Ask HN: What would you put in your dream home?

[kevin_vanilla]

I'll be moving to the countryside soon and have the good fortune to be able to build a custom home. What sort of things would you want in your dream home?

Don't worry about personalizing your recommendations to what I want. Give me whatever you would want, from "more outlets" to "swingset for kids" to "rotating lamborghini garage", and I'll pick out the ones that fit my situation :)

Thanks!

[brucethemoose2]

A home theatre? Somewhere for adults and kids to hang out over a movie or a game, even though that feels like an oxymoron in the country.

Other than that... Low maintenance/upkeep would be my primary goal. Build things small, but well. Coming from someone fortunate enough to grow up in a big house, just keeping up with a bunch of stuff can quickly turn into a nightmare.

[LinuxBender]

In the home, not much. I am a minimalist and like a comfortable and functional tiny home. Food, tools, etc...

Under the home I would like to put bunkers. They are pricey in the US. The one I was looking at was Atlas's "Big Boy" [1] bunker about $300k. Less to do with doomsday stuff and more to do with year-round moderate temperatures as winter here is more than half the year and it would reduce noise a bit. I could see entirely replacing the home with one of these and making the entrance look like a Doctor Who Police Box thus freeing up more land.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcpKcnp_eyQ

[bradknowles]

Well insulated and well sealed, top to bottom. I'd target PassivHaus levels or better. You need good contractors for this to happen.

Single level is good if you're thinking about growing older in the house. It's a bitch having to go up and down stairs with a bad knee or with a back you threw out last week. And that's just the beginnings of growing older.

Along those same lines, the whole house should be ADA accessible. There's nothing quite like suddenly finding yourself in a wheelchair and now you can't go to the bathroom because your wheelchair doesn't fit through the doorway.

I'd also be thinking about an on-site generator for the whole house, plus solar and battery packs. I'd over provision the solar, so that even on the coldest darkest days of winter in twenty years you would still be likely to collect enough sunlight on the panels to power the whole house. Of course, this includes heating elements to clear off snow or ice from the panels.

Many people selling solar these days are trying to get you to "net zero" or close to it, so that over a year you generate about as much power through your panels as you use from the grid, so that your electric bill should be close to zero. I'm not a fan of "net zero". I don't trust the power companies down here in Texas, and I'd like the ability to be completely and totally off their grid. Even if I am grid-connected 99%of the time, I want that ability to go completely off-grid if I need to. If we had solar panels during the Great IcePocalypse a couple of years ago, and we were on the grid, we would have been forced to shut them off when they did rolling blackouts. So, I want to be able to stay on my own micro grid, even if the main grid goes down.

I think you also want to be looking at multiple Internet providers, each of which should hopefully be at least gigabit-class and symmetric speeds. Then you want to look at what kind of failover mechanisms you should be using when your primary provider goes down. In our neighborhood, if you go two miles in any direction, you can find multiple gigabit-class providers. But inside this neighborhood, the only one is Spectrum. And they're just not reliable enough. I've checked out all the fixed wireless solutions here, and no one can give me better service than 4G/LTE. Satellite is okay as a tertiary backup, but not as a primary or secondary source.

That's broad strokes. I could point you to certain YouTube channels I watch for this kind of stuff, if you like.

[hitpointdrew]

Home gym complete with cold plunge, and sauna.