2-floor Paramecium House Plans with Split Saircase

We've been working hard to come up with a plausible floor plan.

The Hot Dog House plan wasn't much of a hit. We didn't really like it either. Sometimes when going for green, pride is put on the shelf for practicality or for the environment (hopefully for both). But the Hot Dog house was not practical.

Susan was worried about how hard it would be to keep those beehive shapes warm in the winter. So she set about to come up with more of an earthship design (usually done with rammed-earth tires), but with earth bags instead.

She's got a floor plan designing software program, and this is what she came up with on her third version within our input along the way.



I just had a few modifications to make on that, and it turned out that this excercise came in very useful as you will see below.



A couple of days prior, I had a phone chat with Tim Hall, the Earthbag builder in Hawaii, who has been providing a lot of great input for us. He wasn't very excited about the square plan, thinking it was too conventional, and that it wouldn't really work very well with Earth bags.

I addressed the concern about how hard it would be to keep an earth bag home warm in the winter. Yes, there is nearly 2 feet of thermal mass in the walls, but usually you have to go 4 feet in the soil to get past the frost line. Soil isn't a very good insulator, but it's a great thermal mass flywheel. But without insulation, I would think that it would tend to reflect an average of inside and outside temperatures over a week-long period of time, or more. So if it's really cold out, that cold is not only going to penetrate, but it's going to sap the warmth out of the home. If it's insulated, though, against outside temperatures, and tied into the below-4-feet temp of the earth, then it would be great for its thermal flywheel capability, maintaining a comfortable average temperature, augmented by the solar gain to offset the winter cold.

Anyway, he encouraged me to come up with a hybrid design that combines Susan's floor plan with the vault earth bag design, but to go with two floors, and with a 20-foot width and height of the vault.

My first step was to make a revision to Susan's design, then apply that to the two story vault.

Here's what I came up with this morning, with input from Cheri.



It's not drawn to scale. It started as a very rough sketch that I planned to replace with a more carefully drawn version. But the longer I worked on it, the less inclined I was to re-draw it. The second floor would only be about two feet more narrow than the first floor at it's base, then would more rapidly curve to the apex of the parabola shape. I estimate the total square footage as around 2500 ft2. The first floor is around 1700 ft2.


We found a design of a split staircase online that we really liked to pattern in our living room. One section going to the kids area, and the other to the storage over the garage.

We like this floor plan a lot, especially the split stairway in the living room, the high ceilings in the living room and master bedroom, how things are grouped well together, the master bath & walk-in closet design that we liked so much in our Ephraim home; the reading loft with spiral staircase in the master bedroom, the playroom balcony that our kids love at my parent's house. The taller structure would enable us to put solar thermal and PV panels along the second floor with a walk way over the first floor solarium so we can brush the snow off the panels and give them a wash occasionally in the summer. The eutectic salts rack to the right of the solarium would help keep that room warm at night. This plan would work for us.

Cheri as a bit reluctant to have two doors to the outside from the second floor, considering teenage escape tendencies (once the kids get older). But I figure that teens will find ways to escape anyway (code requires egress), and I'd prefer to go for the trust deterrent than the cage.

Owen Geiger thought that a 20-foot vault would be a stretch for Earthbag technology, and he wondered how we would move forms (guides) that big along. I'm thinking that if the interior walls that are also earth bag are laid at the same time, that they can help hold things together until the arch is completed.

Tim also discouraged me from relying on rainwater harvesting. Given issues of 1) potential nuclear events and fallout, 2) chem trail muckity muck, 3) pollution from the 4-corners coal plant (~300 miles away); he thinks it would be best to get the potable water from a well, pumped by renewable energy.

Susan's going to work up a new set of plans based on this Paramecium design. She might not be able to put the curve into it, but it will give enough guidance to an architect who can do the plans more precisely once we settle on the design.

Keep the great input coming. We appreciate all the guidance we've been getting.

What a ride!