As soon as the Hormuz Strait closed, our neighbors started making small talk about the increases in petrol prices from when they went to fill up their tank. Ten groszy more one day, twenty the next, who knows what’s next?
We nodded, because that’s what you do. But we didn’t relate because we don’t have a car. We have electric bikes. They know this too because they live right across the street and we look after each others’ houses when we’re away, but they forget.
Around here, not having a car is genuinely difficult to hold in your head as a real choice someone made. Two, sometimes three cars per household is normal. Most people’s jobs are dozens of kilometers away; and even though the biggest local employer has free buses to the facilities, not everyone works there. The car comes with the life, the life comes with the job, and that’s just how it is.
Car or no car, this crisis will still touch us. Energy shocks won’t skip us just because we made different choices about personal transportation. Most of what we buy arrives on a truck from somewhere, and those trucks run on fossil fuels. Most of what the world grows uses fertilizer that probably came through that strait. Every shipping company has been clear about the fact that consumers will pay the price, presumably to encourage everyone to be angry enough to demand change. But the billionaires who wanted these wars don’t care about the cost of bread or vegetables, so the crisis continues.
Welcome to our 19th century home
Our house is a detached single-family home built sometime in the 1880s in what was then German-occupied Poland. Not even the conservation office knows who built it and when, and only a single grainy, black and white photo survived the ages.
She’s a registered monument subject to conservation laws, like most houses in this area, and the entire layout of the village is also subject to strict zoning laws. That means you can’t cut any (non-fruiting) trees on your property or add extensions without lengthy planning permission applications.
She’s got thick double walls, no insulation, chronic damp, a basement with groundwater less than a meter and a half below the floor. But she has good bones. We fell in love with her immediately and discovered the water problem later. We knew there would be surprises and don’t regret it. We secretly believe she picked us to solve this, really.
She’s been standing for nearly 140 years, and the renovation we’re planning will determine whether she stands for 140 more.
How a crisis led us to the house
We bought our house in the spring of 2023, during the Silicon Valley Bank crisis, for reasons that felt obvious to us and sounded either faintly eccentric or unhinged to everyone else. Our company at the time had most of its money in SVB, and we spent a weekend contemplating that Monday could be the end of the ride for reasons outside our control.
We originally wanted to buy a plot and build an energy-efficient or passive house and had even seen some areas and show homes by that point. But the collapse of SVB and others shifted the build vs. buy equation. We cancelled our previous search and pivoted sharply to three criteria: no mortgage, village with trains nearby, must have room to plant potatoes.
We wanted to own something outright that we could make as self-sufficient as possible and make us more resilient against future events. We fell in love with a building that’s so old, it’s been through several previous civilizational reorganizations: industrialization, war, resettling, communist collectivization, and hopefully it will survive whatever comes next.
We’d already lived through several global crises by 2023, but it was Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 that made it clear how much of European daily life rested on supply chains that could be severed by a single political decision made somewhere far away.
We thought, there will be another one.
And here it is today.
We didn’t predict this specific crisis, but we knew it would be an energy crisis. Different in origin, but similar in its effects.
A note on “self-sufficiency”
Potatoes are worth more than gold! […] A potato is always worth a potato, anywhere. A knob of butter and a pinch of salt and you’ve got a meal, anywhere. Bury gold in the ground and you’ll be worrying about thieves for ever. Bury a potato and in due season you could be looking at a dividend of a thousand per cent. — Terry Pratchett
My partner’s joke, when we bought this place: at least if the global economy collapses, we can plant potatoes.
As it turns out, our neighbor already has them (and grain). We can grow other things and, between us in the village, we’d survive. Collapse or not, it’s how mutual aid in the village has worked for centuries. Which, to us, is kind of the whole point of being here.
The plan is to make the building more self-sufficient, not ourselves. In buying this property, we’re not trying to escape dependency. That’s not really possible or desirable, which is why some self-sufficiency influencers are often humbled into admitting they do need other people.
What we’re trying to do is shift the nature of dependency more into our control: to become less dependent on supply chains we can’t see or influence, and more dependent on neighbors, on soil, on devices and systems we understand and can repair. We’re looking for interdependence rather than independence. We do have plans to include our local community in the project, but more on that later.
The climate conditions we walked into
Before we signed anything, we spent weeks reading climate projections for this part of Poland. If you’re committing to a building for the rest of your life, the climate that building will have to survive is a reasonable thing to understand.
The cold is significant but not unusual for Poland. Temperatures drop below zero degrees Celsius anywhere from early autumn to late spring. Winters at –15°C are ordinary. The coldest we’ve recorded at the house so far is –17°C. At the same time, the number of truly frosty days is trending downward. This sounds reassuring until you understand that it means more freeze-thaw cycles, not less stress on the building.
The heat is also increasing. Severe heat waves (defined as three or more consecutive days above 30°C) have grown more frequent since the 1990s. The European Scientific Advisory Council on Climate Change has recently called for serious planning around a 4°C warming scenario for Europe - not as a worst case, but as a prudent risk-management exercise, given that Europe is warming roughly twice as fast as the global average.
The drought situation surprised us most. Parts of Poland have seen rain-free periods extend by up to five days per decade. Drought struck somewhere in Poland 24 times in the 20th century and nine times in just the first decade of this one. As much as 55% of the country’s land area is at high risk. Water reserves are a constraint people aren’t talking about loudly enough, which is ironic considering the water-under-the-house situation we’ll describe shortly.
Summer is the wettest season and when it does rain, it’s increasingly intense: flash events high in volume and short in duration. We’ve been hit by this a few times, most recently in 2024. We’ll write more about this, as it’s the hot topic of Europe and a challenge most people we know face.
Luckily, we haven’t seen much hail that could damage a solar array or crops, but it’s not totally out of the question in the future.
The grid, for now, is reasonably stable. We’ve had minor outages, but never more than half an hour. But we aren’t going to design around optimistic assumptions.
What we didn’t know about—there’s an underground river under the house. We only discovered it through a geotechnical survey that bored deep holes and found water dangerously close to the basement. While other parts of Poland are seeing rewilding efforts and returning floodplains and marshlands, we’ll need to have a different kind of negotiation with water on our property.
We’ll write more about this too. For now: there’s an underground river under the house.
The plans
While the conservation office locked the entire area in its 19th century look and layout, we don’t plan to live inside a period home and burn single-use fuels from the previous centuries to keep ourselves warm.
Together with architects who also love old homes we’re trying to keep what’s real and irreplaceable about her, like the walls, the proportions, the modest but pretty decorative detailing that miraculously hasn’t fallen off yet while making her genuinely livable and resilient for whatever comes next. Authentic character on the outside but modern comfort on the inside. That’s the brief.
But we also had a bigger question: if we’re tearing out the guts of a 140-year-old building anyway, what would it look like to do this sustainably? Not just insulating against cold and heat, but thinking about energy, water, connectivity, and creating systems that will outlast us.
The longer we live here, the more obvious it becomes that everything we believe about building software is reflected in what we’re doing to these walls. In my head and heart they’re expressions of the same thing.
We started a company that builds technology for people trying to do something real in the world. In the meanwhile, we’re renovating a 140-year-old house carefully rather than quickly, with care for what came before.
The people we love working with are doing or thinking about the same things: they have something precious on their hands, they’re serious about it, and need someone who can understand and care for their thing properly.
This is the project of our lifetimes, so we’re treating it accordingly.
What this series is
We’re going to document what we’re doing and why in a post series about this big bet.
A few things we’ll cover:
- Materials and choices. The most sustainable material isn’t always the one that’s right for the problem. Neither is the newest one that the industry is installing everywhere.
- Home automation and sovereignty. We spent over a year researching this. The teaser is: your lights don’t need to talk to the internet, and neither does your security feed. We’ll explain what we chose, how we’re wiring it, and why we’d rather reverse-engineer a software license than let a vendor overreach into our house.
- Solar panels and storage. What it actually looks like to size a system for a building with serious winter loads and increasingly serious summer heat while navigating the bureaucracy that comes with government subsidies for them.
- Water. The well, rainwater collection, and more on the general water situation under the house.
- Landscape and gardening. What we’re planting and why in an area where everyone would rather cut trees than plant them. How we are designing our outdoor space for climate resilience while keeping it maintainable and safe for children and animals.
- Heating and insulation. We’ll talk about the heat pump that our neighbors regard with some suspicion, the materials we chose and how we keep a building warm efficiently in a continental climate.
…and possibly other areas as we discover them.
This is not a guide by any means. We haven’t even started the renovation. It’s not a manifesto either. We don’t live in an ideal world. In an ideal world, this series would be titled “How to renovate a 140-year-old house sustainably” but there will be plenty of constraints that mean it would fall short of its promise.
She won’t magically become a passive house at her age, so the thread running throughout will be the tension between the ideal scenario and what’s actually possible or desirable.
We could settle for “how to renovate a 140-year-old house as sustainably as possible.”
It’s an honest account of the decisions, the tradeoffs, what we’re learning, and what we’re still figuring out. There will be details, but not about exact lambda coefficients or technical calculations; more about specific choices and discoveries.
This house will outlive us if we do this right, so we intend to do it right.