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Green Houses: The New Way to Build

© April Kelley

Whether your family is growing or downsizing, one of the biggest steps personally, financially and ecologically is purchasing a new home. I'm in the growing stage, as is my sister. We've recently been discussing the best way to go when getting a new home. My dream includes solar power, composting toilets, point of use water heaters and passively heated homes with stylish layouts and ecologically harvested wood. I had a whole list of "Green Features" that I enthusiastically enumerated for my sister. But darn her and her common sense! She brought up a good point...there is no perfect ecological home.

No matter what I do, I'll still be using resources. So rather than take up more space and use more materials, wouldn't it be just as conscientious to purchase an old home in my neighborhood and bring it up to new ecological standards? She also pointed out that no matter how many green features I had, if I build a giant-sized home, it would have a giant-sized footprint. So if I truly wanted to have an eco-friendly home it would have to use space innovatively and be not-so-big. She recommended "The Not So Big House" series by architect Sarah Susanka. The designs were beautiful and it seemed I loved every other one. But unfortunately, the price for the plans alone was not something I was prepared to pay.

So, I decided to delve into some research about green homes. Green architecture seems to be the newest fad so I was delighted to find a plethora of information about the topic. I decided my choice for how to go about deciding on my new home would be based on three topics:

1.Cost 2.Resale Value 3.Impact of Green features.

I'd like to say that I'm so darn dedicated to ecologically sound living that cost is not a concern. But like most folks, I'm on a budget and frugality plays a huge part.

The first thing I did was figure out how much home I could afford. Some good calculators for this can be found at the following sites:

http://www.interest.com/hugh/calc/howmuc...

http://www.smartmoney.com/home/buying/in...

http://www.bankrate.com/brm/calc/newhous...

The second step was to figure out what sorts of Green features are most important to me. The type of features you desire will depend greatly on where you live. Are you up north where heating is a main energy sucker? Perhaps you live in the sauna otherwise known as New Orleans? Or maybe the human dehydrator known as Tucson...or like me, in the mild but extremely damp rainforests of the Pacific Northwest? Wherever you reside, if you want to go Green, you'll have to follow the number one rule - go with the flow of the land. Here are some fantastic sites chock full of information about what sort of Green features are right for you. Many of them even deal with the financing....but I'll get to that little kink in a minute.

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