Hugh Joyce's Solar Idea House

Found this nifty green house project that was built in Richmond, VA. They have before and after pictures of the project, showing the wretched condition of the house before the green renovation. The project site has plenty of information of what was done.

- http://www.home-reviews.com

Hugh Joyce sent us these photos of his recently completed project of the house renovation. When he bought this house in Richmond it was in a very poor condition – basically it was a brick box full of garbage that once was it’s interior. The idea was to re-green the house to make an interactive learning model exploring the most of available green building techniques. Large Kyocera Solar Panel produces enough energy to drop the power bill to $20 a month. There are water recovery systems for irrigation and air filter and purifier and this is just the taste of the Solar Idea House’s technologies, the full list is here. Implementing even a few of those green strategies can save you a valuable amount of money and minimize the impact to the environment.

click image to visit before & after slideshow:

Here's some information on the benefits of a LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) home:

Benefits of a LEED Home from U.S. Green Building Council on Vimeo.

Michael Jantzen's Homestead House

I stumbled upon the work of Michael Jantzen today while checking out the "Tiny House Design" site and was immediately struck by the design for his "Homestead House". I'd been looking at homes built around corrugated steel and this one grabbed me with its homestead ranch house layout.

Inspired by my experimental design work in the late 1960s as an undergraduate at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, I decided to re-examine the potential use of certain readily available agricultural building components in the creation of alternative housing systems. The Homestead House is a conceptual design for alternative housing that explores the potential use of a commercially available steel, prefabricated, modular, high strength, low cost, arch building system normally used for agricultural purposes.

Jantzen describes himself as an artist who's preferred medium is architecture. I like it!

Michael Jantzen's Website

FYI - Home Improvement Links

Here are a couple home improvement links I'd like to keep handy:

Micropaperlaminated Panels - interesting ceiling panel replacement idea

The Field Lab – Extremely Sustainable Homestead - the 40-acre sustainable desert homestead of John Wells.

Plug-N-Play Solar & Wind Power

I've found that Facebook is a rotten place to use as a repository for information that you may want to reference later down the road, so it's back to the more reliable blogger for that task.

First up, an interesting plug-n-play solar and wind power system that you basically just plug into an existing power outlet at your home. Just connect the solar panel(s) and/or wind turbine to a converter and plug that into an exterior power outlet. The electricity generated is then integrated into your homes electrical grid. This is a great way to offset all the equipment in your home that continues to draw electricity even when it's turned off.

These are supposed to be hitting the market sometime in 2011 at a cost under $1000. I'd love to add something like this to my home, but I'm not sure how well it would perform with all the trees that surround the house.

Still, I'll have to keep an eye on this: http://www.clarianpower.com/solar.html

Despair

de·spair

[dih-spair]

–noun

1. loss of hope; hopelessness.

2. someone or something that causes hopelessness: He is the despair of his mother.

–verb (used without object)

3. to lose, give up, or be without hope (often fol. by of ): to despair of humanity.

–verb (used with object)

4. Obsolete . to give up hope of.

Origin:

1275–1325; ME despeir (n.), despeiren (v.) \ AF despeir, OF despoir (n.), despeir-, tonic s. of desperer (v.) \ L dēspērāre to be without hope, equiv. to dē- de- + spērāre to hope, deriv. of spēs hope

I had a brush with despair recently. Interesting how dark and grey things become when you think that you've reached a dead end in your life. The darkness has passed and I'm feeling like my old self - for what it's worth ;)

Unfortunately, so many people are not able to shrug off the darkness that depression and despair can levy upon them. I think I understand now what it is that drives people to suicide, suicide bombings, and possibly what drives those people who go on shooting sprees. They probably feel they have reached the end of a one way street with no turning back; some may choose to go quietly, while others choose to go out in a blaze of glory.

Bill Zeller was once such person who reached the end of the line and chose to exit on his own terms. Zeller was a programmer who was featured on the weblog LifeHacker. He took his own life on Sunday and left an explanation which has been posted of fellow weblog, Gizmodo:
http://gizmodo.com/5726667/the-agonizing-last-words-of-bill-zeller