off grid. This idea came about with Tesla releasing the Powerwall house battery. A battery linked to solar to charge it (and a propane generator as backup) would take care of our electric needs. Read about the Powerwall HERE. Ok, now off with the hats. The problem is the cost ...

The second draft is in! We still have more changes to make but it is getting closer to what we want. The main changes to this version are: Center domes are now taller than wing domes  We added a circular window and moved one to the main kitchen Redesign master shower a bit Master suite office is now clearly not a bedroom Redesign main kitchen island to include a connected extendable table  Redesign to add pocket doors (we still need to redesign to get rid of more swinging doors) Increase basement height to 10' (this allows us to drive a tractor in) Add people door next to garage door We may be crazy to want to live in an unfinished house but our plan is to do only as much as the town requires to get a Certificate of Occupancy (CO). We will then do the rest of the interior work ourselves. We may find ourselves living in a VERY open floor plan at first! We are also not new to living in construction zones. This was a renovation project from our first hou...

I have talked about our first draft but I haven't shared it yet. We gave the designer a whopper of an email full of changes to make so it seems a bit silly to show you the draft that has so many changes needed. What I WILL share is the first draft sketch of the exterior of the house. This too has many changes that need to happen but it is not nearly as far from the end design as the first draft of the floor plan.  There are distinctly two reactions we get from sharing this drawing. The WOW that is super cool reaction and the polite non-reaction. Every time we get the non-reaction I hear the sound of crickets in my head and it makes me want to laugh. It is a bit like I am playing a movie sound track in my head. Cue "The Crickets". I completely understand the reaction. It more than qualifies as an unusual house and even the people that think it is cool wouldn't choose to build it. Building a round house is also going to pose many problems in our world set...

A post or 2 back I talked about getting window/door quotes. I am finally coming out the other side of wading thru a ton of quotes for the large 18 foot opening onto our deck. There are a bunch of companies out there that make big (either folding or sliding) doors for large openings. I contacted 9 or 10 companies. It is kinda a blur. I got back numbers ranging anywhere from $30k to $8k! Now that is quite the number spread! These numbers vary greatly depending on how it opens and what it is made of. Then there are screen systems, shipping and tax. Some estimates have packing and shipping charges as high as just under $3k! Some have no tax. Each company makes a door that functions a bit differently to add to the confusion. I have spent hours emailing and reading to try to figure out if we can incorporate this type of door into our design. Unfortunately our cold winters and hot summers here in CT require a thermally broken door. This is the same as saying it is insulated and doesn...

This past weekend we made a family trip to the Equine Affaire held at the Eastern States Expo. in MA. This is something I go to each year and normally I am just like everyone else. Just wandering around looking at all the stuff I can't afford and don't actually need. It was a marketing overload day where you walk out feeling exhausted even though you only walked around at a super slow pace. You are tired just because everywhere you look is plastered with marketing slogans and anything else they can think of to get you to stop at their booth. While not directly related to building our dome it was a helpful step in our process. Why?  Because the property will be a mini farm of sorts. Our 8.2 acres will be home to not only our dome but to a few horses and other critters. Our house site is at the back of a 4 acre hay field. It is a pretty long driveway and a long trench to dig for utilities! We think the best way to get the required power and water to build the dome is to build t...

I arrived home today to an email from the designer. The first draft of our house was sitting there in my inbox! Mr. Dometastic was the one who noticed it first and called me. "Did you see it?! Did you see it?!" Nope, I hadn't seen IT. I didn't even know what IT was. A very frustrating few minutes went by and I still didn't know what IT was. Finally after he gave me step by step instrutions that led to me turning on my computer I found out IT was an email. It is very much a first draft and at first glance I could see several things that needed to be changed. The back and forth communication has really finally begun. Now to start clarifying and making some decisions. Before we go back to the designer we need to iron out a few things. We sent her examples of the windows and doors we liked but nothing concrete. The next step is to really look into it because it impacts the augment (or bump out areas for the windows and doors) design. We need to actually pick out t...

One of the best things about building a house is all the decisions you get to make that aren't possible when you buy one. Renovating lets you make decisions too but not on the same scale as building. I think that is why we have been warned that this process will test our marriage. Every decision we have to make is also a possible disagreement. So far our biggest tension has been over windows. Everything from the number of them to their type and placement. Mr. Dometastic sees them as a weak point. This stems from those hoards of attacking neighbors. I see them as a needed functional and aesthetic feature. We have had some of the strangest conversations in regards to windows. Everything from looking up how much bullet proof glass would cost us.... to watching YouTube videos of people smashing glass blocks. Initially, just like our design reference house, we wanted a wall of windows in the great room with a 40% cut back.  With any luck our house will not look like a giant fish eat...

One very visible design element of the house will be the solarium. We have included it in our plans to Monolithic even though they don't do glass domes because we want to make sure that we are prepared for how it connects. This is something that we will add after we move in. Ideally we would like for it to be an all glass geodesic dome. Unfortunately, so far the only company we have found that makes what we want is in the UK. Solar Dome The plan would be for it to connect right over the front door of the great room of the house. I am leaning towards a combination of the above 2 images. Solar Dome refers to these as skylights. A glass dome attached to a 4 or 5 ft. wall would give us extra height and lower the cost of materials. The new front door would become the door into the glass dome. This area would be an unheated enclosed area that would only get heated if we chose to leave the house open to it. I spoke on the phone today with Monolithic and decided it was tim...

As I have mentioned before Mr. Dometastic and I want different things as we go through our initial planning phase. Maybe that is one of the reasons Monolithic has you create the word picture. Recording all the tiny details about your plan makes you work out your differences ahead of time. Or at least come to an understanding of each side.  Our first clash was over sky lights. I love sky lights! We had one skylight in our first house and it made that area of the house so much nicer. My plants actually lived for once. Mr. Dometastic hates them. Well... maybe hate is too strong  a word. He likes them in other peoples houses. He thinks they are weak points in an otherwise "defensible home". I argue that our armed attacking neighbors won't be able to climb the side of the dome to get to the weak points.  Initially this argument worked and we just went down in the number of skylights but as you can see in my previous post. Now there are NONE. Don't get me wrong, I...

Monolithic has many stock floor plans available to use as is or to change around. We decided to create a ranch dome (if that is a thing). It will be all one floor and very open with multi use areas. It isn't one single dome but instead 4 interconnected overlapping domes. The result is an aerial floor plan that looks like none other than good old Mickey Mouse. Then we added in a greenhouse dome. An all glass geodesic dome that will serve as a green house/solarium. This glass dome will attach to the house right over the front door entering into the great room. Our last house had a screened in porch but it was so far from the kitchen and not connected directly to the house that we never used it. We are designing it so that it will be easy to get to from the kitchen and just becomes extra square footage that isn't heated but should still get enough passive solar to stay above freezing in the winter. The kitchen and great room dome areas will be higher ceilings than the bedroom wing...

Right now we are playing the waiting game. Its fall in New England and in a very short time everything will be buried under snow. Not exactly the best time to be building a house but it is a great time to get our plans all set to start in the spring. I just sent over all our brain storming documents to Monolitic so they can begin the "feasibility study" part of the planning process. Read here about what that is - http://www.monolithic.org/feasibility-residential I sent them several documents that will help them guide us through this process. 1. Word Picture - This is just a text only file that describes every aspect of the house. Everything from the overall lifestyle to how many toilets we need. Being a visual person I found this the most difficult part but they made it easier by providing an outline of questions to follow. The result is a super detailed boring document that will inevitably change as we go along. The birth of this document has already been a source...

The company that we have decided to build our dome with is Monolithic based in Texas. http://www.monolithic.org You can see examples and read all about the construction process on their website. It isn't worth me re typing it here. The thing most people say to us when we talk about what we want to build is "Will it look like an igloo?" My answer.... Some do but here is an example of the home we are using as a style reference.

My long time client and friend is Catholic and ever since she heard we were selling our house she has been offering to send me a statue of St. Joseph to bury upside down in my garden. I am not Catholic... in fact I don't identify with any religion BUT I can be superstitious. After a year of only a handful of people looking at our house I told her bring on the good mojo St. Jo! Three days before our second open house he arrived from Amazon. A little 4" resin statue, instructions on how to treat him and a prayer card to read to him. I was skeptical but thought it couldn't hurt to bury him while my husband was pretty sure I was crazy. SO I buried him right in the front flower bed. Sure enough 3 days later we had an offer! This of course has completely triggered my superstitious side. My husband laughs at me but I can take it! Although, I do admit that I feel super awkward reading the prayer card (printed in China) to a plastic (made in China) figurine that I buried head fir...

Over 10 years ago my husband and I first became interested in dome homes. It was back in 2002 when we bought our first house. It was about as far from a dome as you could get but that was what we could afford. As we went forward with that house we began to plan and dream about our future house.....one day. Built in 1890 our first place enabled us to stretch our renovation muscles. Some of it not by choice! My husband had some experience when he was young working for someone that made custom cabinets and no doubt he learned some skills helping his dad with various projects growing up. All my skills were fine art based but I was very comfortable around power tools. During my time in art school, I had many sculpture classes using all the big wood shop machines as well as welding etc in metal shop. Not really renovation but better than nothing! Some conflict arises in how we approach projects. My husband is cautious and plans every detail. I just go for it. The first day of renovations...