HARVESTING WIND ENERGY TO COOL YOUR HOMESTEAD HOUSE
Design your home to use more fresh air instead of spending energy on your HVAC. Permaculture tells us to use natural processes and store energy. Here’s one way we can do it in home design.
EXTERIOR VIEWS
Progress design for a permaculture inspired home for homesteading. This shows the main form of the house that meets the purpose it is designed for, the finishes have not yet been selected.
Permaculture Homestead House Design – Scale model views
I took the photo outside and this shows the approximate shading the house gets on a winter morning (February)
Optimizing a Trellis Spacing for Texas Summer Solstice
What is the best spacing to maximize shade from your trellis? I modeled different trellis spacing to see which would get me the most bang for buck of shade for my lumber. This is fine tuned to my geolocated site, set for the summer solstice. The best spacing for my site was 9 inches apart,…
End of Year Permaculture Homestead House Design Update
I can say that, as the year ends, I was able to put much more design thought into this home designed for homesteading. I hope you invested your time well for 2021.
A Personal Design Breakthrough
Today is a mini breakthrough for me. I have been working tirelessly at a design for a permaculture concept home, a home for homesteading, for the last year. The thing that took a lot of creative effort for me was the exterior. It was wrestling with years of creative neglect and brainwashing myself into what…
Honest and efficient home ornamentation
A home designed with permaculture principles needs to be honest and true to it’s resources. The facade in this sketch mirrors a deeper indoor living space on the north end, and the south end has a shallower interior space but has a deeper shade from the outdoor porch.
RENOVATIONS FOR AGING IN PLACE
I aspire for functional forever homes-where you live the life you dream about and are able to keep doing so into old age. I want you to have that home where your kids grew up in and where your grandkids can visit you. One way we refer to this is the design concept of aging…
Permaculture Home Concept: Detailing a Storm Shelter
Inside the permaculture home concept plan I have been working on, I’ve planned for a pantry that can be upgraded to a storm shelter in the main section of the house. Today as I was developing the roof I realized I was very close to connecting the roof supports to one of the storm shelter…
On Passive House design for a Permaculture Home
Would a passive house approach work for what I am trying to do with the permaculture house concept? How does the Passive House design apply to this Texas Permaculture home concept?
PERMACULTURE HOME DESIGN UPDATE
What would my permaculture concept house look like at this point? Here’s a quick 3min video of what that exterior would look like simply using the floor plan.
Plastics over Steel for easier rural home construction
The advantages of using fiber reinforced plastics over steel for residential design: lighter, less fuel, less equipment, low maintenance…
Rocket Mass Heater add
Would a permaculture home in this climate benefit from a rocket mass heater?
Permaculture Concept Home: Not a Starter Home
This is a floor plan for a forever home-where I would hope to host family reunions with my grandkids sitting under the shade of a food forest their parents grew up in. I have enough of the spaces figured out in my head and can start being more creative with it.
Permaculture Concept Home: Shop Room for Zone 0 Production and Homesteading
The permaculture concept home has been missing a room that can boost homesteading. While keeping the concept home lean and efficient, there’s lots of benefits in adding a dedicated production space.
Permaculture Concept Home: Sketches on Plumbing w Permaculture
I have spending lots of time trying to explore ideas on where your house plumbing should go using permaculture principles.
Extending Thermal Gain in a Home
Can we make our exterior walls and windows warmer – letting our floor capture more heat and radiate warmth beneath our feet during the cold winter months, by stretching out the structure to increase thermal gain from the sun?
Managing Water in Zone Zero
I found myself dreaming about pvc pipe layouts at 5am and contemplating better routes to run water utilities beneath the slab. We should manage and function stack these water utilities in zone zero with as much design effort as we do for our zone 1 to 5 water systems
Schematic plans for a Permaculture Inspired Home
I’m sharing a schematic floor plan for a house I was working on, designed with permaculture in mind. I imagined this to be a site built home on a rural property. I hit pause on this idea after getting stuck on a problem which I now don’t recall. The design follows the flow of a…
REMOTE WORKSHOP SHED
Worried of the logistics and the size of starting out a homestead from scratch? You want to take it on in manageable chunks. You may want an inexpensive, flexible shed to use as your weekend workshop.
EVALUATING HOMES FOR COLD CLIMATE RESILIENCE
I wanted to compare how Texas homes fair to homes in colder northern states like Nebraska. What upgrades would make sense to get us to a more similar cold climate resilience?
REVISITING CLIMATE ZONES
Given the Texas freeze we had 2 weeks ago, I think we should spend some time evaluating how we here in Texas design homes for the cold. However, what does it mean when we say we should design for colder climates even in Texas?
THE PERMACULTURE FUNCTION STACKED WALL FOUNDATION
Can we build walls better with more efficient materials and methods so they are easier for a family to DIY it? Consider having more efficient and function stacked materials; more manageable labor.
Record Winter Temps in Texas
We lost power on Monday early morning. I woke up at 3:30am, and it was already cold. I estimate that we lost power at least an hour more than that, at 2:30am
OUR STEPS TO GET NEW LAND STARTED
My family and I have been looking at purchasing property outside of the metropolis we are in, here in Dallas TX. Plan B is to find acreage with no house on it. If we find one at the right price, here’s a list of projects we could put in that would help us transition a…
RABBITRY + CHICKEN SHED
A peek into how I designed a rabbitry plus chicken coop and run to suit the lifestyle design of an awesome homesteading client.
DEFENSIBLE HOME DESIGN
We need to consider how a home can be more secure at the onset of the design. We also need to have options to increasing security for homes that are already built-here are some ideas from an article by Jeff Cooper called “Notes on Tactical Residential Architecture”.
Mudrooms – improving your transition from garden to kitchen
If you plan on a permaculture home, there will be a lot of time outside on your yard enjoying your land. You may have noticed it sucks when you come back inside and you end up tracking your dirt in the house, or you have no proper space to sit and sort of transition into…
EXPANDABLE HOMES
A home must be expandable. This also means that one can build at a more remote location more easily. Consider how homes were built back in the pioneering/homesteading days when a family would start with a basic shed and expand as their stability in their land was established. To build DIY remote homes we must…
Future concerns
In the last week, protesters got into the Capitol building. An elected president of a world superpower has been censored. And pro-free speech social media app Parler has been attacked by the big tech companies (Apple, Google and Amazon).
Homes Produce Yields
Let’s chat about some of the different yields we can get from our homes from an architecture and permaculture perspective.
Improvements for a Permaculture Home
How about more permaculture oriented changes to make a more permaculture home? How about a few more creative ideas we can use for our zonezero: -enhanced kitchen space -workshop space -natural ventilation -furniture layout -avoid bottlenecks
Making Architecture more Permaculture
It is about time that we saw our homes shift to the ideas that are driving us. We need these homes to catch up to the inspired food forested land that we are designing to support the lifestyles and purposes we want to have.
A Corner Stone Concept: Empowering DIY Homes
I have been mulling over the design for a concept permaculture home for the last few months. I’ve done so initially to have a good basis of design that I can locate onto a site, with most of the problems of a home solved, most of the solutions included- then I can edit it to…
Why America is Not Building Forever Homes anymore
A Forever Home – one where a family puts down roots, builds their lives together and the kids come to visit mom and dad when they are old. Family memories are etched on the door frames, a tree house the kids built with their dad or the kids’ bedrooms still set aside for when they…
Alt-Ark 