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A message from me, via Seesmic. If you want to respond on Seesmic, but don’t have an invitation code, please let me know and I’ll send you one.

I’ll update the post with any answers that come in!

I’m currently flying at 35,000 feet on my way to a conference in Washington DC. I’ve just read, cover to cover, this month’s copy of Grand Designs Magazine, and I’m struck by just how far I have to go. True, it’s still another five hours until I land at Dulles, my back is aching, my sinuses are threatening to give me hell later and I’m so squashed in my seat that I barely have room to fidget. But that’s not what I mean.

Reading this magazine makes me realise how little I know, and how much I have to learn about this whole self-build malarkey. Yet some things are becoming very clear, very quickly. Kevin and I are not eco-martyrs, and we are not looking at this project as a way to salve our consciences. There are no hairshirts here, no Luddite rejections of technology or modernity.

Re-watching old episodes of Grand Designs, especially the eco-builds, and reading websites about green houses has quickly illustrated that some of these projects are predicated on the rejection of almost everything about modern society. They are run by people who have fallen for the Victorian myth of Arcadia, the concept of the rural idyll in which we all hoe the land and live happily ever after. It’s an idyll that never existed, and never will.

Now, I’m a rural lass who grew up in a tiny Dorset hamlet where the amenities were, in order of importance, a post box and a phone box. There was a bus once a week to the market and if you missed the bus home, it was a long, long walk. Kevin is from rural Illinois, which is just like a stretched out version of Dorset but with maize instead of wheat. Both of us love the countryside, but both of us love our technology too, and believe that technology can help us live a more environmentally responsible life.

We also like our luxury. Well, ok, maybe this is more me than Kev, who does like his camping trips, but even so, I think he enjoys a bit of luxury once in a while too. I’m not giving up my future hot tub just because some eco-purist somewhere might think it’s too indulgent. Instead, I’m going to find the most responsible way to run a hot tub - recycling and conserving water and energy, and powering from renewable sources. Equally, I want my big American fridge (the Americans do such amazing fridges which make standard British ones look like small chiller boxes), my server rack, and my pervasive wifi. I see no reason why I can’t have all that without either succumbing to rampant consumerism or killing the planet.

Before someone suggests it, I don’t believe in offsetting, which to me seems to be an easy way for the guilty to feel better about themselves without actually ever having to do anything about reducing their environmental footprint. There’s not enough room on this planet for us to all plant trees, and if I want to invest in new green technologies, then I’ll actually invest as a shareholder and commit to the long term, rather than hope that money I’ve spent on carbon credits actually goes somewhere useful.

Nor does the irony of writing these words whilst on a flight to DC in order to speak at a two-day conference escape me. But we don’t own a car. We go everywhere on public transport, which is easily enough done in London where a car would be more of a liability than a use. Even with these flights as a blot in my copybook, I bet my carbon debt is lower than most car owners.

See, for me it’s all about balance between living a modern life as a technologist and behaving responsibly towards my environment. This is why I feel quite suspicious of some projects that claim to be green, when really all they are doing is making a weak political statement about the state of the world as they see it. I don’t care about politics, I care about building a future and a home with the man I love, and doing my best to ensure that my niece inherits a world that’s not totally ballsed up.

The only way we’re going to do that is en masse, by adopting more environmentally friendly building materials, by insulating our homes to the highest possible standard, by using renewable energy…

Those things have to become not just mainstream, but so embedded in our society that to skimp would be unthinkable. And the only way to achieve that is to make the end result desirable, aspirational. Few people aspire to be martyrs or to show off their lovely new hairshirt, and those that do rarely make a good job of it because they’re focused too much on the appearance and not enough on the substance. If green became synonymous with luxury, we’d see the adoption of green all over the place, but by associating it with privation, sacrifice, and soapdodging, activists have effectively shot the the environmental movement in the foot.

Luckily I think that it’s recovering. We are seeing increasing examples of green being just another form of normality. And with the price of energy and fuel skyrocketing, even just being energy efficient is moving from the “Oh, I suppose we ought to” category to the “We can’t afford not to” category.

We still have a long way to go as a couple, as a nation, and as a world. And I still have another 1858 miles before touchdown.

The back of my childhood home, originally uploaded by Kevglobal.

Suw and I know the vague outlines of the kind of house we want. That’s the relative known in this equation, but at the moment, one of the biggest unknowns is where we want to live, where we want to call home.

This is the house that I grew up in, and really it’s one of only two ‘homes’ that I’ve known in my life. I lived here from when I was four until I was in my early 20s. I loved, and still love coming home to this house. It’s set on a 6-acre plot in 40 acres of trees amongst the dairy, cattle and corn farms in northern Illinois. It is an ocean of calm for me conveniently located not far from Chicago, Milwaukee and Madison. It’s far enough from those cities to still be able to see a blanket of stars in the night sky. This isn’t suburbia. This is rural farmland.

To be honest, I’d love to live in the countryside somewhere and travel into the city when I needed to or wanted to. I enjoy cities but as a visitor not a resident. In this century of the city, I probably seem like a throwback, but it’s how I grew up. This house, my home, was a refuge from the stresses of my life when I was young, and I miss having a place like it. A postage stamp-sized flat in the sea of stress that is London hardly seems a substitute.

Suw definitely feels more settled in London than I do. However, she grew up in rural Dorset here in England, and she instantly felt at home in rural Illinois. It seemed like home to her, just more spread out, she said. The one sticking point for her would be the climate. She’s never been there in winter, and winters can be are bone-chillingly cold.

I really wish that the internet rendered geography as irrelevant as the cyber-utopian in me thinks it does. But so much of the business we do is still face-to-face, and neither Suw nor I are in the kind of businesses where we can set up shop and do programming piece work to support ourselves. We are trying to become less geographically dependent, but we’re still quite a way from that goal.

And we are torn. We do enjoy the convenience of the city on some level. We are less than five minutes walk from a gym, two markets and mass transit where we live now. I’m wondering if there might be a happy medium in a small-sized university town or city. The other ‘home’ I had was a group house with two friends in Ann Arbor Michigan. That was fleetingly brief, only a year, but I quickly settled in there. There was good food, wine and culture in a small town with leafy green streets and beautiful old homes. The city has a great farmers market, the famous Zingerman’s deli and a range of ethnic food that is relatively rare in a city of its size in the Midwest of the United States.

This is just the first post of many in which we think out loud about where to call home. In some ways, we’re overwhelmed by choice, we could settle in the UK or the US. The range of options is daunting, and the pull of city and country is just one of the tensions we’ll have to resolve.

Kevin and I signed a one year extension on the lease to this flat today. The contract is onerous, the rent has gone up by 10.6% and there’s stuff that’s been wrong with the flat since we moved in that’s never been fixed.

I looked at Kevin as we left the estate agents and we both said “Let’s not renew.” So, we have a year in which to decide on our next step. Do we find another flat locally that’s maybe a bit bigger? After all, we’re very convenient for Kev’s work here, we have a nice corner shop, the gym over the road, Waitrose five minutes away, and very easy access to tube and buses.

Or we could move further out, perhaps get something with a garden. That would give Kevin a much longer commute to work, though, and having lived on the outskirts of London before, I’m not sure that the trade is worth it. It used to be that you could get a much bigger, nicer place further out, but the cost of both commuting and living in the commuter belt has risen, the railways are rubbish, and I wonder if it’s not more hassle than it’s really worth.

Or do we give up London completely? Give up the UK completely?

I doubt that we’ll be in a position to start the self-build process in March next year, not unless something miraculous happens in the meantime, but we do need to figure out what the next step is. Right now, I don’t think either of us is sure about what we want, and a year seems a long way away, but I know how fast it’s going to creep up on us. We’d better start mulling it over soon.

Now that our wedding is over, Kevin and I need to figure out a few things about our future together. One of those things is to decide where, and how, we live. Right now, ‘home’ is a small one-bedroom flat in north London, a flat so small that even the gas boiler repair man felt the need to pass comment on it. We’ve been here two years, and the place has filled up to capacity with stuff, even though most of my worldly possessions are in my parents’ loft, and Kevin’s are all in a lock-up in Maryland. We have no idea where we are going to put our wedding presents.

At some point, we want our own house: A place that’s not only our refuge from the world, but also a canvas for us to paint as we will. We are prohibited from changing this flat in any way (technically, we’re not even allowed to move the furniture), which means no art on the walls, no changing the decor from its current pale yellow, no repainting the grubby woodwork. But we want somewhere we can make our own, where we can change what we want, however we want it.

I have dreamed of building my own house for years and years now, spurred on by programmes like Grand Designs, where the lovely Kevin McCloud follows people who have decided to build their own house. The series started in 1999 and is now on its eighth run, and I’m as avid a watcher as ever. Kevin too would like to self-build, and as we can’t help but comment on the Grand Design builds, talk about what we want, and discuss what we’d do differently, we figured that we might as well start a blog as a place to gather all our ideas and thoughts.

There are two organising principles to both house and blog:

1. The house we want to build must be green. Not just token green, but as green as we can feasibly make it. That means looking not just as things like energy efficiency, but also the environmental impact of the very materials we intend to use. There will be limits to our budget, so we’ll need to ensure that we make the the best decisions we can for us, for the house, and for the environment. It means thinking innovatively, drawing in ideas from wherever we find them, and thinking about how our decisions will change the character of the house itself.

2. The house must be cat-friendly. We’re both love cats, but there are many places in America where it’s just not all that safe for kitties to be let outside. Kev’s brother has lost many cats - coyotes, eagles, and snakes are all a danger - so we want to build a house that’s not just good for us to live in, but good for our cats too. What does cat-friendly design mean? To be honest, we have no idea. But we’ll have fun finding out.

So that’s why the blog is called Kits and Mortar - not because we’re going to build a kit house (although never say never!), but because our house is going to be designed to keep our kits happy. It’s also going to be a commercial venture, so there’ll be advertising here soon to help pay for hosting and maybe even provide a little extra to go into our house fund.

Now, you might be asking, where are we going to build? That’s a very good question. We don’t have a plot of land. We don’t even know which country we’re going to build in - the US or the UK. All that’s up for grabs. We don’t even know what we want to build. We just know that we need to start the process now, we need spend some time - maybe even some years - working it all out.

And who knows, maybe we’ll even make some of those decisions right here, on our blog.