How Important Is The Direction Your House Faces

How Important Is The Direction Your House Faces

It depends! What are your interests? Where do you like to spend your time and doing what?
Do you like to garden, grow vegetables,flowers,grass? Do you have sensitive rugs, paintings. Do you read a lot, paint, draw.Do you have a Plasma TV, or watch a lot of TV?
Well unless you are buying or building a mansion, you won’t be able to cure all these nor would you want to spend the time figuring it out, but with a little planning and a good builder you can maximize your homes potential.

The first question is where in the world are you building, we’ll just deal with the US for today. North, South, East, West, or a combination of them. Being in the South-East we have mild winters and warm summers so shade in the afternoon is important to keep the house from heating up too much. I started this post after being in two houses yesterday, both had three season rooms. The first house which faces East-South East, has a fantastic three/four season room with tile floor, Eze-Breeze windows, bead-board vaulted ceiling and it was frigid cold in there. Now the builder could probably add a vent to take the chill off. The next house we went to faces North North - West, same four season room, tile, Eze-Breeze windows and this one was toasty, in fact you could have opened the windows and let a breeze in.

Quite a remarkable difference, which got me thinking. If you live in a colder climate that gets a lot of snow there might be an advantage to having your driveway face towards the sun to melt the snow, I’ve seen streets where one side is cleared completely and the other side is still dealing with frozen snow and ice.

This is a fascinating subject and there is a lot of opinion out there on it, there is one issue that is common and that is using the suns rays in the winter but shielding the house from them in the summer. This can be done with proper placement and also the correct overhangs. Vital to have the correct insulation also. Getting the sun into the kitchen, bedrooms in the morning is another favourite, the placement of the garage can make a difference, trees, and the type of trees, deciduous trees look and act a whole lot different in the summer time versus the winter, (they loose their leaves, silly!)

Many a patio goes unused in the summer because it gets too hot, and many a lawn suffers through life with no sun. I have seen many amateur gardeners start their vegetable garden in the shade only to curse their lack of edible vegetables...no I haven’t! That was me!!
So building your dream house just got harder, well not really, better to find this stuff out before you build rather than after you move in, and with the technology available today, and the advances in building materials there is a lot of help out there, start by getting a compass app on your phone!