Quote:
Originally Posted by DieselX
We had a 1500' house for my wife and 10yo daughter and I. We rented it out and are full timing in our travel trailer (my wife is a traveling nurse) for the last 6 months. We don't miss the house a bit and most monthly rates are less than $500/month.
Point being most people have way more house than they need and use more energy as well. I understand it is not practical for most people, but our experience has taught us how much we don't need or use.
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I'm with you, when I was house shopping at the beginning of 2009 there were a lot of so-called McMansions on sale - basically big cubes that occupy 95% of the property they're on and have 2500+ ft of floor space built as poorly and cheaply as possible. The price per square foot was very low, but I had no interest in heating and cooling 5 times more house than I was actually going to be using to live. I ended up with something on the small side of what's available but really it's too much.
3 years ago I sat down with a consultant to discuss remodeling and she said to draw my home exactly how I would like it to be if cost was no object and the only constraints were the property I'm on and the laws of physics. I moved the kitchen upstairs and made the whole ground floor a machine shop. Turns out that moving the kitchen upstairs would be
really expensive when we switched off the "cost no object" fantasy...
I'm also not zoned for manufacturing, which would limit how much a machine shop could pay for itself
I'm not entirely opposed to indoor gardening, but would probably want to do something about natural lighting since
indoor growing puts an insane load on the environment - which isn't necessary when the plants you grow aren't illegal. There's no shortage of sunlight here in AZ.