Entries from January 2008 ↓

“From the Betsy Ross House to Your House” by Karrie Jacobs - the Metropolis article mentioning our project - is now posted on their website. Check out the full article and feel free to leave comments on their site. It doesn’t look like they get a lot of comments on their site so it would […]

When I saw this inspirational house on a Inhabitat Prefab Friday post a few weeks ago, it reminded me of our house. Actually it made me think of what our house might look like if we were forced to cut costs in the design as much as possible.

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I got an email over the weekend from ISA suggesting a new roof design for the 100k house that would be more economical than the existing two-tiered, flat roof with windows in between the two sections. Our final plans will be sent to Level 5 for bidding tomorrow so I quickly agreed that this was […]

Most of the inspirational homes I find are from the visually fantastic blog - materialicious. Do check it out if you haven’t been there before. Also click through the other links below the images here to see more images on each home.

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We had a brief design meeting today at ISA to finalize the plans that we will have quoted next week. We’ve been so focused on the design lately that we haven’t discussed the schedule in a while. We originally had discussed breaking ground in March when the ground was hopefully beginning to loosen up after […]

It’s official. We have an article in the January issue of Metropolis magazine entitled, “From the Betsy Ross House to Your House - Philadelphia, a city of tiny row house, might be just the place to build a new version of the American dream:green and affordable.” The article is written by Karrie Jacobs and is […]

This inspirational project was completed by architect Edward M Baum and developer Diane Cheatham in Dallas in 2004. As I review the Dwell article detailing the project I am reminded at the similarities to our current project. The project was a prototype for building modern and affordable homes on Dallas’s standard building lots of 50′ x 150′. They were able to fit four, one-story, 1,700 square foot homes on two of these lots and build them for roughly $100 psf using mainly materials sourced from local big box retailers like Home Depot and Lowes…

I’ve received a couple of questions about the new plans so I thought I would clarify what will be changing in the next week. We had a design meeting last week and finished with a rough sketch of what would be changed in the final iteration. Here’s the list:

The kitchen and core module on the […]

Interface delivered new plans with much greater detail in one of our recent meetings. We have had one design meeting since and will have the final versions available in about another week. A lot of the interior and exterior finishes are called out in this iteration as well. It’s been a lot of fun getting […]

Over the Christmas break I went on what I am now referring to as my “Zero Energy Design Binge.” I started thinking about the through wall air conditioner we are considering to handle the cooling demands for the home and thought it would be fantastic if there was a way to economically eliminate the cooling demand altogether via passive design. This thought quickly put me into research mode and when I couldn’t find anything in stock at my local Borders or B&N, I found an 800 page e-book on the subject from www.ZeroEnergyDesign.com…