which type of home construction is energy-efficient, quick and economical to build, and high in resale value?

Question

area is rural Midwest, at least an hour from major cities.

Answer 1

Use Superior walls for a full basement and then put a modular on to. Best buy for the buck. We love it!!

Superior walls are prepoured at the factory, delivered to the home site on a low boy trailer. Take one and half hours to set the walls for a 1400 sq, ft. modular. No footer required.

Answer 2

I agree with the architect, it is difficult to get energy efficiency, economical and a high resale together. Be careful with too many windows, high solar heat gain can be a good thing, but at night you are losing heat. Even the best windows are not very efficient, glass is a poor insulator. You can purchase triple glazed insulated glass that is the about the most efficient available now, but you get little heat gain through it. It is also very expensive and the payback on heat saved is many years.

I would not recommend a modular for resale, a lot of the fixtures used in manufactured houses are fair quality at best.

Answer 3

Go with U.S. Dept. of Energy Insulation recommendations on insulation, keep high ceilings to a minimum, find someone who knows how to caulk all the seams and windows, install a ground-source heat pump or air source if not feasible. Use wet blown insulation, which helps seal the house too. All these things pay for themselves quickly. And you will be more comfortable. None are weird and your utility bills will help resell the house. I would stick with conventional construction, although you can check out steel framing. Problem is, steel prices are really up right now.

Answer 4

Some of your descriptors are mutually exclusive, particularly in this economic climate and are not apt to change for the forseeable future. This simple answer, without 20 pages of supporting documents that I do not have time to link, is NONE.
This may change in 15 years, but I doubt it. The previous answers are all correct to a very limited degree, and will not satisfy all three of your requirements.

Answer 5

Big south facing windows - passive solar gain in the winter but shaded in summer if you have just a bit of overhang. Good insulation - good windows. Wood frame is probably the cheapest way to go. If slab floors are the norm in your area you might consider in floor heating (no dust or noise) but that may prove too costly.

Answer 6

Wow, you men have a great hazard. First have you ever appeared at option development strategies collectively with straw bale or Cob? between the biggest environmental impacts your new homestead could have is via the huge quantities of concrete that maximum present day homes use. Concrete takes a multitude of fossil gas to make and each and all of the flexibility fee reductions you build into your homestead will take many some years to pay off in carbon fee reductions in case you first lay down a concrete slab. in case you're rather set on development your very own study development with cob - cob is a clay, sand and straw mixture it is labored into place moist yet units as complicated as concrete. There are cob homes in the united kingdom that are many hundreds or years old and as stable at present because of the fact the day they have been made. Cob has severe thermal mass so the completed shape of your development helps adjust air temperatures by utilising soaking up and liberating warmth. The thickness of the partitions additionally factors stable insulation the two against summer season warmth and iciness chilly. in case you easily need to push the boat out and warmth your homestead completely with image voltaic (even in the non-public depths of iciness while the sunlight would not shine for a week!) you may desire to look into designing Annualised Geosolar Heating into the layout. truly this traps warmth from the top of summer season in the soil under your homestead. This warms the completed floor of your homestead from below in the time of the completed iciness. the assumption is which you're amassing image voltaic warmth while this is abundant and affordable to assemble in summer season, and then liberating it while this is maximum functional. provided you be responsive to in improve of making you are able to layout the completed set-up into your homestead so as that it runs completely passively, heat air in simple terms convects certainly with the aid of pipes below the floor, laying off warmth. image voltaic warm water is yet another stable option as heating water makes use of loads of power. and remember to think of approximately setting up timber fired heating - timber is fairly affordable and a renewable source. make certain you have an outstanding timber range (ideally on with severe thermal mass like a rocket range). mixed with a nicely insulated and designed homestead it may truthfully furnish your supplemental heating needs.

Answer 7

Any design (method of construction) that is not your typical wood-framed house will make it harder to sell. Most people want wood studs, drywall, etc. Log cabins, timber frames, hay bales, used tires, etc are all niche markets and appeal to fewer buyers.