Hi
We are in the process of purchasing a 4 bed detached on app .2 of an acre east facing rear garden. We moved from dub having had a south facing rear garden and especially with last summer we had a brill time in our small garden with the kit and living room flooded in light for most if the day!
Back renting again and keen to get going and don’t fancy hanging around again for another 3/4 years for the right aspect given pressure with children in school places , wishing to get settled etc but not too happy compromising on the aspect as felt it really improved our quality of life previous also adding to great solar gain!
The house we are purchasing is a private sale so can’t post link! One advantage is no EA involved thank F!!!.
Any advice welcome but the area we are looking at not much comes up and there is a lot of demand given this!
Got a arch to have a gander as would need front alteration and pp etc so extra expense as building regs have changed as you need a arch/ eng etc to certify the whole process and any works completed require certain so I imagine it is going to be more costly that previously would have been obviously to fund the poor arch that have been having such a hard time the past 5 odd years!!
Thanks for advice in advance and excuses the rant just very fed up of our self serving policy makers!
For me garden orientation is about the last thing to compromise on, particularly if the living space is at the back of the house.
Even worse if you are used to a good orientation. There is a sundial app where you can specify the house on google maps and see what path the sun (and light for your back garden looks like).
Play around with this for a while to see when you lose the light at the back of the house, it may help inform your decision)
Given the house is detached and on 0.2 acre I don’t think orientation is as important as if it was a terraced or a semi-d that are close together or an apartment. If its detached then the living room and kitchen might have two aspects anyway??? Also 0.2 of an acre would be big enough to get a lot of light no mater what orientation the back was. TBH I think people have gone OTT regarding the importance of orientation. Allot of dark house are due to do with bad layouts and placements/size of windows rather than orientation.
There’s a few of them referenced on here already but one above seems to have same functionality.
I’ve willed away many hours looking at how sun moves around for various houses I looked at over the years. But I get a bit obsessed over stuff like that(other people might put it differently).
In a well insulated house you get a lot of passive heat from sun so it’s nice to get where the house is most lived in.
Don’t forget to look for obstructions to light to, particularly high trees.
Seriously though, light is good for the soul.
For us we wanted south facing in a very specific area. Missed the “bottom” in 2012 where we could have easily got what we wanted within budget. Come the end of 2013 we were faced with increasing prices and no supply so had to give in on one of aspect, location or size. We chose aspect. North facing but very long back garden. Not ideal but the sun comes in the front of the house all day, the back garden is long enough to get sun in the summer, we have big windows on both sides of the house and at least the shelf life of our food is longer in the colder kitchen!! Plus the fact that we both work, most of the year we wont exactly have the time to lounge in the sun.
We’ve just had to make a compromise and get on with it. If we really want south facing in the future we could sell up and add 10%. Again not ideal, but we’re gonna make the most of it. My biggest issue is that we’ve dropped a few hundred k on a pile of bricks in a bankrupt country
+1
The back of my house faces ESE and we have fantastic light in the morning. In the afternoon the side of the house is heated by the sun, and in the evening sunlight comes in the front. TBH the easterly windows are most useful at the right time - early morning which is the only year-round consistent time for everyone to be in the house.
I concur. One of the houses I’m looking at is detached on a similar sized plot and I think the aspect issue is far less of an issue than it’s made out to be, especially for this type of house and plot. The back of the house, where the kitchen, the livingroom and the patio nearest the house is northfacing. But because there is nothing to the side of the house, they also get sun from late afternoon until sunset. And with a large garden, there is a second patio further down the garden which is permanently sunny (in so far as sunlight is permanent in this country). The south facing front of the house already has a large porch but as the front garden is large and private, fitting a front conservatory is a very viable option. I remember how exciting I found glass porches as a kid, as they gave you a feeling of being outside even when the weather was crap, so having such a space for my son is a very appealing idea.
As well as that, maybe I’ve got very messed up priorities but I prefer the room I have my (main) tv in to not be very bright as I enjoy being able to make out what’s on the screen when I watch it.
May have been mentioned previously but I use this app called Sun Surveyor. Tried a few different android apps but find this the best. It has a camera view that overlays the path of the sun that you can adjust for any time of the year.
Just the tool to have at a viewing to tell whether the Sun will make it over that easterly terrace of houses all summer long or is your garden a modern-era Newgrange.
A lot will depend on your lifestyle and the size of the garden. I will say one thing, as an architect, a lot of the calls we get about extensions are from people with north or north east facing gardens. The first comment is always ‘we want more light’. Cast Architecture did an interesting front extension on a terraced house with similar orientation castarchitecture.ie/?project=fro … n-tallaght
There are advantages to this orientation too - it is really nice to have your breakfast in a east facing room, you don’t have an issue with blinding sun/overheating as you’re cooking your dinner in the evening. If you do extend to the back or side, it would be easy to get some southern orientation on the extension. If the house is detached, you can probably put in a south facing window on that elevation.
Some compromise is needed and it is a personal choice. Having lived in both it was important for me to have S/SW at the back of the house. Its not only the light in the house but it’s sitting outside the “back door” on a sunny evening - no matter how few they are. I have miserable memories of bringing everything down to the end of the garden and huddling round the last bit of sun as it dropped behind the roof of my own house when the orientation was E/NE
