Our Modern Homestead Vision

We’ve started a challenging journey into waters that are unfamiliar to us. What stars will guide us?

We’re building a house on Salt Spring Island, in the Salish Sea. We are on the unceded, ancestral lands of the SENĆOŦEN and Hul’q’umi’num speaking peoples. We are conscious of our place as settlers here and are listening to the long time caretakers of this land.

Before we embarked on this journey, we discussed how we would navigate, when the seas inevitably get rough or when we have to decide which way to go. This week I’m clinging to the vision and guiding principles we set out because, WOW, is this a wild ride!

Today I’m continuing on my week-long challenge to write and share daily(ish) and because we have some big house-related decisions to make at the moment, I’m checking back in with our vision and guiding principles.

Vision for our new home

Our vision is of a Modern Homestead. It’s built in an ecologically responsible (or perhaps even a regenerative) way and allows us to live close to the land. We also aim for the planning, designing, and building process to be as easy and fun for the whole team as possible.

This will be a home for our family. It will be a relaxing, practical space for us to rest, play, connect, and create. It will also be the launching pad for us learning to grow as much of our own food as possible – enough to store and share. We hope to have chickens, bees, and maybe goats or sheep one day.

Regenerative Building

Our family can’t solve the climate emergency (ourselves, in the next year). I’m not saying we aren’t trying to do our part, but I have to admit I feel overwhelmed by the scale of it all. What we can do is to build a house that treads as lightly on the planet as possible and aims to support the systems, of which it is a part.

There are so many terms out there that describe these types of buildings…

For us, we are learning as we go, so what we mean and what words we use to convey that meaning are evolving.

The term regenerative building currently appeals to me because it reminds me to think on a systems level. Our house is connected to natural and human systems, so we’ll acknowledge and aim to support them. We aim for our building to not only be energy efficient (which many of the modern sustainable building certifications focus on), but also to use natural materials and work with the local ecosystem – the water cycles, forests older than my grandparents, sensitive habitats, and human communities and farms.

We will build with…

Natural materials
Local materials
Reclaimed materials
FSC certified materials
As little plastic as is possible
No materials from the Red List

We will design systems that are…

Quiet
Energy efficient
Minimize carbon footprint
Rely on characteristics inherent/natural to the materials (as compared to overly mechanized)
Re-use/re-cycle flows (e.g. greywater to the garden, heat from heating house to help heat hot water, solid human waste composted and returned to the soil)
Durable
- Repaired easily by us, or sturdy/simple enough that don’t require much repair
- Repairable by locally available tradespeople

Joy in the process

Our goal of a regenerative home is only part of our vision. The other important guiding principle is that we want to enjoy the process of building and our lives in and around the home as much as possible.

Every story I’ve heard about folks who have built a house has similar themes of high stress, not a fun process, surviving through it only to get to enjoy the end product. This does not sound fun, to us.

Just because that’s the way it has been, does it have to be like that?

What if we could actually enjoy the process? What would that even look like?

Tomorrow I’ll dive into how we are aiming to minimize stress and maximize our enjoyment of building our new home.

Stay tuned!