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Building a modern home in the woods

johnnyrodgers.is

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Re: Building a modern home in the woods

#481

Post by brailsafe »

prawn wrote: post #451
brailsafe wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well.. it depends. I'm not making any uncharitable assumptions about the author's intentions. The entire article could say "I bought a house near Vancouver" and you'd be expecting the person to be extremely well-off, because it'll cost $1.5m anyway. It's obviously a little disingenuous to call it a "modern home in the woods" because it's definitely not a humble bungalow, but whatever. I just find it a little silly to…

"modern home in the woods" because it's definitely not a humble bungalow Why would a "modern home" in the woods need to be a humble bungalow? He hasn't termed it affordable or DIY. It could be a $100k tiny house and someone living in their car would gripe. This sort of thing seems to happen every time someone writes for their audience and an adjacent audience finds it; just doesn't seem like a very charitable reading…

I also enjoyed reading it, and didn't mean to imply otherwise, but I think there's a few bits, particularly starting with "we could only afford the land and couldn't agree on a timeline for paying for a house" (paraphrase) that implies it's going to be a more gradual humble project, perhaps like Les Stroud's off grid home in the woods https://youtu.be/hWfgxxZl5Tg

Re: Building a modern home in the woods

#482

Post by lazide »

kccqzy wrote: post #477
lazide wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wood is not a fossil fuel unless you’re burning petrified wood or coal (and somehow calling that wood). Fossil fuels are from carbon sources taken out of the normal carbon cycle (aka buried generally)

I understand wood is not a fossil fuel. But doesn't burning wood have the same environmental effect as burning fossil fuel? They both produce large amounts of CO2 and generate heat. If you didn't burn that wood, those would still be trees capturing CO2 from the atmosphere. So they didn't really achieve anything, did they? (This is way outside of my expertise so I appreciate if you tell me what's wrong with my logic.)

If there is a tree, it is composed of carbon it extracted from the atmosphere using sunlight. For that tree to exist, -1 tree worth of carbon (roughly) was removed.

If you chop it down and burn it, or it dies and rots, +1 tree of carbon goes back. But the total carbon in the system hasn’t changed, and on average (if this happens a lot everywhere), the amount of carbon in the atmosphere is pretty much the same.

nothing lives forever, and most things stop growing quickly pretty fast. Unless there is a huge disaster, forests turn over in a stable way generally - new trees always growing, old trees always dying and rotting.

So unless you had chopped down massive forests and stopped new trees from growing, or stockpiled half a continents worth of wood for a century and then decided to burn it all at once, it’s hard to meaningfully change the average amount of carbon in the atmosphere, because it never really stops ‘moving’ or gets out of the cycle.

Fossil fuel is carbon that got pulled out of the system a long time ago - those trees or ferns or peat or whatever got stuck underground, where they couldn’t rot or burn, and on a scale that IS continents worth of trees, for millions of years. We don’t know what it is like having that amount of carbon in the system, because the last time it was in the system was millions of years before we existed.

Once those fossil fuels get burned, even if you plant trees, it doesn’t really reduce the amount of carbon back to where it was, because those trees will die and rot or burn or whatever, and on average, the total amount of carbon in circulation is now higher.

Does that help?

Re: Building a modern home in the woods

#483

Post by daydream »

glxxyz wrote: post #413
daydream wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The exterior does look like shou sugi ban wood which (done properly) should indeed last for a long time.

However long it lasts, it would last longer protected by an overhanging roof.

Reasonable conclusion. Without an overhang and gutters it seems like more rain and snow would run off the side of the building than there would be otherwise, keeping the wood wet for longer. But, on the other hand, the green roof might have some characteristics or affordances that prevent that. Hard to tell. I am curious now though!

Re: Building a modern home in the woods

#484

Post by dleslie »

prteja11 wrote: post #457
dleslie wrote: post #163

We recently moved from Vancouver to the Island; and made a similar calculus about locations at which to live. I have a friend who ended up with 160+ acres in the interior, whereas I've settled on a quarter acre on the central island. There's a reason for this difference... What's I found _conspicuously_ absent from the author's considerations was anything at all regarding their children. Elementary schools, family do…

How much did this quarter acre cost on central island if you don’t mind sharing? And is it a good location for schooling young kids (5/6 yr olds)?

No problem. Roughly 700k CAD.

I'm half a block from a pump park and playground, a block from the elementary school, and two blocks from the ocean. Not city blocks, mind you. Each block is roughly large enough to hold 4 acres of land.

For my young kids it's night and day; they are much happier than when they were living in Vancouver. We have a large house with enough rooms for everyone to have their own; more yard than we know what to do with; and the kids are safe to run around outside without being heavily monitored. Unlike where we left, where they shared a tiny bedroom, the parks had to be swept for broken glass and used needles, and we had no yard to speak of.

There are gangs of roving kids all over the place, every evening and weekend; it's totally unlike living in the big city.

The only downside is that family doctors are hard to come by; you basically can't access non-emergency health care without one, either, as there's only one drop in clinic for the entire region. But that's a province-wide crisis that the NDP government seems happy to ignore.

Re: Building a modern home in the woods

#485

Post by prawn »

brailsafe wrote: post #481
prawn wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"modern home in the woods" because it's definitely not a humble bungalow Why would a "modern home" in the woods need to be a humble bungalow? He hasn't termed it affordable or DIY. It could be a $100k tiny house and someone living in their car would gripe. This sort of thing seems to happen every time someone writes for their audience and an adjacent audience finds it; just doesn't seem like a very charitable reading…

I also enjoyed reading it, and didn't mean to imply otherwise, but I think there's a few bits, particularly starting with "we could only afford the land and couldn't agree on a timeline for paying for a house" (paraphrase) that implies it's going to be a more gradual humble project, perhaps like Les Stroud's off grid home in the woods https://youtu.be/hWfgxxZl5Tg

That's more about your interpretation than their intent, right? If it had said dirt-cheap or humble or hand-built or similar, then they've implied something they didn't deliver. The only time the word "humble" is used at all is in describing the architects.

My house is pretty standard. It would be a hovel for someone living in a palace but a palace to someone sharing a dirty apartment. I would describe my experience building it in terms of what I could or couldn't afford along the way relative to who I was and what I understood. Just as the author did.

So many comments on the HN story got caught up on what the reader was expecting from the link. It was modern and it was in the woods!

Re: Building a modern home in the woods

#486

Post by kccqzy »

lazide wrote: post #482
kccqzy wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand wood is not a fossil fuel. But doesn't burning wood have the same environmental effect as burning fossil fuel? They both produce large amounts of CO2 and generate heat. If you didn't burn that wood, those would still be trees capturing CO2 from the atmosphere. So they didn't really achieve anything, did they? (This is way outside of my expertise so I appreciate if you tell me what's wrong with my logic.)

If there is a tree, it is composed of carbon it extracted from the atmosphere using sunlight. For that tree to exist, -1 tree worth of carbon (roughly) was removed. If you chop it down and burn it, or it dies and rots, +1 tree of carbon goes back. But the total carbon in the system hasn’t changed, and on average (if this happens a lot everywhere), the amount of carbon in the atmosphere is pretty much the same. nothin…

Yes. Thank you!

Re: Building a modern home in the woods

#487

Post by pkamb »

mips_avatar wrote: post #251
crowbahr wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a European you probably don't have an outdoor heated pool & hot tub in a frigid northern climate. I also think it's ridiculous, for what it's worth. 400A is a wild amount of electricity for a supposedly high efficiency, modern home.

You'll find a hot tub/sauna in most Scandinavian cabins.

> for Jess the pool was the centerpiece and outweighed all other concerns. For me it was the wood-burning fireplaces.

A proper Sauna would have satisfied them both!

Re: Building a modern home in the woods

#488

Post by ttul »

shtopointo wrote: post #70
ttul wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These kids may not have a trust fund, but to have already bought and sold a Vancouver townhouse with enough equity to buy raw land and build a fairly baller house on it… they definitely had parental help.

Dude works for slack – a quick search reveals that he was one of the early employees. I know nothing about him otherwise, but he doesn't have to come from money, being lucky with the IPO could explain the windfall to afford the house. In other news, it looks pretty (and over the top), but I doubt most of us here will ever be able to afford something like this.

Ahh, yes. Slack explains it.

Re: Building a modern home in the woods

#489

Post by ajuc »

tiborsaas wrote: post #458
ajuc wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have you lived in these? Yes, in several different ones (when I was studying in Lublin I lived in 3 different places and later I rented a flat in Warsaw). I also lived in a detached house in countryside for most of my life and now I live in a reasonably modern neighborhood. I have a comparison. > Parking spaces are ridiculously under planned, because workers used took a bus That's the best feature of them. You can…

I'm glad that those neighborhoods in Poland are nice, in Hungary the panel blocks are mostly ghetto style places. Most people live there not because they like the lifestyle, but that's what they can afford. Weird, I'd trade a chance to live in a commie block for the modern blocks you linked to. But of course, I'd like to have my own land with my glass-concrete utopia home if money weren't an issue.

> Weird, I'd trade a chance to live in a commie block for the modern blocks you linked to.

That's because you don't understand how big of a deal is 1 hour spent in traffic every day for the rest of your life.

Re: Building a modern home in the woods

#490

Post by scotty79 »

dandellion wrote: post #449
Kluny wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The walls are concrete, there's probably no sound transference at all.

Also we don't know that the kids are not deaf.

Also we don't know that if they are still having sex or already are past that phase of their lives.
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