I have two kids from a previous marriage – one in college, one in high school and graduating in a year (hopefully – this pandemic is throwing everything out the window currently) so we planned on moving when the high schooler goes to college. Using that date (2021) as a basis, we started researching like crazy to see what houses were available up there for when we eventually want to buy. My wife ran across a pre-fab house maker in Maine called GO-Logic and it totally shifted our gears – maybe we don’t buy an existing house. Maybe we buy land and put a pre-fab house on it. Hmm…

GO-Logic is based in Maine and their houses were made in the cold climate and seemed to embody the ideals we were looking to incorporate into our homes. They were the first site we saw the world “passivehaus” and it took us down a rabbithole of research. We set up a call with them and talked to their team to find out what their houses were all about. We asked if they built many houses in Vermont and they said “Actually, not that many.” which surprised us since Vermont is always touting “green” and sustainability. Once we dug into the details we realized it is because, not only does Vermont have a huge passivehaus building movement in the state, but they are also big on building and buying local which also fit very well with our philosophies as well.

This phone called launched months of research and had us digging into Vermont builders and architects. We found an architect that built houses that we loved. We wrote him an email and set up a phone call with him. He was surprisingly candid – Vermont has high taxes (very high), land is expensive, you need to make sure that there are waste water certifications and well certifications included in the land price or else you might buy land that you can’t even put a house on, building in Vermont is expensive, building a well-insulated and efficient house is expensive. All-in-all, it sounded… expensive. The dream was kind of dead at that moment but we decided to go through with his on-boarding process, paying a few hundred dollars and get an assessment done that would give us a basic design that would suit our needs and, crucially, expenses.

He gave us a questionnaire that was many pages in length. It really forced us to nail down our thinking on what we actually wanted. If you’re thinking of building a house or looking for one, I suggest this method because it takes your nebulous ideas of “house” and makes them “I want this kind of house” ideas. It doesn’t nail things down but suggest things that might prove useful when comparing different features. Here are some of his questions:

Please rank the following in order of importance (1=most important, 3=least important)? Schedule (3 ) Budget (2 ) Quality (1 )
Please explain your energy efficiency goals for the project?
Please explain your sustainability goals for the project?
What is the very essence of the home you can see in your mind and feel in your heart?
How long do you expect you will own your new home?
Which exterior building materials do you find most appealing?
How do you envision your house relating to its site?

21 pages of questions like that really makes you work to imagine where you want to be. We also included tons of photos for inspiration. It all sounded so awesome. We got his design plan and estimate. It was around 3 times the value of our current house. The dream was pretty much dead at that point. We were going to need to find another way to make a house in Vermont happen.