Finding (or Building) A Eco Friendly Sustainable Home ~ I (HEART) Retail Therapy

Finding (or Building) A Eco Friendly Sustainable Home

With the addition of our baby girl, we are quickly running out of room in our townhouse. My poor seven year old son behaves as if he is making a prison break every time I say he can go play outside. Baby furniture and baby paraphernalia are scattered around the house, so much so that walkers and bouncers have now become apart of our formal living room decor. The poor, dear, sweet hubby, after 12 hour work days, is now regulated to the lower 1/8th of our bed, because even though the children have their own rooms, they somehow always end up in our bed.

Now that the hubby and I are deciding to put our collective big boy tidy whities and big girl panties on and pursue the American Dream of homeownership, the little weasels on Wall Street have already ruined (and pissed on) the easy route to buying a home. Gone are the days of buying a home with your pretty face and a promise to pay. Add the fact that we are both self employed, I as a solopreneur and he with his brick and mortar stores, we usually have to jump through hoops and run through hellfire to even be considered for financing.

However, we are not deterred nor defeated. We will buy our home very soon AND it will have all the amenities and features we are looking for. Can you tell I have been working on my positive thinking? On top of that, whatever home we invest in, I want it to be as eco friendly and self sustaining as possible. An organic garden, rainwater collection, solar panels, recycled materials, and everything else to make my home kind to mother nature as well as to me and my family (and our budget).

While envisioning what I want my home to be, as well as what I want it to do, I have found so much information. Apparently, I am not the only one dreaming of sustainable, eco friendly, self sustaining, minimalist living. The people I have come across who are interested and/or living this lifestyle range from free loving flower children to the waiting for the apocalypse doomsayers. I fall somewhere in the middle. I want to lessen my family's carbon footprint, cut down the clutter, stop being a prisoner of "things", and have a safe, comfortable place to live just in case a doomsday scenario does happen and the apocalyptic yahoos start roaming the streets. (Just saying)

With all that I am envisioning (and will eventually put on my vision board), I started doing research. The possibilities are ENDLESS. There is something for the fun loving hippies (I love you all by the way) to the "shoot everyone on sight", apocalyptic yahoos. There are even possibilities for the in betweeners, the peace loving, community builders, who are rebelling against the rat race with a desire to live simply.

While searching for actual homes, this is what I found:

Four Lights Tiny House Company:

This company was founded by Jay Shafer, whom by all means, seems to be a Tiny House living guru.

Here is with National Geographic's Dan Stone. From The Huffington Post, "Shafer is considered something of a patriarch of the tiny house movement, a small but growing band of people who drastically shrink their living space in hopes of living a cheaper, less wasteful, and happier life.

Shafer started building tiny houses in the late 90s, attracted to the idea of living with fewer possessions. “When you live in a tiny house you only have room for the things that truly matter,” he told us when we visited his current 106-square-foot home in Sebastopol, California. “You have to choose what’s essential.” From the Four Lights Tiny House Company web site, "In the past fifteen years, Jay Shafer has been disseminating his message of conscious consumption thru his house designs, books and workshops. Now, he's bringing people's dreams for a simple, sustainable life to fruition thru his new Four Lights Tiny House Company."

Four Lights Tiny House Company offers floor plans and step by step instructions on how to build your tiny home. They also offer building plans and instructions for certain furnishings for the tiny home. Sign up here http://www.fourlightshouses.com/pages/workshops to attend one of their Tiny Home Workshops.

Here are some images from their site:

The Beavan Click here http://bit.ly/1yt5J2D

Sleeping Loft

The Gifford Click here http://bit.ly/1kVuIBu

The Zinn Click here http://bit.ly/1lc4zD7

Another company that specializes in tiny homes is the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company. (http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com) Tumbleweed offers both ready made houses as well as build it yourself plans. For the DIY'ers they offer professional building plans, workshops, how-to videos and even a specialized trailers to help you get your foundation started.

Here is one of Tumbleweed Tiny House Company's model and floor plan:

The Whidbey click here

Plus now Tumbleweed is offering an amazing deal, build a Home for $25 Grand...requires 14 tools, most of which you already own. Click here to find out how. People everywhere are pairing down their belongings and opting for a simpler life. Tiny houses help cut down waste, minimize carbon footprints and focuses people on what is truly important. Tiny homes are affordable and get people out of rentals or sky high mortgages into a place of their very own. Tiny houses are much more environmentally friendly than the standard single family home. Not to mention it's a lot cheaper to heat and cool.

If you want to see other another family's tiny home journey check out the Tiny House Family Blog here http://www.tinyhousefamily.com/. The curator of the blog moved in a tiny home with her children and husband and chronicles her life on the micro homestead.

As I stated earlier, I am actually looking for more space, preferably near to the city. I am definitely a city girl at heart, however, the appeal of the tiny home to me is having the ability to not be suffocated and strangled by the cost to maintain our 3000+ square foot home. I am striving to work to live not live to work! The maintenance, repairs and heating and cooling expenses in a tiny home would be cut in half, even compared to the townhome we have now.

Tiny homes, however, are not the only answer to simpler living. Enter the grandaddy of all self-sustaining, eco friendly homes, the Earthship. (http://earthship.com/)

While these homes are way larger than tiny homes (around 2200 square feet depending on your wants) and cost the same to build as buying or building a conventional home, these homes are completely self sustaining. No external utilities are needed. These homes are solar and wind powered, as well as collects, cleans and reuses it's own water. Could you imagine not having to pay water or electric bills?! I would write a letter to Virginia Dominion Power every month that states, "HAHA! Take that energy monopoly! Signed, living off the grid" Then I would take selfies turning the lights off and on.

From the Earthship site, "The building is built from 45% recycled materials... thus starting the construction of the building with a negative carbon footprint. Discarded materials take the place of new materials that require energy to produce. Also, once used, discarded materials, would have taken energy to dispose of. There is no energy required to reuse existing materials. This further contributes to a negative carbon footprint at the birth of the building." Here is a video about the company's Biotecture Academy.

What I love about the earthships is that they are completely self sustaining and quite cozy on the inside. You can either get people to build it for you or build it yourself. There are even a few for sale if you just want to move in!

The earthship is actually my dream home. Unfortunately, just like the tiny homes, some counties are not as accommodating to earthships. The closest earthship I have found was one in Suffolk, VA. In this home, due to local building codes, they had to compromise quite a bit on the building of their home. Recycled tires were not legal to use as building materials, among other things. The farther away from civilization you go, the building codes get less oppressive. But do not let that be a deterrent, there are earthships in Florida, Tennessee, New Mexico, Arizona, Virginia, Texas, Wyoming, Montana and in Canada. The Earthship site actually shows what they call "pockets of freedom", meaning earthship friendly locales.

I am not quite ready to live out in the middle of nowhere, as the hubby still has to go to his brick and mortar stores, however, this is what I truly want. I dream about earthships! Hopefully the bureaucracy will finally catch up with the changing times and embrace the eco friendly earthships. Fingers crossed.

The earthships and tiny homes are by no means the only way to eco friendly, self sustaining living. Here is another examples of a self-sustaining or autonomous home:

The Cropthorne Autonomous House http://www.cropthornehouse.co.uk/

This home has absolutely no heating or cooling needs, it collects and recycles its own water and even has an efficient toilet system that is also eco friendly.

If you are looking for your own environmentally friendly home Here are some more ideas to help http://freshome.com/2011/01/17/think-green-10-best-sustainable-homes-of-2010/

I know this post seems rather odd for an "I HEART Retail Therapy" blog. While I do love "stuff", what I love more is being able to enjoy my life and not just working to maintain my "stuff". Having the time to really nurture my relationships and being there for my children is all the success I really need. Furthermore, now that I am a mommy I worry about my childrens future and want to do everything I can to leave them with a better life than I had. Whatever I can do to be more in tune with nature and lessen my own waste, I am doing. What's that old saying? "If mamas happy, everybody is happy". So let's make sure mother nature is happy!

In a week (or so, you know I am a shameless procrastinator at times) I will post about what you can do to make your own home more self sustaining and eco friendly, while introducing you to some awesome companies that make that process easy and affordable!

So what are you doing to lessen your carbon footprint?

As always, happy saving the environment and living a better life!