Search results for "Reduce projects" in Home Design Ideas

This modern green home offers both a vacation destination on Cape Cod near local family members and an opportunity for rental income.
FAMILY ROOTS. A West Coast couple living in the San Francisco Bay Area sought a permanent East Coast vacation home near family members living on Cape Cod. As academic professionals focused on sustainability, they sought a green, energy efficient home that was well-aligned with their values. With no green homes available for sale on Cape Cod, they decided to purchase land near their family and build their own.
SLOPED SITE. Comprised of a 3/4 acre lot nestled in the pines, the steeply sloping terrain called for a plan that embraced and took advantage of the slope. Of equal priority was optimizing solar exposure, preserving privacy from abutters, and creating outdoor living space. The design accomplished these goals with a simple, rectilinear form, offering living space on the both entry and lower/basement levels. The stepped foundation allows for a walk-out basement level with light-filled living space on the down-hill side of the home. The traditional basement on the eastern, up-hill side houses mechanical equipment and a home gym. The house welcomes natural light throughout, captures views of the forest, and delivers entertainment space that connects indoor living space to outdoor deck and dining patio.
MODERN VISION. The clean building form and uncomplicated finishes pay homage to the modern architectural legacy on the outer Cape. Durable and economical fiber cement panels, fixed with aluminum channels, clad the primary form. Cedar clapboards provide a visual accent at the south-facing living room, which extends a single roof plane to cover the entry porch.
SMART USE OF SPACE. On the entry level, the “L”-shaped living, dining, and kitchen space connects to the exterior living, dining, and grilling spaces to effectively double the home’s summertime entertainment area. Placed at the western end of the entry level (where it can retain privacy but still claim expansive downhill views) is the master suite with a built-in study. The lower level has two guest bedrooms, a second full bathroom, and laundry. The flexibility of the space—crucial in a house with a modest footprint—emerges in one of the guest bedrooms, which doubles as home office by opening the barn-style double doors to connect it to the bright, airy open stair leading up to the entry level. Thoughtful design, generous ceiling heights and large windows transform the modest 1,100 sf* footprint into a well-lit, spacious home. *(total finished space is 1800 sf)
RENTAL INCOME. The property works for its owners by netting rental income when the owners are home in San Francisco. The house especially caters to vacationers bound for nearby Mayo Beach and includes an outdoor shower adjacent to the lower level entry door. In contrast to the bare bones cottages that are typically available on the Cape, this home offers prospective tenants a modern aesthetic, paired with luxurious and green features. Durable finishes inside and out will ensure longevity with the heavier use that comes with a rental property.
COMFORT YEAR-ROUND. The home is super-insulated and air-tight, with mechanical ventilation to provide continuous fresh air from the outside. High performance triple-paned windows complement the building enclosure and maximize passive solar gain while ensuring a warm, draft-free winter, even when sitting close to the glass. A properly sized air source heat pump offers efficient heating & cooling, and includes a carefully designed the duct distribution system to provide even comfort throughout the house. The super-insulated envelope allows us to significantly reduce the equipment capacity, duct size, and airflow quantities, while maintaining unparalleled thermal comfort.
ENERGY EFFICIENT. The building’s shell and mechanical systems play instrumental roles in the home’s exceptional performance. The building enclosure reduces the most significant energy glutton: heating. Continuous super-insulation, thorough air sealing, triple-pane windows, and passive solar gain work together to yield a miniscule heating load. All active energy consumers are extremely efficient: an air source heat pump for heating and cooling, a heat pump hot water heater, LED lighting, energy recovery ventilation (ERV), and high efficiency appliances. The result is a home that uses 70% less energy than a similar new home built to code requirements.
OVERALL. The home embodies the owners’ goals and values while comprehensively enabling thermal comfort, energy efficiency, a vacation respite, and supplementary income.
PROJECT TEAM
ZeroEnergy Design - Architect & Mechanical Designer
A.F. Hultin & Co. - Contractor
Pamet Valley Landscape Design - Landscape & Masonry
Lisa Finch - Original Artwork
European Architectural Supply - Windows
Eric Roth Photography - Photography

We closed off the open formal dining room, so it became a den with artistic barn doors, which created a more private entrance/foyer. We removed the wall between the kitchen and living room, including the fireplace, to create a great room. We also closed off an open staircase to build a wall with a dual focal point — it accommodates the TV and fireplace. We added a double-wide slider to the sunroom turning it into a happy play space that connects indoor and outdoor living areas.
We reduced the size of the entrance to the powder room to create mudroom lockers. The kitchen was given a double island to fit the family’s cooking and entertaining needs, and we used a balance of warm (e.g., beautiful blue cabinetry in the kitchen) and cool colors to add a happy vibe to the space. Our design studio chose all the furnishing and finishes for each room to enhance the space's final look.
Builder Partner – Parsetich Custom Homes
Photographer - Sarah Shields
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Project completed by Wendy Langston's Everything Home interior design firm, which serves Carmel, Zionsville, Fishers, Westfield, Noblesville, and Indianapolis.
For more about Everything Home, click here: https://everythinghomedesigns.com/
To learn more about this project, click here:
https://everythinghomedesigns.com/portfolio/hard-working-haven/

Blurring the boundaries between internal and external Casa Pabellón uses a unique plan that brings the external environment inside and directs the inhabitants to secluded nature filled spaces. When fully opened the house allows it’s family to live and work nearly completely outdoors. When privacy, the elements or security require it, the house can be completely closed down. The plan and lightweight pavilion structure allows for a fast and modular construction with off site prefabrication reducing environmental impact and waste. Open air circulation routes through the property reinforce the connection to the surrounding South Pacific jungles that cover the hills in this quiet corner of Costa Rica. It has been our pleasure to work alongside our clients to create for them their dream home and lifestyle in this project and we look forward to guiding the design through the construction phase.
Find the right local pro for your project

Design Builders & Remodeling is a one stop shop operation. From the start, design solutions are strongly rooted in practical applications and experience. Project planning takes into account the realities of the construction process and mindful of your established budget. All the work is centralized in one firm reducing the chances of costly or time consuming surprises. A solid partnership with solid professionals to help you realize your dreams for a new or improved home.
This classic Connecticut home was bought by a growing family. The house was in an ideal location but needed to be expanded. Design Builders & Remodeling almost doubled the square footage of the home. Creating a new sunny and spacious master bedroom, new guestroom, laundry room, garage, kids bathroom, expanded and renovated the kitchen, family room, and playroom. The upgrades and addition is seamlessly and thoughtfully integrated to the original footprint.

Woca Oil Diamond - Chicago - Night Work Restaurant Hardwood Floor - Recoating with Woca Cleaners - and Apply I coat WOCA DIAMOND OIL NATURAL - WOCA is where the future of hardwood finishes meets traditional and proven methods. WOCA is manufactured from natural, cold-pressed vegetable oils and is VOC-free.
Unlike conventional finishing methods, WOCA penetrates the fibers of the wood, hardens and strengthens the wood from within while simultaneously creating a hard-wearing, dirt resistant wear layer on the surface.
Unlike other common oils such as tung oil, WOCA is a hardening oil that increases the strength of the wood and reduces the required maintenance. For any additional questions you may have, please Call 847-956-2244 we would be more than happy to share our years of experience in the hardwood industry with you and provide guidance with your project.

Water features add an element of both sound and movement to your outdoor space. This provides many benefits. A water feature can serve as a stunning focal point, and the sound of moving water has a peaceful effect. The sound of babbling water can be calming, and serves to reduce noise pollution from nearby traffic. A water feature can help to create the perfect space to relax and unwind. Water features can be integrated into any size landscape project, and will provide lasting value and enjoyment.

More projects, welcome to website: www.maxdiashop.com,
or INS: maxdia_home
1. Handmade with cotton and linen blended thick fabric. The color of the base fabric is cream.
2. Easily installed in minutes with all necessary hardware included, lift cords are on the right side.
3. Lifting track is made of a robust aircraft aluminum alloy. Each shade can be adjusted to any position due to our unique speed reducer and self-locking device.
4. Standard shade is unlined, can block out 65% of light, privacy lining and blackout lining can be selected for a custom order.
5. Attached to the headrail with a velcro strip that holds tightly for daily use but is easy to pull off when you want to wash them. They are great for people with dust allergies, families with small children or homeowners with pets.

Sponsored
Fredericksburg, OH
High Point Cabinets
Columbus' Experienced Custom Cabinet Builder | 4x Best of Houzz Winner

The Ascenda Through-the-Floor Elevator makes adding accessibility between floors easier. Its compact, space-saving design travels through a floor opening without requiring a traditional elevator shaft, helping reduce construction requirements and overall project complexity. Ideal for homes, offices, churches, and other spaces where a conventional elevator isn't practical, Ascenda delivers convenient vertical access in a streamlined, customizable package.

The Ascenda Through-the-Floor Elevator makes adding accessibility between floors easier. Its compact, space-saving design travels through a floor opening without requiring a traditional elevator shaft, helping reduce construction requirements and overall project complexity. Ideal for homes, offices, churches, and other spaces where a conventional elevator isn't practical, Ascenda delivers convenient vertical access in a streamlined, customizable package.

The Ascenda Through-the-Floor Elevator makes adding accessibility between floors easier. Its compact, space-saving design travels through a floor opening without requiring a traditional elevator shaft, helping reduce construction requirements and overall project complexity. Ideal for homes, offices, churches, and other spaces where a conventional elevator isn't practical, Ascenda delivers convenient vertical access in a streamlined, customizable package.

Blurring the boundaries between internal and external Casa Pabellón uses a unique plan that brings the external environment inside and directs the inhabitants to secluded nature filled spaces. When fully opened the house allows it’s family to live and work nearly completely outdoors. When privacy, the elements or security require it, the house can be completely closed down. The plan and lightweight pavilion structure allows for a fast and modular construction with off site prefabrication reducing environmental impact and waste. Open air circulation routes through the property reinforce the connection to the surrounding South Pacific jungles that cover the hills in this quiet corner of Costa Rica. It has been our pleasure to work alongside our clients to create for them their dream home and lifestyle in this project and we look forward to guiding the design through the construction phase.

The Ascenda Through-the-Floor Elevator makes adding accessibility between floors easier. Its compact, space-saving design travels through a floor opening without requiring a traditional elevator shaft, helping reduce construction requirements and overall project complexity. Ideal for homes, offices, churches, and other spaces where a conventional elevator isn't practical, Ascenda delivers convenient vertical access in a streamlined, customizable package.

The Ascenda Through-the-Floor Elevator makes adding accessibility between floors easier. Its compact, space-saving design travels through a floor opening without requiring a traditional elevator shaft, helping reduce construction requirements and overall project complexity. Ideal for homes, offices, churches, and other spaces where a conventional elevator isn't practical, Ascenda delivers convenient vertical access in a streamlined, customizable package.

Sponsored
Delaware, OH
Buckeye Basements, Inc.
Central Ohio's Basement Finishing ExpertsBest Of Houzz '13-'21

Blurring the boundaries between internal and external Casa Pabellón uses a unique plan that brings the external environment inside and directs the inhabitants to secluded nature filled spaces. When fully opened the house allows it’s family to live and work nearly completely outdoors. When privacy, the elements or security require it, the house can be completely closed down. The plan and lightweight pavilion structure allows for a fast and modular construction with off site prefabrication reducing environmental impact and waste. Open air circulation routes through the property reinforce the connection to the surrounding South Pacific jungles that cover the hills in this quiet corner of Costa Rica. It has been our pleasure to work alongside our clients to create for them their dream home and lifestyle in this project and we look forward to guiding the design through the construction phase.

Always on HVAC has an unwavering commitment to meeting, no.. EXCEEDING our client’s HVAC needs. With many years of experience and a wealth of industry knowledge to boot, our team of professionals will use an extensive range of approaches for the projects we take on. We have acquired the necessary certifications and experience for installing ductless mini-split systems. We take great pride in assisting homeowners and businesses who are looking to replace their old systems with ones that produce clean energy, which further reduces your carbon footprint!

We closed off the open formal dining room, so it became a den with artistic barn doors, which created a more private entrance/foyer. We removed the wall between the kitchen and living room, including the fireplace, to create a great room. We also closed off an open staircase to build a wall with a dual focal point — it accommodates the TV and fireplace. We added a double-wide slider to the sunroom turning it into a happy play space that connects indoor and outdoor living areas.
We reduced the size of the entrance to the powder room to create mudroom lockers. The kitchen was given a double island to fit the family’s cooking and entertaining needs, and we used a balance of warm (e.g., beautiful blue cabinetry in the kitchen) and cool colors to add a happy vibe to the space. Our design studio chose all the furnishing and finishes for each room to enhance the space's final look.
Builder Partner – Parsetich Custom Homes
Photographer - Sarah Shields
---
Project completed by Wendy Langston's Everything Home interior design firm, which serves Carmel, Zionsville, Fishers, Westfield, Noblesville, and Indianapolis.
For more about Everything Home, click here: https://everythinghomedesigns.com/
To learn more about this project, click here:
https://everythinghomedesigns.com/portfolio/hard-working-haven/

Timber frame homes offer unique challenges during a remodel. What often makes them beautiful and attractive to most homeowners, also makes them challenging for space requirements.
Context: The lovely couple that owned this home were struggling with some interesting floor plan challenges that just didn't work for their family. The loved the beautiful timbers and woodwork of their home, but the dramatically sloping ceilings on the second floor, particularly in the bathroom, just didn't work for this 1 1/2 bath home. Needing to use the skylight to approach the toilet was a less then ideal scenario. Although the bathroom footprint was more then adequate, the sloped ceiling only made half of the space useable. Check out the Before/After post on our blog to see the photos of the house pre-renovation. As much as they loved all the wood features in their home, another challenge they had was light. The wood ceiling made everything inside the house darker, even with a fantastic array of south facing windows, there were spaces in the home that felt dark and small. When they contacted us they wanted to know how could they make their brighter and more inviting, were there solutions to the 2nd floor sloped ceiling issues, and if they were going to do all of this work, how could they make their home more comfortable and efficient. A nagging water leak in the upstairs bathroom spurred them into action and here is how we solved their dilemma.
Conclusion: First, we added a little dormer to the rear of the house so we could get full headroom in nearly all of the upstairs bathroom! Then we decided to extend that dormer one more timber bay over to create a walk in closet with natural light and plenty of space. Since we were contemplating energy efficiency, we resolved a nagging issue that is present in a lot of timber frame construction, air tightness. Commonly found in timber frame construction, fiberglass insulation is installed in the rafter bays and board ceilings are installed over top. Unfortunately, board ceilings are anything but air tight, and fiberglass insulation needs to be in an airtight cavity for maximum effectiveness. So we were able to solve two issues at the same time for this homeowner. We removed the board ceiling and fiberglass insulation, we dense packed the rafter bays with cellulose insulation, and installed sheetrock in place of the boards. The boards were salvaged for re-use by the homeowner, and the space and light quality was dramatically improved. Some may think that losing the board ceiling took something away from the space, but what you'll see in the pictures is that it highly accentuates the heavy timbers and really makes them stand out in a beautiful way. Now with this added airtightness, better insulation, and brighter space, the homeowner hardly runs their wood stove, and it's so quiet in the space, an added bonus from changing the insulation. It became necessary to also add a sheetrock ceiling to the living room to hide the plumbing from the new bathroom layout above. Changing this ceiling gave the homeowner some real quality lighting that was lacking in the living room before. The brighter ceiling and new lighting layout completely transforms the living room into a space you want to hang out, even though the layout didn't change at all. When the homeowner saw the finished spaces she said "I can't believe this is my house, I want to live in this house"
Energy Efficiency: I touched a little on the efficiency above, but like all projects done with Mottram Architecture, we always want to leave you with a little extra. Timber frame construction with board ceilings and fiberglass insulation are notoriously leaky! If you want to know what we think about fiberglass insulation, check our our blog post on Why Fiberglass Insulation Sucks. By installing cellulose insulation and covering it with sheetrock we were able to greatly reduce the heat flowing out of this home. It not only improves cashflow it improves the comfort level in the space. Who wants to sit in their living room and feel a draft? Let us remind you, we are not saying cellulose insulation is an air barrier, we use the sheetrock to help with that, but it does significantly reduce the air flow over fiberglass insulation. And when we reduce the airflow, we reduce the heat flow. And when we reduce the heat flow, we reduce the need to re-heat that drafty air from outside. When it comes to energy efficiency the first and best place to start is air infiltration. We greatly reduced the air infiltration with the new insulation, but we also added a hat and warm boots. What I mean by that is, we improved the insulation in the roof, and we installed insulation in the basement. Maybe it's a silly analogy, but when you think about keeping warm, we always start with the hat and boots! With sustainability in mind, the next project will be to add a deck to the front of this house with rain catchment barrels from the metal roof. They are planning to plant a garden in the spring and the rain catchment system will help to irrigate the new garden.
Builder: East Shore Builders
Photographer: Michael Eric Berube

Sponsored
Fredericksburg, OH
High Point Cabinets
Columbus' Experienced Custom Cabinet Builder | 4x Best of Houzz Winner

The Ascenda Through-the-Floor Elevator makes adding accessibility between floors easier. Its compact, space-saving design travels through a floor opening without requiring a traditional elevator shaft, helping reduce construction requirements and overall project complexity. Ideal for homes, offices, churches, and other spaces where a conventional elevator isn't practical, Ascenda delivers convenient vertical access in a streamlined, customizable package.

The Cherry Road project is a humble yet striking example of how small changes can have a big impact. A meaningful project as the final room to be renovated in this house, thus our completion aligned with the family’s move-in. The kitchen posed a number of problems the design worked to remedy. Such as an existing window oriented the room towards a neighboring driveway. The initial design move sought to reorganize the space internally, focusing the view from the sink back through the house to the pool and courtyard beyond. This simple repositioning allowed the range to center on the opposite wall, flanked by two windows that reduce direct views to the driveway while increasing the natural light of the space.
Opposite that opening to the dining room, we created a new custom hutch that has the upper doors bypass doors incorporate an antique mirror, then led they magnified the light and view opposite side of the room. The ceilings we were confined to eight-foot four, so we wanted to create as much verticality as possible. All the cabinetry was designed to go to the ceiling, incorporating a simple coat mold at the ceiling. The west wall of the kitchen is primarily floor-to-ceiling storage behind paneled doors. So the refrigeration and freezers are fully integrated.

Finished effect of the main reception living room with pure white plain wall to reflect natural light and reduce indoor stuffiness under high temperature climate. A large L-shaped tufted fabric sectional sofa is matched with multi-color decorative throw pillows, paired with a marble double-layer combined coffee table in the center. The space reserves a background wall for TV cabinet customization later, with large sliding glass door leading out to the courtyard lawn. Light-colored large tile flooring reflects light to brighten the whole room, furniture and cabinet materials all add moisture-proof coating to avoid deformation and mold caused by Senegal’s long rainy season.
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