New House near Colorado Springs

We’re closing on the new house this Friday (2/22/2013), and will begin a small rebuild of the current house before starting the first project of building an Earthship inspired shed.  As with the “Cincinnati House” that Dan Richfield and his crew did at offthegridbuild.com, if we are building under 120 square feet, it doesn’t require building permits.

The house is a manufactured 3 bedroom, 2 bath home with 40 acres of land near Colorado Springs.  Here are some pics of the house:

The initial rebuild has a pretty big “todo” list..  First thing is to tear off and replace the roof shingles as well as install gutters.  We’ll be doing some of these prior to moving in.  Along with that, we plan to replace the kitchen, dining room, and living room with a wood laminate floor.  I installed one in my last house and it is so easy to work with, it should make for a pretty easy install.

Laminate floor installed in Villa Park house:

After that and painting the rooms, the major interior stuff should be set.  I’m trying to talk my wife into allowing me to knock a couple of wall out to make it a little more open, but we’ll have to see about those.  We plan to replace all the windows as well as siding, but we can do that while we are living there.  Another idea is to build a solar heater on the south side of the building to reduce the requirement for propane.  It’d be extremely easy to tap into the current furnace ducts right next to the south wall, but I may run them into the bottom of the furnace ducts to help distribute the heat.  I’d guess running it strait into the duct in that bedroom would make it pretty hot in that room.  Though, I guess we could close the vent.  We’ll see.

First draft of shed design: