Home of the future?
You hear prefab mobile home and you don't usually think stylish, but this one is kind of cute. The $100,000 price tag seems a little steep to me for a 992 sq foot place that still needs an foundation but I suppose with the energy efficiency built in you would recoup costs rather quickly and the green products used in construction are a plus. I could see myself living in a place like it. [More posts daily at The Detroit News]
Labels: technology
posted by Libby Spencer at 1:42 PM
9 Comments:
Very cool. It's small, but it would be great if Americans got used to the idea of smaller houses (cars too). I guess it's our idea of manifest destiny and conquering the frontier that draws us to big, sprawling...everything.
But there's something quaint about smaller homes.
Plus, this particular house seems to use the space really well. It looks larger than it is.
I kind of like it myself. But I'm geared to a smaller home as a single person anyway.
My husband and I purchased our 1st home, a split-entry, 21 1/2 years ago. We were only going to stay in it for 5 years. Well, we're still in our 1700 sq ft home and glad we never did "up-size" because in about 6 years our youngest will be going to college and we want to "down-size"! That mobile home looks great. Not much to keep clean and perfect to set on a huge piece of acreage. I've learned over the years that the bigger the house the more the maintenance. Your home is where your family and heart is, regardless of size. Too bad more people didn't feel this way when the housing boom was going on.
The McMansion craze was not healthy and now we're all paying the price for it. I see a lot of potential in a place like this. I've also seen one that's even smaller and more mobile that I really liked. It has the same clean lines and efficient layout.
I like it, I'll buy. On a seaside cliff. I would want a foundation (basement).
Dr. Mohit posted part 3 of his Single Payer series on Huff blog today
Thanks for the headsup Time. I'm pushing single payer this week.
Reminds me of how I was supposed to help the world's starving children by eating my spinach. It doesn't work that way.
Tell me, will I use more hot water in an 800 sq ft bathroom than in a tiny little one? I doubt it.
We're not running out of living space, we're competing with an ever more affluent world for dwindling amounts of oil and water.
Sorry to bring up physics, but a small box loses heat faster than a big one because it has more surface area per cubic foot and flat roofs are a bear to air condition - or heat for that matter. A nice masonry house with thick walls, a basement and attic and lots of insulation will be cheaper to heat and cool. A buried house with solar panels would be far better still.
Apartment buildings, however, offer the most energy efficient storage for people by a big margin.
We started out as creatures of wide open spaces but we're likely to wind up like ants in huge cities where nature is something you see on TV, like it or not -- unless we're able to produce fusion power or control the population.
The problem is not that we don't have room to live in the US. The problem is that we won't live near where we work, that we have hundreds and hundreds of times too much retail space, that our distribution of everything is too centralized; too many stoplights, too many cars, not enough trains, too many millions of acres of lawn that have to be watered and fertilized -- and not too many affluent people, but TOO MANY PEOPLE.
Too many " green solutions" I hear involve living like Ted Kasczinsky; wearing dirty clothes, washing less often and not flushing toilets -- if we are so "elitist" as to have them in the first place. We do have a puritan heritage, after all.
There is no civilization without energy (or sanitation) - we just have to get better at obtaining it from other places because any other way like downsizing just means putting off the inevitable.
I take it you don't like this little house then? :)
Physics or not, it costs me less to run the apt I have than it did to run the two bedrm brick house I had before. Everything is a tradeoff. I don't mind the idea of cluster housing with open space around it. That keeps the natural world available. Of course, it depends on the neighbors when you start living in close quarters.
You're right though. No easy answers.
Neighbors - well at least they're good for target practice.
But as I said, apartments are more efficient.
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