It is oriented on our lot and designed to absorb heat from the sun to help with heating costs in the long New England winters.
It is wheelchair friendly and accessible so our son can use all the rooms in it. Our house is energy efficient so we don’t stretch our budget to pay for heating and cooling it. A “good house” fits into the landscape and is well suited to the lives of its occupants. I consider our house a “good house,” a term used by Richard Manning to describe a house that is built with consideration to its environment, the site and landscape where it is built, how its occupants will use it, and the aesthetic qualities of it. No single method of finishing a basement space was suitable for our particular basement situation, I thought. There are proprietary systems sold by companies for tens of thousands of dollars, there are old standards that don’t necessarily work for wet/humid basements, and there are ways to finish basements that don’t require modulating the temperature. I did hours and hours of research on how people finish their basements. This combination of temperatures makes the basement unbearably cold in the winter, but delightfully cool in the summer. Below the three feet of soil, it generally stays around fifty degrees Fahrenheit all year long. In the winter, the air temperature outside is frequently below freezing, and the ground from about three feet up can freeze.
This means there is almost always water present in the sump pit, and the basement walls are absorbing moisture from the outside, making the basement humid most times.Ģ) It is cold in the basement most of the year. We installed a sump pump in our basement (first photo above) to pump out the water which collects underneath the concrete basement slab.
We have wetlands in our back yard too, where the water stays on the surface of the soil for long periods of time, due to the soil content. This is common in our area and water can be found as close as twenty-eight inches below the surface of the ground at different times of the year. This means there is water in the ground close to the surface, like streams running through the rocks and soil. The two most important facts I took into consideration when designing the finishes for the basement, which entails picking materials and figuring out how to put them all together, were:ġ) Our property has a very high water table.
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