Most websites file things in menus. Whole Earth Home, our sister site about healthier, greener and less wasteful homes, now files everything in a house.
We’ve actually wanted to do this for a long, long time.
We built it as a small 3D model you can turn with a finger.
It has sixteen rooms, from the kitchen to the rec room in the basement to the solar panels on the roof, and each one holds the guides and Field Notes that belong there. It now sits right at the top of the Whole Earth Home homepage, and we would love for you to walk through it.
Why a house?
Home advice is usually sorted the way a library sorts it: by topic. Energy. Air quality. Cleaning. That works fine until you are standing in the laundry room wondering what to do about the dryer. Nobody thinks about their home by category. We think about it room by room.
So we put every guide where you would actually use it. Washing in cold water lives in the laundry. The furnace filter lives in the utility room. The garage, freshly stocked this week, holds a guide to cleaner air, smarter power and a place for everything. More than 120 guides and 36 Field Notes now have an address.
How to walk through it
1. Turn it
Drag to spin the house around. On a phone, one finger does it.
2. Lift a floor
Outside, Upstairs, Main floor and Basement peel the house open so you can look inside each level, furniture and all.
3. Tap a room
A panel opens with the guide to start with, the Field Notes for that room and every other guide filed there. Each room has its own little icon, so the kitchen gets a pot and the laundry gets a washer.
4. Change the season and the light
Spring, summer, fall and winter each dress the yard differently, with a tree in blossom in spring, orange leaves in fall and snow on the roof in winter. The sun is placed where it really sits over Portland for the date and hour you pick, so golden hour really is golden. Tap Now and the house shows the light outside our window right now.
Make it your house
Every Field Note in the house now has a little circle beside it. Done it? Tick it. Fridge at 40°F, tick. Wash in cold, tick. Your progress fills in room by room, and when you finish every note in a room, its marker in the house fills in with that room’s color. Finish all 36 and the whole house lights up!
It saves on your own device, with no account and no sign-in. Each season the house also pulls up a short list of what is worth doing right now. This fall, that means leaving the leaves in your beds and draining the hoses before the first hard freeze.
Every guide knows its room
The house works in the other direction too. Read a guide on Whole Earth Home and you will find a small card at the end showing which room it lives in, with a view of that room and a door straight back into the house. Reading about heat pumps? You are one tap from everything else in the utility room.
The small things we fussed over
The roof is dark standing-seam metal with a row of solar panels. The yard is ringed with tall firs, the kind you see over almost every Portland fence. Out back there are raised beds, a pair of compost bins and a little pond, and a car is tucked in the garage. And the house still works when 3D does not: every room is listed beside the model, and you can walk from room to room with the arrow keys.
Come on in
Whole Earth Home is part of the Moss and Fog family, a field guide to a healthier, more efficient home with tested gear, honest guides and real numbers. The house is its new front door. Go turn it around, open a few rooms and tick off a Field Note or two. We would love to hear which room you open first!
