I've done this in Portugal, but on a smaller scale and pretty much with only my own labor. I purchased 6 hectares (15 acres) for mid-5-figures.
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.
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.
Sounds cool, like a fantasy. How far is the house from stores like groceries and other necessities? Must be out of the city I'm guessing? So you'd have to do a long drive every now and then to buy things?
I can walk to the nearest village in about 10 minutes, although it doesn't have much in the way of amenities.
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.
One question I always have when people build houses with large windows: don't you worry about someone smashing the windows and stealing stuff when you're away?
Not any more than you worry about someone kicking in your shit-tacular cheap door, or drilling the lock out. Homes aren't often fortresses; you'd build differently if you lived in an unsafe, unstable area. Lots of homes in America have no property walls or fences, either--probably the supermajority of them. I assume that's also true for Canada, especially in uh, the woods.
I have a full pane glass door into my shop. I’m definitely replacing it for this reason. Someone could absolutely break in by other means and there’s other windows big enough for a person (by regulation), but somehow a big door full of glass seems too inviting.
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.
The company I work (manufacturing) has facilities in not-so-nice areas. We have had break-ins that used sawzalls or other large power tools to remove the entire door frame of steel doors (set in concrete walls).
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.
Did you use a set of plans specifically for the A-frame studio house, or was it an amalgamation of a bunch of different resources? I'd love more resources on it if you have a suggestion.
I would love to be able to suggest something, but I think I just made up the design from my own head. I had a rough plan, and I made the rest up as I went along.
If you send me an email (see my profile -> website) I can share with you the construction photos.
Sounds like you do not have the building inspection hell of many places.
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.
We tend to be quite building inspection heavy over here in the UK but I gather if you work with people who know the system well, you can get off-grid style buildings built. Hopefully this is quite a useful example that featured on two episodes of Grand Designs.
The UK (and Ireland) both make it default-illegal to build things and then you have to beg a bunch of church elders on the council to let you build your house, and they'll decide if it's pretty enough, but there is _one_ cool thing the UK is doing - http://www.oneplanetcouncil.org.uk/ - making it easier to do off-grid living in Wales.
So the floor heat system is somewhat unusual. Details are:
- 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.
>>> 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.
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.
Hey! Well I think it took me about 3 months ish to build, but it was spread out over about a year so it is hard to say for sure. And I’m a software developer so I don’t think my day rate would be a fair way to do the calculation. But I’ll ballpark a builder at around €70/day around here, so 3 * 22 * 70, so around €5k for labour?
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 :-)
Which area of portugal is this? I was looking to do exactly the same. Buy a cheap land and build a small house myself. I am just wary or property tax, bureaucracy and construction costs. Would love to read blogpost about your experience on this
I'm in Central Portugal. It is the Gardunha region (known for its cherry growing). Between Fundao, Castelo Branco, and Penamacor.
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)
Hi! I love the ideia of an off-grid house. If you didn't get that permit for urban land ("you can build a house here") then the whole thing has no sanitation, electricity or water connected to the main supply right? And are we still allowed to place a building, even in those conditions, in an agricultural land?
Amazing thank you so much for the details! I was looking anywhere nearby the sea I am sure it will be more expensive than countryside but still doable. Do you have recommended Portuguese site to search for land/property? Thank you again! I will reach out via email
Hehe, no. There is no-one to see in. It is because I made a miscalculation in the house design. I was hoping that the awning would prevent the worst of the summer sun from hitting the windows, but it did not. So I got some custom canvas made up which I can use to keep the sun out. [1]
Our large west facing windows get way too hot so we had this 3M film installed that essentially tints the windows and blocks UV. I’m a HUGE fan of it — in many ways it actually improved the view out the window by reducing glare.
It is a fair point on climate change. I'm not really an expert on this, but I'll make some various points...
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.
It does not, but it has only been about 8 months. Break-even is in sight though. Then I can decide if I want to just let it bring in some money, of it I want to 'Bezos' it and expand coverage instead.
Sure! I saw startyourownisp.com on HN years ago, and once I moved here I remembered that starting an ISP was actually a thing. I started a wireless ISP (WISP). The rough process is:
- 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.
Thank you so much! Another question if you don't mind - how difficult was the bureaucratic aspect? Registering with regulator etc... what would you consider the biggest hurdle?
Well this is going to vary hugely by country. I think that got easier in Portugal from 2017, so I was a little lucky in that regard. I think it is also fairly straight-forward in the UK/US too. We had to pay a €700 one-off fee, and we need to fill in a report (i.e. spreadsheet) once per quarter with our total customers (and various other bits).
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.
Data rétention directive, France does not want to obey the CJEU ruling because of 'national security' jocker card. And they make fuss about Poland not respecting EU law.
this is obviously awesome, I just want to ask you if you see the idea of a 50-year-old tractor harmonizing with the idea of an ultra modern sustainable home and energy source?
TBH, sustainability is a byproduct rather than the goal.
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)_/¯
First comment from my partner was “I don’t know if this is the Parasite house of an Apple Store” :-).
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 choices don’t seem particularly shocking to me, so I don’t understand why they seem so obviously bad to you. For placement of bedrooms, I think the question is where else to put them. I guess they could have the office/4th bedroom next to the master instead but what the rooms for is obviously somewhat subject to change. For the bathing part of a bathroom being near bedrooms seems logical. There appears to be a small lavatory off the kitchen area but maybe it isn’t ideal not having a proper lavatory connected to the living space, especially if they actually do as much entertaining as they planned when designing it. I don’t know how to square your statement about architects seeing dumb money with the fact that many things you suggest they do would be more expensive and therefore increase the architects fees.
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.
> The choices don’t seem particularly shocking to me
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.
When those kids get older they will probably need attention from a therapist having lived in the woods alone with their parents. I hope their schools are good.
That exposed wood with no rain protection will age terribly. I've seen quite a few houses for sale with this sort of design that probably looked good new too.
Without overhangs and gutters, you are going to have a lot more water exposure to your siding, windows and doors which will definitely affect longevity. In a snow climate, this is even worse.
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.
Growing up in that part of Canada I have some worries about that flat roof. "Rural BC north of Whistler" is the sort of area to expect snow, and structures need to be designed to clear said snow...
Reasonable conclusion. Without an overhang and gutters it seems like more rain and snow would run off the side of the building than there would be otherwise, keeping the wood wet for longer. But, on the other hand, the green roof might have some characteristics or affordances that prevent that. Hard to tell. I am curious now though!
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...
Beautiful house and there was a day I would have been extremely jealous but...
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.
I live in the forest in rural norcal and everything you say rings true. We had a huge fire come within 3 miles of us last year. This year's obviously going to be just as bad given the prolonged dry winter. The neighborhood is aggressively managing the fire risk, yet it seems it'll never be enough.
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.
Yes, I'm also looking at buying a house in California, but I too am afraid to buy a home anywhere that could realistically burn in the next 10-30 years. It's a shame since it rules out many of the best (and more affordable) areas of the state.
Some of this may be obvious (especially after you read it) so I apologize if this comment is unhelpful...
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'd love to see a source for these statements, because it directly contradicts what I've seen in the Fire Smart BC (https://firesmartbc.ca/) materials.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Designing a house to survive a fire isn't that hard. You need a defensible space, pick the right materials (don't go with cheap wood tile that takes 1 oz of burning pine needles to light, like in Paradise CA). If in a particularly high risk area I've seen insurance require things like a watering system for the roof, including onsite water (not depending on water pressure) and pump (not requiring grid power). Not a particularly big expense if designing a new home.
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.
Almost everywhere in California could burn in the next 10-30 years. Huge fires around LA every year. The Oakland hills fire burned down thousands of homes. Santa Rosa burned twice in three years. Santa Cruz, etc. Maybe somewhere in the central valley or the Mojave desert would meet your requirements.
I guess much of the land that burns around L.A. is classified as a desert by some. I was thinking more of the Mohave or Death Valley areas where there is much less fuel to burn and preventing structures from burning is a bit easier.
I live in the Mojave desert. Fires are a real problem here. I know people who have lost their homes because of them. We tend to have low humidity and high winds which are a bad combo. The desert isn't all sand dunes like people think. The dry brush burns really well. Here is what it looks like when it goes.
Funny, I've actually considered buying property in that area now that it's been cleared of houses. With a bit of planning, it should be possible to make it more resistant to another wildfire roaring through. I'd still build myself a couple of contingency plans anyway, of course, and buy good insurance.
Good luck to you! It is truly beautiful out there, even still. If you clear out an acre or two around your house and have some kind of fire line you'd probably be fine. I'd be concerned about the road to your house and how accessible it is to a major hwy.
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.
Unfortunately even a clear couple of acres won't protect against ember attack. The house can be built to be fully fire-resistant and you're still faced with stay-or-go decisions when the next fire arrives.
Pemberton had historically high snowfall last month, followed by a massive rain event. If the roof didn't have issues in January it's probably not going to have issues for a very long time. Pemberton is in a rain shadow. Owl creek gets some snow, more than town, but not much. Much less than Whistler.
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.
You could but would it make enough of a difference? Having the structure remain standing, but the entire landscape be totally destroyed (including all major infrastructure like power) doesn't seem like much of a victory.
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.
My property (rural acreage an hour north of SF) burned twice in the last two years. Black hills everywhere. But looking around now you'd never notice.
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.
Aside from all the big prep ahead of time, when we evacuate for a fire, is there anything we should be doing at the time of evacuation to help our house survive or easier to partially save... leave interior doors open/closed, leave drapes open/closed, leave hall lights on for firefighters or off to prevent electrical shorts, etc? I've also heard that the fire hydrants are typically on a different water infrastructure from household supply... is that true? If that's true, should I turn my lawn sprinklers on to help make my landscaping less flammable?
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.
The way to do this if you're not wealthy is to get a cheapo plot of land on the Oregon/Washington coast ($<100k for up to .5 acres) and put a manufactured home on it. It's way simpler, cheaper, and the construction on manufactured homes has improved a lot over the years (they're framed with 2x6s to survive transport, and this makes them sturdier and better insulated than most traditional houses). I did it and it's been great! No complaints. No architectural magazine is going to feature my house though.
In my short experience, there is a very practical difference between "manufactured" and "modular" which is explained at the Ideabox site link below.
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).
Ideabox's cheapest home is a 780 sq ft 1BR for $230K. According to their cost estimate, the total cost would be $420k. This seems over-priced. Pre-fab homes should be cheaper than custom-built homes. A new home of that size will not cost $400k in Wyoming or Kansas.
>Pre-fab homes should be cheaper than custom-built homes.
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 ...
To clarify a little: Where I am interested in building, there are county-wide laws or code regarding mfg vs mod homes, effectively taking one of those options off the table for 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...
Also in BC/PNW you can buy old houses that are going to be demolished. Some friends on Lopez Island had an old home shipped over and plopped on their 40 acres where they then started growing wheat and baking bread.
That might depend where you live. 2x6 is standard here in my part of Canada, but that's just for added insulation, not for any structural reason. Older homes were built with 2x4 exteriors
The manufactured home thing is really interesting. Do you have more information regarding that? I Googled a bit and found much info about "Mobile home", is it the same thing?
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.
We used Skyline: https://www.skylinehomes.com/ They're pretty standard American-looking houses, though a little narrower than a traditional house because they put them on a truck.
Still going to be cheaper than a site-built home in a rural, high cost of living area.
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.
Is there a difference with manufactured vs prefab in the resale process in the eyes of lenders?
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.
You can't, because land within commuting distance of a major city is going to have more people that want it, and be more expensive. You need to go farther out. I'm not super familiar with the Washington coast, but in Oregon places like Lincoln City, Yachats, Coos Bay, Otis, etc.
Wow. Might I ask where? I'm thinking of places like the outskirts of Monroe, North Bend. I've heard of people doing this farther out on the Peninsula in places like Port Angeles.
You're about 15 years too late to find 'deals' in Monroe/North Bend area. It's seeing huge growth and property values are way up. There's not as much land as you think too since a lot of it butts up against state and national forests.
there's a lot of land on the WA/OR coast, but you won't find it cheap in a Seattle suburb, which is where a 30 minute drive along the coastline will take you
Another option is kit homes. I've been looking at First Day Cottage and Shelter-Kit. They are designed to be assembled by homeowners, but some people hire contractors. This FDC on Reddit looks extraordinary.
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.
This is the type of house that gets published in architecture and "Home" magazines as inspiration. The thing is most of those houses do a bit of media and advertising to help pay costs. It's partly sponsored and used by architects to sell their services. The "FU Money" emanating from this article is palpable.
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?
Well.. it depends. I'm not making any uncharitable assumptions about the author's intentions. The entire article could say "I bought a house near Vancouver" and you'd be expecting the person to be extremely well-off, because it'll cost $1.5m anyway. It's obviously a little disingenuous to call it a "modern home in the woods" because it's definitely not a humble bungalow, but whatever. I just find it a little silly to keep implying budgetary constraints and keeping costs as low as possible, but not providing any context for what that really means.
The house does look pretty nice, and while I don't care for Pemberton much, it's seems like a decent build.
"modern home in the woods" because it's definitely not a humble bungalow
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.
I also enjoyed reading it, and didn't mean to imply otherwise, but I think there's a few bits, particularly starting with "we could only afford the land and couldn't agree on a timeline for paying for a house" (paraphrase) that implies it's going to be a more gradual humble project, perhaps like Les Stroud's off grid home in the woods https://youtu.be/hWfgxxZl5Tg
That's more about your interpretation than their intent, right? If it had said dirt-cheap or humble or hand-built or similar, then they've implied something they didn't deliver. The only time the word "humble" is used at all is in describing the architects.
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!
Minor edit:
The median salary earned in Vancouver at a tolerable savings rate would require 35 years to pay for a minimum downpayment on a detached home, if not many other kinds of properties.
I think it's a cashflow vs capital thing. I'm in a similar situation - my wife and I aren't making much money at the moment, but our condo increased in value by so much that we were able to buy a million-dollar property. Granted it would have been a 300k property about ten years ago, but here we are. And due to the condo sale and the magic of financing, we have about 100k leftover to spend on renovating it and making it feel worth the money we spent. But we don't have much cashflow, so we need to spend that money as efficiently as possible, because once it's spent it will take a LONG time to build back up.
This reminds me a lot of time I spend reading Dwell magazine a decade ago.
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.
Yeah, it blew my mind that having a pool was so important to someone in a cold place like Canada. We have a pool in Texas and while it was installed with propane heating 30 years ago, the heating has really never been used as it’s not efficient to do so. I can’t imagine how much it would cost to heat a pool in the author’s climate.
In the central and eastern parts of Canada the summers can get scorching hot and humid and a pool would be lovely to have.
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.
The carbon footprint of this individual is off the scale. He's got a funny idea of what 'low impact' means. Low impact is a well insulated residential flat. This is extreme impact.
"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"
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.
A heated pool for a single-family home in the wilderness seems particularly decadent and indulgent.
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.
In Pemberton, no less. An outdoor pool, _very_ large windows, open/not-enclosed outdoor patios, etc etc. They've basically planned to heat the outdoors when it is below 0C a few months out of the year; and most of the year it's below 18C. And all that exposed, non-insulated concrete. The thermal mass they have to heat is practically unbounded. Bonkers.
They're going to have a hell of the time with the weathering on that siding and roof in 10y, too.
Edit: I saw someone else building a cabin with similar windows recently. They are double pane, they are just some sort of frameless unit, held together by the strip of black material around the edge. Whether they work probably comes down to how well the installer seals around the edge of the window.
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, I'm sure those are at least double pane. Modern windows (especially high end) can be both energy efficient and nice looking. Same goes for their concrete walls--its quite likely that they have insulation in wall cavities or embedded directly in the concrete itself. That being said--I'm sure it still costs a pretty penny to heat in the winter. Its just probably not as bad as you might think.
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.
Dang, what makes the west coast so prone to burning? I've lived on the east coast all my life and have never encountered a wild fire. The biggest fires we get are ~1000 acres[1], and easily contained.
The west coast has large tracts of unoccupied, I maintained forest land, and a more Mediterranean climate (wet then much drier).
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.
I can't believe no one at any step of the process gave them a warning about flat roofs, huge glass windows, having a pool, etc. in frigid mountain areas with tons of snow. I feel like there must be a lot more to this story, like cycling through different architects and engineers until one would finally not tell them the idea was bonkers.
A flat green roof. Which is much worse than just a flat roof.
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.
I wonder if the pool can tolerate freezing solid in the winter, or if it cracks the concrete? Flat roofs might be okay if they're built right. In Oregon, people would look at you funny if you built a house with a flat roof, and yet almost all our commercial buildings have flat roofs, so apparently it works out somehow.
(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.)
> I wonder if the pool can tolerate freezing solid in the winter, or if it cracks the concrete?
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.
It's also weirdly not mentioned in the article - the lack of any of this type of feedback, especially considering it's about building a home in the Canadian woods.
These are usually pretty small spaces. So heating them isn't that much of an problem. And going from 22 to 80 for a few hours a week or day isn't too wasteful.
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.
No, a lot of saunas in Finland are electric heated. But they're still only 3*16A at most (and usually a lot less, but that depends on the size of the sauna). I think mine is ~7kW and still heats the sauna to high temperatures, just takes a bit more time.
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.
There is a common saying when living in areas when using wood for heat -
‘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 for a wood-construction sauna with a heater warming up rocks that you can steam water off of? That's a lot less mass to warm up, mostly air, and a lot less ongoing energy loss than a big heated pool.
My house has 350A split across two meters because we have a ground source heat pump which has a special electric rate. I don't think we ever actually use that much power.
Where I live we have to pay to the electric grid for the amps on the main breaker. Because the grid has to be able to provide those, needs to be planned accordingly, needs to have the proper diameter cables and transformers, etc. Even if we don't use them. So having 300A "just in case we need it" would be insanely expensive on the monthly bill. This amount of apmeres is more like for a workshop, small industrial or office building
Many utilities will do this based not on the amperage to the house but the peak kw used in a billing cycle - a capacity charge. This helps incentivize reduced peak usage. In your scenario it's strange because you have zero incentive to keep your maximum usage below the breaker amount, other than the per-kwh cost.
I live in the same such country with such rules. They assume rightly that if you request that amperage you will use it and they will plan and bill you to handle it. And yes we then also pay per kWh :)
Why would it be harmful to run at the amperage that I'm buying ? What disincentives do I need?
I'm from the US and I was shocked they needed 400A plus propane. We draw more current then you guys because our voltage is lower but still, 200A services are pretty standard for large rural homes.
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.
I'm running a small hot tub in central New Hampshire. I figure it costs me $15 per month in the winter.
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!
NH electric rates are $.20/kWh [1]. If you are spending $15/month for heating the hot tub, then you are consuming ($15/month)/($.20/kWh)=75kWh/month to heat it.
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.
I pay $0.13 per kWh in my town. (That's my marginal cost.)
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.
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).
It's funny how removed we are from reality. Even if $15/month might be cheaper than a propane bill, it would be far far more expensive against the planet to heat it with gas/coal burned at a factory 100 miles away, converted to electricity, then converted back to heat inside the spa water heater.
I think that an air/water heat pump on the tub, with say a COP of 8, would be less expensive to operate than propane or straight electric. But, I couldn't justify the capital expense. (Small hot tubs are electric.)
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.
> I'm not sure why there's a push to eliminate gas cooking in favor of electricity.
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.
I don't think this is true. Could you source this? I've had several small outdoor electric hot tubs, and all of them have had dedicated heaters. The couple times I've had problems with the heater, the symptoms involved the pump running constantly and the tub never reaching temp. I'm sure there is some friction heating, but I don't think it's anywhere near enough to reach standard temperature.
Apparently you're correct, and I was misinformed. You could implement it this way—like how Tesla's newer designs can run the electric motor in a less-efficient mode to provide heat for the battery pack—but the designs I investigated did have separate heaters as part of the circulation system. (For some reason the specs for these were not listed in the product summary, but rather only in the manual.)
> 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.
So in NH I am paying just over $4.20 a gallon for propane and about $0.18 a kwh for electricity. With those prices a propane heater for my hot tub would cost more to run. Also a heat pump heater for the hot tub would optimistically get around a 3-4 COP in warmer weather and 2-3 in the colder weather but either of those would lower your price to heat it considerably but the capital expenses neglect those savings.
> they have an outdoor heated pool, though, so crazy as it sounds they are presumably using electricity to heat it.
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).
reading this as a french, this is wild. AFAIK you can't even get more than 136A as an individual, you need to operate a company (if my calculation is correct - max. for individuals is 15kVa AFAIK). Huge majority is 6kVa / 230V => ~26A
as a heads-up, most electrical mains in the USA are 240v; they are wired two circuits in series for most residential applications. But you'll find a 240v plug in most homes; it's the industrial heavy-duty looking plug.
True. For comparison, I have a 60s era 1000sqft house in northern Canada that had a 60A service into a 50A breaker panel up until last year. For insurance, safety and maintenance reasons[0] we upgraded to a 200A service, but for a small house and a 3-4 person family 50A is sufficient provided your hot water heater is natural gas.
[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.
It was probably upgraded from ~30A at some point in the past as a requirement of a lender. Presumably it has circuit breakers? Those weren't even a choice in a 100 year old house when it was built AFAIK. I've been curious how well these jobs are generally done, when I was a kid it was a big selling point to have circuit breakers instead of fuses. I've always been curious how through some of those upgrades were, did they replace all the wiring too, does everything have grounds, etc. Or did they just pull a few 240 lines for AC/range/etc?
My thought is that power can go out for days at a time after a big storm, so propane is mostly a backup electricity/aux heat source.
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.
The amount of cognitive dissonance required to say "we want to limit impact" on one hand, and to run a 400Amp electrical connection to heat your hot tub and pool in Canada, is staggering.
If it’s cheap hydro power driven (like much of Canada), it isn’t absurd.
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'll not defend our wasteful habits -- we really are screwing up the world over here -- but still, most North Americans don't have electrical outdoor heated pools. In a rural, fairly chilly area... that's really something.
I doubt most North Americans need a 400A connection. (How much wattage is that? 48kW?) I live in an ordinary single house in a boring suburb in the bay area, and on hottest days, if I have to use the A/C, the oven, and the dryer at the same time, maybe it would push it over ~10kW. Maybe once in a year.
There are places where we waste energy because we're doing dumb stuff: in northern parts of the country, your house should be well insulated and designed for cold temperatures.
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?
True, most places would need to run A/C or heater much more often than California, but I doubt they need three times as powerful an A/C at any given moment.
Their contractor talked them into building it without a fixed budget. That's a pretty good financial incentive to just say "can do!" to every suggestion the owner makes.
The whole thing is pretend environmentalism. It starts out with some superficially "green" elements like solar power but eventually throws it all out the window when that conflicts with luxury or desire. In the end they've built a huge, inefficient house with enough embodied energy to power Ghana for a year, only accessible with the family's giant gas-guzzling truck, as depicted.
> 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.
What gets me is that the space doesn't seem to get you very much - it's a 3-bedroom, 2.5-bath house.
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?
Yeah, that bit made no sense to me. I'm not familiar with the location but clearly it's rural and only accessible by car. They also were living in Vancouver which sounds quite far away, and presumably have friends/family there.
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??
Yep. My partner and I have had the same thoughts about having a property outside of the city that's large enough to entertain in. We jokingly call it The Compound - but there is something to the name I think in terms of how it needs to be designed to fulfill that need.
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.
Top-to-bottom windows all over and narrow spaces .. it's actually amazing they fit it in 100KVA. This thing in winter would need about twice that just to not freeze. Hence the propane, and forget the tub and the pool.
400A is an absurd number. I live in the northeast have a heated pool, electric water heater, and am putting in heat pumps and it all runs off a 200A. 100A is the standard hookup in my area. I have no idea what this person is doing (are they heating the pool in winter??) but those numbers are absurd. Also a propane pool heater is far cheaper then electric, converting propane to electricity is really crazy when you could just have propane heat, hot water, and pool heater.
My rural home never uses more than 4kW (and even that's rare), so under 20 amps. I can't imagine needing 400A supply without building a machine shop or something.
I had the same reaction (European too). If it's in Canada the supply voltage is 120V, so roughly half what we have in Europe, apples-to-apples it's comparable to 200A in Europe.
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).
240v is delivered to homes on two legs - the legs are split to make 120v circuits for lighting and wall plugs. 240v circuits with both legs are common for things with a large draw such as HVAC, electric water heaters, electric stoves/ovens, electric dryers, etc.
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.
Supply is 240V in North America. You probably have multiple 240V circuits at your home, typically for electric range, oven, and clothes dryer at least. It is split into two for regular outlets and lighting.
I had 400A installed at my house (all electric, solar, batteries, the works). It's still overkill. What's shocking to me isn't that they went with a 400a panel, that I can (and obviously did) justify. It's that it WASN'T ENOUGH and they had to add propane as well. I can't imagine what kind of pool heater they have that needs more than that.
Since our voltage is 120/240 volt split phase or 120/208 open Y service (less common) we tend to need higher currents for main breakers/fuses. The old standard for a home was 100 amps whereas modern homes are built with 200 amp mains. I suppose the low cost of air conditioning and heat pumps has raised this demand. Otherwise our lighting and appliance loads have become more efficient.
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.
My impression is that in many European countries much lower supply ratings are normal (like 25A, I think I've even seen 17A on an apartment with A/C!) and it's just sort of accepted that you will trip the main breaker if you run too many things at once. In the US tripping the main breaker would be a pretty crazy occurrence, we seem to always spec in order to make that very difficult to do. I wonder if one difference is the safety margin applied considering the long trip time for breakers in a light overload condition... if you have say 100A service you could pull 150A for a decently long time before the main trips, perhaps for the runtime of some appliances, and over time that could lead to heat problems.
> if you have say 100A service you could pull 150A for a decently long time before the main trips, perhaps for the runtime of some appliances, and over time that could lead to heat problems.
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.
It's not a typo because 400A is indeed the highest tier residential service BC Hydro currently offers[0]. 400A is also in the right ballpark for the amount of equipment he describes.
The copper coming from "something" will be at least 1/2 inch thick, probably more so that it doesn't lose voltage. We're probably talking a 7/0 cable where 4/0 would be bare minimum.
Probably larger than that. If they’re 200m from the transformer, 400A service requires (3) 1000kcmil cables per leg. 100m drops it to (3) 350kcmil which is still pretty beefy
There are highly efficient heat pump powered water heaters, going out anywhere remote, these and other heat pump systems should really be used. This is a really great overview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J52mDjZzto&t=1840s
The house is obscene, but just because one has 400A service doesn't necessarily mean they're being inefficient in doing so.
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.
You aren't missing anything, that's pretty ludicrous. My (midwest USA) house has 100A service, and I weld for fun and run a rack with servers. The welder can make the lights dim which makes me want 200A, but 400A is just insane.
It strikes me as high too, but it's possible that he needed more than a 200A 240V main panel to meet code for his very large solar panel system. In the US (I don't know about Canada where the house is) there is a 120% rule, which limits the amount of electricity that the solar panel is allowed to feed into the panel: https://unboundsolar.com/blog/electrical-panel-requirements-....
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.
I investigated solar and generation requires appropriately sized circuits and capacity, even if the direction is the opposite.
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.
It's 400A peak usage, not average. Different decisions could have been made to lower that peak load considerably. As another commenter mentioned, swapping out the tankless water heater which can trip a standard house's electrical connection all on its own.
It's entirely reasonable if they have a tankless water heater + electric heat. The amount of powerdraw that can be required during a shower means I would trip a 200A circuit during the winter. Average powerdraw would certainly be much lower, but you have to prepare for the peaks. Adding in an electric pool heater, more square footage to heat, and probably a fancy electric range, means you could hit 400A somewhat easily if you aren't being careful.
Nobody should be running electric heat (resistance heat, COP=1), since we now have heat pump technology that can operate below 0F and do so with COPs of at least 2. Electric tankless WHs are also a terrible idea in almost all cases. A HPWH or standard electric tank would be much better for overall power demand.
Using 400A consistently would be insane. Building the capacity to support 400A but using much, much less on average is... prudent, especially when building a house that is remote.
Just because you prudently plan for 400A of peak capacity doesn't mean you would actually come anywhere near using it at any given time. Part of building a house in the woods is planning for contingencies.
Totally agree. I can't warp my head around the effect of this house in environmental impact including using cars all the time, disrupting local fauna and the energy costs.
I also did. Another ridiculous thing was that the article initially claimed no fossil fuels, but the one thing they couldn't live without was wood-burning fireplaces. I mean don't they both generate large amounts of carbon dioxide?
I understand wood is not a fossil fuel. But doesn't burning wood have the same environmental effect as burning fossil fuel? They both produce large amounts of CO2 and generate heat. If you didn't burn that wood, those would still be trees capturing CO2 from the atmosphere. So they didn't really achieve anything, did they?
(This is way outside of my expertise so I appreciate if you tell me what's wrong with my logic.)
If there is a tree, it is composed of carbon it extracted from the atmosphere using sunlight. For that tree to exist, -1 tree worth of carbon (roughly) was removed.
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.
I have 3*25A in a relatively old, three-story house in Sweden. Heated with a heat pump. I assumed 400A was a typo but apparently not? I guess it makes sense considering the heating of the pool, the large surface area and maybe an EV.
The current tesla wall charger will charge 48A and requires a dedicated 60A circuit. The previous model wall charger would charge 80A and required a 100A circuit.
You can limit the charging current but at some point you will have to make compromises on driving.
If this sort of thing interests you but you can't afford a multi-million dollar build I'd recommend checking out Theron Humphrey's work building a modern lakeside home in Montana (https://www.thiswildidea.com/casa). He built a simple, modern and affordable (think low 6 figure) home and did a good amount of the work himself while sharing info on the process. Apparently he's embarking on a new build this year in Arizona and sharing more in-depth info on his youtube.
What's modern about that house? Ridiculous amount of electricity required, flat roof in an area where snow is expected for a big portion of the year, heated outside pool, very remote but VERY dependant on electricity, internet and TV must be fun. It all starts kicking in pretty fast once you move in and realise your kids grow up alone because there's nobody in their age group for miles, no days when you feel like doing nothing (especially in the winter), no way your kids can play outside (in the wilderness) unsupervised, no way can they play outside when it's darker - so many WTF's and ifs there.
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 was thinking about the kids, too. Children need real and regular contact with classmates and peers, as the pandemic has demonstrated. Having a luxe bedroom and a heated pool in the middle of the wilderness doesn't make up for extended periods of loneliness and isolation.
> Geothermal wasn’t viable on the slope and with the space we had to work with, so we switched to an air source heat pump for exchange. 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. We eventually settled on supplementing our electrical generation with propane, which we had hoped to avoid. High-efficiency electrically powered water boilers and other mechanical systems are more advanced in Europe, but we found that subcontractors were wary of importing anything unfamiliar (and unrated for North America) and prefered to use gas.
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.
One space heater is 12-15 amps. I can't count how many people I've had to explain that to as they scratched their heads why they keep tripping the circuit breaker in the winter.
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.
I mean, technically they're 100% efficient (as are computers).
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.
100% efficient is extremely inefficient for electric heating. A good modern air source heat pump has far above 100% efficiency in all but the coldest climates and a ground source heat pump has far above 100% efficiency in essentially any climate.
Most residential electrical service in the US is 200A or well below that. Especially if you have a place with gas heat, hot water, dryer, range you do not need that much. But even with electric appliances and a typical pool heater, 200A is plenty.
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.
NA uses 120VAC at most loads - but service is 240V split. So 200A service in NA is the same as 200A in the EU. Of course this is confusing since we often talk about 120V loads, e.g. a 15A electric kettle in the US is pretty lame compared to a 15A electric kettle in the UK.
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).
But 200A in EU is roughly 44-50 kW, a common contract for a flat (here in Italy) is 3 kW, if you have a heat pump and/or conditioner it goes to 4.5 or 9 kW.
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.
Yep, 3 KW is the "minimum contract" (but still very common for small flats) though there are of course no fuses anymore but a current limiting switch that trips and that can be re-armed, it allows peaks of about 20% more than target, older versions of these switches allowed higher peaks, so when they started replacing it with the new version which is more "strict" many contracts were upgraded to 4.5 KW because the limiter was tripping very often.
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.
Yeah, I saw those flat roofs, and talk of whistler, and thought what a nightmare. Peaked roofs exist for a reason. I wonder what their snow strategy is? Because one day of rain on top of several feet of snow causes severe structural strain if it can’t just slide down.
Pemberton is quite rainy, so forest fires aren't a huge concern. Once you get to the other side of the Coastal mountains (the interior), fire is a much bigger concern.
here's an article from this summer when there were four out-of-control fires burning in the pemberton region. pemberton is definitely less of a concern than the other side of the mountains, but there is definitely still a risk. and that risk is only growing.
This house and lot are incredible and I would love to build a modern home in the woods, but I feel like this article was missing a disclaimer somewhere "Step 1 be rich" - even though land in Canada may not be super expensive this project was clearly in the one to several million dollar range.
The whole tone of this article with respect to money is really frustrating. The guy is obviously very wealthy, but doesn't want to admit it. he really wants to feel as if he's sharing the struggles that normal people have, like getting a mortgage, but the "struggle" is just a vanity thing for him - he wants to feel like he's still normal, so he's pretending to have financial worries that he doesn't actually have to have.
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.
Sure but step 1 is reasonably attainable for lots of people working in tech in North America. It seems like a ‘have (two?) good tech jobs for a while and get a bit lucky’ money rather than ‘inherit some enormous fortune’ money.
Yes its not an outrageous amount, I was just expecting something more diy/homesteading from “Building a home in the woods” then it was more hire contractors and an architech and build a massive modern house in the woods.
Now imagine you're hiking in the woods and, all of a sudden, you reach a fence with a sign "PRIVATE PROPERTY NO TRESPASSING". Years go by and even more rich people build such homes in the woods. Now you're hiking in the woods, constantly passing through gravel roads leading to these properties and hearing traffic noise of a more major road where some cars from some of these houses went to fill the propane tank, buy food supplies or whatever.
Thanks for this - I have what you might call champagne taste on a beer budget. I've always wanted to live in a small, but highly efficient house in the woods. You know, something that looks like it came from an architectural magazine. But I am consistently blown away by what even pre-fab homes cost. I clearly don't have the budget that the author does, but the process felt eerily similar to mine so far.
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?
Usually the county clerk will have some pointers. Always double check lot lines, plat maps, zoning, permit and ownership history yourself. Use the realtor provided information as helpful pointers to get started, not ‘the truth’. They often aren’t trying to mislead, just not questioning things they are told or that are convenient for them to believe, but there but there are also some outright frauds.
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.
Ugh, the font doesn't scale when zooming, but the pictures do. The font does scale though when changing the container size. The font is massive on a monitor, terrible UX.
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.
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...
Pemberton (where this home is located) is much wetter than Kelowna, so I think it's less of an issue. It's similar to the difference in Washington between the west slope of the North Cascades (such as Mt Baker, which holds the worldwide single season snowfall record) and the east slope of the North Cascades, which are dry and have large wildfire seasons.
Even the Olympic peninsula (rain forest) burns periodically. I’ve seen the burn scars from apocalyptic sized fires in central Ontario too. The Amazon burns when someone ‘helps it’ a little.
Everywhere dries out enough it will catch fire at least some of the year. If there is forest, there will be fire.
Can someone please retitle this to "Building a multi-million dollar mansion in the woods"? "Modern home" makes it sound quaint and interesting. Instead this is just someone throwing a lot of money at a giant dwelling.
Yes, I was hoping for something more insightful around DIY, costs and sustainability. Instead it's an article with some nice pictures that mostly boils down to "pay someone else to do it" and I almost laughed when I got to the bit where they were using too much electricity and their solution is just to burn more gas :/
I haven't used them myself (I live in Europe) but in the US there are companies that will build passive houses and ship them to you in parts. https://www.phoenixhaus.com/ comes to mind.
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.
They die so that we may truly live! (pounds shields)
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.
We recently moved from Vancouver to the Island; and made a similar calculus about locations at which to live. I have a friend who ended up with 160+ acres in the interior, whereas I've settled on a quarter acre on the central island. There's a reason for this difference...
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.
It’s too bad they didn’t share their final costs, there’s very little public info on how much custom builds like this really cost. I think people are a little embarrassed by how much they spent and so they don’t want to reveal it.
I did not know software engineers could get this rich. It seems outlandish. That house must have cost a fortune. Or am I just way under-paid compared to the rest of you?
Also, who checked off on the flat roofs in that location?
Would be nice if they were a little more transparent about these numbers instead of being incredibly vague. Salaries in Vancouver have not kept up with housing costs.
Well, I think it's probably both. In the same geographic region you see very high homes prices but wildly different salaries for the same companies across the border. I don't know enough about why that is, but there's surely a disparity
I can see why it would make some ppl angry, but I know how much the house is worth, and it's not much different in the city, but in terms of what it takes to get it done in $$ I haven't a clue, so it's something to be curious about. If anything, it would be a consolation if the development costs were not that far removed from the current value, meaning the person has a lot of money (obviously) but didn't necessarily make out with crazy short term profits.
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.
As soon as they started talking about paying cash + HELOC against their duplex in the city - I knew this guy had a fuck load of money. This isn’t your average dude - it’s someone who got rich off of tech.
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.
To all the questions about including costs, the only blog I've ever come across that was transparent and honest about costs of building a custom home was Mike Davidson in http://ahousebythepark.com/journal/
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.
Always intrigued by this idea. But the thing that I never see addressed in these discussions: what's the plan for schooling? just do small local rural schools? do online supplementation? This is the sticking point that keeps me from going far down this path.
Yep. It’s weird because it definitely sounded like it was their primary home from the article. But - it sounds like it’s just a ski resort home that’s a bit far from the resorts…
> BC Hydro’s solar payback plan is regressive: generation on grid-tied installations only allows you to pay your bill down to $0. You cannot earn money or credit for producing more than you use.
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 wish he mentioned the total cost. It's nice that this amount of information is provided for those that would want to do similar, but by the same token, I'd need some sort of ballpark cost estimate to know whether I should even begin thinking about something like this.
It’s likely $1m minimum. Assessed value was $1.8m.
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.
Interesting read, who hasn't dreamt of doing something like this (perhaps at different scales). I've started saving for a parcel of land in the Kootenays to build a.. ahem... much less grandiose dwelling for weekend getaways.
The form is incredibly inefficient. It look a bit like design magazine, but the price you pay for that is incredible.
Look at the surface area of exterior walls and roofs compared to the inside volume!
A design like a four square would probably cost 1/3-1/2 of this for the same volume and be way easier to heat.
If you're interested in this sort of thing, there is a youtuber called "Essential Craftsman" who did a lengthy (multi-year) series going through, in exquisite detail, the process of building a house.
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.
I have often dreamed about buying a vacation property. But when I seriously consider it, the idea of owning a second property stresses me out. There is the time and money investment to buy and maintain the property. Then there is the worry about a home being vacant most of the time - is a pipe going to burst or is someone going to break into it? And there is the guilt when you aren’t using it - would we realistically be able to visit even once per month?
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.
It's funny, at first glance of that top photo, I was sure I had seen it in a Blender tutorial video and it might even be the same (rendered) image). But no, I found it and although the layout is strikingly similar, it's not it.
Doesn't the author actually mean postmodern? "Modern home" architecture is from the early-mid 20th century.
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.
Modern is usually referring to mid-20th century in terms of style. Post-modern doesn’t include everything after that — it’s kind of a mess to describe but probably the simplest explanation is that post-modernism is a reaction to modernism. It’s a style full of visual puns, and structural manifestations of literary criticism.
“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 :)
What a beautiful home and and setting. I was curious about a couple of design choices given the environment though:
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.
Building a house is an incredible feat, the caveats of it are hard to understand for the casual bystander. There's a lot of comments here criticizing this project based on personal preferences, it's great that you managed to create something you are satisfied with!
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.
There's a fetish for tiny homes, a fetish for semi-off-grid living, a fetish for impractical homes in impractical places. YouTube is full of these projects. Curiously many tiny homes and impractical off-grid home projects seem to be abandoned and turn into half-built or mostly-compromised results. I'd attach some links to those YouTube channels, but I don't want to send them any traffic because at this point it has become less about the home and more about the fetish.
We're about to embark on a similar (less fancy) project on San Juan Island in WA. The architect we're working with built a more modest, energy efficient home (designated ZERH, zero energy ready home) similar to what we're shooting for. Her blog is wonderfully detailed about building choices, complexity, tradeoffs, etc: https://www.domaindesignarchitects.com/blog
Interesting write up, a not comparable example as my house build was nothing like this scale or cost (I imagine), but during building our house it was interesting to observe where problems came from and how they could be fixed.
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.
Flat roofs can be functional. As the sq footage grows the area and volume needed for a pitched roof will grow much more. At the extreme of a 12:12 pitch you’d have 40% more materials for the roof and you’d create 50% more volume within the house. Additionally the space of the flat roof can be functional and used as an outdoor living space, unlike a typical pitched roof.
I wish there were more detailed blogs on the building process. I really liked this construction blog with estimates and final numbers by category that educate you on how plans meet reality. https://ahousebythepark.com/journal/
Hard to call it modern with those kinds of energy demands. I'm on a similar path, but a large part of the plan is to have a minimal footprint. I have access to a community well and electricity, but the goal to make it self sufficient enough to be off grid, while maintaining a reasonable lifestyle. So instead of a heated pool/etc the money would be going into solar arrays and batteries and a well.
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.
I didn't build it but I live in a modern home in the woods. Just outside Toronto, surrounded by trees about 600 metres from the nearest road or house.
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.
Cool story! I didn't notice it in there, maybe I just missed it, I would be worried about animals getting in the house, I wonder if they designed it to be animal proof? Being up in the woods there, the house must be under constant attack from the woodland creatures.
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)
I had fears of that when we moved into our house surrounded not only by woods, but wetlands and farm fields. We were pleasantly surprised how little problems we've had from creatures. We do see animals of all kinds wandering on the property - deer, squirrels, rabbits, racoons, opossum, coyotes, owls, hawks, eagles... you name it. The tracks in the winter are even more evidence that we are surrounded by wildlife. But they honestly aren't a problem. They leave the home alone. We have had one mouse in our first year here. A few ants and flies last summer. Honestly, we had bigger problems in the city. My only guess is that there is such a strong natural ecosystem here that they simply don't need anything from our home, so they are just as happy to leave it to us humans.
I live in a suburban city and I've had all of those either in our backyard or just beyond our back yard over the past couple of years (except the eagles). Squirrels, rabbits, an opossum, a skunk, mice, owls, hawks, toads have all been in our backyard before. Deer and coyotes just beyond our back fence. Raccoons I've seen in the neighborhood but not from our backyard. A couple times now I've taken pictures of hawks chilling on our back patio. I have a bird feeder so the birds might attract it.
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).
Is there a post about the technology of the house? I'm interested especially in energy conservation technology like insulation, windows, heating solution, foundation etc...
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
A hot tub is easily super insulated, brominated and locked up but I'm pretty sure a heated outdoor pool in the mountains is going to end up costing him far more time and money than he budgeted for, especially if there are no pool services in the area.
This is HN male oriented wealth porn. Just as some women fantasize about dream weddings and pore over the NYTimes Vows section, or some teens watch influencers give tours of their high-rise apartments, we have HN men who really, really want an ultra modern mansion in the woods. The craving for luxury is universal and it's no surprise this guy is a senior engineer at Slack. Seriously, what an extraordinary house.
You're going to need to figure out what trades you want to do and what ones you'll need/want to hire out. Volunteer to work on other people's projects for free (or beer) to see what you enjoy working on. For example, Habitat for Humanity and other home building charities often need bodies and can be a good way to sample different aspects of a build.
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.
My limited experience with Habitat is they will train you on the job for whatever they're doing that day. If you can drive a nail or use a miter saw, you'll be greatly appreciated.
First step is to thoroughly understand the building process and sequence of construction as well as all the materials, fasteners, tools, etc. Then for building, start small with a chicken coop or shed with relatively low risk if the build goes south. Going from zero to house without serious supervision from experience builders is a recipe for a failed structure.
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.
And the fact that there's a chain of other responders disagreeing with your take suggests that it isn't.
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.
I guess we can file yours under "callous indifference". Someone complains about the societal issues that allow a couple to build a SECOND mansion like this in the woods while millions of people are homeless and your response is to paint them as "jealous".
OP isn't complaining about societal issues; OP is trying to drag a couple just because they have demonstrated some modicum of success and happen to be "white".
They literally mentioned nothing about societal issues, except the implicit racism in their assumption that whiteness somehow inherently detracts from people's accomplishments.
You've already changed your argument from "they never said anything about that" to "okay they said it but I think they were making assumptions". Log off. Go touch grass.
By "go touch grass", I assume you're probably a younger person. You certainly have the reading comprehension of one.
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.
White priviledge is not something that would be on my mind(for all I care, they could be black), but unsustainability, destruction of nature and self-righteousness to do so... I would really wonder why such article has appeared in HN, as it is going against current global social narrative and NH is not really far-right nutwings, but rather on the left-spectrum.
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.
I don't think this matters much at all though. It's a pretty cool house and it's not like their pov needs to match everyone else's. You could find interesting stuff here just like someone describing their perfect vanagon/compact apartment/log cabin.
> Person's actions influenced by their circumstances
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.
That's how I feel too but at least I'm disappointed in myself for that which manages to help me feel that I'm better then you which in turns makes me feel just a bit better about me. So, thanks.
It's different from traditional square houses. Most houses are a big box with a sloping roof, so anything that deviates from that expectation is interesting (for some).
My 2¢ from observation. I could be completely wrong, too.
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:
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.
I'm glad that those neighborhoods in Poland are nice, in Hungary the panel blocks are mostly ghetto style places. Most people live there not because they like the lifestyle, but that's what they can afford.
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.
Leaving out the actual financial information makes this post a little useless. Before I can imagine it, I want to know if I can do this or if I need to be a trust fund baby.
Assuming they hired an architect and had hired labor build it (and put Feist lyrics at the bottom of the post), easily in the multi-million dollar range considering the location.
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 live in this area. Build prices for modern, architectural homes up there is probably in the $300-$400 / sqft range at the moment. Sure, you could do some work yourself, but unless you've got an army of friends and family that can do complicated concrete work in remote areas, your going to have to hire professionals, and professionals are _really_ expensive right now.
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
In case anyone else thinks that's crazy, I bought 40 acres in the Ozarks with a (manufactured) home, a shop, a 52x14 storage building, and a few other outbuildings. The land was mostly wooded, with a few acres in use for a garden.
$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.
These kids may not have a trust fund, but to have already bought and sold a Vancouver townhouse with enough equity to buy raw land and build a fairly baller house on it… they definitely had parental help.
Dude works for slack – a quick search reveals that he was one of the early employees. I know nothing about him otherwise, but he doesn't have to come from money, being lucky with the IPO could explain the windfall to afford the house. In other news, it looks pretty (and over the top), but I doubt most of us here will ever be able to afford something like this.
If a couple in their 30s with 2 children are kids...what do you consider adults?
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.
The source of the power is important. Are they kids if they care about the environment and pay for 400A service of renewable energy?
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.
They have a large propane generator to provide supplemental power when the 400A service isn't enough, such generators typically do not have advanced pollution control / carbon capture devices attached. This, combined with the design of the building, is evidence their care doesn't extend to action in this instance.
Sounds like a stop-gap measure, partially because building codes in the region didn't let them do what they really wanted to do:
> 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.
The post says they own a duplex in Vancouver, the most expensive housing market on Earth. This is where your rents are going if you are a family renting a flat in Vancouver for $4500/month: for these people to pave over some remaining BC forests.
According to the author, the couple acquired the money within 5 years. So yes, this is a wealthy person building with very few constraints.
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.
It’s at least $1,000/sqft all-in. Construction costs have gone up a lot in recent years, and architecturally designed houses like this are expensive to design and build.
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=...
ISP: https://gardunha.net/en/
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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.