Four Houses and a Hole

A homeowner couple planning a high-performance house for their retirement years is chronicling the project in an ongoing series, and this installment covers how they settled on a final design before breaking ground. They started with four different house plans, including a one-story, 2,400-square-foot version on a slab meant to keep everything accessible as they age, with no stairs to navigate later in life. That early draft also packed in nearly every high-end building technology and material they had come across, from online research to ideas picked up at a Passive House event. Living in tight quarters, in an RV and a small cabin on their property, shaped their thinking along the way, teaching them that unused rooms still cost money to heat and clean, and that comfort has little to do with square footage.

Much of this entry focuses on the first irreversible step in construction: pouring the basement walls using insulated concrete forms, known as ICFs, a type of foundation wall that combines concrete with built-in foam insulation. The couple consulted with an expert beforehand to prepare for the risks of the pour, including the possibility of a wall blowout, and the work went smoothly.

For homeowners not building from scratch, the specifics here are less about rebates or upgrades you can act on and more a glimpse into the kind of planning and tradeoffs that go into building a durable, low-maintenance, age-in-place home from the ground up.