Modern Hovel

AlfredJWheeler_Wiki

Green ergonomic home building, maintenance and management

In my opinion, the best green homes are primarily underground or earth sheltered. I like the design where the rooms have six sides and the home is built on or into a hillside. The walls should be concrete or stone, except that the weather exposed walls should be grand windows. So, I guess, this will be about how I go about filling out and implementing this concept.

I found this great design and visualization tool on SourceForge called “Sweet Home 3D”,

http://sourceforge.net/projects/sweethome3d/

It is a fairly straight forward tool for playing around with your design ideas. It takes some getting used to, if, e.g., like me, you have no CAD experience, but it’s interesting seeing your thoughts take on real shape.



Okay, so that’s cool. I have something to share with an architect that is more substantial than baby babble (I hope!).

A living space needs a place. I search real estate sites from time to time. Not so much lately… I prefer real estate sites that are browse-able by map. Looking at a list of location names, or trying to recall the name of a location, does not work for me.

One such fun real estate website is “landsofamerica.com”. For some reason, I cannot even guess at, it seems to think I live in Houston Texas–it’s a mystery! Like the name says, it is all about land. A similar one is

http://www.loopnet.com/Land-For-Sale/

"Realtor.com" is intermittently interesting, but it seems more oriented toward existing home sales. A couple of others, also oriented toward existing home sales, are "zillow.com" and "ziprealty.com". If "building your own" is not your thing, then these sites are reasonable starting points.

That's it for now! 'Later!