California - Design
Compared to the Seattle house, we've spend probably triple the amount of design time on this cabin, and due to life complications, we've been at it for more than three years. Although we're much more experienced with green building, the project has been quite challenging because this building is in a very different climate, we're doing a style we're not familiar with (which includes a lot of handmade stuff we're designing), and we're doing most of the finish work ourselves.
The general idea was a rustic, handmade style building (partially hoping to keep the cost down) that was near zero energy and utilized passive solar heating and cooling. We hope to use as much salvage, recycled and sustainably harvested stuff we can, all while keeping the costs reasonable.