How much room do we really need? + straw bale houses

[Astrid]

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)

[AnyDream]

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

[Astrid]

Interesting article today:
Room to move, but is a bigger home better? | victoria

[toomanyshoes]

Thanks Astrid, it was an interesting read.

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.