Eco-Friendly Wooden Homes Flourish Online

Technology Today

 Dr Archana Verma

With the prices of real estate skyrocketing, economy broken by the lockdown and rising costs of electricity and other utility, the traditional house building is now losing its charm for the prospective house buyer.

Today, the buyer wants a low-cost house, cut down on energy costs and yet retain the aesthetic charm of a loved home. Some builders are beginning to realise this and are coming up with attractive options.

Some Alternatives

Some of the design strategies used are using wooden and terracotta structures which add aesthetic quality and are cool in summers and not so cold during winters; using solar power grid which the residents can switch to in order to save traditional electricity, using recycled material in construction and so on. The cost of these houses is less than 10% of the cost of a conventional building made of concrete and they look a lot more beautiful than the concrete buildings.

The digital technology is making these houses popular and now it's easy for house buyers to find houses at low cost online and set them up wherever they want.

Only problem is that these houses need the ownership of a plot of land where they can be set up and land is difficult to get in modern times, unless one is willing to move out of the urban areas.

Possible Solutions

There can be several solutions for this problem. One solution is that the builder can buy land and sell the plot of land alongwith the house to the owner. The other is that the govt can gradually convert concrete buildings in cities into these modern, low cost, wooden houses. This will make the cities beautiful and cut the exorbitant electricity usage by the urban residents. Pulling down concrete structures and establishing a wooden-terracotta structure in its place is a matter of 10 days.

Caution

Having said the above, care needs to be taken that new trees should be grown as more wooden houses are constructed. Otherwise we are in for a greater disaster linked to widespread deforestation. We must remember why we shifted in the first place in history from wood and mud to concrete.

With some strategic planning, we can escape the prison of concrete houses we have got ourselves into.