My husband and I are moving to Australia on November 2. Once there we'll start looking for land, and once we find it we'll begin building.
This house is very similar to what we'll be building- about 1,000 sq ft of living space, probably with about the same amount of sq footage in verandah space around the outside (verandah is the Aussie version of "porch"). We'll only have a great room and bedroom, enormous kitchen and bath, and possibly a loft. Our place will be post and beam with strawbale infill and clay/sand render (plaster), with a corrugated iron roof on which we'll catch rainwater for our water supply, we'll install a greywater system before the house starts going up, and we'll have a composting toilet. With the exception of pouring the slab and putting up the frame, we're going to do as much of the rest as we can ourselves, with the help of friends. That's the nice thing about strawbale, you can do most of it with unskilled labor. The idea is to build a house that's more sustainable, has a smaller ecological footprint, and will be designed using passive solar/thermal mass/insulation techniques so that we won't need heating and air conditioning.
I just wanna get started.
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