Our home journey began over a decade ago, when my wife and I were looking for a new home. We stumbled onto an old storefront with a house attached. The “Davidson Rock Shop” had been polishing Petoskey stones and selling them to tourists for over 50 years. The building was part of Traverse City’s original downtown and was built just after the Civil War. It sits across the street from the public beach on West Bay - an awesome location, just 2 blocks away from downtown.
We decided to tear down the commercial side and sell the small house to some friends. The design was particularly difficult due to the fact that the commercial infill lot that was left was 25’ wide and 117’ deep AND we needed a ‘one hour fire rated wall’ on the long sides. That means no windows on the long sides. A big challenge was bringing light into a ‘shotgun’ style house.
The other big design consideration was that I wanted to build the most energy-efficient building in Traverse City. The building follows a German design standard called Passive House. This design standard has four main criteria 1) Super-insulation 2) Very tight envelope 3) an Energy Recovery Ventilator to bring in the fresh air and is 4)Solar heated.
I retired from teaching and started tearing down the old building the next day. The final design (I went through 4 major design changes) has a small apartment and a garage on the first floor. The second floor has the main living space and has a ‘clear story’ that goes up to the third floor and the decks, flooding the house with light. The floors and the domestic hot water are heated by the solar panels on the roof.