Ahhhh. The budget????

18 months later, we now know better. In October 2007, we thought you could build a custom home for around $125/ sq ft. That's what the web resources said. That's what the Architects said. The "devil in in the details", however is very true in home building. While I have no doubt that the spartan little homes on flat downtown 'in-fill' lots that are the prototypical "green" home can be built for that, we were clearly naive to plan on it for our home. The cost of site work and all the unfinished spaces don't fit into tidy calculations like 2290 sqft x $125 = ~ $300,000. Boy, did we miss the mark!

In all honesty, we DID know there would be extra costs associated with our lot: gently sloping vs. flat; a new development vs. in-fill; 3+ acres, off the road vs. 1/2 acre in town. We knew all that, but didn't fully appreciate the magnitude of the cost impact of those details. Soooo.. we naively pressed on thinking that we could build this house, lot and all for around $420,000.

It's about the future

This project has been in the works for over 40 years. It began while I, as a small boy worked alognside my Dad and uncle to build our family's cabin in the Smokies. It grew while my Boyscout leaders invested their time and energy to teach us a love of nature and God's physical world. It crept along while I discovered a love of the sciences at MHS and UT. It blossomed at UT, protesting for the Snail Darter with the UT Environmental Coalition. As a Co-op Chemical Engineering student at Tennessee Eastman Company, I learned how to use Chemical Engineering to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Today, the problem of climate change is larger than any of us could have imagined years ago. We choose to be a part of it's sloution too.

Now, we prepare to break ground on our dream home. We hope it will clearly show our respect for God's gift to us all in these beautiful East Tennessee hills. We hope it will take full use of the sciences. We know it will represent the compromises that are the essence of good engineering. We hope to be leaders in the important field of green building, but we are not fanatics. We would like to build a green home that is simply an early adoption of techniques that become commonplace within the next few years.
Check back from time to time to see how we are progressing.