Alternative Home Construction

Alternative home construction is all about ordinary people doing extraordinary things with the limited means available to them. The homes they build are testament to the creativity of the human spirit and proof that here are viable solutions to some of our most seemingly intractable problems.

Putting a roof over our heads is the single biggest expense most of us have in our lifetimes. To borrow a Churchillian phrase, there is more blood, toil, tears and sweat goes into that enterprise than into anything else we do. Not surprisingly, housing is also one of the biggest consumers of the world's ever-shrinking resource base and emitter of greenhouse gases. Whatever we can do to mitigate the waste both in human terms and to our over-stressed planet has enormous beneficial consequences for us all. We are only limited by our imagination.

As someone who has done my time in the trenches of the building industry and had to butt heads with the mind-numbing orthodoxy that usually prevails, I am all too familiar with the rationale, "That's the way we've always done it." Fortunately it has also been my privilege to work with and learn from others who set their sights somewhat higher. For these mold and rule breakers, the alternative builders, a different code applies, from which I borrow the slogan of this site...