The Money Mustache Community
Learning, Sharing, and Teaching => Ask a Mustachian => Topic started by: mrigney on August 01, 2016, 02:23:15 PM
-
My wife and I are looking way down the road to when we FIRE (current plan is 8-12 years depending on how side hustles do) at which point we're hoping to move back to her hometown (smallish, rural area). Our plan is to build a "forever home" on either some family land (65 acres) or buy some land and build.
When we do build, our hope is to build something that with as small of a environmental footprint as possible (e.g. reduce utilities, put in a graywater system, maybe solar panels....it is Texas after all, etc). I'm sure there are more ideas than I can even think of. We're probably not extreme enough to do things like composting toilets, but hey, everybody draws the line somewhere. What resources (books, websites, articles, etc) does the Mustachian community know of that I could read that would 1) help get me thinking about new ideas for these types of houses that I haven't thought of, and 2) talks about how to actually design houses like this (e.g. "If you want to build a house to reduce heating costs, put big windows on the west side of the house")? Looking for anything and everything at this point since I have about 10 years to plan:-)
-
greenbuildingadvisor.com
For framing and insulation, the "perfect wall" at building science is a good place to start. Really, anything at buildingscience.com is good to read. Joe L. is one of the godfathers of modern building techniques.
https://buildingscience.com/users/joseph-lstiburek
-
Talk to your utility companies, too, they often have rebates and depending on what those are you may be able to get a significant rebate for something you were planning on doing anyways.
-
http://builditsolar.com/
I found a lot of interesting information there.
I suppose heating won't be a big issue, but water heating can be done pretty cheaply with one of the designs posted there.
They also have resources for efficient/passive cooling :).
And what I like the most is that they post detailed DYI instructions from people who really did those things for almost everything.
-
permies.com, but if you read it long enough you probably will start to want to use a composting toilet, so read at your own risk.
-
Thanks for the resources! Going to start reading through some of them and see what ideas get lodged in my head.
-
you can search youtube for "homesteading" lots of great videos and families who have being blogs for years on stuff they have setup.
I have started to watch every video from https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqTGYxXH21MTYnMoOZGvX6A/featured
A good overview video is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NUBTIomUWs
Only downside is the God/Jesus comments but whatever still great videos :)