my green home

So I wrote about this a little before. Nathan anddd I want to build a sustainable cool-ass casita of our own. We want to buy land, then build something small, paying for it as we go. Then we would end up only owing money on the land.

The house will be tiny to keep costs down, and we are used to living in small quarters. Our current place is about 456 square feet, including the loft area. The house will be built from adobe, incredibly well insulated, have the south side open to the winter sun but protected from the summer sun by an overhang, and have a green roof. I was not into green roofs until recently. I had heard that they could hurt resale value and were expensive. But then I must have read some article changing my mind. Now I have done lots of research on what kind of plants you can put on a green roof and am all excited about my rooftop garden full of sedums, thyme, and buffalo grass. I want a little rooftop table and we can still even have a rainwater catchment system to collect unabsorbed water. A green roof is also highly insulative.

The house will also have some solar panels. I would love to have it be off the grid, but that really depends on what lot we buy. If their is electric available, we will probably just hook up to the grid and feed our excess wattage back to it. There are lots of lots with no nearby electricity, so in that case we would need a good number of solar panels and maybe a wind turbine as well. That could be quite expensive to get all set up.

I want to recycle the greywater - the water coming from washing machine, sinks, shower. It can be filtered, then used to flush toilets or water the garden. I was thinking that the toilet might be a composting toilet - in which case no need for the graywater to flush it.

What else is required in this complex little casita? Lets see. Triple glazed windows. Radiant heating under the saltillo tile floor. Solar hot water heating. Recycled tile countertops. A dishwasher (you would agree if you knew how rarely I do the dishes). Nice native landscaping outside (definitely going to shell out for help on that one).

The way to keep costs down on this is to do most everything ourselves. And keep fixtures cheap that can be upgraded later on (i.e. IKEA). Installing a green rof ourselves would save us a ton of money. Same with laying the walls ourselves. Things that cannot be done myself are things like solar panels and turbines and solar hot water heaters. Rainwater catchment.

Anyway, the house is a lot of fun to plan. I really want a site though because it is hard to design a house without a site. I suppose right now is practice at designing a little house, generating ideas and seeing what works and what doesn't. Also, I picked up a book called Structures at Abebooks to learn basic structural analysis. I want to be able to draw the friggin construction documents myself.