Okay, so where do we start. I'm new to blogging, so bear with me as I try to get past the newbie stage.

First, some info about the house to be. I'm building a 3 bedroom, 2 bath, single story home over a crawlspace. The main floor will have about 1700 sq feet with outside dimensions of 30 wide by 57 long. As the lot slopes down about 7 feet from the home's west to east end there will be a roughly 12' by 22' basement room in the lowest corner.

This house will utilize as many energy efficiency techniques in design and construction as I can afford. I have been researching these ideas for a year from many different sources. A lot of the information came from the website BuildingScience.com. I bought and read one of their books "Builder's Guide to Mixed Climates". Lots of what I am designing into this house came from that book. I strongly recommend that book to anyone building in this mixed-humid climate region (which starts in and includes most of north Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, northern halves of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and pretty much all of Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, North and South Carolina. Technically defined as the "mixed-humid" region it is a particularly difficult region to build in because it has plenty of rainfall, a fair amount of cold weather and lots of humidity in both summer and winter.

Just a few of the techniques used in this house are:
.2x6 exterior walls on 24" spacing.
.stack framing - where roof trusses will sit directly on top of wall studs, which sit directly on top of floor joists. This creates a continuous load path all the way to the ground.
.a sealed crawlspace - read that as unvented. The crawlspace will be my hvac return. Each room will have a supply duct AND a return. All returns go into the crawlspace. So, the crawlspace will be conditioned (heated and cooled) air.

I don't want this post to get too long, so I'll stop now.