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Needless to say, when you have 8 acres of land you have a few choices as to where to put your house. We started out by walking around and putting stakes into any place that looked open, flat, and reasonably high. Then we went around again took most of them out, for one reason or another. This way we quickly narrowed down our potential sites to just a few.
Some principles of permaculture come into the picture when determining the site. In Austin's climate, you want to build a house on the east side of a nice big tree to protect the house from the hot western sun. Since we have a pond and the wind blows mainly from the south/southeast during the summer, if we put the house somewhere on the northwest of the pond the air that travels over the pond may cool down the house site. Furthermore, not many places are completely flat - we wanted to put our house on a high spot, for obvious drainage reasons. The driveway and utilities placements also affect the picture. Finally, we wanted a place where we intuitively felt that a house was a good fit.
Our long range building plan actually involves two buildings: a main building (about 400 sq.ft.) and small building, which we are building first (about 150 sq.ft.). We found that it was very difficult to fit two buildings under the shade of a single tree. So, we chose a site near the northern edge, close to the driveway. There's a great big tree that covers the place where our big building will go. However, we decided that the small building will have to tough it out in the sun for now, because we really wanted to reserve the best spot for the big house. We'll plant another tree on the southwest side of the small house, so that it will have its own shade down the road.
You can click on the picture to see it larger.
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This is the view of the site from the southeast side. The red stakes mark the outline of what's going to be the big house. |
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This is the view from the east. Notice the second batch of stakes in the back, where the small house is going to be. On the right side of Terri is the big, shade-providing tree. |
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The small house site, looking at it from the north. We'll probably take out the mesquite tree on the south of this house and plant a nice cedar elm. |
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The small house site, looking at it from the east. Unfortunately, there's no tree on the west side of this one. |
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The small house site, looking at it from the south. To the right will be the big house. We're planning on a covered or partially covered patio in front of these two houses, facing southeast. |