The Initial Sketch Ground Floor (2018)

Over the next years, we would occasionally think a bit about it, but it wasn’t until Covid hit, and Jay lost his job, that we decided to really go all-in about learning how to construct ecologically, and started an online course about it called Solution Era. (That really threw us for a loop: Jay got fully into high performance and energy efficiency, while I was still very into natural materials, which can be two very conflicting perspectives).

We tried to take what we were learning and apply it to the interior layout of the house. We consulted with friends who are architects, learned about public and private spaces, loud and quiet spaces, and eventually we put all the rooms we wanted on post it notes, with different color codes for those things, to try different configurations.

You should do this too, if you’re involved in designing your home! You want to make sure people won’t be traipsing through your private space to get to a more public one: a common one for example is having a bathroom attached to a bedroom, so people have to go through your bedroom to use that bathroom (At some point, every available bathroom in a house will probably be used by guests!) You also want to consider the sunlight: are you a morning person who wants an east-facing window in your bedroom?

For a while, we were working on a version of the house where we only have one floor, where there was a bedroom on the ground floor, then a version where we had a second floor, but no basement. We must have made at least a dozen different sketches with possibilities, and in the end, we settled on something we were quite proud of (and got an architect to finalize):

The Final Plans Ground Floor (2022)

And when we looked back at that original, first sketch of the ground floor, it was almost identical. Just goes to show… well, fill in whatever parable you want.

I think the main take away for me is that, even if the answer is right in front of you, you still have to go on the journey to find that answer. Test your hypothesis!

But maybe we could have just trusted our gut instincts, haha. Sometimes you have an intuitive understanding of something, with good reasons, but you just can’t immediately articulate those reasons.

-Pip

The dream began as a desire to build my house with my own hands. I don’t quite remember how old I was, I think maybe in my teens, and I was starting to get better at building things, and I just had this sense that to feel truly connected to the place I live, I would have to build it myself.

And then I met an apprentice timber frame carpenter, and that dream seemed to finally be tenable. And like most processes that take something in our brains and turn it into reality, the reality was far from what I originally dreamed.

In my mind, building my house would be 100% traditional artisanship, with thick, rough hewn timbers, stone or adobe walls, ideally even a thatched roof. It would be the most real house that ever was, made of authentic materials, 100% by hand. I would spend countless hours of heavy labor if need be, and it would be glorious.

Now, I’m not saying that it couldn’t have been glorious–I think it would have been extremely satisfying for me to build a house this way, and I hope to someday build some kind of structure like this, so I can know that satisfaction. But the reality is that it just isn’t possible for my house if I want to 1) construct it legally, and 2) respect my other values of making an ecological home (which can mean different things to different people).

There are many ways to be ecological. Solution Era has a nice breakdown of what they see as the Five Movements in Ecological Building (only available in French), which emphasize different ideals: Simple Homes (like tiny houses), Carbon Neutral/Reduced Carbon Footprint Homes (in both its construction and consumption), Self-Sufficient Homes (aka autonomous and resilient), High Performance Homes (aka Energy Efficient Homes), and finally Natural Material Homes (aka using human-safe, renewable materials).

Subscribe now

My husband and I argue all the time because I want Natural Materials, and he wants High Performance, which are very hard to reconcile (I’ll dive into this more in future posts). And none of these highlight something important to both of us, which is Longevity: it’s more sustainable to have a house that will last, so it doesn’t have to be rebuilt and/or have the materials disposed of. Most people building a house probably hope to either eventually sell it or leave it to their children, because a house is supposed to last longer than our personal use of it.

This was another reality check: An ecological home isn’t just something that’s made for you and your satisfaction, it has to be something that other people will want to use. The reality is that in North America, the likelihood of our children taking this house from us is very slim1. More likely, it will be sold to someone we never meet, even if we do live in it for the rest of our lives. Which means, it has to be convenient for someone else, and honestly, even for me and my husband.

It needs to have modern creature comforts, like a stable temperature, good air circulation, and at least semi-modern aesthetics and tastes. So the building envelope has to be really solid and well–performing, the interior room layout should make sense for our use and potential other uses as well. We don’t want to spend all this time and energy making it look wonderful, only for a corner of the basement to collapse because the footing wasn’t made properly, or for a leak in the roof to destroy the inside of one of the walls. This means we have to use updated methods of construction, rather than only more traditional ones.

My ideals as a young adult were to have this intimate connection with the things I own, but as I grow older–and hopefully wiser–I’m realizing that there’s far more to consider when creating something that will (hopefully) outlive yourself. The dream is to build something that is perfect for you and your needs, but the reality is that a home doesn’t only serve you: it serves the community and future generations.

What are the things you think a good home should have? Things that will outlast you and contribute to the happiness of future generations?

- Pip

Bonjour/Hi! We’re Pip and Jay, the dynamic duo building our home (mostly) ourselves in Moe’s River, just outside of Sherbrooke Quebec. We hope this blog will help inspire you or someone you know to build more sustainably, even if you’re a Millennial on a budget, and haven’t built a house before.

The main topics we’ll keep coming back to are:

Traditional Building with Natural Materials vs. High Performance Building

Beauty on a Budget (where to Save and where to Splurge)

DIY vs. Subcontracting (when to hire a professional)

First up, we want to dive into the beginning, of designing our Green Dream Home, and the search for land.

We’re excited to share our process and our progress!

Thank you so much for reading,

Pip & Jay