There was this idea gnawing at me for a couple of years. Why can’t you find a sustainable, affordable net-zero home, basically anywhere? The tech is here, the renewable and efficiency prices have come down, smart home products are advertised all over, and yet you just can’t seem to find anything.

It just seemed to make sense all around that this would exist. You save on monthly bills and are sustainable, fun, and modern. A more comfortable home and lower ownership costs ultimately create a more valuable home as well, along with the opportunity for wealth building over time.

Aside from a few homes here and there, this doesn’t really exist yet. And the ones that do exist are mostly priced out of reach for the average working family or first-time millennial buyer.

Enter our first net-zero solar home renovation project. In this article, I’ll go over the details of the full project renovation, numbers, and the update through early 2023, when I successfully sold the home due to moving out of state.

And after a year of procrastination and probably some form of imposter syndrome, I finally made a video about the three-year journey of this project. Check that out here –

What if?

So what if the above goals were possible? I didn’t know what would happen when I set out in 2019 to make this a reality. While I have experience as a real estate investor with some solar design and energy efficiency, I had never renovated a house before. I was coming at it from a non-expert starting point.

Nearly a year later, now, I’m writing this from inside a fully renovated, net-zero, and hurricane-proof home under the area median average home price. It was definitely a roller coaster start to finish, but ultimately very rewarding.

This article will be mainly a summary of the project.  But there will be many more after it covering all the details.

A drone shot of our first net-zero solar home renovation project in Cape Coral, FL.

Why do a net-zero home renovation?

There has been all this talk about net-zero, carbon neutrality, Teslas and EVs, and sustainability. And by now, we all know about climate change and sea-level rise.

We also know about the housing affordability problem and widening the wealth gap, which is now totally amplified by the pandemic.

And you can see awesome renewable and efficiency projects on a country-wide scale going up around the world. Still, it seems like individual homes themselves have been left behind.

Millions of Inefficient Homes

There are something like 82+ million single-family homes in the United States, and hundreds of millions across the world. Nearly every single one of them is inefficient by today’s standards and technology. This also means wasted energy and ongoing costs.

Tens of millions of millennials and younger buyers are also now looking to buy a house for the first time. We love Tesla, we love smart home tech and renewable energy. And most of us have an interest in making a difference and caring for the environment if at all possible.

We love more mid-century modern or farmhouse-style homes, with Ikea products and Amazon boxes all over the house. But when we’re looking on Zillow or at houses for sale, the reality is that this doesn’t exist yet, especially in our price range.

Hard to Do But Totally Doable

The truth is, and as I found out over this 9-month renovation project, it’s near impossible to bring all this together. Don’t get me wrong – people are doing it, and there are many cool projects out there. But how are we going to tackle each of these existing homes one by one? That’s what I wanted to go for. To create something that can be used to intertwine personal finance, wealth building, and sustainable living. I wanted to prove that it was possible.

Goals

While there were a lot of ideas in play, the actual, functional goals of the project were very concrete:

1) Keep the total cost under the median average home price of the area.

The first goal really covers the traditional wealth-building aspect. If you have a home under or at the median average home value of your area, even with all these bells and whistles, you will have a really good chance of being sheltered from recessions and temporary market declines (as compared to the owner of a more expensive home). You also benefit from riding the home price appreciation wave up over the long run as well.

2) Ensure that it can rent out for 10-15% above all ownership costs, including long-term maintenance.

Goal #2 is really the first and most important traditional real estate investing rule when buying rental homes, in my opinion. This is most likely going to be your own home. But unexpected things happen in life.  A new job or a family member becoming ill could force an unexpected move. The market could decline over the next 5-10 years. But if something like that does happen, you’re able to rent it out and cover all costs to own it. This allows you to ride out any temporary setbacks or market cycles. It also allows you to benefit from long-term homeownership and wealth-building

3) Be fully net-zero, with efficiency and renewable energy (solar) powering the entire house. 

The third goal has to do with sustainability and cool technology. Costs have come down now, to the point where it can make financial and environmental sense to have homes save and produce their own power. To the point even where it’s making homes more valuable and you get a better risk-free return on your investment. Better than the stock market, bonds, or other traditional measures, even. While it’s not all about the money, the money has to make sense.

4) Bonus – Have enough budget and power production potential to also power an electric car fully.

The last goal of powering an electric car is really where the world is going next within 10-15 years. So why not do it now? It wasn’t initially on the radar, but after the planning and crunching the numbers, it ended up being a possibility.

This wasn’t going to happen without meeting the other three goals first.  But I was elated when the numbers showed that I would be able to reach my personal goal of selling the gas car to get a Tesla Model 3. The system was designed to power the Tesla for 10,000 miles per year.  But the solar production now shows that it can actually go much further than that.

Model 3 plugged into the Level 2 Enel X Juicebox 40 Amp EV Charger. No more gas!

The EV Charger

While the Tesla wall connector would have been a good choice, I chose the Enel X JuiceBox 40 instead. I really liked the design of the unit, plus it has wifi, it charges the Model 3 at about 40 miles per hour (charging the whole battery over night, and Enel X I found has great customer service.

The biggest reason for choosing this over the Tesla Wall Connector is the standard J1772 connection adapter on the end of the charging cable. This gives flexibility for the future to anyone staying at the home with an EV, so the home can be used as a rental or for family members with a non-Tesla.

You can pick up one of these chargers here if you’re looking for a Level 2 EV charger for yourself (affiliate link).

an electric car charger picture with a phone showing wifi connectivity

Finding The Home

It took a long time to find the house itself due to the criteria needed. Options were limited because real estate has already been red hot for years, even before the pandemic. In addition to that, you want to look for some specific things when going for full net-zero.

A big south-facing roof, which ideally has recently been redone (new shingles), is high on the list. If you’re not a wholesaler or a full-time real estate professional doing flips all the time, good luck finding a good deal in a hot market.

This roof is largely the reason for buying the home. It was just redone six months earlier, and faces 180 degrees perfectly south, at a near-perfect angle for optimal solar energy production. The total area is about 800 sq ft, allowing for a 10+ Kilowatt system if needed.

Choose A Solid, Fast Growing Market

I also wanted to do the project in an affordable, growing real estate market. Someplace where, if a recession hit and I screwed up royally on my budgeting (being a first-time fix-n-flipper), I might be able to get out of it alive.

After scouring the MLS in many cities, the best option ended up being in the Cape Coral/Fort Myers area in Florida, for this project anyway. It was a combo of the overall real estate market and the house itself, having a near-perfect roof for solar. It was also my hometown, so I knew it reasonably well.

As long as you catch the wave in a growing city, and the bottom doesn’t drop out of the economy, you should be good.

The Renovation

It was a pretty crazy full-time nine-month project, especially being my first one. For the first three months, I was actually stuck in planning (and admittedly perhaps panic mode). The pandemic had just hit, and the world was seemingly ending in March/April. There will be many more write-ups, but here is a rundown of some of the progress:

Some Before Pictures:

Planning

I had just driven across the country from Denver, CO to Cape Coral, FL. The idea was to move into the home and run the project as my primary residence. (More on the tax benefits of that later). Certainly, I did not anticipate a full pandemic lockdown when first trying to get started. It was pretty hard to think about tackling a home renovation at the time, but ultimately we all have to plow forward.

The house itself is a near-original, 1984 built, wood-frame home. Being a typical three-bedroom two-bathroom home, it was a good candidate for a full fix-and-flip update.

a notepad with the floorplan of the netzero house drawn on it with a pencil
a man looks at the dial and data of the blower door test in the front door of our netzero home renovation
A picture of our net-zero solar home modeled in 3D showing the sun's travel throughout the year.
a diagram of the solar radiation in a heat map of the roof of a house
an infrared camera seeing the heat map between the walls and ceiling of our netzero home renovation
a pencil drawn floor plan layout of a standard kitchen

The idea was to combine typical updates with efficiency, hurricane-proofing and solar energy, then add lots of smart home tech.

The project included everything. New paint inside and out, flooring, plumbing, electrical, a new kitchen down to the studs, busting walls down, drywall repairs, new showers, and all the rest.

Kitchen

a demolished kitchen down to the studs in our netzero home
a finished kitchen with white shaker cabinets, light wood colored vinyl plank floors, and bright windows

Master Bedroom

a 1980s style bedroom with a brown mirror and dresser, white walls
a renovated bright and light master bedroom with white and a blue duvet and mid century modern furniture

Flooring

a torn up floor and carpet, preparing for new vinyl plank floors
new light wood vinyl plank floors in an open and bright living room of our netzero home

Garage

an old garage under construction for renovation with tan walls and a painters sheet on the ground
In the thick of it..
A picture of an empty renovated garage with bright white LED's shining, and a new EV charger installed to the left.
Complete with smart garage opener, new drywall and paint, LED lighting, and a Level 2 EV Charger on a 240V line

Backyard

a teal house with an all white shell backyard used as landscaping
a finished renovated backyard at sunset showing plants in the foreground and a hammock hung up in the middle of the green grass

Exterior

two people in white outfits painting the front of the house
Photo of our first net-zero house in Florida

Hurricane Impact Windows & Doors

two men removing the old single panel sliding door and installing new double pane hurricane doors
A picture of the background in our first net-zero home renovation, showing brand new impact sliding doors installed with a hanging chair next to it.

I’ll be doing a deep dive into every single improvement over the next weeks and months. In short, as I look back on it now – it was incredibly fulfilling.

Living in a Project House is Insane 

I’m not going to sugarcoat it, though, as I feel it’s essential for people to know what they’re getting into. Living in a project house is insane. The stress of living in a dust bowl, without a kitchen, for weeks, all while a pandemic was going on outside, was too much to handle sometimes.

Having contractors and people in and out, material delays, and working twelve-hour days gets to you. While it’s rewarding in its own right to have it done, just know what you’re in for.

Would I do it again? Yes, for sure, especially given the numbers (see below).

As they say – Will it be easy? Nope. Is it worth it? Absolutely.

Living here during the project was beneficial in many ways, though. It allowed for more hands-on management, learning, and saving on rent and vs. living somewhere else. Other advantages included tax benefits of being a primary residence, security (materials not getting stolen), being on site all the time, getting to know the house, and more.

I’ll probably take a more experienced and business-like approach to the next house. And I would anticipate easily shaving off a couple of months and $10,000+ using what I learned on this one.

Would you like to get notified when we write up new articles? Sign up here for our newsletter and notifications. The idea for this site and the company is to create a community around all these topics and interests, and there’s so much more to come.

Sustainability – Energy Efficiency and Solar

All of the energy efficient and solar elements were added costs onto the project. But the goal was to achieve full net-zero while still making financial sense for the average home buyer.

It was a real challenge given that there’s not much out there yet in terms of organized resources or examples of it being done. Though I have a background in solar, energy efficiency, finance, and real estate, the combination was a new one.

Even the appraiser actually had no homes to compare it to when I went for the cash-out refinance at the end of the project. This was literally the first home in town going for this. This led to many nervous discussions between the lender and the appraiser. It also led to a slightly suppressed home value vs. what I spent (on paper) for the new mortgage. This is something that you all might run into in your area as well.

Pick the Lowest Hanging Fruit First

Nonetheless, there was a good way to tackle it. When you’re doing efficiency or renewable projects and trying to make the financing work, start with the lowest hanging fruit. Chip away at all the items with the lowest payback on your money and highest return on investment first. This will, in turn, bring down the overall costs for the complete project.

To compare energy to personal finance – the more you’re able to save, the less you need to produce.

I tried to tackle all of it. But a quick list includes energy modeling, blower door tests, air sealing, insulation, water heater, HVAC calculations, and appliances. Correct solar design and system sizing were the final pieces.

All The Data

a screenshot of the Emporia Vue energy usage for the netzero home
a screenshot of the enphase enlighten app solar energy production and energy usage in the netzero home

The home is outfitted with monitoring systems and apps (either affordable or totally free) that show electricity production and usage. Every electrical circuit and every individual solar panel is monitored, allowing you to see exactly what the house is doing!

There’s a lot there, but don’t worry–I’ll be writing up each part of the project separately. I also plan to make calculators and systems available so you can do this yourself as well. Stay tuned!

The Numbers

I went into this thinking that I would probably lose money on it after everything was said and done. At some point, you have to be willing to do this just to get the idea jump-started. That’s true not just with homes but with anything you go after.

So Here’s How Our First Net-Zero Home Renovation Turned Out:

3 bed / 3 bathroom / 2.5 car garage 1,836sq ft home in Cape Coral, FL built 1984
Purchase price: $199,900
Total project cost: $84,357.14
Total spent: $284,257.14

Per Zillow the average area home for this zip code at the time was $318,301, meeting goal #1.

Yearly home electricity savings: $2,000 ($160+ per month) 
Yearly Tesla/EV savings from not buying gas anymore: $592 ($49 per month)
Total yearly electric and gas savings: $2,392 per year

Total on-paper appraised value for the loan: $275,000 (there were no comps in town)
Value if I were to list the house on the market per the appraiser’s opinion at the time: $325,000-$350,000.

Mortgage payment with 20% at 2.99%: $926.34 per month
Property tax payment per month: $95.98
Homeowner’s insurance per month: $147.17
Water bill per month: $85 (ridiculous)
Monthly utility solar net-metering hookup fee (they still want your money) even if net-zero: $21.69
Assume $1,000 per year in ongoing maintenance (to be safe): $83/mo
Total monthly cost to own: $1,359.18

A house like this rents out for $2,500+ per month unfurnished, and over $2,750 per month furnished/AirBnB type of thing in this area. This number, again, is to cover goal #2.

The monthly cost to own vs. the rental value is really the key to long-term wealth building. Even with all the extra net-zero home expenses of $35-40,000, the numbers work.

It meets all the goals described above. Whew!

A Great Netzero Rental

I had moved up to Saint Petersburg, FL in May of 2021, turning this into a netzero furnished rental. I had listed it on Zillow, and within a couple days I had it rented.

I think the fact that is was newly renovated, furnished (mid-century modern style), netzero, and otherwise ready to go made it very easy for others to view the listing remotely and feel comfortable with it.

For nearly a year, I got $2,750/month rent, just about double the monthly cost to own. This is due to a combination of being frugal on the purchase, renovation, and refinance. Also low mortgage rates and increased rent in Florida due to everyone moving in during the pandemic really helped also. Originally I had thought the home would have rented for somewhere around $2,000 per month, but the market had spoken.

Hurricane Ian

Unfortunately, Hurricane Ian came through in late September of 2022, and it was probably the worse storm I have ever seen (growing up in hurricane-prone areas my whole life).

a white house with trees down and flooding in the driveway after hurricane ian

The storm hit this house for about 7-8 hours of 140 MPH winds, and the backyard and fence were pretty much destroyed. According to the renter in there at the time of the storm though, the house “was a fortress”. What a relief to hear that.

Here are some reasons why he might have said that, and also what to watch out for in Florida in general when it comes to hurricanes:

  • Only buy well outside of flood zones. This house was 7ft above sea level, just enough to not get flooded. Regular homeowners insurance also does not cover water damage/flooding. You need a separate (very expensive) policy for this.
  • A new roof and hurricane ties make a huge difference. Hurricane ties literally hold the roof to the walls, which are held to the foundation. This prevents the storm winds getting into the house and literally blowing your roof off. Your homeowners insurance costs can sometimes be cut in half when you prove that your house has hurricane ties installed along with a newer roof.
  • Hurricane windows are an amazing upgrade. We installed new PGT Winguard hurricane-resistant windows on the house as part of the project. Not only are they quiet and much more efficient, they will save you in a hurricane.
the backyard of our netzero home showing trees down, a white vinyl fence blown apart, and more damage
The poor backyard got pummeled in Hurricane Ian.

Incredibly, the house itself was just about perfectly fine, aside from one little area where shingles blew off. The solar panel electrical system started up when the power came back on like nothing had happened. To me, that is absolutely incredible.

So many of my friends, family (parents, aunt, uncle), and acquaintances got absolutely devasted in that storm between the wind and flooding. It really makes you think.

Deciding to Sell

Early in 2023, I decided to sell. The market was still elevated enough, and I honestly had a little PTSD from the Hurricane Ian incident.

I had moved out of town, and had a good bunch of equity in the property from the renovation project and three years of ownership. Yes, it’s tough to give up a 3%~ mortgage rate for sure, but it was the right move.

The market had really calmed down by this time, and mortgage rates had spiked to 6-7%. They are even higher today, hovering at 8% for good credit.

Given that I was out of town, doing the project in Saint Petersburg, FL, and needed some capital to keep building Attainable Home, I decided it was a good time to sell.

It took about three months, but it sold for $416,500 to a first-time millennial homebuyer who was saving up money by living with his mom. He was a great buyer to work with, and was honestly the exact kind of person I was aiming to build this for.

Overall it was a success, and there was a good profit made given all the factors.

Summary

This is now a full net-zero asset and home. The home produces zero-emissions net-net (after a short period to recoup the building costs and emissions). It’s also set up as a great home to either live in or rent out. And beyond that, it checks all the boxes of using real estate for long-term wealth building and asset ownership.

To get started on your own, check out our free energy efficiency guide. It has dozens of simple DIY efficiency projects that you can do in your home to start bringing that bill down.

You can download that from this signup form here:

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5 Comments

  1. Thank you for sharing the journey. Amazing results. Furthermore, I think the story could make an informative and practical book for anyone making the leap to manage a sustainable renovation effectively. Excellent information.

  2. This was a great article, inspiring, and really illuminates how behind Florida is when it comes to this type of building and remodeling. I am over on the east coast in Jupiter and we have been struggling to find contractors, designers, and resources to help us renovate or build a modest affordable green home. Your website’s recommendations and articles are helping to build our confidence. We really appreciate the content geared for the south Florida climate as well.

  3. Love it! I share your passion and goal for a NZE/NZC home and am in the process right now, after months of research and finally obtaining financing, to begin the planning phase of renovating my nearly 50 year old house. I do not intend on occupying my house, however, at least not until the infrastructure (demolition, insulation, etc. – the dusty parts) phase is completed. I may rent an RV and, if possible, stay on site. You are so right about how there are so few retrofits of existing homes to NZE as well as expertise available to do so. Hopefully, that will change with more incentives in our infrastructure. I’m so excited and hope that my home will be an inspiration and a beginning of a neighborhood renovation and revitalization. Can’t wait to get my first all electric car, too! Did you know your EV can provide power to your home when there is a power shut-down? How cool is that?!

    1. Hi Marilyn,

      Thanks so much for your story! Wishing you the best of luck with the netzero project coming up. I feel you on not wanting to live in it while the project is happening. I’m personally living in the second one I’m renovating to netzero and can’t say I will be doing this again. As I touched on above – the mental stress gets to be too much and there is just no where to settle as a “home”. You’ll feel amazing when it’s done though! And yes I agree – the new EV’s that allow you to power your home are awesome technology. I’m holding off on putting batteries on our netzero projects here because of that. Within another 1-3 years we’ll just be able to use our cars instead. Really wish Tesla would add this feature as well. Best of luck and feel free to reach out with questions along the way. If you take picture and document the process, we’d be happy to write up a case study or feature on your journey.

      – Erin

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