The Project
Project Overview
Our house was built as environmentally friendly as possible while still being beautiful and a joy to live in.  Compared to conventional custom construction, our extensive list of environmental aspects increased the cost by 9%.  Our methods were a multitude of small changes from standard construction, and so could be adopted by anyone.

Our idea is that if the majority of people knew what was possible, they would do it.

We don't call it an environmental house, because it's about people too.  If we only cared about the environment, we'd live in a tent.  Instead, it's about reducing environmental impact and getting a better house in the process, and that's why we call it The Sensible House.

If your unfamiliar with "green building" or  "sustainability", read the beginning of the tutorial.
Our thoughts on being an environmentalist and housing choices can be found here.

Complete design notes can be found here.

Rather a whole new building method, we did a lot of little things differently.  The majority of these are:

  • Super insulation - it uses much less energy than is required by code
  • Passive solar - the house takes advantage of solar energy
  • Healthy house - it follows the proposed EPA healthy house principles as much as possible
  • Not so big - the house is somewhat smaller than average
  • Aesthetics - the house is designed to look and feel good
  • Materials - it attempts to use materials as sustainably as possible
Find out what we did differently:

The origins of the project can be found here.
To find out who worked on the project, click here.
Complete design notes are here.

Since green building is a relatively new aspect of a field that has traditionally been slow to change, we don't expect we will make all the right decisions.  Some may even argue that we haven't used the right principles.  Our goal isn't to be perfect, but rather to be part of the baseline that future sensible builders can learn from.