Seed Eco-Home 2 Preorder Form

How it Works

This form is used to pre-qualify potential buyers of the Seed Eco-Home 2 by Open Source Ecology (OSE)/Open Building Institute (OBI). This is a unique opportunity to obtain an expandable, 1000 square foot starter home at the lowest possible cost. All our plans are on line for free - so if you download our designs and blueprints, you don't need to buy anything from OSE. But if you are interested in a house kit or a turnkey house build - we can offer you this service. If you are interested, please read this introduction - and if you qualify - fill our our pre-order form. There is a $20 charge for form processing, which is applied towards your purchase. Before you fill out our pre-order form - make sure you read the following and understand all of our options. This will help you to determine if you qualify for the turnkey build - or make you aware of other options so that you can negotiate the best solution for you that provides you with an affordable, expandable, high quality home. This way, you can avoid debt and reduce your financial burden - and thus be a happier person all together as we help you negotiate the single largest expense in one's life: housing.

OSE is providing 3 services that will will allow you to access additional support - up to a turnkey house build. However, in all cases - you need to get your own buildable land parcel - as we are helping you to build your home. You simply hire OSE for the additional services or for a turnkey build.

There are 3 main options here:

1. 14 Day Builder Crash Course - $2100 early bird offer for build training where you participate in a complete build.
2. Drop-Shipped Seed Eco-Home 2 House Kit - $10k service fee + materials + any outsourced contractors, BYOL (Bring Your Own Land)
3. Turnkey Build of the Seed Eco-Home - $50k service fee + materials, BYOL

FAQ

Current Model

1. Is it legal to build your own house, or do you need to hire licensed professionals or contractors to build a house for you? It is legal. You need to follow 5 requirements: have a buildable lot, zoning must allow you to build a house, local ordinances must allow you to build in the particular way you choose, and you must follow building codes for soundness and safety of the home. Also note that none of this applies, or is not enforced - in some locations that do not have or enforce any building codes - see map at Counties Without Building Codes. In fact there is over 100 counties where 'building what you want without asking anyone' is actually allowed. However, if the question is deciding to build your own house, legality is not the only question. Another question is - are you qualified to do so and to do so safely? If you are not qualified, we can train you. If you don't think you can do so safely, we can teach you safety. In short, if you would like to build your own house, there is nothing stopping you - though to do so responsibly, you have to possess or acquire a skill set. And this skill set is not prohibitively difficult. You can also hire out some work to licensed professionals or contractors. There are cases where a fully built and functioning house requires zero contact with the outside world. That would be an off-grid situation where building codes do not apply - or special building types such as barns or utility buildings for which no approval may be needed. But if there is a public grid involved - water, sewer, internet, power, gas - involvement of the utility is required as you are not allowed to tap into public infrastructure by yourself.
2. Do you offer an off-grid option? For the Seed Eco-Home, we already have the off-grid option on gas/electric with solar panels - and the absence of gas appliances in favor of more efficient electric induction cooktop, on-demand electric water heaters, and heat pump. We are working on grey and black water reclamation as well, so that the house is completely autonomous and pollution-free, and we expect to offer these as standard options within the next 3 years.
3. What special ecological features do you offer? We offer PV, superefficient applances (refrigerator, heat pump, on-demand water heater, induction cooktop), eco-friendly polished concrete floors, water-saving devices, and a standard bidet option. We plan to apply for Living Building Challenge Certification with the Rosebud model.

Risk Management

1. What are the risks of building the Seed Eco-Home 2? Let's talk about general owner-builder risks [1], and how the Seed Eco-Home 2 mitigates these by design. 1. Risk of out-of-control construction costs and blowing your budget - Fortunately, we have a good solution to this - we are digital - Housing 2.0. That means there is no builder/contractor figuring things out on the fly because the architects' plans are not specific enough. In our model, we specify the exact material and sourcing, provide complete build details and instructions - and these procedures are optimized (as far as they can be until someone downstream points out how we can do better because we are open source). So you know exactly what materials you will use, how much they will cost, and exactly how to build them. This is critical for material/labor cost overruns. If you build yourself, you can manage this. If you hire someone to build - you will know how much time it _should_ take. Ie - you make fully informed decisions thoughout the whole build. The remaining risk is materials cost - such as skyrocketing lumber and building materials prices because of a construction boom in Covid times. 2. Inability to control your schedule properly, causing costly time overruns and delays in project completion. We address this by defining an exact schedule - there is no mystery there as we have documented build times and specific build procedures. 3. Complicated construction issues, requiring solutions that may be beyond your capabilities. We kill this completely - by optimized, simple design that took years to develop and now anyone can access. 4. Failing to build to local code (and the unbudgeted costs of correcting issues). This is solved at the plan check stage with the building department. First, our design follows the IRC. Second, the specificity of our building plans allows us to communicate very explicitly with building officials, so that any changes are caught prior to the start of construction. This issue is largely solved with Housing 2.0. 5. Many of the best subcontractors won’t work with owner-builders. That's great- because we don't need them. In the 14 day crash course, you will learn everything clearly, and our abundant instructionals will make it easy for you to hire any handyman, friend, or non-builder tradesperson to follow our plans - the guesswork is taken out of the equation. Our detailed build videos will leave no detail to the creativity of your worker - unless you ask them for more creativity. In which case we ask you to feed this back into our database if it's an improvement. 6. Banks may not want to give the best terms on a construction loan without a licensed builder on the job. Simply sharing our documentation and website with the bank officers may even inspire them to give you a better deal, especially if you took our building crash course and explained the modular build method. You may actually be selling our product for us without knowing it, as the construction model that we use is compelling. 7. Being taken advantage of by shady contractors. Not likely, because you don't need specific contractors. Our techniques are transparent - so you can guide your contractor effectively - or just hire your friends instead because we go to great lengths to simplify build procedures by smart design so more people could build for you. 8. Mechanic’s Liens filed against your property by subcontractors or suppliers. Hmmm - on this one - you have the advantage of being able to pick and choose what contractors you work with, because you are empowered to not need contractors in the first place. 9. Difficultly refinancing a construction loan (especially when off schedule). The construction time is controlled tightly in our program, so you should be able to keep to schedule. The modular design allows you to pull in more people into the build if you have a delay - while avoiding Brook's Law. Thus, you are not likely to require refinancing in the first place. 10. Foreclosure or other loan-related distress caused by budget and cash flow problems. Our design for Incremental Housing, low cost, and build efficiency reduces the capital outlay required, and makes build completion more likely than traditional build projects. You can even build smaller - 512 sf or even 256 sf - as our building technique allows for complete expandability. 11. Depressed resale value when home is not built by a known professional. The bank should be able to get an accurate assessment from our exhaustive documentation. If you care about 'fitting in with the Joneses' for standard cookie cutter design, then you may be coming to the wrong place. We offer a unique design with significant attention given to aesthetics - without breaking the budget. It is likely that our uniqueness may be an asset - more in the custom home category associated with more expensive housing - than in the sup-par housing category.
2. What if I get in trouble and the bank forecloses on my loan? As a socially responsible enterprise and nonprofit, OSE is committed to helping as much as possible. This is where our swarm build techniques come in handy. We have learned how to do extremely rapid builds by our modular design, with novices - that take only a few days. We can offer our swarm build capacity to save a situation in crisis - assuming that you were conscientious about the build and ran into some authentic bad surprises in your life or build. We plan to pull this trick out of the hat as necessary, and also to use the swarm build capacity under normal conditions.

Future Work

1. Do you offer an autonomous house option? We are offering an aquaponic greenhouse option for food production. We are developing a closed loop water system with water catchment and recycling. We are developing an open source microfactory option for 3D printing and other productive work so that the house is all together a net producer of energy, food, water, and products - while being zero carbon and socially conscious.