This book details the design for a smaller living space. You can adjust the plans to meet your desires and needs. If this book says to do something one way and you want to do it another way, investigate how to do it another way and then do it that way. Hopefully this idea will encourage your own ideas. And, hopefully, it will more than halve the carbon footprint of a typical home in the US. 

Five thousand sq ft may sound like a lot of space, until you realize we're talking about land area and that 10,000 sq ft is the typical size of a city residential lot. Ten thousand sq ft is a little less than a quarter acre. So, 5,000 sq ft would be half that much or about a tenth of an acre. Since we're reducing the land area by half, we should also reduce the house and the car by half. The Not So Big House reduced houses to about 2,000 sq ft. In this project, we will go even further, reducing the house to 500 sq ft. 

Many starter homes, modulars, trailer homes, and two-bedroom apts are 1,000 sq ft. Large RVs and houseboats are about 1,000 sq ft or less. Five hundred sq ft is the size of a small 1-bedroom apt or a large studio apt. We could make the house 1,000 sq ft by giving it a basement or a second floor, but we want to reduce the amount of house we have to heat, cool, clean, and maintain. 

Some of things I've designed to maximize the space in your home and garage have yet to be invented. If they are never invented, there is still plenty of room in both the house and the garage. The inventions just give you that much more space. One of these inventions is the car. The car is a modular car, meaning it comes in pieces or modules which can be easily taken apart and put back together. The main module or cab of the car holds two people and a few groceries. Most of the time, the only module you need is the main module. The other two modules are a back seat, and an enclosed truck bed or van module.