Do Houses Have to be So BIG?

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  1

  Martin Holladay

  06/18/09 | Report as spam

  RE: Do Houses Have to be So BIG?

  John,
  Why do you and your wide need an 8,000-square-foot home? You wrote that yoiu "presently live in one approaching 4,000 square feet or about half of what my wife and I, both empty-nesters, need."

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  2

  John Dodge

  06/18/09 | Report as spam

  RE: Do Houses Have to be So BIG?

  Martin,
  
  Fair question. These are the reasons we stay here. We simply have not gotten around to moving which after 16.5 years in one place is a big undertaking. Second, we have two kids in college and one still come homes summers. We also like it here. We built the home at well under 3k sq ft. (a typical 4 BR colonial) and developed a home office above the garage where I work fulltime. We probably are couple of hundred square feet below 4k.
  
  The house is well-insulated and that we burn about 750-800 gallons of fuel oil a year for heat and hot water is quite efficient comparatively speaking. My last electric bill was for a miserly 574 kilowatt hours (I confess, we're not always that good especially when kids are home). I cut and split every last stick of three cords of firewood each season and burn it a high-efficiency Hearthstone Heritage wood stove. Check it out.
  
  http://www.hearthstonestoves.com/wood-stoves/stove-details?product_id=3
  
  Let's look at it a different way. Which rooms do not get used or rarely? And how many square feet? The kids two BRs, a formal LR and DR. So there's 715 square feet right there. So there's no doubt we could happily live in a smaller house.
  
  So now there's the question of where do we go and can we sell the house. I think we can, but someone else who will more than likely will be less efficiency-minded than us will probably move in. But we will eventually move.
  
  Had we to build again, we'd build smaller for sure.
  
  
  

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  3

  DanaBlankenhorn

  06/18/09 | Report as spam

  RE: Do Houses Have to be So BIG?

  
  We are presently adding 500 sq ft. to our home, after putting $40,000 into
  tightening it up so it uses less energy. (It was built in 1921.) When we're
  done it will be 2,000 sq. ft. We raised both our kids in 1,500 and were
  quite comfortable.

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  4

  mheartwood

  06/22/09 | Report as spam

  RE: Do Houses Have to be So BIG?

  My God! It's HUGE.
  
  My wife lived quite comfortably for a decade in a house that was slightly under 900sq.ft. With a change in work, we moved and the "new" house, a hundred year old farm house, is slightly bigger at 980sq.ft.. We're planning on building ourselves the "Greenest House in Canada" when we have time and sufficient cash. In our area, it'll be hard to do. There is considerable competition in this area alone.
  
  I have to say, Paul is already a long way from being the "Greenest House in America". It may yet become the greenest white elephant in America, but that waits to be seen. Certainly the house he is building will not only NOT inspire the many people he may hope, many like myself are TURNED OFF by the shear wastefulness of the design already.
  
  Here's a recipe for a greener house.
  1. Use strawbales, and build it Nevada style (i.e. load-bearing strawbales.). Staw is a waste product of the agricutural industry and is easily and usually cheaply available anywhere grass grows. Wood, on the other hand, uses a lot more energey and produces much more greenhouse gases in its cutting, stripping, transport, sawing, and pressing.
  2. If you don't like staw, then use earth. Earthships which are made out of discarded tires filled with dirt are another viable construction technique which not only saves the tires from landfill, but saves considerable in building supply costs.
  3. If an earthship is not to your liking, then how about earth-bag construction. All of those used plastic grocery bags need somewhere to go. Why not fill them up with dirt and pile them on top of each other to form walls? There's plenty of examples across America already.
  4. Consider Adobe or papercrete for your foundations and ground floor.
  5. Use in-floor heating. It's friendly to liquid-filled photothermal systems, and it can make a house feel warmer than it really is.
  6. Passive solar, photothermal, photvoltaics, and so forth, are great ideas, but they can be augmented by wind, micro-hydro, and geothermal.
  7. Consider a composting toilet. They use a lot less water and you can place them anywhere. Plus you don't have the huge expense of maintaining a septic tank or a sewage system.
  8. Look into grey water reclamation to further save water.
  9. Wash water doesn't need to be drinking water. Consider a cistern or a shallow well for your wash water, and a seperate system for your drinking water.
  10. If you must pump water, build an above ground storage tank on top of a papercrete pillar above the main living floor of our house and use a low-volume pump which runs continously. Low volume pumps can run easily off of photovoltaic systems with out requiring large batteries. High volume pumps, designed to produce the desired water pressure, use much more energy both in the short term and the long term.
  11. And for heaven's sake, go get yourself a copy of The Not So Big House by Sarah Susanka.
  
  And yes, there's more you can do to make it even greener, but I figure that's just a start.