Finalizing Our Passive Solar House Design: Minor Tweaks and Major Planning Tips

Reader Contribution by Jennifer Kongs
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The Small Home, Big Decisions series follows Jennifer and her husband, Tyler, as they build a self-reliant homestead on a piece of country property in northeastern Kansas. The series will delve into questions that arise during their building process and the decisions they make along the way. The posts are a work in progress, written as their home-building adventure unfolds.

A few weeks ago, we picked up the preliminary house plans that we had drawn by John Roe at McCray Lumber near us in Topeka, Kan. We highly recommend paying the additional fee for a set of preliminary plans. Based on the estimate our contractor, Jeff Wooster, came up with by looking at the preliminaries, and based on some of the design features we wanted to adjust for aesthetic or functional reasons, we would have been in a tight spot should the first drawings have been our finals. After we discussed the changes we wanted and the changes Jeff recommended, we finalized our passive solar design plans (see evidence above) and are now awaiting a revised lumber list so we can put it out for bids.

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