Garden/grounds related half of the "move a door" planning. 1/? (Not sure how long this will develop.) After thinking on this a bit more than initially planned since my last post, I've decided to divide this into two parts...one for here (Garden/grounds), and one
for the house proper. It might be easiest to follow if you go read there first because that gets into the why and how we decided on a new spot more.
Our side door is awkward for a host of reasons which I get into more in the other thread. Garden specific is the side porch currently prevents a straight walk through exterior path from the front of the property to the back unless you walk on the driveway which is near impossible when a car is parked in it because the neighbor's fence is reachable if you're standing on the east edge of the driveway--so zero wiggle room--especially parked near the porch because the porch extends a bit into the driveway, as seen here:
I'd been bringing up the idea of moving it around to the back of the house and coming into the kitchen. Well, much to my surprise this time, Sean apparently had had enough of dealing with being faced with overnight snowdrifts on that side porch and stairs when he leaves for work in the wee dark hours of the morn when I have actually gone to bed before 2AM and so had not yet shoveled.
So after more discussion he decided that, yes, moving it around back was a good idea, as was adding on a relatively narrow width three season porch which would make the walk from the driveway both closer and more sheltered. (His preferred location for the move would be to the left of the double windows you can see in the pic above, which I have come to agree with for reasons I get into in the other thread).
How this relates to the garden is the following:
1) At first, he wanted to now add an above ground greenhouse on that side of the house. (A bit more of this below.)
2) He also likes the idea of being able to wash up whatever from the garden/also groceries without tramping through the dining room.
3) This doesn't mean we won't still add the pit greenhouse/walipini on the west side of where the bulky door exit is.
4) We can reuse bits of the current side porch in the project, and the removal of same will allow for a clear walkway alongside the driveway from front to back.
One thing I'm concerned about is our town has some odd restrictions about additions that can be construed as "work spaces" and therefore make the property be deemed mixed use solely based on their size--not if you're actually making anything to sell in said space. (Apparently this happened when a lot of people added small business workshops to strictly residential areas and then same because noise nuisances.) So we'd have to be careful of the footprint of the greenhouse because it would be considered in addition to the walipini's footprint. The latter was never meant to be very big because we originally were intending to only make the back line of the house flush with where the current bulky stairs and bath/kitchen wall are which left us well within the footprint that would push us into "commercial space".
I did float the idea to him that instead of making a walk out greenhouse (if the footprint turns into an issue), we instead just make a plain three season porch that can double as a seed starting spot with much better sun than we currently have. We already have a hose spigot we no longer use there but we could add a simple potting sink using just the cold water, and would only need to tie in a drain (and we will soon be having some replacement drain work done in the cellar anyway--so it would be a short run and thus easy to add to the already discussed work.)
I also need to see how the two additions (porch/greenhouse and pit greenhouse/walipini might be tied together to walk between the two internally, but the bulky stairs might mess force us to build further out, and I don't want to move those because they are near perfectly lined up with the cellar stairs coming down from the first floor which has helped with certain longer bits being cornered in the past and likely will be again.
My other concern about the above ground attached greenhouse is moisture issues, particularly given the south facing orientation. The intended walipini build out has a much smaller area width, and we were also planning to help mitigate moisture by building a root cellar between the house and walipini. You can see the difference in the photo below.
I actually did wonder something similar...but maybe by "earthy" they mean more nutmeg/mace/clove sort of deeper flavor?
