Custom-designed home fulfills owner’s dreams

— “You don’t want a corner fireplace, you don’t want all those porches, you don’t want to use knotty alder for your cabinets - use oak,” Brenda Henson said everyone told her when building on her 2,000-square-foot home began in 2006. “I couldn’t make a decision on what I wanted as far as paint and tile color, but I knew what else I wanted.”

In 2007, Henson got what most people only dream of - her house built just the way she always wanted it.

“We played in the creek when I was a kid,” Henson said, pointing across the vast green 75 acres to a wet-weather stream bed, on the farm that has been in the family for several generations.

Now, Henson is a mortgage lender for Arvest Bank in Pea Ridge. Construction loans are her business. People come to her to help make their home owning dreams come true. Going through the building process herself helped her gain perspective on what her customers come to her for help with and helped her better understand her own line of work.

“It doesn’t always have to be a mess,” she said, speaking highly of her builder, Rick Lockridge, and the building experience.

High wooden ceilings, an open floor plan, huge windows, oakdoors and trim and an oversized bathtub were all things on Henson’s dream-home list.

“If I have to design the bathroom around the tub, I will,” her thoughts were when starting on the bathroom.

Above the corner fireplace that she was told not to have is a cedar mantle - cut right from the land on which Henson lives. The builder cut it, stripped it, polished it and it now displays itselfproudly in the open room.

But being nice to look at and sitting on historical homestead land is not all this house has to boast about; it is extremely energy efficient.

Enormous oak trees shade the house from all angles. Henson said she opens the windows about May and doesn’t close them till around this time of year. She seldom runs the air conditioning.

A radiant barrier in the attic reflects the summer sun and keeps winter heat in. She had low-emittance (low-E) glass windows and cellulose insulation installed.

She said she worked with Carroll Electric to design an energy-efficient plan for the house.

Another unique feature in the house is the wood-burning furnace in the basement.

“It was a customer that did it,” she said, on how she found out about the idea. “A lot of people tried to talk me out of it, but it’s what I wanted.”

In the colder months, Henson loads the stove full of wood in the mornings and at night and the house stays warm. The heat comes up through the same vents that the air conditioning comes through.

People used to have a hut out back where they would burn wood, Henson said. They would dig a trench and run the heat underground, then into the house.

She didn’t want to have to go outside every time she wanted to make it a little warmer, so she put it in the basement instead.

The builder had never done anything like that. He did all the leg work in researching the right way to go about it.

The house is all electric, with the exception of the gas fireplace and cookstove.

“I have lived in older houses my whole life,” she said, adding that her electric bill is now com-

News, Pages 1 on 11/11/2009