Building a modern home in the woods
johnnyrodgers.is
johnnyrodgers.is
I've built an A-frame studio house for around €10k (excl tools), and installed a 5kw solar system for about another €10k. The house has air conditioning and underfloor heating (water-based, heated using wood from the land).
I've also brought a 50-year-old tractor and started a rural ISP.
AMA, I guess?
House: https://www.dropbox.com/s/sx8hj9s4u7n6ef9/My%20house.jpg?dl=...
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Just to add some thoughts that the questions below prompted.
I've realised that I really enjoy infrastructure projects. I get to be sat in my little house and phone up huge telecommunication companies and ask for things. Our provider lit up 250km of fibre to our local single-track train station. I get to do lots of stuff where I think, "errr.... am I allowed to do this?", and I love it.
The large providers are skeptical at first, but once they realise you are registered with the national telecoms regulator they realise that you're actually serious and get onboard. They were bemused, but they went with it. I think they actually found it nice to work with a mom-and-pop organisation for a change.
- Find the customers*
- Find somewhere to broadcast from*
- Find a wholesale fibre provider*
- Register with your country's regulator & read a bunch of laws
- While you are doing the above, learn about networking. Get this right before you launch, then forgot about it. Post-launch all problems will (hopefully) be non-tech related.
And also lots of good old-fashioned business cash-flow spreadsheets.
I really like enjoy it (even though it can be stressful) because:
- I like geekery
- I like business (even thought it can be stressful)
- I like being in nature, and this one of the few lines of work that combines the OSI model & chainsaws.
- I like having a reason to meet people in my area. Great way to make friends.
- This area really needs it. There is fibre in the villages, but lots of people live & work on remote patches of land. The service I provide really makes a difference to their lives.
It don't think it'll necessarily make you rich, but it may give you a meaningful livelihood if you have the market for such a service.
* You kinda need to do these three simultaneously, because they all need to be in the same location. At some point I just had to commit to one of the three and hope that everything else fell into place.
We also need to log netflow data due to the EU counter terrorism directive, and keep it securely. Last I heard it had been deemed unconstitutional by the EU courts, but the law had yet to be revoked.
The hardest part BY FAR, was getting the fibre connection. My advice for this is to do your research to find the available providers in you area/country. There is no fibre map for Portugal, so this was tricky. Reach out to actual people and ask for contacts at telecoms companies in your country. You are looking for Direct Internet Access (DIA). This comment of mine is a bit relevant [1]
The WISP facebook groups [2] [3] really helped me with this, and in figuring out what I need to go and learn about. Don't let those groups stress you out though. I've un-followed them now.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30128418
Does the ISP cover your expenses or is it supplemental?
PS. And thank you :-)
[1]: https://www.dropbox.com/s/bbe9z3risocrl5e/IMG_20190909_12531...
Edit: Clarity
I'm mostly curious about the cycle time. We install floor heat in our homes, typically with a gas-fired boiler.
- The house is 5x7m. The heated area is about 2.5x7m
- There is no concrete base. The system [1] I used was designed to receive concrete, but I decided against it.
- The floor heats up in about 30 minutes, but the water temperature is substantially higher than normal (because lack of thermal conductivity due to lack of concrete)
- The flooring is large plywood sheets[2]. Surface temperature is variable, 23-26deg.
- The heating is provided by a wood-burning 'bailarina' [3] [4] [5]
- There is no heat exchanger. The hot water that goes under the floor is the same as the hot water that comes out the tap. Not drinking the hot water is kinda normal for europeans though. The pipes may clog up with sediment in 5-10 years, but they are not concreted in so I'm not too bothered.
It may seem like there are some odd choices there. My priority was simplicity and being able to easily change things in the future.
Edit: clarity
Edit 2: If I was to do it again with more time and patience, I would pour in sand. It has about the same thermal properties of concrete, and is way less permanent.
[1]: https://www.dropbox.com/s/yisemvup42cd86l/IMG_20190917_16511...
[2]: https://www.dropbox.com/s/yjmqarrgqcnnzto/IMG_20190918_15193...
[3]: https://b-shop.pt/en/fire-wood-water-heater/1018-bailarina-i...
[4]: https://www.dropbox.com/s/nfttkuqqxzapwff/IMG_20191211_16325...
[5]: https://www.dropbox.com/s/g57ytyvi7c31w3o/IMG_20190317_16555...
Yes. A lot of people (I think the original author of this piece) wish to have everything from the start.
Much better IMO to start small and simple and expand.
Easier to sneak around the out of whack inspection systems. In my area, that matters, as the inspection system has gone bananas
I did something similar when building a fence. The "proper" way to set the posts was in concrete, but I calculated how many bags I'd need, relative to my own strength and patience. Instead, I poured sand in, got it wet, and shook it to make it settle. The fence has held up for almost 20 years. The last few posts I ran out of sand and used dirt. They've held up just fine too.
I don't think property tax is a big deal. Bureaucracy is a PITA, but accountants, lawyers, and architects are cheap. Use them and it'll all be easier, and likely cheaper in the long run.
Construction costs are going up around here. The price I heard 4 years ago was €500-€750/m2 of house construction minimum.
Land should cost around €1/m2, although it will be more if it has a habitable house or is being sold as 'you can build a house here' plot. I got planning permission (via an architect) to build a 300m2 house on an agricultural-only plot of land, although I didn't go through with it. Rules vary by region, but around here you can fairly easily get planning permission if you own more than 2ha of land.
Get in touch if you want to talk more! Email is on my website. (asking questions here is also great)
If you send me an email (see my profile -> website) I can share with you the construction photos.
Local governments often insist that every aspect of the build is documented before you start (which is unachievable) and any deviations from the plan require stopping work and re-documenting at vast expense in professional fees and charges from the state.
Original: https://vimeo.com/28848933
Revisited (apologies for the C4 link which requires hoops to watch): https://www.channel4.com/programmes/grand-designs-revisited/...
Ben Law's website: https://ben-law.co.uk/
The nearest city is about a 20 minute drive away. The region capital is about 30 minutes away. Lisbon & Porto are about 2.5 hours away each.
Anything I go to regularly is 20-40 minutes away.
The roads are of high quality and mostly empty. Petrol is about €1.80/litre, a return trip to Lisbon costs around €80 in fuel in my 2019 Suzuki with a 1 litre engine, plus around €20 in tolls assuming you take the motorway.
I'm originally from the Coimbra region (Mira and Penacova), and this is my dream!
I'd love to retire back to Portugal and do something similar, but unfortunately, I'd have to hire someone to build the house :-)
But this style of construction is pretty unusual for the region, so you may need someone more specialist. If you need someone let me know though, I can think of a couple of companies.
I can give you more details over email.
The things I think I really got right are: 1) build from new, don’t renovate. And 2) build the whole structure on a platform off the ground. The entire building is supported on 6 steel legs.
Also, solar power + AC is fantastic. A bit of thermal bridging doesn’t seem to matter so much in 40 degree weather when the AC is solar powered :-)
That said many stores have big glass windows and their best goods out front. But on the other hand, other stores also have security doors that enclose everything when it’s closed. I might be being too paranoid, but the same concern applies to even locking your door. A locked door only keeps the honest folks out is what they say, so should we do away with locks completely? Obviously people find some utility in them despite their inherent weaknesses.
If someone wants in, they're getting in.
All the break-ins failed to get anything of value, however... everything gets put away, there are cameras, and we are VERY friendly with people living in the area (imcluding employing as many locals as we can).
Of all the "security" measures, people living in the area were the best defense. We take care of them, they take care of us.
Plus, the tractor is definitely an occasional use tool. Now I think about it, I suspect a modern new tractor would take a very long time to pay off its embedded energy with the level of use it would see here.
And my old tractor cost €3k. A new one would cost €30-60k. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Sitting in Munich and we plan to buy something right now as well. Rural lots of land (min 10k sqmt)
What are your thoughts on climate change?
I'm planing to buy only once and we are 35. I'm slight y ignoring Portugal due to this.
I think winters have become drier, but April can be absolutely torrential.
The specific location can also make a difference. I'm near the base of a mountain which I believe can prop-up the underground water table nicely, and can certainly cause more rain.
I think Portugal being costal also helps with rainfall, certainly compared to the plains of Spain further East.
Try and get some data for the last decade or two. That will probably be more useful than any local anecdotes. But local terrain/micro-climates will make a difference.
Is 15000 sqmt for 100k possible?
Are you aware of any community to exchange experience?
Surely it is.
https://www.idealista.pt/en/point/comprar-terrenos/39.62296/...
Regarding internet access, you can use our coverage checker :-) gardunha.net. We only cover a small area of Portugal.
There are some Facebook groups for people who have done similar things, although they do have some odd people in them. Lookup Pure Portugal.
But really, so many weird decisions here that make no sense: why would you put your kid’s bed next to your bedroom in a new build? Why the bathrooms next to the bedrooms for your kid? Why cement floors and no floor heating? How did you end up at 400A/96kw of service (my car charges slower than that!). Why not building a indoor pool instead of a outdoor one? Feels a lot like your architect and contractors saw you had too much tech money and not enough common sense.
That, and the fake pretending to care about the environment when you live in the middle of nowhere and have a heated outdoor pool with 96kw of service in Canada is just astounding!
The concerning part is all the exposed windows, which aren't sealed to the framing at the bottom. There's a much larger chance of water ingress.
I don’t understand the comment about how fast your car charges at all. I suspect that electrical heating in the winter is the main thing that would push up power usage (especially with double-height rooms) but I’ve no idea really.
Do I really need to tell you why it’s better to not share a bedroom wall with your children? :). If I had a choice, I 100% wouldn’t.
Did you see all the glass? And the snow? Those two don't go together, even with triple glazing. Then again, if you have major $$$ to spend on heating, I guess it doesn't matter.
Having the family bathroom near the children's bedrooms is pretty common in floorplans, at least in Australia.
They have a wardrobe between them and the kid's room which would mean an insulated wall, soft clothing that would muffle sound, and then perhaps sliding wardrobe doors. That might help. We have a similar format in our house, but a dressing room in place of the wardrobe.
I suspect that once kids are old enough to be aware, parents are typically a lot more careful with their timing...
I live in Oregon and in 2020 chose to (was not officially in an evac zone but the smoke was awful) evacuate when the horrible Beachie Creek and Lionshead [0] fires ripped through the Santiam Canyon. Houses that my wife and I had looked at possibly purchasing were torched, as well as some of the most pristine ancient forest I've seen [1].
My outlook about living in the forest drastically changed after these events. The Beachie Creek fire reached 130,000 acres overnight at a growth rate of 2.77 acres per SECOND. [2].
You couldn't pay me enough money to live in a forest at this point. It's just too damn dangerous. Also, the flat roof seems problematic. Everyone I know in the PNW who has owned a flat roof has had issues with it due to pooling water. That far north, I imagine snow accumulation would also be a really big problem in terms of stress on the roof.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santiam_Fire
[1] - https://www.opb.org/article/2021/09/02/oregon-field-guide-op...
Several folks died after being trapped on North Fork Rd and it's not hard to see why. It's a super tight, two lane road that goes for miles and miles. After the fire started, there were apparently miles of treefall up and down the road. No way you get out from that even on a dirt bike.
https://www.google.com/search?q=roof+sprinkler+fire+australi...
I think this link is for commercial, but there's something analogous...
https://www.mainelegislature.org/legis/statutes/25/title25se...
Source: I live there
The fires typically start in open spaces, so if your house is right next to open space, you're at a high risk of fire (and this is basically how your fire insurance rates are determined).
Your best protection against fire is other houses. If the fire has to burn through 500 other houses to reach yours, chances are very high that the fire will be stopped by that time. It's pretty rare for that many structures to be lost in a fire, and from a personal safety standpoint, you'll typically be long gone by the time that happens.
I won't claim to be an expert, but am a local volunteer firefighter who has gone through some wildfire training. Forest fires create their own weather, including winds that drive burning embers ahead of the blaze, raining firebrands all over everything. Having numerous houses between the fire and your place just means the firefighters are already busy. The response to this is a combination of building material selection and landscaping.
Basically, you want to keep a 10m zone around your house as free of flammable materials as possible, and try to thin things out beyond this priority zone. Don't use bark mulch in the flower beds beside the house, and don't run that wooden fence right up to the house. Clean your eaves troughs of dead leaves. Wherever leaves and junk collect from the wind, burning embers will too.
I also have a couple of these mounted at the peak ends at my roof, with hoses I can connect and leave if needed: https://waspwildfire.com/products/gutter-mount-sprinkler-sys...
A department colleague used to fly fire suppression missions all summer long. He was able to spot the fire-smart places easily, because the massive fires appeared to "go around", and the homes were still there.
I generally agree with everything you stated, I think we're just talking about different scales. Instead of several houses, I was talking about having several subdivisions ("500 houses") between your house and the open space.
It has happened, but it is not the average fire that starts in an open space and burns through several subdivisions. Structure protection is often the highest priority in those cases and the fire doesn't usually get too deep into a subdivision. When that does happen, there is almost no prep you could have done to save your house, because as you mentioned, the natural forces that create that kind of situation are virtually unstoppable -- as we recently saw in Colorado (Marshall), or California in 2018 (Woolsey), and Ft McMurray in 2016.
My point was, for your average fire that can be fought with enough water/phos-chek/etc, being as far away from that open space is your best protection. That's obvious to us now, but I didn't think about it when I first moved to California, so I wanted to put that on OP's radar.
The main problem with these big fires is they can send sparks for a good ways, and most roofs (even with no trees nearby) end up with leaves and/or pine needles collect in the roof, which are great tinder for starting the house on fire. If 50 homes light up within 20 minutes the fire departments are helpless, which then of course starts the cycle anew with a new launch of embers.
It can happen anywhere though. I have immediate family who lost their home to a fire last year - they lived in a town of 20,000 people, among grasslands in the suburbs.
IMHO California and PNW homes need to be rethought, starting now - much like how we stopped using unreinforced bricks due to earthquakes. Stop building houses out of flammable materials. Use intumescent coatings. Intentionally fireproof your landscaping. I was hoping that was the focus of this article but.. nope.
Can you say what would be some good and/or practical choices for this?
Not to mention a large portion of damage from wildfires is smoke damage, which your concrete house isn't immune to.
A fully concrete/steel home would likely remain structurally sound, but you're still dealing with intense property damage for everything inside and most probably uninhabitability due to lost infrastructure in the area.
Not to mention during a wildfire you'd still have to evacuate.
Whether or not your home burns makes a huge difference. PG&E had the poles replaced in a week. If you've cut and mowed defensible space, your house will be fine and life goes on like normal. The problem is, folks love their tree-shaded homes and love building at the tops of ridges.
At least in my district, mandatory evacuation is not actually mandatory and (I say this as a firefighter) we aren't going to force you off your property. Especially if it looks like you're prepared. But you really need to be prepared. It's not hopeless - you really can make a huge difference but you have to put the work in long before the fire arrives.
Shut all windows and doors to keep embers out. Open or remove flammable window treatments like drapes, but if you have nonflammable (ie metal) blinds keep them closed.
Related preparation: Make sure your soffit and attic vents have screens, and keep the gutters free of leaf litter (install gutter guards!).
Leave the electricity alone. The fire may never approach your home and you never know how long you'll be gone, it could be days and it sucks returning to a fridge full of rotten food. Power will probably go off for the neighborhood anyway.
Spend a little time cleaning up the area around your house. Move flammable items (furniture, toys, etc) either into the garage or away from the house. Shut off the valve at your propane tank, if you have one.
Assuming a rural district like ours, make the location of a garden hose next to the house really obvious. We go from house to house, defending each in turn as the flame front passes over. A brush truck holds ~300 gallons of water, which doesn't last long. Throwing a hose in the tank to top up while we wait delays the need to stop and refill (or call for a water tender, which might be busy).
I don't know the answer to your question about hydrant infrastructure, that sounds like something that will vary locally. In my district almost everyone is on well. Is your landscaping dry fuel or green grass? Personally I have an impact sprinkler on my roof and turn it on as soon as I hear about fire, in an hour the surrounds are saturated. Unless you hear otherwise from an official source, I'd start the sprinklers.
Fully agree on the fires. I live in the woods on a steep slope and it's not ideal. Pemberton has insane fire risk. The pool might help with that, you can get agricultural water cannons and use the pool water to soak the roof and surrounding land.
https://www.reddit.com/r/woodworking/comments/sibihx/first_d...
The materials price increases that are causing factories to raise their prices are also hitting local contractors who do site-built homes.
In fact, if anything, the factories can insulate you from this price volatility more because they have a lot more bargaining leverage with their suppliers than a local contractor who's doing 10 homes a year.
In factory built home parlance, generally, a 'mobile' home is built to HUD building codes (which are the same nationwide) and is not considered a permanent residence - often time it stays on wheels even when put in place, and can theoretically be moved at a later date (although they rarely ever are). These are also sometimes referred to as 'trailer houses'. They used to be built very cheaply and were a depreciating asset (think like a car or an RV), but there are higher quality options these days.
A 'modular home' will be built to spec to the local building codes wherever it is being placed (which is usually IRC + whatever peculiarities local government officials have tacked on). They are placed on a permanent foundation, cannot be moved, and are generally treated as equivalent to a site-built home once finished. Again, you can spend a little or a lot on these, some factories will do fully custom designs that would be completely indistinguishable from a high-end site-built home once finished.
Many factories will build either variety, some specialize on one over the other. In rural, higher cost of living areas both varieties are often quite a bit cheaper than a site-built home, both because of the efficiencies and economies of scale a factory can provide, and also because they can be built in an area with lower labor costs and shipped to your land.
In populated, growing urban areas, the cost benefit diminishes a bit because production builders can approximate the benefits a factory has by building 100s of homes in the same neighborhood at the same time.
edit to add: My information pertains to the US, the article references land in Canada. I don't know as much about factory built homes or building codes in Canada.
irishvernacular.com/ also has a guide to building a lovely, modest, warm home yourself (with friends, admittedly) for <50k .
We have seen/stayed in one of these Ideabox homes and they seem a good balance for a house when you're not a "I want to build my dream castle" kind of person (that's me).
And, just to be clear, I am not a build my castle person, but I do want something more modern than the usual cabin in the woods. Hence, Ideabox...
Yeah that's my main pick with all pre-fab proposals that eventually pop-up here and there, some of them even winning awards for "affordable" housing. Every. single. time. the total cost of the project is on the 6-7 figures range ...
That's what has always steered me clear of doing this. If you need to sell, I've learned that manufactured homes are not lendable by many institutions. Maybe this new class of modular will count as "Stick built" for lending purposes. They seem really nice.
With no intention of attacking the author, but as someone renting in Vancouver, I think excluding costs while regularly hinting that they didn't have much of a budget seems a bit off, if not even just to add a transparent datapoint to the corpus of potential Canadian/Vancouver salaries that have been stagnating for years, while Johnny and his family likely saw massive appreciation on their duplex between what seems like 2014 and now. It's not easy to support a family in this city, so no matter how much you make, owning anything and having two children is going to be tight, and I wouldn't assume you're being disingenuous about that, but if you're cool, break down the actual overall costs. Not necessarily what the specific contractors charged you, but probably an approximation of what your take home salary is and what it cost to build. It wouldn't be terribly difficult to geogeuss the location and property assessment, but it would be slightly more charitable to be upfront.
> A lot of people dream of building a modern home. Or rather, a lot of people dream of living in a modern home. A place of their own, with the people they love, surrounded by functional beauty and considerate form.
A lot of people in this city, even in tech, couldn't dream of owning anything, but this article has the potential to be inspiring. The median salary earned in Vancouver at a tolerable savings rate would require 35 years to own a detached home.
> I hope you’re able to fulfill your own dreams too.
Well...
Edit: It was trivial to track this information down, it's named in the article. I won't reveal the address, but I'll add the cost of land and current value of the property if the author doesn't. Overall the property gained at least 1.8M in taxable value as far as public records are concerned, but it would be awesome to get a sense of what it actually cost to build.
Good for OP - it's amazing, but boy sometimes the shit you read from tech folk is so detached from the regular every-day experience of regular people. "Building a modern home in the woods", really?
The house does look pretty nice, and while I don't care for Pemberton much, it's seems like a decent build.
Why would a "modern home" in the woods need to be a humble bungalow?
He hasn't termed it affordable or DIY. It could be a $100k tiny house and someone living in their car would gripe. This sort of thing seems to happen every time someone writes for their audience and an adjacent audience finds it; just doesn't seem like a very charitable reading of their intentions.
It's more expensive than I could afford, but I liked reading about the process and seeing what they built. I also enjoy reading about tiny houses, people living in their vans, $100m mansions, chateau conversions, anything.
I liked Architectural Digest's tour of JJ Redick's apartment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZDNGVmHxn4 He has all that money yet the kids still fight about Lego, and neither kid can be convinced to sleep on the top bunk. And then their patio is near-unusable due to construction noise.
My house is pretty standard. It would be a hovel for someone living in a palace but a palace to someone sharing a dirty apartment. I would describe my experience building it in terms of what I could or couldn't afford along the way relative to who I was and what I understood. Just as the author did.
So many comments on the HN story got caught up on what the reader was expecting from the link. It was modern and it was in the woods!
Since that time, I've moved past the point where building such a house is impossible for me financially, but I've also moved past the point where such a house is attractive to me.
I saved up a lot of back issues of Dwell thinking I'd refer to them when building a dream home, and in a move a few years ago I threw them out. It felt exactly like what I imagine throwing out an adult magazine collection might feel like - oddly relieving.
Like airbrushed nude photos in Playboy (showing my age, I know), grand home schemes of all kinds are a pursuit of perfection. But nothing is perfect, or stays that way very long, and the higher your expectation and expense in relation to objects-as-happiness, the greater the disappointment.
I really am a sucker for innovative architecture, but for me, innovation is about dealing with constraints, not conquering nature and heating your pool at all costs.
In this particular part of Canada though, more known for its mild summers, not so much. In Vancouver there's honestly maybe only two weeks in july when it's hot enough when you'd really appreciate a pool. Now this is a bit inland, so maybe it gets hotter, but still, yeah it's a luxury that is not gonna be used often.
Also it's fun to throw parties with a nighttime 90 degree pool. Our pool costs about an hour and $10 to increase each degree. Sometimes it's worth it.
Am I the only one who almost spit out his coffee when reading this paragraph? I mean, building a remote home in the middle of a forest is a cool idea, sure. But then end up feeding the whole thing with 400A worth of electricity? And when the current is too high, end up supplementing with a propane generator?
Am I missing something? As a European, I'm used to way more modest figures for family homes - maybe 400V @ 25A plus gas for heating.
Maybe they have a heat pump setup which switches to propane when it gets really cold.
Wood is there, but somebody needs to feed it. And people inevitably get old or lazy about it and depend more and more on the convenient heat sources available.
Seconded. I recently completed an all electric high performance remodel, and with 200A service, I can power a heat pump, heat pump water heater, all electric kitchen and laundry, and an EV charger, with Amps to spare. This is in the mild Bay Area, and my heat pump draws about 6A (15A breaker). The largest loads are EV and cooktop/stove.
A 3000sqft custom house built to high performance standards (airtight and well insulated) can be space heated in a cold climate with a heat pump that draws no more than 24A (40A breaker) using a heat pump. At that load a modern heat pump will make 40kBTU of heat. There are many examples of this across Canada.
I just now read that they have an outdoor heated pool, though, so crazy as it sounds they are presumably using electricity to heat it.
> plus propane.
Apart from backup water heating when the power goes out, their hot tub will waste huge amounts of energy, so propane might be operationally cheaper than electricity.
Edit: Service in the US is generally 200A or 400A. I'd say 400A is overbuilt for what they have, but that doesn't mean they actually use much of that capacity.
For example, I average 1000 kWh per month, which is about 1.39 kW 24/7, or 12 amps average on my 200A service. The 200A is to have headroom for peak demands, and we probably never get close to 200A.
If I were to rewire my panel (it's full), I'd go for the 400A - it's just heavier copper in the three lines to the entrance panel. That would not increase my monthly power bill right now, but it would provide lots of excess capacity in case I want to switch to heat pumps and electric vehicles.
Since we heat with wood and propane and don't use electricity for either and have mostly LED lighting and a gas stove, I do wonder where all the power is going, especially at night. Too many computers, I guess. Add analysis to my to-do list!
I like my wood/propane mix for heating, because it's immune to power outages. At some point I'll get too old to cut/split/haul wood, though, and will have to figure something else out.
I'm not sure why there's a push to eliminate gas cooking in favor of electricity. Perhaps some people are concerned with methane leaks in the natural gas distribution system.
It's that, as well as the fact that having a gas stove means you have a gas hookup in the first place, so you're more likely to also use it for heating. That in turn leads to more emissions than other heating methods produce.
It can make a lot of sense in urban areas. In addition to removing the methane leaks (with their high GWP), it reduces the need to install/maintain expensive natural gas distribution infrastructure, and also improves indoor air quality by eliminating NO2 and CO production within the house. If the power goes out, you just use a propane grill in the backyard, or a small butane stove.
S̶p̶e̶c̶i̶f̶i̶c̶a̶l̶l̶y̶,̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶o̶s̶e̶ ̶w̶h̶o̶ ̶w̶e̶r̶e̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶a̶w̶a̶r̶e̶,̶ ̶s̶m̶a̶l̶l̶ ̶h̶o̶t̶ ̶t̶u̶b̶s̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶t̶y̶p̶i̶c̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶h̶e̶a̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶r̶o̶u̶g̶h̶ ̶f̶r̶i̶c̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶w̶a̶s̶t̶e̶ ̶h̶e̶a̶t̶ ̶f̶r̶o̶m̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶i̶r̶c̶u̶l̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶p̶u̶m̶p̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶d̶o̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶d̶e̶d̶i̶c̶a̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶w̶a̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶h̶e̶a̶t̶e̶r̶s̶.̶ ̶Y̶o̶u̶ ̶c̶o̶u̶l̶d̶ ̶a̶d̶d̶ ̶a̶ ̶s̶e̶p̶a̶r̶a̶t̶e̶,̶ ̶m̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶e̶f̶f̶i̶c̶i̶e̶n̶t̶,̶ ̶w̶a̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶h̶e̶a̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶r̶u̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶p̶u̶m̶p̶s̶ ̶l̶e̶s̶s̶ ̶o̶f̶t̶e̶n̶,̶ ̶b̶u̶t̶ ̶i̶t̶'̶s̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶a̶s̶ ̶s̶i̶m̶p̶l̶e̶ ̶a̶s̶ ̶r̶e̶p̶l̶a̶c̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶k̶i̶n̶d̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶h̶e̶a̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶a̶n̶o̶t̶h̶e̶r̶.̶
Never mind. Apparently I was misinformed. The circulation pump moves the water through the heater, but isn't the primary heat source.
Assuming you are using are using a resistance heater (100% heating efficiency), to raise 200Gal of water (typical small hot tub size) from 50F to 100F requires about 25kWh of energy.
To only use 75kWh/month (255kBTU), you would need to only raise it to 100F less than 3 times a month, and that assumes that the water temp doesn't naturally drop below 50F (unlikely in NH).
It's likely you are spending significantly more than $15/month to heat it with electricity.
Propane is about $30/MBTU, which would work out to about $9/month for the equivalent amount of heat.
1. https://www.electricrate.com/residential-rates/new-hampshire...
2. https://bloglocation.com/art/water-heating-calculator-for-ti...
The tub is well insulated, with an insulated cover, so you need to account for that. My estimate on the hot tub cost is by comparing my kWh usage after the tub was installed to the prior year use.
Most small tubs are electric, like mine.
So assuming $15/month, you are using 115kWh, which is 392kBTU of heating energy. It takes about 83kBTU to heat 200gal of water from 50F to 100F, which would be like 5 full heat ups from 50F. Of course there are the other convolved factors you mentioned (insulation).
That’s an almost ideal case for an air-to-water heat pump though, the heat capacity and efficiency of which go up as the output water temperature goes down. Pool heating (and snow melting) are ideal use cases that can support a very low output water temperature and still get the job done (as compared to baseboard or cast-iron radiator space heating).
https://www.thespruce.com/service-panels-changed-in-the-1900...
Which says 100A didn't become common until the 1960's.
[0]: The incoming line was aerial and over the legal span length, so it had been attached to an insulator nailed to a tree halfway between the house and mast. Also the mast was deteriorating to the point that it needed to be replaced anyways and insurance was making noise about not allowing a new policy if it wasn't upgraded to at least 120A. We did a customer pole and went underground to the house. Much nicer aesthetics and I can now turn off a breaker on my side of the meter at the pole to do maintenance.
Still, it's a very high amount of power (48kW) that would not even be subscriptable in France for a consumer (the max is 36kW).
Remember, they didn't want fossil fuels - if you are going all electric, especially for heating (in CANDADA!) you are going to pull some wattage.
That big outdoor pool - in CANADA - doesn't help either.
No, I thought that was a typo and should be 40A (so 120V * 40 A or 400V * 12A).
[0] https://app.bchydro.com/accounts-billing/electrical-connecti...
Most places in the US experience much harsher seasons than the Bay Area.
Then there are places like Nevada, which are just not suitable for large-scale habitation. "Can we make this monument to our hubris more energy efficient" is kind of missing the point, right?
A lot of hydro power is ‘use it or lose it’, since the dams also provide flood control and MUST keep extra capacity free to absorb sudden water surges. They can’t just store everything they get.
I also think it's ridiculous, for what it's worth. 400A is a wild amount of electricity for a supposedly high efficiency, modern home.
Why would it be harmful to run at the amperage that I'm buying ? What disincentives do I need?
I still don't get though, if living in rural area, why not heat the pool with wood. It just has that sensation that electric heater doesn't provide.
‘Wood warms you up three times. Once when you cut it, once when you split it, and once when you burn it’.
The amount of manual labor and time required to keep a pool warm from wood is monumental. It will definitely keep a fit man in the prime of his life busy and tired.
It isn’t something to sign up for lightly, especially for someone who may not have that kind of physical strength (or want it spent on heating their pool).
Is this some kind of new homeopathy? Wood memory gets into the water making two types of heat have a different sensation?
Hot tubs are also rather small.
But a hot tub? There are very, very few bodies of water that you can submerge comfortably in that doesn't end up being a non trivial amount of energy to warm up, much less keep warm.
To each his own I guess.
A proper Sauna would have satisfied them both!
It looks like they wanted a California house, with flat a roof and giant windows, in the Canadian Wilderness. But there's a reason houses in the mountains look the way they do. This house looks as out-of-place as a ski chalet would on the beach in San Diego. In any case, it looks as if they have enough money not to care.
The drainage will clog and they’ll risk having a leaky roof every spring. And you can’t get up there with a snow shovel because it’s a green roof and you’d scrape off all the dirt and plants.
[0] https://www.davos.ch/en/information/portrait-image/storybook...
I wish they had detailed how flat roofs guards against an avalanche? What is the logic/physics at work there?
https://www.webcenterfairbanks.com/2021/04/04/spring-melt-me...
(Love your username, btw)
(Oregon has one semi-famous flat-roofed house that I'm aware of, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. I suspect FLW hadn't actually ever been to Oregon: it looked like a house that belongs in Arizona or California. Anyways, the eventual owner of the land the house is built on wanted to tear it down and build a mansion, and after much protests they allowed some people to come in and take the house apart and reassemble it near Salem. After putting it back together, they found some of the original contractors who had built the house originally. Supposedly they took a tour of the house and declared that it must have been properly reassembled, because the roof leaks in all the same places.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_House_(Silverton,_Orego...
A lot of people have inground pools here in Quebec. AFAIK it's just a matter of removing some of the water before it freezes, to minimize the effects of expansion. It does tend to generate small cracks, but nothing that can't be patched over with annual maintenance.
They're going to have a hell of the time with the weathering on that siding and roof in 10y, too.
I knew a person who tried to put in triple-glaze, in New Westminster, BC, and it took a special lien on the property along with special approval from the Province because they weren't allowed by the building codes at the time.
That was ~10y ago, so maybe it's changed now.
And while the sliding glass doors look like they are single paned, look at the quadruple reflection. Isn't that usually caused by multiple sheets of glass in close proximity?
The external framing is also 2x6, so someone was thinking about insulation. I think it's just that after declaring victory on a well insulated house they then decided to heat the outdoors anyway by directly heating things that are out of doors.
Yes, compared to other windows. Compared to a well-insulated wall with external insulation and 6" of interior insulation, they're not great.
Good windows are an R5. A well-insulated wall cavity can easily be an R30.
Millions of hectares burn down every year:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_British_Columbia_wildfire...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_British_Columbia_wildfire...
Last year an entire town disappeared:
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-sept-7-2...
[1] https://www.providencejournal.com/story/news/2021/05/17/larg...
The two combine into large, periodic forest Fires.
The east coast has much fewer unbroken tracts of forest, and where it does have them they are more heavily managed and stewarded for a number of reasons.
The east coast was developed and property subdivided/allocated long before the tendency towards large national parks, monuments, etc.
It isn’t that these national parks or forests cause all these problems (though many of them DO feature prominently in these huge fires), they are also a sign of the very different nature of land allocation during the settling of the area.
You can see this pretty clearly if you pull up maps of federal land (national forests, national parks, blm land, etc). Several western states have more land owned by the federal government than anyone else.
They are all out west.
[0]https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/transportation/driving-an...
[1]https://www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/f0ac328d88c74d07aa2ee...
And the pine beetles are doing a number on BC. It's only a matter of time before those catch on fire.
To which end, I wonder how long such a home would last, given the upkeep. The bling times come and go. Just look at history.
3-5 years at most I think. I've seen futile attempts to sell such experiments.
After that time it's just easier to bulldoze or burn it, and then build something more sensible.
A 230/400V open Y service at 25 amps is just 10kW which to me sounds like an old standard or mains for a small 1-2br apartment. I'd expect at least a 50-60A service. Though I know some (many?) homes in EU are on actual 3 phase so 25A at 400V 3 phase becomes 17.3kW which is not far from the 24kW a 100A 120/240 service provides. Still anemic but quite a bit of power for a 1-4 person household living modestly. Though in the USA it seems utilities make residential 3 phase difficult or impossible to obtain as you might do commercial stuff with that electric without paying commercial rates or your neighborhood is served by a single phase feeder.
Depends on the trip curve and the age of the overcurrent device. Looking at the trip curve for a Fuji BW250 (125-250 amp frame size), at 150% the device will trip in what looks like 5-30 minutes. Any load over 10x rated current is an instant trip.
There was a scandal many years ago where an electrical equipment manufacturer, Federal Pacific, was caught rigging its testing machines to pass faulty or poorly performing circuit breakers. It was found that some of those breakers would carry 150%+ rated current without tripping. They were responsible for quite a few electrical fires and were sued into oblivion.
That, and tankless water heater are stupid, frankly.
I dunno, maybe my thought is unrealistic - but if I were to splash out a ton of money for a palatial rural manse, I'd shoot for something with a bit more space than a large-ish suburban home.
Especially because one of the most common uses of such a property is entertainment - forget having folks stay over unless you make the kids bunk?
So how are they going to be entertaining people all the time (they specifically mention entertaining large groups being important to them)? Come over for an evening, except one of you can't drink and has to drive 2 hours back at the end of the night??
At a bare minimum it needs to be large enough to have a guest suite - the central socializing spaces like the kitchen and living room also need to be scaled for that use.
Ideally (assuming a grand budget) you can have separate structures for guests entirely.
But certainly one has to assume that guests are bunking over, given how remote the location is. It seems eminently unreasonable to assume guests are driving several hours at the end of the evening.
> A goal for the build was to limit impact to the site during construction, and then to limit the footprint of the home after completion. In pursuit of this we planned an efficient mechanical design that would feature solar panels for electricity generation tied to the grid, geothermal for heat exchange, and no fossil fuels.
Oh, great, sound like you have some good environmental principles!
> However, we quickly ran into several problems with this approach.
Yeah, it can be a bummer to sacrifice your own comfort. But it is worth it for the environment!
> The bigger issue was that the energy demands for the house, which included hot water heating for the pool and hot tub, outstripped the electrical supply we could get on a rural residential build: 400A.
Wow, that's a lot of electricity. Like, a loooooot. Maybe we can pare it down a little bit -- limiting our impact is important, right?
> We eventually settled on supplementing our electrical generation with propane, which we had hoped to avoid
Right?
O-oh. Oh so you're using propane to heat the pool.
Yeah.
You can limit the charging current but at some point you will have to make compromises on driving.
this is all for one car.
For multiple cars, the compromises get trickier.
It could just be to handle momentary bursts, and the equipment drawing that power might actually be doing the job more efficiently than something that does it slower, drawing more power cumulatively over a longer period of time.
Fossil fuels are from carbon sources taken out of the normal carbon cycle (aka buried generally)
(This is way outside of my expertise so I appreciate if you tell me what's wrong with my logic.)
If you chop it down and burn it, or it dies and rots, +1 tree of carbon goes back. But the total carbon in the system hasn’t changed, and on average (if this happens a lot everywhere), the amount of carbon in the atmosphere is pretty much the same.
nothing lives forever, and most things stop growing quickly pretty fast. Unless there is a huge disaster, forests turn over in a stable way generally - new trees always growing, old trees always dying and rotting.
So unless you had chopped down massive forests and stopped new trees from growing, or stockpiled half a continents worth of wood for a century and then decided to burn it all at once, it’s hard to meaningfully change the average amount of carbon in the atmosphere, because it never really stops ‘moving’ or gets out of the cycle.
Fossil fuel is carbon that got pulled out of the system a long time ago - those trees or ferns or peat or whatever got stuck underground, where they couldn’t rot or burn, and on a scale that IS continents worth of trees, for millions of years. We don’t know what it is like having that amount of carbon in the system, because the last time it was in the system was millions of years before we existed.
Once those fossil fuels get burned, even if you plant trees, it doesn’t really reduce the amount of carbon back to where it was, because those trees will die and rot or burn or whatever, and on average, the total amount of carbon in circulation is now higher.
Does that help?
The idea is that you don't want more energy in the panel than the panel is designed to handle. Practically (if I understand it right) this means that the breaker for the solar panels is limited to 20% of the panel rating. A 200A 240V panel would limit you to a 40A 240V breaker, which (according to the link above) means a maximum of 7.6kW of backfeed solar.
In the article, he says he has a 11.6kW solar array, which would require (if I'm calculating right) at least a 60A 240V breaker (maybe plus some required overcapacity?). Since this isn't allowed on a 200A panel, he may have needed to bump up to the next largest size of 400A unless he wanted to go smaller on the solar array. So while it sounds like overkill, it's possible there is more reason for it than just a desire to heat his wife's outdoor pool in the winter.
so 100A panel + 100A of solar requires a 200A panel
A few other things that require high-amp service - on demand electric water heating, and electric car charging (and we're moving towards multiple vehicles).
It's also worth mentioning that by far the largest cost of an electrical circuit is the labor, so sizing for 100A, 200A and 400A is not 1x, 2x, 4x. upgrading later is a huge cost.
Cool house though.
That's something I would build when I retire and grow sick of the world. Even asylums can be "modern" I'll give you that.
I don't get it though either. That style is for flexing and showing off to other people. In that location I would want a baddass log cabin.
Huh, as someone who wants one day to build a passive house to live in, this is all very interesting. Sounds like they're not getting quite as modern of a home as they wanted.
My house can make do with 60A, and my previous one with 40A
Do they use 350A to heat a swimming pool? Talk about a waste of energy.
400A service in the US is the purview of the very wealthy for their Taj Mahals - which is obviously overrepresented here - but that's a fucking distorted view point if you think it's the norm.
I have seen (largish) villas with 20 or 25 kW, but everything more than that - like 100 A or so - is definitely beyond common use.
So kettle + oven and you blow your fuses?
Traditionally the oven was (only in the last years electic ones have become prevalent/ubiquitous) gas-powered and that electric kettles are not common, so the typical tripping scenario is now electric oven cooking+ironing or (say) iron+dishwasher+washing machine.
The 120V outlets are approximately equally split between the two legs (which you could view as -120 to 0 and 0 to +120), so one way you could view it is that 200A service in NA allows for about 400A of 120V load. But then larger loads are usually across both legs and you have to account for imbalance so it doesn't work out quite that simply. And then there are "weird load" like dryers, which commonly put the heating element across both legs but the drum and blower motors across only one, resulting in some amps on both legs and some more amps on only one of them.
And while we're at it commercial buildings often run the lighting across both legs for wire gauge economy. So there's a lot of nuance on the load side. But on the supply side it's all 240V either way (well, kind of, could be 208V in case of a wye supply, but that's not common).
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...
The split is almost bi-modal, not pointing fingers but this bundling seems a little bit of an unfair generalization, not all nations pollute alike.
Also lesser know fact: A circuit breaker doesn't cut off at the rated amperage. It cuts off when it spikes above that amperage. When the current is steady, you can blow past the limit, but one little wobble and it will finally trip. "I wasn't doing anything different" being a common refrain. A little ripple from the city power or the other end of the house can push it over.
Heat pumps are limited by how cold and humid it is outside. The coils freeze up and they have to cycle to melt it off. It's not particularly cold in Vancouver but it is definitely humid. I'm not sure where the triple point is.
Their insurance is going to be fierce.
I wonder if they actively melt snow on the roof?!
https://www.squamishchief.com/local-news/pemberton-area-fire...
if he could just admit that he built a silly house because he's rich AF and he can, it'd be a lot more respectable.
It's never mentioned how much acreage was purchased, I don't think. My mental block is anything sub 5 acres where I am looking. My current trouble is that I don't live anywhere near where the property I am looking at is. Getting there is… quite a to-do. I'm leery of putting much trust in a realtor as my eyes/ears given that 1.) the property is cheap enough that their commission will be small potatoes and 2.) they have an incentive to sell you _something_. How does one navigate that part? How much of the soil test/survey/etc was done pre-sales, how much was a contingency, or do you just YOLO it?
Also, pay for your own independent well inspections (it has a well right? If not, uh oh), septic inspections (the soil type is okay for a septic system the county will approve right? If not, uh oh), and walk the property a couple times at different times of the day and night.
Sometimes there is a noisy train line, or airport landing patterns change during certain times, and what was a mellow quiet plot can be noisier than LAX during Christmas.
Also: It sucks that bookmarklets have fallen out of fashion. I just spent a few minutes trying to find a working bookmarklet that changes the font size and failed.
The author used viewport-relative units for body text and (guessing) only tested on a laptop screen.
This fixes it:
[data-predefined-style="true"] main { font-size: 20px; }
I had the opportunity to stay very nice place up in BC last summer — at the price of constant fear that we might need to hop in the car and leave everything behind at any second. And this was in a fairly big town (Kelowna).
I can't imagine what the risks are for living in a place like this is...
Everywhere dries out enough it will catch fire at least some of the year. If there is forest, there will be fire.
I took a similar approach to building a new house on a field in Ireland - my house was built in Latvia and assembled in a week or so by a local crew.
Seriously though, every NA forest community I’ve seen is similarly screwed. There is a reason the firefights always get seen as heros - those communities would not exist if it wasn’t for them.
What's I found _conspicuously_ absent from the author's considerations was anything at all regarding their children. Elementary schools, family doctors, even the local density of children near to their age.
Houses in the woods are lovely for a family to visit for some of the year, and are lovely for reclusive adults; but they severely restrict the opportunities to fulfill the needs of children.
I'm half a block from a pump park and playground, a block from the elementary school, and two blocks from the ocean. Not city blocks, mind you. Each block is roughly large enough to hold 4 acres of land.
For my young kids it's night and day; they are much happier than when they were living in Vancouver. We have a large house with enough rooms for everyone to have their own; more yard than we know what to do with; and the kids are safe to run around outside without being heavily monitored. Unlike where we left, where they shared a tiny bedroom, the parks had to be swept for broken glass and used needles, and we had no yard to speak of.
There are gangs of roving kids all over the place, every evening and weekend; it's totally unlike living in the big city.
The only downside is that family doctors are hard to come by; you basically can't access non-emergency health care without one, either, as there's only one drop in clinic for the entire region. But that's a province-wide crisis that the NDP government seems happy to ignore.
Also, who checked off on the flat roofs in that location?
With that information, you can kind start to think through whether or not it'd be feasible to do it at a smaller scale given some of the fixed costs in preparing the land and so on.
If you’re not in that ballpark - not likely worth thinking about tbh.
Watch builder videos on YouTube if you want to get an idea of how much this costs.
This is less due to poor Vancouver salaries and more due to a basket of real estate issues, but yea the salaries aren't that great either.
Granted this was 2010-2012 on a super-desirable WA plot, and inflation has probably 2-3x'ed, but still, it's a very interesting read and a good model for how to disclose costs and still maintain a modicum of humility.
It's not regressive, it's because BC is not California and peak power consumption in the mid-late afternoon is not a thing. Paying people to feed the grid when the sun shine just doesn't make sense in that region.
I'm usually pretty cool with these success blog post, but something about this one really makes me angry. It feels like the author just consider himself to be above the people that actually lives there.
I honestly cannot connect the person who wrote the above with the one who designed and built what is an absurdly inefficient unnatural mansion in what used to be some pristine wilderness. Talk about cognitive dissonance.
I can’t imagine that home being less than $1m just for construction costs. $250/sqft for custom is a reasonable floor - and that’s for a pretty basic house. This is quite upscale with some weird ass options and a finicky customer - so the design and construction firm are going to take them for a ride.
This guy has a lot of tech money. He speaks of financial prudence but it’s more that he was eyeballing 8 figure when he could only afford 7 figure. That’s the level he’s playing at.
I would invest in a couple of these [0]
He is a general contractor who did or oversaw almost all of the work himself. It covers everything from finding land, to prepping it, goes into a tremendous amount of detail about framing, and concrete work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn4L_aJ1rV4&list=PLRZePj70B4...
Seriously cannot recommend this enough. It's a treasure that he created all of this and put it onto youtube for free.
Perhaps if I were significantly wealthier, the financial burden would be less and I could pay someone else to deal with any issues that arise. But for now, I feel like a second home would own me more than I own it.
Photo: https://cortex.persona.co/w/768/i/dee5ee05cc81d757e22f2338ab...
Render: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyXRBu7gn2o (0:36 in)
If you're looking to build a home, do yourself a favor and watch Essential Craftsman's Spec House series (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn4L_aJ1rV4&list=PLRZePj70B4...). Your eyeballs will grow wider and wider with all the considerations, but you'll be better informed for it.
“Contemporary” is the more generic umbrella term for things that are modern with a lowercase “m”.
Of course, nobody agrees on what Postmodernism is so please feel free to tell me why I’m wrong :)
Wouldn't the flat roof be problematic in area with significant snow accumulation?
Wouldn't the amount of glass also be problematic in terms heating efficiency?
Would a home like this require significant maintenance? As fantastic as that roof is, wouldn't it also require constant landscaping? Similarly with the pool, I'm wondering if maintaining a pool in the forrest with no barrier or fencing like this would be almost a daily undertaking.
My experience from building our first, and so far only, house are quite different. Having a limited budget (unlike what the blog post let you believe) was extremely stressful due to a large number of economical factors hard to foresee as a novice developer.
Land development comes with so many gotchas and bills needs to be paid, else, the build stops. Groundwork are most important and the economical impact will be great. We also had the romanticised view of "minimal site disruption", and modeled the house for it. In the end, the result was inevitable "site disruption" anyway. Make choices based on what you want, not based on whats there, the site will be so different anyway, it might be better to "create a new one" from start.
I can relate to the post. It took us 5 years from buying land, design grandios, re design more down to earth, permits, sourcing materials and finding-, firing-, re-hiring- local contractors, digging and building, until we finally where finished with the body and interior of a house. The sheer effort in doing this is astounding. We live in a beautiful one of kind house as a result. The one of kind also brings problems; Flat roof, Shu shogiban facade, oiled hardwood floors, limestone, large fixed windows, mosaic tiles. We have it all; great to look at and too feel, not so great when salt from outside makes stains on limestone, dogs make large pee stains on oiled floors, windows unreachable to be cleaned, tiles collecting dirt and open floor plans supporting sound travel more than we could previously understand.
In retrospect, it's very easy to make the wrong decisions, how ever prepared you previously thought you were, as new decisions needs to be made a la minute onsite, all the time.
The author seems well read about the technical part of their house, I cant help but feel they where overrun by contractors deciding what and what not should be installed. It is a shame they could not find a solution the geothermal heating. Nothing is said about ventilation or insulation. Not much feels "modern" to this build except the shape of it.
The architects -> engineering -> builder handoff is obviously the most lossy, tons of context/intent/purpose is lost in these steps, and normal way incentives align doesn't help with each group being sympathetic to the greater mission, the more they care or clarify etc the more time things take / cost incurred. It is natural to assume everyone is thinking the same as you and will be motivated because you are paying them, but they rarely are, they care less about the result than you do so staying on top of the details you care about throughout the process is a must.
What worked great for us was to have the builder part of the architecture design process and inject their learnings of how to actually build the thing along the way, rather than trying to bolt it on at the end. This isn't normally the way things work as normally architectural drawings are a primary input to a tender process to find a builder.. so is a bit cart before horse but we already had a builder so could avoid that.
It is "modern" in architecture, but makes a lot of aesthetic choices over function (flat roof, no overhangs, a heated pool in a cold climate).
Plus, pools suck, sure its a lot of fun for the kids a few weeks of the year, but they tend to sit unused most of the time, while consuming electricity, chemicals, etc. I have a heater that broke a few years ago, and i haven't bothered to fix it because getting out of an outdoor heated pool when its 60F or colder just isn't something most people enjoy. So I just stopped heating it long before it broke.
Modern as in built 5 years ago but not a 'modern' design like the article. A flat roof without eaves looks great but is impractical in Canada. As well as protecting the walls and footings from rain, eaves allow the low winter sun to shine through the windows, but keep out the high summer sun (trees block the low summer sun for us).
The only connected service we have is electricity, I'm planning to add a barn with solar panels on the roof so we may not need that soon.
Animals being anything from bees and ants and assorted bugs to squirrels and chipmunks and maybe bears. I have a SMALL woods behind my house and find all of those things have ways to get in without being invited way more often than I like. (Not bears)
The dogs freak out whenever I inadvertently let them out with animals in the back yard (happened with the skunk and opossum), so I've had to rush out and put myself in between them and the animals to keep them from possibly getting attacked or attacking they animals (they did get skunked).
We have a tall fence and do our best to repair holes and gaps, but it doesn't seem to matter much except keep deer and coyotes out of our yard (at least so far).
Anyway a rhetorical question as the article was mostly about the visual and social aspects.
I recently started talking to architects about getting started on the design process of a similar but smaller and simpler home and I was blown away by how much more expensive it was to build a home of this quality than what I'd been reading online.
It looks like as of 2022, you are looking at about probably $600-800/sqft to build something like this for my smaller simpler version. Potentially over $1000 / sqft to match the quality in the post
nice home; kudos but is this really HN material ;-)
Check out Larry Haun's books as well as the Essential Craftsman Youtube channel where he films an entire house build. Also the Build Channel with Matt Risinger is great for more advance topics.
Then, start small and try your hand at something simple like a shed. Once you've shelled out for all of the tools you'll need to build a shed, you're well on your way to the investment in tools you'll need to build a home and can decide from there whether to proceed.
Quite a "hey, look at us" piece.
Film at nine.
They literally mentioned nothing about societal issues, except the implicit racism in their assumption that whiteness somehow inherently detracts from people's accomplishments.
I guess you missed the phrase "extensive societal advantages" in OP's comment.
I'd re-read this thread carefully and then take a moment to consider: is this really a hill worth dying of embarrassment on? You can always just walk away.
IMO, modern home should leave as less impact on nature as possible - be it materials used to build it or energy demands to run that house.
Where you see bitterness and jealousy, I just see indifference and light irony.
Maybe you're the one projecting?
Either way, I don't have a horse in this fight. You may as well be right in your assessment.
The fact of the matter though is this - the original blog post is completely uninteresting. If you have wealth and money - you can pretty much build anything anywhere. There's nothing in that house that is a technological marvel/achievement or anything in its construction method that warrants unique news coverage on HN or elsewhere.
This is a pretty reductive viewpoint, since literally any article or project could be seen in the same light.
* Of course you released a popular jazz album, you had parents who loved jazz and had an instrument at home.
* Of course you work in journalism, you lived in a city that took great pride in its news institutions.
* Of course you like programming, you had access to a computer and free time in your childhood.
* Of course you run a book review site, you had access to functional library systems growing up.
* Of course you are interested in politics, you were able to volunteer at local election campaigns.
Like, if someone is building an expensive home, you would obviously expect that their life experience has been such that they are able to build an expensive home. Likewise, if someone does anything, then obviously their life experience has been such that they are able to do that thing.
This is a cool writeup of a cool project, and reducing it to the fact that these people have been fortunate can come off as pretty smug.
My 2¢ from observation. I could be completely wrong, too.
At the same time, I find these boxes horrible: https://nlc.p3k.hu/uploads/2019/07/ferencvarosi-helytortenet...
In reality that's how they look like (3 photos from 3 different districts in my city):
https://spoldzielnialsm.pl/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Obecni...
https://d-art.ppstatic.pl/kadry/k/r/1/7e/04/5ed7c0329f818_o_...
https://d-art.ppstatic.pl/kadry/k/r/1/79/a3/52da7c5466e91_o_...
And frankly, they are much better designed than most modern neighborhoods built today in my country. A school, healthcare, some local shops, library, park, playground, sport infrastructure in 10 minute walking distance and public transport making it possible not to have a car.
Also - for the CO2 emissions that canadian house causes you could comfortably support about 100 families living in the commieblocks. With no fancy solar panels nor heatpumps.
Have you lived in these? I have and they are terrible places to live in. Parking spaces are ridiculously under planned, because workers used took a bus, but today most families own at least one car. These buildings are near their end of life since they weren't designed to last.
They are rather depressing to look at, but that's just me.
Soundproofing doesn't exists, moving walls is limited, inner height is claustrophobic.
I don't recommend to look up to these as any good. Maybe something to learn from.
Yes, in several different ones (when I was studying in Lublin I lived in 3 different places and later I rented a flat in Warsaw). I also lived in a detached house in countryside for most of my life and now I live in a reasonably modern neighborhood. I have a comparison.
> Parking spaces are ridiculously under planned, because workers used took a bus
That's the best feature of them. You can walk everywhere and cars are optional. Your kids can play with other kids without constant supervision. There's no vandalized underground passes stinking of piss where you get mugged. Old and disabled people can actually live there on their own. My wife's grandmother moved from a detached house to an old commieblock in a nearby city because of that - she doesn't drive anymore and living within walking distance of basically everything is a huge positive.
> These buildings are near their end of life since they weren't designed to last.
The ones in Poland are good to go for the next 30-50 years. It mostly depends on the rust protection for the concrete reinforcement. The cheapest ones with no protection are soon going to fall apart but we had very little of them. We built them with some galvanic protection. The ones with stainless steel are basically forever, but we had almost none of those.
> inner height is claustrophobic
250 cm. The same as in modern blocks in Poland (my current flat has 255 cm and that mostly depends on what kind of floor you have). It's the building code still. In fact the building code is much worse now - for example distances between blocks are several times smaller and there's no requirement to plan utilities in new neighborhoods. The end result is this:
https://static.polityka.pl/_resource/res/path/17/a1/17a1a73c...
Notice that it's all houses and parking, no utilities whatsoever. No public transport. Schools, shops, parks, health clinic - you need to drive through these tiny roads with your car to get to all of these. The end result is traffic jams and people sitting in their houses all day cause there's nowhere to go.
I will grant you soundproofing is worse, but even in modern blocks you can still hear your neighbors.
Weird, I'd trade a chance to live in a commie block for the modern blocks you linked to.
But of course, I'd like to have my own land with my glass-concrete utopia home if money weren't an issue.
That's because you don't understand how big of a deal is 1 hour spent in traffic every day for the rest of your life.
Many, many people dream of living in the woods. The costs are usually unknown or prohibitive!
Also, I'm approximately their same demographic and could afford to build a house like this if the other estimates in this thread are approximate, and have literally not taken a penny from my parents, or used their resources(which are scant - I was paid more my first job out of college than both my parents combined), since I was 16.
Is there anyone in America or Canada who cares about the environment, who is not a kid by your standard? I know a bunch of people who claim to care about the environment, but they still eat meat, drive ICE cars, have children, use ridiculous amounts of power compared to the global average, and do many of the normal things North Americans do. I still believe they care about the environment though.
> These are two areas where the BC building code, BC Hydro, and the construction industry lag behind more environmentally progressive regions. It’s our hope that as the technology and standards improve we’ll be able to eliminate propane from the mix and use a fully electric power base, much of it captured on site from our 11.6 kW array.
> enough equity to buy raw land and build a fairly baller house on it
Sounds about right for Vancouver property market.
That said, it doesn't have to be that way. I'm building a house up in the mountains at the moment. Found ~3 acres for 12k and I'm doing the land clearing and build mostly by myself on the weekends to keep costs down.
My current guess is final costs w/ out-of-pocket financing (goal is to do it debt-free so I own house and land outright when I finish) will be somewhere between $250k-$350k, including the land price (maybe a bit higher as material prices fluctuate).
If you're patient and willing to make adjustments elsewhere in your life, you can do it. If you're just building a simple house, too, and not a Dwell photoshoot, you'd be surprised at what you can accomplish.
I don't think you could buy a temporary ice fishing hut for 12k in Canada.
What’s that worth to you?
$60,000 in 2015
Details: 1 hour from walmart, 35 minutes from the grocery, 5 miles from pavement, zero stoplights in my county, no zoning at all (build anything you want). But a nicely-kept dirt road, plenty of people living in the area, etc.
My guess is this build was between $900k-$1.2m CA. Hard to guess without knowing the sqft or acreage. This isn't necessarily outrageous given the market up there, and was probably a great investment and has substantial equity, but you need a strong personal balance sheet to handle that and the cost overruns.
Your right, though, that if you live in a low cost of living area, and you keep your expectations and footprint manageable, you can get a lot for very little. Like these cob homes, gorgeous - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlzpfkjjqOw
Source: am finishing up a home at a similar finish-level at a similar size, although not quite as fancy as this I don't think.
source: We're currently working with an architect on a similar project.
I mean it's still somewhat interesting vicariously. Kind of like the New York Times' house-hunting section, wherein they pretend that an $800,000 walk-up is an entry-level home.