House plan

Rob Roy's arguments about the maximum area of round structures make a lot of sense, and so our first house plan was round. Our second was 16-sided. After receiving foundation bids that nearly equaled our entire building budget, and realizing that a sixteen-sided roof would cost even more, we started over, working from these criteria:
> Simple enough for novices to build
> Passive solar
> Can incorporate standard-sized building materials
> Cheap enough to pay as we go
Most importantly, we reminded ourselves, the house is a means to an end---a different lifestyle---the house isn't the point. It's just a way to come up with a home that's easy/cheap to heat and power, is fairly "green" to build and healthful to live in, and easy/cheap enough to build to avoid debt.
The design elements flowed clearly and easily from these criteria. Our desire to take advantage of the sun and be able to use "off the shelf" building material meant that the house would have to be rectilinear. In order to be simple and cheap, it would also have to be single story. We decided upon a shed roof, since this is the simplest roof to build and lends itself to capturing southern sun. (Passive solar also meant that we couldn't tuck the house under the edge of the woods.) Here are our initial sketches for the resulting plans: