{"id":4914,"date":"2014-12-22T07:20:32","date_gmt":"2014-12-22T14:20:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=4914"},"modified":"2014-12-22T13:05:13","modified_gmt":"2014-12-22T20:05:13","slug":"this-house-is-a-home-for-three-generations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2014\/12\/this-house-is-a-home-for-three-generations\/","title":{"rendered":"This house was built for three generations"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Blanding\"<\/a>

Ed Kemmick\/Last Best News<\/p>

Nathan Blanding and his wife and two daughters live in the front part of the house he built on the 500 block of Clark Avenue. Nathan’s parents live in the attached residence in the rear.<\/p><\/div>\n

Nathan Blanding chronicled the construction of his Clark Avenue home on a blog he called \u201cMr. Blanding\u2019s Dream House.\u201d<\/p>\n

The title was inspired by \u201cMr. Blandings Builds His Dream House,\u201d a 1948 film starring Cary Grant and Myrna Loy.<\/p>\n

For Nathan Blanding, it really was his dream house: it was an infill project, multigenerational, handicapped-accessible and high-energy-performance. And he built it himself.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was quite a pleasure to get all the criteria in one house,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Everything on his list of criteria might look familiar except \u201cmultigenerational.\u201d That simply means it was designed and built specifically to shelter Nathan and his wife and children as well as Nathan\u2019s parents, in a house classified as a single-family house that is actually two attached residences.<\/p>\n

Nathan, an architect who now owns a design-build company, said he didn\u2019t have many helpful examples to guide him. But there were plenty of cautionary tales about parents moving in with their children for economic or health reasons, or grandchildren moving in with their grandparents. These situations might involve a spare bedroom or a basement, the plans all makeshift and improvisational.<\/p>\n

\"Jocelyn\"<\/a>

Nathan Blanding photo<\/p>

Nathan Blanding had some helpers, including his daughter Jocelyn, when he was building his house.<\/p><\/div>\n

He and his family had the advantage of architectural forethought. It helped that no one was afraid to talk about difficult subjects, Nathan said. He and his wife, Kristen, talked with his parents, Terese and Keith, about a shared house where his parents could live even after they lost mobility, and where eventually they could die.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why his parents\u2019 half of the house (actually a third of the total space) has a downstairs guest room that could become their bedroom when they are no longer able to use the stairs. There is a zero-entry shower and the doors are wide enough to provide easy wheelchair access. His mother\u2019s upstairs art studio is plumbed, meaning it could be converted fairly easily to a bathroom if his parents ever needed a live-in caregiver.<\/p>\n

Nathan also designed the 2,800-square-foot house, relatively small by modern standards, to ensure \u201cthere\u2019s enough room for everyone to have their own space.\u201d His father has a \u201cman cave\u201d study in the ground-floor guest room, tucked under the stairs. Kristen, an oil and gas consultant, has an office just off the front door, where she can have the privacy to conduct her business from home.<\/p>\n

And there is plenty of space for being together. There are frequent visits from residence to residence, particularly on the part of Nathan and Kristen\u2019s two daughters, Jocelyn, 6, and Ella, 1\u00bd .<\/p>\n

\u201cThe girls spend a lot of time up there,\u201d Nathan said, referring to his parents\u2019 living space. \u201cWhenever they get tired of playing with each other, they can find a parent or a grandparent to curl up on the couch with.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is a large rooftop patio between the two residences, a small deck for Keith and Terese and another, larger ground-floor patio for the whole family.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe decided to make all our communal spaces that are big be the outside spaces,\u201d Nathan said.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>Nathan and Kristen used to live right across the street from their new house. He was working for A&E Architects at the time, and his parents were already living in Billings.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe pulled the grandkid card and convinced them to move to Billings,\u201d Nathan said.<\/p>\n

Or, as his mother put it, \u201cWe were living in Oregon and we were accused of being derelict grandparents.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nathan and his parents had been talking for years about living together someday. Twenty years ago, Nathan helped his father build a house between Augusta and Choteau. It was big enough to include a bed-and-breakfast that his parents then ran, and father and son hoped to work on another such project someday.<\/p>\n

They knew they wanted to build in Billings, but they weren\u2019t sure where. Nathan and Kristen loved their neighborhood, on the 500 block of Clark, and they started thinking about the lot across the street, which had two run-down rental houses on it.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe just realized this was the perfect spot,\u201d Nathan said.<\/p>\n

\"Family\"<\/a>

Nathan Blanding photo<\/p>

Kristen, Ella and Nathan Blanding on the rooftop patio.<\/p><\/div>\n

It took a year for all of them to figure out the financial arrangements and logistics of living together. Nathan left A&E Architects in the spring of 2011 and devoted the next two years to the project. His father suffered a small stroke and had a general loss of muscle tone, which prevented him from working on the house as much as they planned.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had a pretty big role reversal,\u201d Nathan said.<\/p>\n

Nathan took a part-time job designing and building sets for the Nova Center for the Performing Arts, and it took two years to build the two-family house, which also involved demolishing the two rental units.<\/p>\n

The two-story stucco house has R-80 roof insulation and R-50 in the walls, both far beyond what is required by code. The house is heated and cooled by a heat recovery ventilator, made for use in tight, highly insulated houses. It brings in fresh air and vents stale indoor air, and in winter months it transfers heat from outgoing air to the fresh air coming in. It operates on the same principle in the summer, except that the incoming air is cooled with the air being vented.<\/p>\n

\"Patio\"<\/a>

Nathan Blanding photo<\/p>

A patio sits on the roof spanning the two residences.<\/p><\/div>\n

The result, Nathan said, is that a gas furnace is their only source of heat, and most of the time it is not needed. In such a tight house, there are noticeable heat gains from appliances, a plasma TV, computers and such. The gas bill averages $25 a month, he said.<\/p>\n

Nathan followed passive-house standards, from the German passivhaus movement, the goal of which is ultra-low energy use.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fact that we can produce houses that produce more energy than they use and we don\u2019t\u2014that\u2019s pretty irritating,\u201d Nathan said.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why he started North-South Building, a design-build company that will give him the chance to build such houses for other clients. Doing the building, too, rather than just drawing plans for a house, \u201cis just a much broader, deeper experience,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Nathan said his ideal clients will probably be a retired couple looking to build a \u201chigh-performance small house,\u201d or to remodel an existing house close to the downtown.<\/p>\n

At the moment he is designing a house for Pam and Bob Ellis. Pam Ellis said she and her husband \u201cwere really enamored\u201d with Nathan\u2019s Clark Avenue home. \u201cIt\u2019s beautifully done, beautiful finishes,\u201d she said, \u201cbut without the huge wasted space you see in so many traditionally designed homes.\u201d<\/p>\n

She said they also like his practical approach, his thoughtful consideration for how a house will be used, and to how future repairs can be made, \u201cto what is attractive but also cost-efficient.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s the stuff you don\u2019t typically get from a builder,\u201d she said\u2014\u201cusing every inch in a creative way that\u2019s also practical.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nathan Blanding chronicled the construction of his Clark Avenue home on a blog he called \u201cMr. Blanding\u2019s Dream House.\u201d The title was inspired by \u201cMr. Blandings Builds His Dream House,\u201d a 1948 film starring Cary Grant and Myrna Loy. For Nathan Blanding, it really was his dream house: it was an infill project, multigenerational, handicapped-accessible […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4915,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,17],"tags":[1841,1842,1840,1843],"class_list":["post-4914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-billings","category-culture","tag-ae-architects","tag-infill","tag-nathan-blanding","tag-passivhaus","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4914"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4914\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}