Re: Home building/living suggestions wanted.
I'll add one more thing, since no one else brought it up.
I disagree with the notion of putting Cat5, or any other "low voltage" wiring in the walls. A proper dwelling should outlast any wiring fashion by an order of magnitude, or more. But I think it's a safe bet that wires will get smaller and less numerous in the future. So put in conduit, cable trays, or whatever floats your boat, but make it easily rewireable without tearing up the walls and ceilings.
I built my house in 1990-1992 and followed this philosophy. Back then people were still putting RG-59 in the walls for cable TV and Ethernet over unshielded twisted pair was just a dream.
Since building the house I've run POTS/DSL, Cat5, AES3, speaker cables, 5 Volt audio control, RG-11 antenna cable, and some stuff I've no doubt already forgotten, without tearing up a single wall or going on any heroic fishing expeditions.
A friend recently built a fancy new place and, over my objections, put an i-Pod docking station in every room as part of the ~$200,000 (not a typo) low voltage contract. I must confess to a small amount of schadenfreude when the i-Phone 5 came out obsoleting his docks.
My choice for a consumer "audio dock" is the venerable 3.5mm stereo phone plug. I think those will be around for a while. I know the one feeding into my stereo gets lots of use when friends show up with music on their mobile devices.
BTW, I appreciate the discussion of heat pumps and ground thermal storage. My next project will likely use that.
--Frank