My wife and I wanted to remodel a small rental beach property into an affordable, green, energy saving, future retirement home. The design challenges included not being able to build out because the existing home size to lot size was already maxed out. To get the square footage we wanted a three story design was decided on. We made the project affordable by doing 80% of the work ourselves and buying quality materials thru sites like Craigslist. We tried to be green by using as much reclaimed & renewable materials as possible. We made the house energy saving by wrapping the exterior of the entire building in a very tight polyiso shell and installing a Heat recovery ventilator.
