A lot of sustainability can be gained in design. Things like passive solar design, collecting rainwater and reusing grey water, having a vege garden and compost.
Strawbale is a great insulating material so it will cut down your power costs in summer and winter. If you use it as infill rather than load bearing you can have a much larger design.
You can also look towards non-Western and traditional design for sustainability. The Japanese system of sliding paper doors is fantastic. You can reduce space in winter and create cells of warmth rather than heating a whole house and in summer open the spaces to so that breezes flow through. Huge glass windows are a massive drain on resources because they create such an efficient energy exchange. Shutters don't take much to install and if you pull them closed over night in winter and when the sun is shining on your windows in summer they make a huge difference in heat loss/gain. Mexican and North-African designs often translate really well to our climate.
One thing that I do is when I see an idea or feature that I like I take a photo of it on my phone so I remember it. I have a file on my computer for photos and links of stuff I like.
Will be going for shutters in the new house. As much as I love textiles, I am not into curtains. As the windows in strawbale are quite deep, we will put in shutters that will fold neatly against the sides of the window recess.
Have the ideas/wish folder here as well and DH is the one taking pics with his phone when out and about.
Still trying to work out designs here, but what seems to be sticking is a house in 2 parts. The main with the living areas, our bedroom and bathroom. Then a secondary wing with the girls rooms, guest room and bathroom. Well the guest room may go in the main part, as it will let us build the bulk of the house, move in with the girls in the guest room and then build the other wing. We mainly want the second wing as it will be able to be shut off when not in use. So if the girls are not around, or when they move out, then we just shut the door and not have to heat or cool that area (not that it would be much of an issue with strawbale)
I second the comments about storage. One house we lived in had a *fantastic* laundry. It was attached to the main house but you walked two steps out the back door to go into it (so you could access it directly from the back yard too). It was large enough to have washing machine, dryer, deep freeze & a work bench on one wall, and the opposite wall was full of fantastic cupboards!!! Much tidier, less dusty etc than keeping things in the shed. We could also probably have rigged up some clever drying racks etc for when the weather was bad but we weren't there long enough (sadly, it was a great house). I loved that laundry and have since dreamed about building one onto this house
I think for me its about keeping overall costs down, plus on going costs (repairs, heating, cooling, etc) and also wanting to be more sustainable.
I really like the idea of having as little as possible "dead space". I also don't want all this extra space I have to clean.
I'm currently just collecting as much info as possible about the best building materials, heating/cooling and so on.
I've found it very hard to find the real environmental cost of things, some things seem sustainable on the surface but when you look a little deeper into what they are made of they aren't really that good.
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