EcoDEEP Haus

The Much-Anticipated Garage

2011-05-24T19:03:00.000-07:00

Yep, it's been a really long time since we've posted anything. What can I say? Time flies.

But it is finely time to do a quick update, since we've added a new garage to the 'ol homestead. Our old garage was ready to hit the dust....literally. When our electric garage door was still working, we had to hit the button and run out to the door, as the garage would shake violently, like it was having a seizure. At some point in the garage's history, 2 trusses had been cut to install the electric garage door opener. Now, I'm no structural engineer, but I can tell you that most structures don't have "extra" trusses that you can just eliminate. Eventually, the structure was so out-of-whack that the electric garage door wouldn't even work. If that wasn't bad enough, the slab was cracked and heaving so badly that we couldn't roll our BBQ grill in and out without breaking the wheels off. Here's a "before picture":
And this is "after". The "Darth Vader" of garages.

We debated quite a bit on what materials to use for the siding- metal or cement board lap siding. We ended up with the lap siding, as it was more cost effective and we don't have to worry about some crazy 4 year old scratching the metal siding.

We also debated whether we needed a one or two car garage. We do have 2 vehicles, but we put very few miles on them, since Kevin's commute consists of a stroll down the stairs and my commute is by bus/train. The problem is that with a family of 5, at night we are often running opposite directions for kid's activities. I'll admit that 2 vehicles is a luxury- but it also makes our lives a bit easier and less stressful. Considering resale value, we're pretty much forced into a double garage. Some people would say it's "butt-ugly" to match our house. We really don't care what she thinks.

We insulated the walls and finished the inside with stained plywood. The plywood allows us nail anything into it anywhere.

We designed a narrow little storage room with shelving on both sides at the front end of the garage. Coming next...... Gardening (or Urban Farming if you are a hipster, which we are not)

TV starzzzz ???

2010-01-28T20:04:00.000-08:00

Well at long last our home appeared on Planet Green's "World's Greenest Homes".
It's interesting - the editing choices one must need to make while pulling together a program.
The crew was here filming for 2 solid days and a bit - the result - 4 minutes of air time, a small number of out of context comments, my best lines left on the cutting room floor and very little discussion about many of the very green features of the home. And no mention of EcoDEEP! Oh well. It was a laugh doing it anyway. The film crew were Canadians and they were fun! They are welcome back anytime!

Here's the link to the video play and the Planet Green programming.

Awards Fever

2009-10-27T13:24:00.000-07:00

I was all set to do an update on the HAUS' energy use and green roof performance this week but have learned that the HAUS has won one of the coveted Evergreen Awards from Eco-Structure magazine. The awards will be presented at GreenBuild in Phoenix on November 11th.

The HAUS has previously won an AIA HOME Award and and AIA residential RAVE Award and is all set to strut its stuff on Discovery/Planet Green's "World Greenest Homes" cable tv show sometime this Fall (still waiting for an exact date from the network).

To repeat a portion of a previous rant relating to awards and the like. We do not spend our time designing in the hopes or intent of winning an award. Rather, we spend our time looking for creative, practical, sensible and simple solutions to problems. We like to solve problems through design and deep thinking so that they may be more effective, environmentally responsible, economically viable and beautiful. Receiving awards are splendid forms of recognition for these efforts - but they do not change our approach- which is simply- to do good work and to do no harm. We like the awards. They make us feel good. We like our work. It makes us feel good too.

For a link to the Evergreen Awards articles - please follow this link

Green Roof and the Sun

2009-06-19T07:54:00.000-07:00

Time for an update!

Our green roofs are doing great! The lower roof experienced some freezer burn after the snow came off in March but with the help of a few new cuttings and plugs from Bachmans, it's pulling through and looking better each day. The upper roof looks fantastic! Lots of pretty flowers and colors showing through the green. It's fun to go up on the roof and walk around with the birds and butterflies.

So far this year, our green roofs, rainbarrels and raingardens have captured and used over 60% of the rainfall on the rooftop. The green roofs are responsible for capturing about 45% of the total rainfall. That's looking good!

On the energy side, our solar panels are performing a little better than expected. From January through May - our PV panels have produced 768 kwh of electricity - which is 40% of the house load and/or 30% of the independent office load and just at 25% of the combined whole house and office load. I expect that number to climb higher as we move into full summer sun.
Our hot water panels are in full production and right now through Sept/October, we should get 100% of our hot water needs produced by our solar hot water panels.

Energy Use and Usefulness

2009-04-22T18:27:00.000-07:00

Hi Gang - thank you for hanging in there with us. We're getting ready for the Mpls/St Paul House Tour this weekend and HGTV to come film next week for the second series of World's Greenest Homes (2) and we're all a flutter. A little cleaning, a little touch up painting and watering the green roof and lawn because we've had no appreciable rain yet this spring and things are drying out. We'll get rain all weekend I'm sure.

SO - We've been busy measuring our energy use and production for the past 6 months - and while it's still a little early to be conclusive, I can say that our home is performing well.

The solar hot water panels seemed to produce nearly 100% of our hot water needs from July - October and the solar PV panels have produced an average of 25% of our whole house electrical energy needs and nearly 50% of the house load if we discount the energy used by all of my office equipment - which is 380 kwh a month - not a typical load in most people's homes!
Given that the balance of the electricity used by the house that we haven't produced ourselves is purchased through Xcel Energy's Windsource program - we're feeling pretty good about our carbon footprint.

A fun little fact - our house uses less energy than the former house does even though it is nearly twice as big. I'll wait to give an exact percentage until we have a full year's worth of data. What I can tell you right now is that our new and improved home uses 47% less electrical energy per square foot and 63% less gas per square foot than the original house did. I expect these numbers to improve as we move through Spring and early Summer - when we'll need very few lights and very little cooling.

I'm also in the process of tying our kilowatt hours of electricity and ccf of gas into an average kBTU/carbon emissions total and square foot for the house. It will be great to be able to see if we use more or less than the amounts predicted by our energy model (HERS score 52, Energy Star Rating 5 stars plus). I hope we'll be below the predicted use. I think we will be. Look for that post in a few months.

The solar panels get the headlines and ooohs and ahhhs, but most of the energy savings are coming from simple, smart design decisions that everyone can do. We've been talking about all of these things in this blog so I'm sure you're familiar with them. Use better insulation with higher R Values and good air sealing, use high performance windows and passive solar strategies; limit the amount of glazing to the west and north, protect the south glazing from solar gain in the summer, maximize it in the winter, use high efficiency energy star rated equipment, use CFL and LED lights, turn your lights off when you leave the room, have heat recovery system on your furnace exhaust, caulk around windows and doors, set your thermostat higher in the summer and lower in the winter....and all the other basic stuff that leads to better energy savings.

Awards and the Minneapolis Saint Paul Home Tour

2009-04-20T09:22:00.000-07:00

EcoDEEP HAUS has recently won two design awards - the Home of the Month Design award sponsored by The Minneapolis StarTribune and a RAVE Award, sponsored by AIA Minnesota and Minneapolis St Paul magazine. EcoDEEP HAUS will be featured in each of the publications during the upcoming year. We'll post more when we know more.

Also - the HAUS is part of this years Minneapolis Saint Paul Home Tour this coming weekend- Aril 25th and 26th. Come have a look at the place if you are able! Learn more about the tour here: http://www.msphometour.com/

Rumor has it that HGtv will be filming our digs the following week for the World's Greenest Homes series. We'll let you know more about that too!

Rain Rain Rain

2009-03-22T20:26:00.000-07:00

For the past week or so we have experienced the first signs of Spring (temps in the 50's, grass showing through the snowmelt and college kids wearing t-shirts and shorts outdoors) we are getting our rain barrels cleaned up and ready for action.

We collect rainwater. We use it to water our gardens (tomatoes and basil grow much better with rainwater than treated tap water) and trees, and any excess gets diverted to our raingardens so that stormwater infiltrates back to the aquifer rather than being sent down through the storm sewer system and into the mighty Mississippi River.

You may recall that we also installed a green roof system (see our post in October, 2008 for more info) to help manage stormwater, among other benefits.

So how much difference do our actions really make? Well, we've been measuring, and while we only have a few months of collected data - we can tell you what we know to be true at this point (stay tuned for updates).

Our total rooftop area is 1,724 square feet and will generate approx. 1,077 gallons of stormwater during a 1" rainfall. Left to its own devices, much of that would find its way elsewhere, and eventually to the river. But the data we collected between July and November of last year suggest that our rain barrels collected some 48% (16% used of for irrigation, 32% diverted to raingardens) or a little over 5,400 gals of water. Our green roof absorbed some 12% (1,200 gals) of the total rainfall at the rooftop for that same period even though it was only in place since October. So, during the 5 months we were able to measure, we diverted 60% of the rainfall at our rooftop from moving across our lawn and into the storm sewer system and river. I expect this number to increase significantly when we have a full year's worth of data and a full year's worth of green roof performance.

That means that if everyone utilized a rainbarrel at one or more of their downspouts we would save enormous amounts of stormwater, sediment, chemicals and fertilizers from entering our lakes and rivers; our recreational waters and our drinking water. That's healthier for everyone. It also means less water being treated by our local governmental water treatment facilities, which saves us money and keeps our waterways beautiful and usable.

We'll report more when we know more! Next up, a post on our energy use. There have been a few unexpected twists and turns as we've measured and monitored our consumption.

350.org- what everyone should know!

2008-11-24T19:55:00.000-08:00

This past week, we were both attending Greenbuild in Boston. Greenbuild is USGBC's annual conference (United State Green Building Council). This year over 30,000 people attended the convention in a rather chilly Boston. The opening speaker for the event was Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Yep, you could say this conference was no small potatoes.

One great speaker was writer, environmentalist and professor Bill McKibben. Click the link if you want to hear his talk. It was inspiring and urgent message that reminded us just how crucial it is that we act now.

He has created a grass-roots organization called 350.org. http://www.350.org/

Here's the deal: 350 is the red line for human beings, the most important number on the planet. The most recent science tells us that unless we can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, we will cause huge and irreversible damage to the earth. We are currently at 385 and it's rising about 2 parts per year.

The goal of this organization is to get the word out. We need an international agreement to reduce carbon emissions fast. The United Nations is working on a treaty, which is supposed to be completed in December of 2009 at a conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. But the current plans for the treaty are much too weak to get us back to safety. This treaty needs to put a high enough price on carbon that we stop using so much.

If you have care about what happens to the planet, spread the word!

New and Improved Photos!

2008-10-28T19:10:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, we had Scott Gilbertson, architectural photographer extraordinare www.gilbertsonphotography.com, take some photos of the house. Here are just some of the photos:

Power Plants on the Roof

2008-10-02T15:29:00.000-07:00

Hello one and all - yesterday was a red letter day for the HAUS - we installed our green roof (800 sf in 6hrs!) and it looks amazing! For those of you who'd like to know, we used a vegetated roof system called LiveRoof. It comes in preplanted modular trays (1 ft x 2ft by 4" deep) with native plant species selected for your specific exposure and microclimate.

Our roof used 2 different plant mixtures -
Classic Carefree Sunny Mix
Sedum Album (Coral Carpet)
Sedum hybridium(Immergrunchen)
Sedum reflexum (Blue Spruce)
Sedum rupestre (Angelina)

Sedume sexangulare
Sedum spurium (dragon's blood)

Sedum Neon
Allium Flowering Onion

and
Shade Mix

Sedum Pachylados
Sedum hybridium(Immergrunchen)

Sedum spurium (Fireglow)
Sedum rupestre (Angelina)
Sedume sexangulare

Sedum spurium (Green Mantle)
Sedum Spurium (Royal Pink)

These plants are carefully selected to handle lots of rain but also do well for long periods without rain in our Minnesota climate. They will grow to be between 2 and 4 inches tall -and besides periodic weeding will require very little maintenance.

I like the Live Roof system because it comes fully planted and ready to rock and roll. We ordered the plants in early June and the nursery did most of our work for us - growing and caring for the plants all summer long before harvesting them for us this past week and prepping them for our installation. Now that they are on our roof, we don't need to be watching bare dirt with a few plant plugs watching and waiting for them to grow - it's an instant green!

Boy, You Crazy! Why you want a green roof?
Green Roofs help:

Manage stormwater (up to 95% of rain fall is used by the green roof)
Reduce Energy Costs (energy use reduction of 25% and higher)
Extend the life of the primary roof system by 200% (protecting rooftop from temperature swings, ultraviolet radiation, etc)
Noise Reduction
Improve air quality

The Live Roof system costs about $12.00 per sf but will vary depending on the size of your order. We installed it ourselves and so saved a lot on labor costs. We worked out the details and became certified green roof installers through our local Live Roof supplier - Bachman's nursery.

Here are some photos of the installation in progress:

The plants arrived via truck and after unloading are ready to be brought up to the rooftop.

We rented a scissors lift to help move the modules (about 50 lbs each) up to the rooftop. There was no way I was going to carry 400+ roof modules one at a time on a ladder. The plywood on the ground helps protect the newly planted lawn.

Even local celebrities get in on the act. Here, the famous Curt Kietzer carries the first of many modules to it's final destination. My brother Brian is working the lift.

Getting Started - all the modules click together to stabilize each other and promote better plant growth. The green soil elevators keep the soil in place until they are installed. Working from right to left, we filled in the rooftop pretty quickly. You can see the dark grey 45 mil epdm slip sheet we used as root barrier on top of our real roof membrane. We don't want the plants messing with our roof membrane!

Jeffrey Swainhart is the man with the saw cutting the modules at the end of each row to ensure a tight fit. Cutting takes a long time and should be minimized!

Regular sweeping is critical to avoid pinching any sharp aggregates between the plant trays and the roof membrane.

Curt K and Guy Williams seen splicing the joints at the metal edging - I favor the edging over the cutting .

When the upper roof was nearly complete, we started in on the lower roof (Shade Mix)

Lower roof complete

Upper roof complete

A nice detail so my ladder doesn't damage the plantings on the lower roof when I need to access the upper roof. The pavers are recycled rubber porous paver systems called VAST from our friends at Natural Built Home.

We've been measuring how much water our rooftop generates during each rainfall (we're collecting runoff in rain barrels). Now, with the green roof in place we can track the reduction in that amount. Rather than sending our runoff to the stormsewer system and thus to the Gulf of Mexico via the Mississippi River, we're using the rainwater to keep our plants healthy and happy so they can do all those good things for our home.

MN Solar Tour - EcoDEEP Haus Open Haus

2008-09-29T19:15:00.000-07:00

That's right, we are opening our doors on Saturday Oct 4 from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm for the Minnesota Solar Tour. This event is sponsored by the Minnesota Renewable Energy Society (MRES). http://www.mnrenewables.org/events/solartour/index.php

The tour is free and is self-guided featuring over 50 exemplary homes, businesses, and institutions that have incorporated renewable energy into the design and operation of their buildings. Projects include not only solar systems, but geothermal and wind as well. This is an excellent opportunity for those interested in solar and other renewable energies to view installations and talk with building owners, builders, architects, and planners about their experiences.

Kevin and company (a whole host of friends) are planning on installing the green roof on Wednesday, so you can also get a peek at our freshly installed planted roof.

Measuring Things - Energy and Water

2008-09-21T21:32:00.001-07:00

Well gang - we're sorry it's been so long since we've posted anything to this site, but we've been a bit busy getting the kids off to their school and being on the local radio station.
Kevin has had his 15 minutes of fame come and go due to his appearance on the local radio program "Everything Green" on AM 950. Follow this link for the podcast if you care to hear the melodious musings of Kevin talking about our house.

This time off from attending to our blog doesn't mean that we haven't been doing things. Far from it oh unforgiving masses, far from it. We've been growing quite some grass, getting our home energy rating tests completed, and tracking energy use and water use in the house.

First things first. As part of our quest to know how we're doing and to see the impacts of some of our decisions during design, we've decided that we'll measure how much energy and water we use as well as how much water we can harvest and divert.

Our house has scored very well on the Energy Star Rating System after a series of blower door and air leakage tests we put it through to verify that the house was working as designed. The house scored well - receiving a 5 + star energy rating (the highest you can get) with a HERS Index Rating of 53 (on a scale of 0 to 500, with lower scores being better). This is great news - especially for a remodeled structure of which we were unable to change a few fundamental things. If we were to do a completely new house - I'd expect a HERS score of 30 or lower.

Our solar panels have been working hard given the summer days and relatively sunny skies of the season. Unfortunately, due to a small programming error in the data logger, we've lost the production data for June and half of July. We can, however, report energy production for mid July through mid September - during which time we produced 453 kwH - averaging 7.1 kwh per day during this period. This represents about 50% of our total electrical energy load for the same period. We've actually been a little surprised that our electric usage has been as high as it has been - given that we've rarely had to turn our lights on - but suspect that Kevin's new office equipment (a few new workstations and server) has caused out plug load to increase beyond expectations. We're going to meter these circuits separately so we can separate office from residential energy use in the coming months.

We'll expect to see solar pv production drop in the winter months but hope for a minimum production of 1,900 + kwh from our solar panels annually.

We've also been measuring water savings - both in terms of water usage within our home and the stormwater management practices employed on the rooftop and at grade.

Within the home, you will no doubt remember kind reader, we have outfitted the place with low flow plumbing and laundry fixtures. For our family of five (plus constant guest and 2 office staff) we would expect a baseline water use of 54,000 gallons per year (4,500 gallons per month) if we used plumbing fixtures that simply met the building code minimum standards. By our calculations, we are using only 32,600 per year (2,700 per month) for a potable water savings of 40%. This water use still seems very high, so we need to double check the flow rates on our dishwasher and laundry washing machines to get a more accurate number. I expect that we're closer to 60% - but we'll find a suitable means to measure that and let you know!

On site - we have a goal of sending ZERO water to the storm sewer system. We hope to accomplish this by means of:

A vegetated green roof system on 55% of our rooftop area: (To be installed in early October, we expect this to absorb 45% of the total rainwater on the rooftop)

Harvesting of rainwater in rainbarrels: So far we've collected and diverted 7,300 gallons of rainwater, or 16% of the total rainwater hitting our rooftops for July, August and September. We expect this number to increase significantly after we install the green roof.

Use of raingardens to handle remaining rooftop drainage, sump pump drainage and over surface drainage: Excess rainwater run off from the roof that is not collected by the green roof and rainbarrels as well as the water from our sump pump (below grade water at foundation wall) will find its way to the big raingarden - keeping those native plants happy.

Minimize impermeable surfaces on site: Excluding the footprint of our house, we have nearly 85% of our site in vegetated or permeable surfaces. - This makes for better infiltration into the groundwater and subsurface aquifers. More than 50% of our lawn is planted with a low mow native plant species grass mix that requires less water and little to no mowing! Except of course that Roxanne enjoys mowing the lawn and is itching to do it.

More Green- Grass and Rain Gardens

2008-08-19T21:37:00.000-07:00

The grass is now officially growing. It's exciting to see it green up. It took 6 days for the sprouts to appear, which I think is pretty good. We were VERY nervous, as Saturday we had a huge downpour that made it appear our entire yard was flowing down towards the Mississippi.

In our neighborhood, everything flows towards the Mississippi River, about 3 blocks away. With the poorly draining clay soil and grass not yet established, we've been really able to see exactly how the yard handles water. The regrading we did greatly improved the water situation around the house. The sump pump was very active prior to re-grading (so much that we joked about having a water fall feature from the sump outlet)- but it hasn't gone on once since the grading. This weekend, we were able to get the 60 plants planted in the rain gardens.
We used a combination of grasses- such as Karl Forester and perennials such as Black-Eyed Susans and Coneflowers. I had to improvise a bit, as not all the plants I wanted were available at Gertens- but overall, I think it will look great once it gets a bit more established.
Here's a list of the plants we used:
Karl Forester- grass
Blue Sedge grass
Prairie Dropsee Grass (edible & nutritious seeds on this one!)
Icicle Veronica
Butterfly Weed
Pixie Meadowbrite Coneflower
Little Joe Pye Weed
Magnus Coneflower

Greening Up the Yard

2008-08-13T20:59:00.000-07:00

It's been difficult to have 3 kids, a nice summer and not be able to play in the yard.... We've grown tired of the dirt yard- although I will say that not having to worry about watering, mowing and maintenance this month has made me jokingly want to consider astro-turf.

Last week and the beginning of this week, the folks at CurbSide Landscape finished the final grading, Buck's Concrete poured the back sidewalk slabs and then CurbSide seeded the lawn. Before seeding, the entire yard was covered with a couple of inches of compost. We opted for hydroseeding the lawn, which a method where a slurry of water, seed and fiber mulch are sprayed on the lawn with a hose. With proper watering, grass should be growing in a week, with mowable lawn in 3-4 weeks.

The slurry has a green tint- and it made quite a mess around the base of the house.....

The front yard is planted with a traditional residential grass, such as Kentucky Blue Grass. For the back yard, we went with an "eco grass". This is a low-mow, low-water, low-maintenance turf. It may take a bit longer to establish the back yard, but we're willing to give it a try. It's amazing how much water is needed to have a lush, green yard. Given our large yard, we were looking for an alternative that will save us time and limit water use.

On Tuesday, after the yard was seeded, we received a huge downpour of rain. Unfortunately, the rain barrels and some of the downspouts weren't in place, so we may have to touch up some of the hydroseeded areas.

We're treating our yard as a work in progress that will continue to evolve over the years. With our limited budget for landscaping, this is the only option. Matthew Fair Jones, our landscape architect, helped conceptualize the plan and master plan ideas. They are simple for now. I want to make sure I understand which areas of the yard get sunlight at various times of the day and how we want to ultimately use our yard. Prior to the seeding, I did plant a small rock garden utilizing the rocks that were in our yard, around the River Birch tree by the patio.

This weekend we will plant the rain garden plants into the areas that were installed by CurbSide. More on that later....

A Bit of Privacy

2008-08-07T21:01:00.000-07:00

We've been living in our new house for about a month now. We love the amount of windows and they way the house really takes advantage of daylight and cool breezes. So far, we only have shades on one set of windows in one room. No other windows have window treatment yet and although we love the simplicity of that, it does leave us feeling a bit exposed at times. We are only about 25' from the street and we do have quite a few people looking at our house these days. There are times when we look out the window to see someone looking in. Sometimes we just end up waving to each other. We really don't mind too much- but there are times we feel on display.

Time for window treatments.....

Our aupair is lucky enough to have this bedroom (although it's very small) with a balcony. The balcony space is really quite wonderful, in that it's like being in a tree house. This tree also provides a bit of privacy, but it will need to be trimmed and the leaves will be gone in a couple of months, leaving it much more exposed to the street. When Kerstin leaves in October, it will become a guest room/study room.

We just installed these roller shades from The Shade Store for this room. We went with the subtle white-on-white pattern.
Now, we're just debating on window treatments for the other windows that need it (mostly bedrooms). Although I like the solar shades and roller shades, we really count on the breezes we get at night. Given the need for breezes to pass thru, and the desire to control light entering, we are going to go with a 2 or 2.5" wood or faux wood blind in white. I just have to do a bit of research to find a louver with recycled content.

The Brick Yard

2008-08-03T21:45:00.000-07:00

As much as we love our new house, the one thing that has made this summer difficult is that we have no yard to enjoy. The dirt that surrounds the house is less than inviting and is something we've tried to train our children to avoid. That won't change too soon, as we are planning on seeding grass- but the one bright spot is that we are well on the way to having a completed brick patio in our back yard.

This is the stack of brick pavers that had to be torn up during construction. It's a painful site for the former owners who put their own sweat into creating pretty elaborate patterns in the walks and patio areas. It's also a painful site for Kevin, who neatly stacked them up and now is working at the unstacking. There are literally thousands of brick pavers in this stack. (We're only going to use about 1/3 for our large patio)

On Friday, the guys from CurbSide Landscape and Irrigation excavated the patio site. They laid down a root barrier sheet, then infilled with about 6" of crushed stone. They took a while to get this perfectly level using a surveyor's transit. Unfortunately, they were a bit short on the crushed stone, so they'll be back on Monday with the remainder.

Kevin ponders just how much work this would have been to do by hand......

We got a tip from the guys at CurbSide about setting the sand base. They suggested laying (2) 1" pipes down, infilling with sand, tamping it and then screeding it level using a 2x4. This technique worked pretty well and Kevin made a ton of progress on Saturday.

A rubber mallet is used to tap the bricks into place in the sand. Kevin used a (mostly)half basketweave pattern. See if you can spot where the pattern goes awry in this photo! We're not too worried about the occassional quirkiness of the pattern. It's a character-builder.

By Sunday, the entire family was helping (?) out.We should be complete with this project mid-week. After CurbSide delivers more crushed rock base, we'll be able to complete the patio area. CurbSide will then be working on the grading on the rest of the site, the installation of the rain garden and the hydro-seeding. Even though the seeding of the lawn won't provide a useable yard this year, at least we'll have a nice-looking patio from which to enjoy the outdoors.

See-ment Floors

2008-07-31T23:30:00.000-07:00

Here's a post I had begun working on in early May and then promptly forgot about while more pressing matters were at hand. Here it is slightly modified for your reading pleasure today.

While the wood floors in our kitchen and bedrooms are being installed, the giant sandbox of our dining and living rooms is quietly leaving us and our new concrete floor awaits. Yep, we're using exposed and polished concrete for our flooring material in our living and dining room. (For the record, Jethro was incorrect in calling the swimming pool the "cement pond" and added to the confusion over the differerence between cement/concrete). Concrete. It's hard. It's simple. It's gray, it's durable, it's cheap. It's relatively simple to make. You take some sand, aggregate, cement and some water, mix them together and there you go. Not much has changed in the 2,00+ years since the Romans started messing with the stuff to build things like this. We like the look of concrete and the fact that it can be a finish material all by itself and doesn't need covering up with other materials. It's thermal mass will help keep our feet and space cooler in the summer and warmer in winter and we'll not worry about scratching it or spilling something on it because, well, it's concrete.

We did add piping underneath the slab, so we can have infloor heating someday if desired.

Concrete is a great material, but the embodied energy in one of its principal ingredients - cement - is actually pretty high. It is non-renewable, needs to be mined from the earth and quite often shipped from a great distance to reach a local production plant.

Consider this: "Two and a half months ago, a ship left Thailand loaded with Portland cement. It spent three weeks crossing the ocean and another week going through the Panama Canal before docking in New Orleans, where its cargo was transferred to barges. These barges then spent six weeks traveling up the Mississippi to Minneapolis, where the cement is now arriving at batch plants for use in concrete. Over 80 million metric tons of cement were produced last year in the U.S., but another 20 million were imported to meet the demands of our booming economy." EBN June, 1999 A view of the concrete floor just after it was poured. Our concrete contractor, Buckcrete, cane back in a day or so to cut in the joints. 28 days later, after the concrete had a chance to cure and come to full strength, we polished it to a nice terrazzo like sheen.
Polishing and sealing the floors.

One of the ways to reduce concrete's embodied energy quotient and carbon footprint is to reduce the amount of cement used in it's production. We can do this through the use of fly ash, a by-product of coal burning that would otherwise find its way to a landfill somewhere. By substituting a generous portion of the cement with fly ash , we've reduced the carbon footprint of the concrete while at the same time making something that looks good. The fly ash gives the concrete a slightly darker shade, and is denser, stronger, and richer looking when polished. The polishing makes it look pretty but is also a healthier choice because the polishing tightens up the pores in the concrete it retards staining. This way we eliminate the need for an additional sealer that needs to be reapplied every few years. We just have to be willing to wipe up spilled wine within 24 hours if we want to avoid some staining. Then again, some patina is kind of fun!

Polishing and sealing the floors. Wine is not the only thing being spilled on our floors....

Before and After Photos

2008-07-27T21:22:00.000-07:00

Sorry, we’ve been lazy about keeping the blog up-to-date lately. The best excuse we can come up with is that we’ve been just enjoying our new house and neighborhood and trying to make up for some lost sleep over the last 6 months. .

Good News-----The best news this week is that we closed on the sale of our old house on Friday. As much as we loved that house, we are very relieved to not have another property to worry about.

I thought I’d do a little photo essay on “before” and “after” photos. Because we’ve so radically transformed this house, it’s sometimes easy to forget that this was an existing 1940’s house. Last week the former owner stopped by to pick up something that had been squirreled away in a closet and even he had a tough time remembering what it was like before. I'll do one on the interior in the future.

We changed the location of the front door and added a full 2nd floor.

We kept the gabled roof form on this portion (Kevin's studio) and just changed up the materials.

I wish we had that green grass now!

We will soon reinstall some of those brick pavers and dispose of the plywood sidewalk.

Part of our reason for doing a transformation such as this was simply to show that it can be done. We hope we've illustrated that you can make your current house (or an existing house) your dream house - and to do it in a way that is energy efficient, environmentally responsible and affordable (a subjective consideration, I know). You can be modern, Tudor or Victorian - the style doesn't matter.

It is certainly easier to start with an open lot and brand new construction than with an existing house, but one of the best things you can do from an environmental point of view is to keep existing structures in good repair and service. Living in the city is also good - we're utilizing existing infrastructure, neighborhood services, adding to density - all good things to keep our ecological and carbon footprint smaller.

It turns out to be a good economic decision as well. Certainly land costs are a little higher when buying in the city but overall, this project cost us less to build as a significant remodel than a brand new home on a new lot would have in spite of some of the extra surprises that remodels often yield. Most new homes are being constructed for $170 to $200 (and beyond) per square foot these days - just for normal construction - nothing fancy. When all is said and done, we will have spent under $125 per sf including all the "extras" such as high performance windows, super insulation, solar HW and PV systems and a green roof! I calculate that without all those extras we would have spent about $110 per sf. All those extras added a little more than 5% to our overall budget (the better windows and insulation, roofing, etc add only a little bit more than the usual suspects do) and offer an average calculated payback of less than 7 years - it would be lower yet but our solar systems increase the payback average considerably.

This project has not been an easy one for us financially. We are pretty frugal people and are not accustomed to spending this much money on anything. However, we realize that even though it will stretch our capacity and limits for a while, investing in our beliefs, our future, our children our neighborhood and our planet is the right thing to do. It would have been easy to always look for the cheapest alternative and least expensive option - but those choices often end up costing much more over the long haul. A building's first cost is somewhere around 6% of its total lifetime cost (assuming a 50 year life span) the rest of it is spent in operating and maintaining the building. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that spending a little more now to save a lot later is a pretty darn good value. If I can cut my operating expenses in half with a very modest increase in first cost, the savings will pay for themselves again and again. Call me a liberal if you want to, but that's conservatism at its best! Oh, and all that money saving happen to benefit the environment too, so you can still call me a tree hugger - its okay.

We're In HOT Water

2008-07-20T20:48:00.000-07:00

No we're not in trouble - at least as far as we know, but we do have a lot of hot water at our fingertips thanks to our solar hot water system. I've even had to adjust the balance on the system because we're making so much of it.
In response to a couple of requests, I'll do a bit more explanation of our solar thermal domestic hot water system. That's quite a mouthful for something that makes hot water for our household use.

Here's how it works:

Solar Collectors are mounted on the roof. Piping runs through the solar collectors and down into a storage tank. Inside the piping is a glycol solution that picks up heat when running through the solar panels and sheds heat when it gets to the storage tank (The pipes are full of hot glycol. The hot pipes make the water in the tank hot). The hot water, when it's hot enough, goes directly to our showers, baths, sinks, etc. If it's not, it goes to our back up water heater (the water heater that came with the house) and gets brought up to temperature. Sounds so simple you'd think a code inspector would understand it right? Well, I suppose that's another story for another time.

Right now, our water is plenty hot. This winter, I expect the water heater will have a little work to do, though not nearly as much as it's had to do in the past.

Our solar panels are Solar Skies SS-32 Flat Plate Collectors, 4'x8' mounted at 45 degrees. We mounted them "landscape" rather than the traditional "portrait" to reduce their profile. Mario of Best Power International custom designed this system and improved the way the piping works in this type of installation. We're getting higher efficiencies and a much sleeker aesthetic. It's pretty dang sexy.
The panels have anodized aluminum frames, low iron textured glass and a high efficient nickel-chrome selective surface copper absorber. All of these things increase solar energy transmission - making them more efficient.

Our Solar storage tank is an 80 gallon Rheem HE Soleraide tank (in addition to our 40 gallon water heater - so we have 120 gallons of superbeautifulandwonderful hot water when we want it.

The system also has an expansion tank, a controller, sensors and a Caleffi Pump assembly.

The pump and valve system essentially manages and controls water temperature. It brings in cold water when it needs to or sends the warm water to be made hotter in the existing water heater. (If the existing water heater hadn't been a fairly new, energy efficient model - we'd have done a different kind of combination system.)

Down the Drain- the evils of Garbage Disposals

2008-07-16T22:11:00.000-07:00

I grew up in the country without the luxury of a sink garbage disposal. When I bought my first house, it had a disposal, which I was quite proud of. I remember the first time my parents came to visit. They were enthralled with all the scraps that could just go into the sink rather than a smelly bucket under the sink. “Can this go down there?” they inquired about the corn cobs...... I guess there is something fascinating about a machine that will take in scraps, grind them to smithereens and makes them magically disappear.

Only problem is that they don’t just magically disappear. It takes a good deal of running water to wash the ground scraps away and it taxes the city sewer system. The city Raleigh NC recently banned the installation of new garbage disposals. It caused quite a raucous I understand, with people claiming it is their God-given right to throw scraps down the drain. Other communities are offering composting programs where, along with garbage and recycling pick-up, they will pick up food scraps.

Although we don’t have a compost program in St Paul, we are planning on having a compost bin in the yard and collect food scraps rather than sending them down the drain. We did not install a garbage disposal and won’t miss it at all because we didn’t have one in our last house either. So, I’m trying to find a bin that will look good (although it will sit under the sink) and contain smells. I’m leaning towards this model because it’s simple and clean in design. It doesn't have a filter, like the more elaborate and expensive models, but I'm thinking we won't have anything sitting in there too long before taking it to the compost bin outside.

This stainless steel compost pail costs 19.95 from Gardener’s Supply.

As far as a compost bin, I’m looking for input. There are models that tumble and ones that require turning with a shovel or pitchfork. I’m looking for easy. Any suggestions out there?

Don't they look like they are having fun tumbling their compost?

Can Air Conditioning be Green?

2008-07-10T21:49:00.000-07:00

So we’re starting to feel a little more at home now that we have gotten the first few scratches in the new floor and have little handprints on the walls and windows. When we first moved in, it felt like we were vacationing in someone else’s house. I think this is because we were cautious about all the new floors and walls- being careful not to dent, ding or scratch anything. We still are being cautious, but the reality of having 3 kids is setting in and we realize at some point, we’re just going to have to settle for the “patina” that comes with children. I have no idea how the new wood floor is getting scratched!

One thing we’ve gotten a few questions on the last week is how can our house be ‘green” and still have air conditioning? Good question. We’ve never lived in a house with built-in air conditioning until now. We’ve had window AC units before, but never the full meal deal. So, here’s the scoop on our AC:
- The existing house had a new AC unit, sized for 2 tons. We didn’t want to toss that equipment and refrigerant in the landfill and so decided to keep it in use.
- The existing AC unit isn’t large enough to provide cooling for the entire house by normal standards, so our mechanical contractor initially recommended that we reuse that AC unit, plus add another 2 ton unit. We resisted, because we don’t like the inside air too cool in the summer- we just wanted enough to take out the humidity and keep it comfortable.
- We settled on reusing the existing AC unit and only air conditioning the upper floor (where the bedrooms are). We have an opening between the first floor and second floors which acts as a natural convection chimney, helping to move air around the house through passive ventilation. The 2-story space allows the cool air to fall down to the first floor and keep it cool as well. By doing so, the ac unit works a bit harder and stays on longer when it does run – which actually helps improve its efficiency. We also tied the return air ductwork serving the two floors together to help balance the system.

- Because we have such good insulation in the walls and roof, and good air sealing, along with great windows the house stays naturally cooler. When it cools down, it tends to stay cool. It’s the same concept as the coolers you carry to your picnic – we keep the cool air in and the hot air out. It helps that our living spaces are facing north and we have exterior sunshade above the windows on the south.
- At night, when it isn’t too humid, we open up the windows and let the cool air in. Every room has windows on at least 2 sides, so it’s easy to get cross-ventilation.
- We keep the thermostat at 78 degrees, so the AC doesn’t have to run much. In the winter, we’ll keep the temperature set at 65 degrees)

It’s not such a bad thing – actually being cool enough to sleep. We’re better rested and happier people if we haven’t stayed up all night sweating in a hotbox.

Settling Into Our New Digs

2008-07-04T22:49:00.000-07:00

We're back! We are officially moved in and living at the new house now. We were even able to take the day off from tackling boxes and enjoy the annual Flynn Family 4th of July gathering. We were lucky to have great weather for move on Wednesday. It only took the movers 4 hours because we had been able to get a head start on hauling boxes and miscellaneous items over earlier. A couple of weeks ago, I had started taking a van-load (that’s right, we have a minivan) everytime I stopped by the house. This head start on moving really took the pressure off and we were able to have the entire kitchen put away before the official move even started. Regardless of that, we were still overwhelmed with all the stuff!

Before photo of Family Room/ Shared Office
2-days and a million boxes later...

Looking towards the living room on Wed.

By Friday, we're looking a bit less cluttered- but still a ways to go.

A couple of thoughts on moving into a new place:

- I think I will feel like it’s really our own place when we learn to use all the appliances. I’m not one to read manuals before diving in and trying. I figure that it should be intuitive. But I guess I’m used to really old appliances without any bells and whistles, so there were a few glitches in the dinner-making the other night. (BTW- the Bosch dishwasher is so incredibly quiet, I can’t even tell it’s running when I’m right next to it!)

- The way to get an 8-year old boy to take a bath is to have a new air bath. Declan was on his 2nd bath for the day when I made the new rule that he has to ask us before he’s allowed to take a bath.

- We love the way our house is so filled with daylight. So far, we don’t need any lights on until about 8:00 pm.

- We’re really happy with the way that our house and it’s spaces are oriented. The living spaces on the north are able to stay cool during the heat of the day. We are also able to get great cross ventilation through the house.

- We’re discovering that it might be really hard to keep the dark wood floors clean. I’m hoping that part of the problem is that the duct work needs to be cleaned, which we will do shortly.

- Bonus for the large kitchen sink is that it’s the perfect size bath for a 19 month old. I hadn’t thought of this earlier, but we were forced to look for options when I discovered the lower level bath had only hot water (no cold water to temper it).

A Roof Full of Energy

2008-06-27T15:10:00.000-07:00

We've spent the last few weeks waiting for Xcel energy to come and trench in new electrical service to the house from the alley. We wanted to replace the old overhead wires (they tend to get burned when your neighbors garages start on fire or come down in storms) with buried cable. Even though we've been on the schedule - they never seemed to make it to our house to do the work. This has cause multiple delays and rescheduling of things and has generally been pretty irksome.

The crew of 6 showed up today - 5 guys to watch 1 work - and started in on the task, their brand new trucks at the ready. I tell you all of this just because in my heart, though I have been completely aggravated about their adherence to schedule - I am secretly amused because I know that in a few days we will be selling them energy that we've created on our rooftop through our solar pv array.

A view of the solar thermal panels behind the solar pv panels. The white roof membrane helps keep our house cooler in the summer by reflecting unwanted solar radiation away from the house. This will get covered up by our green roof system this fall.

With the help of Mario Monesterio form Best Power International, we've created a little energy garden on the rooftop. We have both a solar thermal system for making hot water for the domestic water needs of the house (washing dishes, clothes and bodies), and a solar photovoltaic (pv) system to make electricity. Whenever the sun is shining , we'll make electricity for our own use. And, because we decided to tie it into the utility grid, whatever we're not using we'll be selling back to the utility company and watch our meter spin backwards.

We have the pv system also connected to a battery back-up system so that we can continue to have power even if the power lines go down in a big storm (not ours of course, because they're buried). This is a sweet little system that even Mario is jealous of. He must be at least a little proud of it because he brought a few folks by the house yesterday to look at it. Both the solar thermal and solar pv systems have a lot of nice gizmos and features that allow us to do different things including data tracking and energy production, use and efficiency monitoring.

Okay - so how much did we pay for these systems?

The solar thermal system (2 panel) was just over $6,000.00 (not accounting for federal tax credits) and features a payback period of about 12-14 years.

Leon the builder and Mario the solar guy discussing where to buy white socks.

The solar pv system (1.5 KW) cost just over $16,000 (not accounting for State tax rebate of $3,000 and the additional federal tax credits - roughly another $2,000). In the end, the pv system should pay for itself in about 16 years -perhaps sooner if energy prices continue to climb. Solar energy is still more expensive per kwh than buying regular old electricity from the coal burning plant down the road - but with better social and environmental karma.

Getting Ready for the Move

2008-06-23T21:24:00.000-07:00

Okay. We are about 8 days and counting until move-in. The contractors are going thru room by room finishing everything and doing their thorough cleaning. . The house is cleaning up very nicely!

This is the shared bath. The casework by Eastvold Custom turned out great. We used a douglas fir veneer and the hardware is by Mockett. The Toto sink and faucet is from Rakieten Sales. The recycled glass terrazzo countertop is from Natural Built Home Toilet and tub are also from Toto. I can't wait to soak in this one! The tile is from Kate-Lo Tile.

Here's a few shots of the Master Bath: Some more doug fir cabinets by Eastvold Custom with square recessed hardware by Mockett again. We used the Toto Aquia dual flush, along with Toto sink and Grohe faucets from Rakieten Sales.

The countertops are made of Skatelite. Skatelite is a recycled paper product like Richlite, but it is thinner (and less expensive). It's actually used for skate board parks- thus the name Skatelite. Matt Eastvold suggested the idea to use it with a substrate and some doug fir edge banding. We love how it turned out!

In preparation for the move, we’ve been trying to finish all the closets and storage units so that we have places to put our stuff. It’s a good thing IKEA is so close to our new house, because we’ve been going there A LOT. We’ve become regulars there and Kevin even has developed his own “system” of IKEA shopping which involves shortcuts through the store and ignores the 1-way traffic. What a rebel he is! Even though IKEA products are relatively inexpensive, we’ve managed to spend a pretty penny there this month. I’ve been just waiting to get a call from our credit card company asking what the heck is going on. This is the Ikea Pax closet system we used for our master bedroom closet.

The exterior paint is done. We’re not thrilled about the blue we’d chosen (okay, okay, I chose). I changed the color at the last minute and I probably should have stayed with the original choice. The first blue paint being painted was definitely the wrong color. We gave the painter the right name, but we were one digit off on the number. (I guess that is the kind of thing that may happen when you get only 4 hours of sleep). Then the next blue being painted was still not the what we wanted and we think it’s because it was painted “satin” and not flat –which surprised us. At this point, we’re just too embarrassed to have him repaint it again. I think we’ll live with it for awhile and then see how important it is to us. It’s only paint and we can repaint if necessary.

Outfitting the Dining Room

2008-06-18T20:37:00.000-07:00

In our new house, we have made a commitment to actually sitting at the dining room table to eat our dinner. Imagine that! In our current house, our kitchen is large and has a work island with a couple of stools. The dining room is a few steps away through a past the basement stairs and thru a doorway. Lately, we've fallen into the routine of standing around the kitchen island to eat. It's a bad habit and one that we want to change.

We hope that the openness in our new house between the kitchen and dining space will encourage sitting down to eat meals. This is a good goal. As a part of this new plan, we've decided on a new dining room table. We saw this great table (Cross Extension Table by Matthew Hilton) at Design Within Reach a few weeks back and were impressed with it's proportions (it's narrow at 35.5", which I like) and extends to 116". The extension leaves store right under the table.

It's available in a wenge finish or oak. Although the dark wenge would go with the wood in our kitchen, we decided on ordering the oak finish, partially based on recommendations from our good friend Fiona and hoping that the light wood finish will make the space appear larger than the dark finish. Now, we just have to wait the 12-16 weeks for it to arrive!

For chairs, we decided on this Room and Board version of the Arne Jacobsen classic Series 7 chair. For $79, it's a good deal and it's such a classic, that we can always order more later. It's a stackable chair and easy to clean (great for kids). We're going with the white finish.

So, that's it for our new furniture budget.

Light at the End of the Tunnel

2008-06-17T20:49:00.000-07:00

The stress of building a house is incredible and as we are coming down to the wire, we are feeling the full brunt of it. Somehow, you have to put it all in perspective and know that someday, somehow, our lives will be back to normal again. It helps to have a 18 month old, whose life is so simple and innocent. When things are getting us down, he usually does something like a little dance, or gorilla-chest thumping that can bring us back to a happier place. Tonight, he was walking around the backyard and stopping to sniff every blooming flower, including the blooming weeds. It made me think about how life is too short to not stop to smell the flowers. Call it life lessons from a toddler.

Today, we shifted our move day one week and will now be making the big move on July 2. Although we were pushing for next week, we don’t want to move into a construction zone. No doubt there will still be incomplete work, but the extra week gives everyone a bit more time- including giving us more time to pack all those boxes. I’m longing for the day where everything I owned and needed could fit into the back of a Ford Escort (that was my freshman year in college). Now, apparently we have enough stuff that the 2 Men and a Truck that we hired to move us will actually need to be 6 Men and 2 Trucks. How did this happen to us?

Quite a bit of work happening this week……The exterior and interior railings at the balconies were installed yesterday, making our house instantly a whole lot safer. I was always in constant fear of having a kid fall off one of the openings. We used a cable rail system for its simplicity and minimal esthetic.

The exterior painting is adding a bit of color……

Kevin has become a regular at IKEA with about 5 trips so far. He has put together a number of shelves and closet systems and has a number of war stories....

How Walkable is your Neighborhood?

2008-06-16T20:34:00.000-07:00

This week I discovered a cool website that rates your neighborhood for how “walkable” it is. Living in a walkable neighborhood has been our goal since we started to look for our project house over a year ago. Why? Because we love the idea of walking to get groceries or a book or a beer. We want to be an area that allows us to live without total dependence on a car- not only for ourselves, but also our parents should they come live with us someday.

The Highland Village area of St. Paul has a great collection of shopping and resources- from Punch Pizza (best pizza in MN, besides Kevin’s),Lunds grocery store, Brueggers, Half Price Books, Patina, library, parks and the Mississippi River and more. We are lucky to be only 1 block from some of these shops and walking distance to most of these places is only ¼ mile. Very walkable indeed.

So I when I came across the website Walk Score, I was interested in how our neighborhood stacked up. The system is based on Google information for the following resources and the distance from your address:
Grocery
Restaurants
Coffee shops
Bars
Movie theaters
Schools
Parks
Libraries
Bookstores
Fitness
Drug stores
Hardware stores
Clothing & music

Apparently, they don’t know about our neighborhood bars, because WalkScore lists the closest bar at about 1.4 miles, instead of the ¼ mile it really is to Chatterbox and Tiffany’s from our house. This, it seems is the only reason our neighborhood scores 75 out of 100. (rated “very walkable”) Apparently bars are weighted quite heavily in the equation.

One other problem with the rating is that it lists a home office for a brick sales person as a hardware store. I wish we had a hardware store within walking distance- but that is the one thing that is really not close. Maybe when the Ford plant is redeveloped we can push for a hardware store as one of the retail components. Until then, we’ll be driving the Prius to Ace.

Some Real Wood and Some Faux Wood

2008-06-11T12:38:00.000-07:00

As our project progresses, there have been some moments where we go “Umm. This is not exactly what we planned on….” and then we proceed to lose sleep over it, worry and eventually make peace with ourselves. And some other moments where we say “this looks great!” and we're excited about the project again. It’s all part of the highs and lows of a home project, where we are so emotionally invested. One of those “great” items was the Ipe wood sunshades. We love how the Ipe wood added richness to the façade and was a counterpoint to the gray metal siding.

We liked the look of the Ipe so much that we changed the design to add more wood to the front entry. We originally planned on finishing off the soffit of the balcony and the entry overhang in a metal or hardi-board flat panel. As we looked at the details, we decided it would add more warm and simplify the material language by finishing off both the soffit and entry canopy in Ipe.
The canopy soffit has yet to be finished. The upper soffit (thru the tree leaves) is complete with ipe.

Ipe (pronounced E-pay) is a durable teaklike tropical hardwood sold as Ironwood or Pau Lope (pow LOW-pay). Known for its hardness , ipe is more durable than redwood and cedar. It has a life expectancy of 40 years or more, and is resistant to insects and decay. Ipe is sustainably harvested in Brazil and it has a gorgeous reddish-brown color. To maintain the rich walnut color, it will have to be resealed every 1-2 years. If not sealed it will become silver-gray, which still looks good, but just doesn’t have the richness of the sealed wood.

Ipe is not cheap. It can be even higher or similar in cost to redwood- but it is durable, so if you consider the life-cycle costs, that makes it easier to swallow.

For the front entry stair, back stair and balcony flooring, we chose a composite material called Trex. Trex is made of approximately 50% reclaimed wood and 50% reclaimed and recycled plastic. You know those pesky plastic shopping bags you get from the grocery store? Many of them end up in Trex, along with sawdust, wood chips and shavings. The end product has some great advantages over wood:
- never needs sanding, painting or staining
- doesn’t splinter
- the plastic shields it from moisture and insect damage
- the wood protects it from UV damage
- Trex offers a 25 year warranty
- doesn’t use those nasty chemicals that go into pressure treated wood. (note: before getting seduced by the inexpensive pressure-treated pine lumber option, make sure you thoroughly research the chemicals used. There is a lot of literature out there that may cause you to reconsider this as a viable option).

We choose a reddish color for the Trex that would be compatible with the Ipe. There is will be a bench under the Profilit glass window in the future.

Again, the composite product is not the cheapest solution- but for maintenance, durability and sustainability, it’s a great choice. Although, we could have used the Ipe for the decking as well, we wanted to demonstrate different materials and test how they will be to maintain over the years. Check back with us in couple of years!

Steady Progress

2008-06-05T19:48:00.000-07:00

We are about 3 weeks and counting until we move into the new house. Here's a few things that happened this week...

This might just be my favorite room in the house.... Our master bath Richlite countertops were installed, along with the lav and toilet. The base cabinet is a natural finish douglas fir veneer. Left to finish in this room- lav faucet, shower faucet, cabinet pulls and mirrors.

The above picture is the shower at the shared bathroom. The far wall is an orange glass tile wall, but it looks a bit redder than we anticipated.

The recycled glass terrazzo countertop was installed, along with the Nexus vessel sink and faucet set.

Here is a close-up of the glass terrazzo from Natural Built Home. There is a combination of grey, clear, orange and amber recycled glass.

Here's the first of 5 sliding doors to be installed. We used Leatherneck Flat Track hardware.

The master bedroom floors are finished. We used 4x4 sheets of birch plywood, alternating the grain direction. We debated for quite awhile about which way to install this. The sheets can be biscuited together and act as a floating floor or secured down with screws or nails. We opted for nailing it down and filling in the nail holes with putty. The sheets were then finished with a sealer.

Lights, Camera, Action!

2008-06-01T16:40:00.000-07:00

This week, the lights went in at the house. Although we've been very impressed with how daylit the house is, the lights really make it feel like home. Now, we are actually able to work there at night (both a good and bad thing)! Kevin took advantage of this on Saturday and spent the afternoon into the evening working on laying the FLOR carpet tiles in the kids' bedrooms.

Mazzy designed the floor pattern for her bedroom and also helped lay the tile. We used 4 colors of FLOR Toy Poodle.

View looking towards her closet.

There is one wall with an accent color. Mazzy is finally out of the pink, purple and frilly stage. Her favorite color is blue.

Declan help with his bedroom installation also. In the boys bedroom, we used the Straight & Narrow line from FLOR. It's not nearly as soft as the Toy Poodle, but this is a case where they had the right colors.

There is an orange accent wall in the boys bedroom.

Cormac checks out the drawers in the newly lit kitchen. The glass shades at the island are on backorder, so we'll be looking at bare bulbs for awhile.

IKEA Bust

2008-05-31T10:15:00.000-07:00

You can tell our age and priorities in life by the fact that the most exciting part of our Friday night plans was a trip to IKEA. Yep, that’s where we’re at these days.

Our plan is to lay for FLOR carpeting and install closet organizers in both kids bedrooms this weekend. I had spent several nights this week debating and determining the appropriate closet system for both kids’ bedrooms. IKEA has several options, including the Antonius system and Stolmen. We had settled on Antonius primarily based on cost. It’s a simple system compromised of metal wall standards, brackets, hanging rods, shelves and other various accessories. With help from the IKEA website and a pamphlet on the Antonius system parts, I had designed each closet and had a spreadsheet listing all the parts needed. Armed with my spreadsheet, we had a family IKEA outing. Much to my dismay, the wall standards were on backorder. Without these standards, you have nothing- they are the backbone for the system. When I inquired about how long it might be before they receive them, the answer was 8-10 weeks! Holy cow! I’m amazed that IKEA could not have the major component for their most popular shelving system. I guess when you can get a system like this for such a cheap price, you expect everything to always go your way. It’s the whole beggers-can’t-be-choosers thing.

We’re likely going to have to switch to the Stolmen system. This is a much more expensive system that is compromised of floor-to-ceiling poles that have attachments to add on shelving, cabinets, clothes rods and other accessories. To compare the cost to Antonius, the Antonius wall standards are $4 each. The Stolmen poles are $30. It may be a more sturdy system, which is good- but we’ll have to just do with less accessories and shelves for now.
We headed out of IKEA frustrated and empty-handed. It was raining and the sun was shining and we saw the most amazing rainbow we’d ever seen. It was a brilliant, full rainbow with a slight double rainbow that was ending in front of the Mall of America. The kids were enthusiastic about heading over to find the pot of gold. But with our luck, I’m sure someone else found it first

House #s, Stair Carpet and Roller Shades

2008-05-25T10:52:00.000-07:00

It seems like every night, I’m researching and debating another choice for the house. It’s been fun, but also a lot of work. This week I made a few decisions on a variety of items.

House Numbers
A small, but important item is house numbers. It's part of that whole first impression thing. We saw a couple of nice options on sale on the Design Within Reach website, including the orange numbers above. For $9.99, these options seemed like a great idea. However,we need a number 2 and it must be the most popular number, as there were no more 2s for any of the sale options. The Neutra letters shown below are great, but at 75 bucks a pop, they are not as within our reach as we’d like.

I then went back to my original idea of ordering them thru WestOn Letters. They have a great number of options of fonts, sizes and finishes. I decided to go with 5” aluminum letters in the Roffe font. I love the clean simple lines- no serifs, no fuss. The price for 4 letters- $136.

Stair Carpet.
If we were designing this house from scratch, we would have likely had an open stair, or made the stair a design element. Unfortunately, the existing stair has bearing walls on either side, so we were left with few options to change it. We added a light, but beyond that, I was a little worried about the blandness of this stair. The existing stair runner needs to be replaced, so I went in search of a great runner- something that could add some life to the stair. What I found is not really a carpet runner, but individual stair rugs for each tread. Liza Phillips Design carries these Alto Step designs that have some great colors and modern designs. They are high quality rugs- either hand-knotted in Nepal, or a tufted option from New Zealand wool. There were a few unique sets on sale and I wanted this one called “Spring Bubbles”. The only issue I was concerned about was the existing treads on our house might be a bit to narrow. When I called Liza, she was great to work with, she measured the rugs for me and was willing to put together some other options on how to make them work. I was really excited to find this option and placed my order.

Window Treatments
Architects hate to think about window treatments. We lived in our current house for years before we bit the bullet and decided we needed a bit more privacy at times. We used 2” wood blinds and have been fairly happy with them. For the new house, we’ll likely go thru the same deliberations and delays. However, for Kerstin’s room the large window wall on the south side will have to be addressed sooner rather than later. During the summer, the maple tree in the front of the house will provide some privacy, but we’ll be cutting this back, as it seems to be taking over the front corner of the house.

The shades in this room will need to look good from not only the inside, but the outside of the house. I first got a tip from my friend, Fiona from Scotland on these new type of panels. They work like a vertical blind, but are in larger panels. I love the look of these, but was concerned about the stacking space blocking the window. I wanted to be able to have the window treatment disappear and be able to be totally open.

Because the windows are wall to wall, the only way to have a wide-open window would be to have shade mounted on top. I found these great patterned roller shades from The Shade Store. They come in a variety of patterns, from bold to subtle. I am still debating the pattern- whether it should be bold like this:

Which looks like this when putting multiple shades together:

or more subtle like this:

In Search of the Money Tree

2008-05-20T20:37:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we received notice of our “Economic Stimulus Refund” from the good ol’ government. Now, we’re usually of the opinion that when we get a windfall, however small, that we should save it. However, this time, with the timing of our house project, it’s going to be spent within minutes of receiving it. In fact, we’ve probably already spent it. That is the scariest part of doing this kind of house project- you can spend money at rocket speed.

So far, we’ve been very good about sticking to our budget. We’ve made some tough choices-when we’ve added something, we’ve cut back on something else. But as we get towards the end of the project, we’re finding there is nothing else to cut back on and plenty to add. This week has been particularly hard (and it’s only Tuesday). We feel thoroughly beat up. We’ve had several issues with subcontractors/suppliers that have proven customer service isn’t what it used to be and will likely end up costing us additional money. We hope to work these things out, but we’re not happy about it. More on that later…..

One of the things that seemingly always gets left to the end of the project (after the budget is gone) is the landscape. This project is no different! Today, we met with our landscape architect, Matthew Fair Jones and his colleague, John Workman. Matthew is an old friend and colleague from our HGA days and now works on his own. He is in tune with our ideas about sustainability and has come up with an initial conceptual plan. One of the major challenges of our site is to deal with drainage and water. In this part of Highland Park, the slope is all towards the river and one yards typically drains into the next. Add a very active sump pump, clay soil and an alley sloping into your back yard and you can have a sloppy, soupy mess. One of the strategies we have to deal with the water is by using “rain gardens”. A rain garden is a planted depression that is designed to absorb rain water. It is planted with native plantings that are specifically chosen to tolerate either very wet or dry conditions. The rain garden is sized to absorb the excess water and allow water to soak into the ground in lieu of draining into your neighbor’s yard.

We will need to do quite a bit of re-grading in our yard in order to get positive drainage away from the house. The rule of the thumb is to get 6” of vertical drop in a distance 10’ from the house. In some areas, we’re going to have to remove quite a bit of earth in order to achieve this slope. We’re also planning on using some underground drainage piping to prevent the creation of a swamp in our backyard.

One thing we’ve manage to ignore up to this point is the existing fence. It’s a June and Ward Cleaver white picket fence that was a perfect match for the existing Cape Cod, but is not such a great fit for the new Haus. While we were thinking it would be fine to keep for awhile, the more we look at it, the less we think we can live with it. We wish one of the existing trees in the yard was a money tree that would enable us to replace the fence with one that fits better with our house. Unfortunately, we haven’t found any money trees yet, but perhaps the earthwork will uncover a buried pot of gold?

Exterior Siding Progress and Sunshades

2008-05-18T20:14:00.000-07:00

The work on the exterior siding is progressing nicely this week. It's rewarding to see it all coming together and so far, we're happy with the results. During the design, we debated long and hard on the exterior material palette. Our criteria was pretty simple:
- We knew that we wanted durable materials that would be as low maintenance as possible.
- We wanted a clean and simple esthetic.
- We were concerned about proportions and minimizing height.

Early on, we decided to go with a corrugated metal panel and some sort of cement board. Cement board can come in a variety of forms such as flat panels (4’x8’ sheets and larger), shingle style and lap siding in various thicknesses. HardieBoard is one common manufacturer of cement board products.

There are many sustainable advantages to cement board siding. Cement board is composed of natural materials- wood pulp, cement, sand and water. There are multiple manufacturing plants throughout the country, so it will likely be produced regionally. It’s a very durable material with a 50-year warranty. Cement board resists damage from insects and flame spread. You can get the product in a pre-finished baked-on paint (limited colors) that has a 15-year warranty or you can paint it. Paint holds on to cement board much better than wood, so it means very little maintenance.

Like most products, along with all the good points, there are a few drawbacks. Cement board is very dense and quite hard to cut. Manufacturers will have cutting recommendations, as the dust produced by cutting cement board contains silica. All silica-containing products can produce small, respirable size particles when cut, drilled, ground, sanded, or otherwise abraded. Inhaling excessive quantities of respirable silca dust can cause silicosis (lung scarring) and other serious lung-related diseases. In other words, you need to make sure you’re protecting your lungs when cutting this stuff.

Although we liked the look of the flat cement board panels, with open joints or with reveals, we were a little nervous about this system in that it is so dependent on properly detailing the rainscreen system. Although it can look great, the panels don’t always lie flat and if not properly detailed or installed, it would not hold up over the years. Durability was a major requirement for us, so we decided to go with the cement board lap siding. This is a simple, proven system and requires no special detailing. Visually, it will provide us with the horizontal lines we wanted and recalls the vernacular style of the existing house.

We also debated quite some time over whether to put the metal siding at the base and the lap siding above or vise versa. In addition to the esthetics, we decided to put the lap siding at the base, so when we need to paint it in the future, it will be easy. (Important criteria for Kevin, who has had a bad ladder experience that resulted in a back brace for 6 months a few years back!).

We are using Hardie Panel at accent areas and between some of the windows on the upper floor. This helps to visually make the window openings appear larger, to unify the openings in the façade and to break up the scale of the metal. The HardieBoard lap siding is used in two manners – although they will each look the same. On the new wall construction where we have spray foam insulation and high r-values, the lap siding is nailed up tight against the drainage plane and sheathing (Tyvek Drain Wrap) with flashing and caulking as needed. Just like any other well built wall. However, on the old walls where we used a blown in cellulose insulation, we used a building wrap/drainage plane with a reflective surface (Tyvek thermawrap). We then used a “dri-side” clip system that provides a 3/8” air space between the back of the siding and the drainage plane – this enables the siding to behave like a rain screen and the air space traps warmth –thereby improving the walls’ overall R-value. This additional R-value helps the existing walls with less insulating value behave more like the new walls with higher r-values and so balances out the performance of all the walls, making the house more consistent. This way, negative air pressure and temperature draw is not significantly pulled to the lower performing walls hastening temperature loss which helps improve energy efficiency as a result. That means lower utility bills. That means more beer and pizza for us. And tell me, who wouldn’t rather spend their money on beer and pizza instead of heating and cooling their home?

We're excited to see the IPE sunshades. They are gorgeous and add warmth to the exterior.

Top Five Reason for Daily Site Visits

2008-05-14T20:04:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I stopped by the house on the way home from work to look at a few things that we have to make decisions on. At this point in the project (about 1 month from completion), there is so much daily progress being made, it’s really a good idea to stop by often.

Here’s my Top 5 Reasons for Daily Site Visits:

5. To pick up the mail.
Despite the fact we’ve haven’t lived in this house, we still get a lot of junk mail.

4. Its fun to see the construction progress made during the day.
At this point, the project is cooking and a lot of progress is being made every day.
Kitchen cabinets, solar hot water panels, hardwood floors at office refinished, ceramic tile on site & ready to start and trim has been painted. See below for progress photos.

3. To catch errors before it’s too late.
The wrong refrigerator was delivered. No worries on this one, as there is still plenty of time to order the correct fridge and have it delivered prior to move-in.

2. To talk to the neighbors.
We continue to be amazed at how nice our neighbors are to us, despite the fact we have caused quite a bit of disruption to the quiet street. We understand that there is quite a bit of curiosity as to what the inside of the house looks like, so we’ll be sure to have an open house when we get settled in.

1. To prevent disasters (in my case yesterday, to stop the basement from flooding)
I heard a gushing from the basement when I entered the house yesterday, but thought it was just the very active sump pump. After a bit of time in the house, I decided to go down to the basement (which I rarely do on a visit) and found a watery mess. Someone had left a valve to the water heater open and had attached a hose into a very small bucket. It probably only took 20 seconds to fill the bucket, so the water was gushing out onto the floor. Luckily, there is a floor drain not too far away, so only a portion of the basement was wet. However, it could have been a much bigger mess, had I not stopped by.

Overall, we haven’t had too many disasters or major problems with the construction. We are lucky, we have a great contractor and excellent architects (oh yeh, that’s us!). The biggest issue was with the bad soils, which was no one’s fault. There were a few unexpected issues (existing bathroom plumbing and stair location causing us to lose a bedroom closet) - but overall, this project has gone pretty smoothly. Our schedule to move in mid-to late June has just gotten more real, as we have a signed offer on our existing house and need to be out in July. We’re crossing our fingers that the next month will go as smoothly……………..

See the solar hot water panels on the roof. They are pretty visible from the alley, but they are hard to spot from the front, street side of the house.

Here's the view of the solar panels from the roof. Notice the stack of Solar PV panels waiting to be installed just to the right. I can't wait for this roftop to start making energy. The white TPO reflective membrane helps reflect heat back away from the roof - helping to keep our house cooler in the summer.

The exterior sunshades at the south facing windows are being installed. These look great (stained ironwood), and help keep unwanted solar gain out of the house in the summer but let it in during the winter. They work, the kitchen was getting no direct sun after these were in place.

Some more progress on the kitchen cabinetry. Countertops were measured for and we had to make decision on the countertop details.

Hardware pulls were added to the cabinet faces. They are looking great- well aligned and flush. I love the self-closing drawer hardware. Kudos to Eastvold so far!

The fir floor in Kevin's office was sanded and finished with a clear sealer.

The profilit glass channels were added today along the "bridge" from the master bedroom to the master bath. This is the view from the kitchen. Grazie molto to W.L. Hall for this great looking product!

This is the view from the master bathroom looking towards the master bedroom. The inspectors are making one final check before approval.

Progress Photo Essay

2008-05-10T10:24:00.000-07:00

I realized that if I wait for the time to actually write a decent blog, it might not be for awhile. It's been a few days since we've updated and a lot of progress has happened this week.

So here is a summary of progress and photos.The grey metal panel siding at the upper level was completed. The lower portion will be white HardiBoard lap siding. Sunshades above the windows on the south side will be added soon. A lot of flooring work was completed this week. Above is the existing living room, which was sanded down and is waiting for that very dark stain.The hallway at the upper floor is looking good. This is oak flooring that was salvaged from some of the bedrooms and other places in the house.

The wood oak floor cleaned up very nicely. No dark stain at the upper floor, just clear sealer.

No more sand pit at the dining and living room! We have a concrete floor now. It instantly feels less like a construction zone, but the kids are disappointed the sand pit wasn't permanent.

Casework installation started this week. Eastvold Custom Woodworks was there all week working on the installation. Above is the vanity for the shared bathroom.

Here is a good view of the rosewood veneer that will be used below the bar counter.

Kitchen- The refrigerator will go in the casework tower to the left.

View from the dining room to the kitchen. There will be some open shelving at the end of the bar counter.

The casework tower on the right will be for the wall oven and microwave.

Bamboo, Cork and Some Really Dark Wood

2008-05-05T21:13:00.000-07:00

This weekend was the Living Green exposition at the State Fair grounds in St Paul. This annual event features over 200 exhibitors who offer a variety of services, products and ideas about improving environmental and social impacts of day-to-day life. There were 22,000 visitors in 2007 and I’m sure the 2008 numbers will beat that, based on the crowds waiting for it to open Saturday morning.

One thing that was very apparent from the exposition is all the great sustainable flooring options out there. In addition to FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) certified woods, there are some new engineered options out there that are quite interesting. Natural Built Home’s booth was right next to EcoDEEP’s and I was drawn to the various wood flooring samples. Wood from bushes, scrap wood and other typically-unusable wood is combined to create some very visually interesting and unique planks. They also carry a line called “Wood from the Hood” that is made from Elm trees in Minneapolis that had to be downed because of Dutch Elm Disease. Pretty darn clever.

Bamboo and cork continue to be popular flooring choices and are considered “rapidly-renewable materials”. Bamboo looks and functions similar to a hardwood floor, but bamboo is a grass and not a tree. A bamboo plant takes about 5-6 years to mature and after harvesting, it will regrow again and again. Bamboo flooring is commonly sold in two color tones: a light blond (bamboo’s natural color) and a darker hue, often described as “carbonized.” The darker color comes from heat-treating the bamboo, which actually caramelizes the sugars in the fiber. Teragren is a manufacturer I have used before. Although they are located in Bainbridge, Washington, they get their bamboo from China.
Another rapidly-renewable flooring option is cork. The bark from cork trees is harvested every 9-12 years, without any harm to the tree. Portugal is the largest producers of cork When we traveled in Portugal years ago, we were fascinated by the cork tree forests and how becoming a cork farmer would be a great gig. Imagine having to stop drinking vinho verde long enough once every decade in order to cut some bark off a tree. We currently have cork floors from Unicork in our kitchen and a plank cork product in our family room. Overall, we’ve been extremely happy with the Unicork product. Kevin laid it and finished it himself and it’s very easy to maintain. The best thing about this product is that our kitchen floor really never looks dirty. This can be a pro and con, as we probably don’t clean it nearly as often as we should. This cork naturally has a lot of texture, so if it is damaged or dinged, it’s not apparent. Another great advantage of cork is the cushioned surface it provides. This eliminates the need for a rug in the kitchen and it’s forgiving to dishes that may get dropped. We haven’t had any problems with the Unicork product denting or being damaged and it’s been installed for about 5 years. One caution is that floor imperfections may telegraph through if the cork pattern is too regular. The pattern we had selected is very patterned and it masks floor imperfections.

The floating cork plank floor in our family room has a thin layer of finished cork on top of a thicker cushion of cork. It’s a tongue and groove product with gaps at the room edges to allow for expansion. It does add insulation value to our slab on grade floor, which is the main reason we chose this product.. The one downside is that it can be damaged by heavy objects. We had a extremely heavy, ancient couch sitting on it for a couple of months and didn’t realize that a furniture pad had come off one of its skinny legs. It left a series of small dents that never really sprang back.

We were very tempted to go with cork in our new kitchen because of the great experience we’ve had with it in our current house. We did, however want to create a consistent flow from entry to hallway to kitchen- so we decided to go with a locally harvested FSC red oak floor.

Our flooring contractor (and neighbor), Greg of Chelsey Flooring was busy working on it this weekend. On Saturday, Greg was working on finishing the edge details and sanding the floor to an ultra-smooth finish. The adjoining existing wood up to the entry was also sanded. On Sunday, I stopped by the house and Greg and Tonya were panicking as they started to lay down the stain. We had approved quite a dark, rich coffee color sample. The stained wood was such a huge contrast with the existing floor that they weren’t sure we would like it. I did match what we had approved and was achieving the consistency in tone that we were after. Oak is not one of my favorite woods and I generally don’t care for the grain patterns. A dark stain is able to even out the grain patterns and creates a strong, solid base. I think it will be great when complete. It’s definitely making a bold statement!

A few notes about our wood floors - We salvaged much of the existing oak flooring upstairs and are re-using that in the hallway and guest room. More information about that in a future post. For the new wood in the kitchen we were able to obtain FSC certified red oak from one of our great local suppliers - Hovland Lumber in Mora, MN. Eric Hovland hand picked and milled the wood himself and it is of exceptional quality. Hovland Lumber is part of the Upper Minnesota Certified Forest Products Group - see Resources for link. The group has a lot of high quality woods unique to nothern Minnesota and manages their forests in a sustainable manner. Greg Fisher (our flooring guy) drove up to Mora on a Saturday to pick up the wood and get it inside the house so it could acclimate to the conditions of the house for a few days before he started installing and finishing.

May Day Update

2008-05-01T19:32:00.000-07:00

It’s May 1 and the house has been under construction for about 3 ½ months. In some ways, the time has gone very fast. In other ways, it seems like we’ve been burning the midnight oil on this project forever. The house is now barely recognizable as the 1940’s Cape Cod it started out as and it’s less than 2 months until this project will be complete.

Here’s a summary of our amazing rocket-fast schedule:
End of Oct 07: First saw house
Nov- Dec: Design and drawings
Jan: Began construction
Mid June: Expected completion
Total- 8 months*

*This kind of aggressive schedule is not recommended if you need more than 5 or 6 hours of sleep at night.
The metal roofing was installed today, along with the gray corrugated siding on the east side.

All the sheet rocking, taping, mudding, sanding and priming happened last week. This week the doors were hung, including this pocket door at the shared bathroom.

The locally sourced and milled FSC red oak flooring is being installed in the kitchen. The floor will have to be stained and sealed and made ready for kitchen cabinets to be installed next Tuesday.

We still have a sand pit in the dining/living room, but not for long. The under slab ductwork was installed yesterday. Rigid insulation, 6 mil polyurethane sheeting and the piping for in-floor heating will be installed tomorrow and then the concrete slab will be poured and polished next week.
The subfloor was installed in the kids' bedrooms and will be ready for the FLOR carpet installation. The wood trim was installed at the windows and base.

The downside of this aggressive schedule (and contractors that work at blazing speed) is that we did not detail the window trim. We were surprised to find it all installed on Tuesday. The contractors did a great quality job- but with the window stool and apron, it wasn't exactly the clean look we envisioned. In hind sight, we should have had them install trim at one window for approval first. We may have ended up with the same solution, as it does look similar to the existing trim. In the end, we can't lose too much sleep over this one as it will be painted out white to match the white walls. Que sera, sera.

First Impressions

2008-04-27T21:27:00.000-07:00

As the old saying goes, “you never have a second chance to make a first impression”. Up until now, we have been concentrating on the big picture- what the house looks like from the street, how it fits into the neighborhood, scale and proportion. But the small details can be equally as important on one’s first impression and deserve some attention as well. We’ve made a couple of choices on some of these smaller details including solar step lights, a mailbox and doorbell,

Solar Accent Lights
This Smart Solar product has a solar module in the center that charges the batteries. At dusk, the LED lights automatically come on and turn off at dawn, as long as the batteries are fully charged. I found these solar step lights at Amazon.com. They are about $25 each. I was impressed with the quality of the housing, which is stainless steel ring with glass top. The unit can be inserted into concrete, a wood deck or just placed at the edges of a sidewalk in mulch. I ordered 4 to start with, but I may order more now that I can see they are of good quality. We just have to decide if they will be mounted into our wood front entry deck, or will be alongside the sidewalk.

Mailbox
We have a partial height wall at the side of our front door that will serve as an edge to our entry stairs and as a place for the mailbox. This prominent location calls for something more than the $12.95 mailbox at the local hardware store. We also get quite a bit of mail because Kevin’s business mail is delivered to our home. We need to have an oversized box that looks good.

There are a number of places on the web that have links to well-designed, modern mailboxes. Apartment Therapy has their Top Ten Mailbox list with some great options. Chaisso http://www.chiasso.com/ has a number of inexpensive models and a search of mailboxes on Live Modern http://livemodern.com/ turns up a number of good options and resources.
We ended up selecting this Blomus model and ordering it from Amazon.com. It has a small window so that you can see when the mail has come and a matching newspaper slot can be added on the bottom. It costs a bit more than some of the other models we were looking at- but I think the quality will be very good and it’s a bit oversized to accommodate the extra mail. Blomus is a German company that specializes in stainless steel products that have a simple, modern design. A German mailbox for EcoDEEP haus makes perfect sense!

Door Bell
There are a number of well-designed modern options at Lumens.com http://www.lumens.com/lumens I picked the De-light Doorbell Button by Spore. This model has a LED light (I picked blue) and a couple of options for the surround (I picked polished aluminum). I was a bit disappointed when I received the doorbells, as the polished aluminum finish made the unit seem a bit cheap. In hindsight, I should have selected the matte finish. For the door bell chime, I went with this Cage Door Chime by Modern Doorbells also from Lumens.com. It has a 2-chime ring for the front door and 1-chime ring for the backdoor. Genius!

Flooring and FLOR

2008-04-26T22:01:00.001-07:00

Remodeling of an existing home means there is going to be some mixing and matching and patching. This certainly holds true for the flooring in our project. The majority of the house will have hard surface flooring. The main floor will be refinished hardwood flooring with existing oak hardwood used in the entry, pantry, and new FSC certified oak hardwood at the kitchen. The mudroom has existing maple floors and Kevin’s office has existing fir floors. The dining and living room will be new polished and sealed concrete.

The upper floor is a bit of a challenge, as the existing walls are all gone and none of the new spaces align well with the previous flooring outlines and uses. This meant that spaces like the bedrooms and corridor have only partial existing oak hardwood. We decided to consolidate the existing oak hardwood by salvaging it and using the hardwood flooring from the kids’ bedrooms to piece in and complete the flooring in the corridor. We were told it would be less expensive to just rip out all the wood and start over with new, than it would be to piece in existing wood. But we feel it’s important to reuse the wood from the existing floor, so we'll pay a little more to do so.
We decided to go with carpet in the 2 kid’s bedrooms, rather than hardwood or cork. The use of carpet is a hotly debated topic these days. There is the camp that says that carpet is a source of mold, dust mites, and other critters that are horrible for your health. The other side has evidence supported by the Carpet and Rug Institute (not exactly unbiased) that claim that carpet actually traps allergens that can be removed by vacuuming, thus increasing air quality. If someone in our family suffered from asthma, we might have a different opinion- but we don’t have a problem using a limited amount of carpet. Because we'd likely use area rugs in a hard-floored room anyway, we don’t think a fully carpeted room makes much difference when it comes to air quality.

FLOR is a modular carpet system made by Interface. The modular carpet system idea is certainly not new. As a child, I remember quite a few basements with carpet sample squares as the flooring in the rec rooms. FLOR carpet is that same concept, as it’s a do-it-yourself system that allows you to change and rearrange the tiles. I love the idea of being able to change out just one or 2 tiles if there is a stain, rather than recarpeting the whole room.

Interface is a very progressive carpet company that pledges to eliminate any negative impact they may have on the environment by 2020. They are leaders in industrial ecology, with the goal to be a restorative industry. They have continued to be very successful and are a great example of how a company can be sustainable and profitable at the same time.

FLOR comes in both residential and commericial grade. FLOR carpets for residential use come in a variety patterns, colors and prices. The tiles are 19.7” x 19.7” and range in price from about $7/tile to $25/tile. There are loads of styles from which to choose and I would highly suggest seeing actual samples before ordering, as the tiles range from soft/cushy to rather hard/scratchy. It’s impossible to tell from a picture in a catalog or on the web what exactly the carpet will feel like. The tiles have varying amounts of recycled content, wool, or corn- but all FLOR products meet the Carpet and Rug Institute’s (CRI) Green Label Plus standards for VOC (Volatile Organic Compound) emissions, are formaldehyde‐free and contain anti‐microbials that inhibit the growth of bacteria and mold.
This is Toy Poodle, color LaLa Lime. We will use this along with 3 other colors in Mazzy's bedroom. She is excited about designing the pattern.

FLOR is also completely recyclable. You can just call up Interface and they will arrange to pay for shipping costs to send the FLOR tiles back to them at the end of their useful life.

The FLOR website has a great tool to design your own floor or rug. You define the size and then you can place the color/style tile as you wish. After you have designed the floor, it will give you a breakdown of the types and price. Only negative thing is that there is no way to save your pattern.
We will use Straight & Narrow tiles in 3 colors in the boys' room. Declan says he likes everything I design, so he trusts me to figure out the pattern. I think he's trying to score a few points with me......

We ordered our FLOR tiles from Natural Built Home. They offer 10% off and we were able to make the deadline to get free shipping (another 13% savings). This even beat the 20% trade discount that we could have gotten by buying directly from FLOR (available to design professionals only). Stay tuned to see if this product can actually install as easily as they say!

Outgrowing the DIY Phase in Life

2008-04-21T20:36:00.000-07:00

We often get asked the question “Are you doing some of the construction work yourself? Fifteen years ago, the answer would have been “yes, of course!”. But somewhere between the 10 year attic project, living without doors on our closets for 7 years and a bathroom with only a toilet (no sink) for 2 years, we ran out of steam for do-it-yourself projects.

We've been enjoying our closet doors for a year now. I can't believe it took us 6 years.\

We also realized that these drawn-out projects that we attempted to complete on our own to save money, actually saved us very little at times. This could have been avoided by getting projects done in a timely fashion. For example- light fixtures we bought and didn’t install for 3 years were discontinued, so non functioning ballasts led to eventually having to purchase all new fixtures. Lessons learned the hard way.

A completed bathroom- just in time for selling the house.....

After 10 years of living in an 70% complete attic, we hired a contractor to finish it. Very well spent money in my opinion! Jeffrey Swainhart was the saviour for our attic. http://www.swainhart.com/

So this time around, we’re doing the drawings, selecting products and coordinating, but the bulk of the real work will be done by our contractor. We will take on only a few safe tasks, such as installing closet systems, some cabinetry, the FLOR carpet tiles, the green roof and likely some of the landscaping and fencing. Could we do more? Yes, probably, but managing time to do that on top of 60-80 hr work weeks and the busy schedules that come with young families make it less a reality than we would perhaps like. We will end up changing and adding or tweaking things over time, after we’ve had a chance to live in the space for a while and we’ll no doubt change our minds a few times about paint colors and the like. Hats off to those who put in sweat equity into their own projects, it’s very satisfying to do the work yourselves! For us, we will settle for the satisfaction of seeing our design completed by others! (Thank you, Michlitsch Brothers)

Rocking, Taping and Sanding

2008-04-17T21:38:00.000-07:00

. Looking up from the kitchen to the second floor "bridge".

This week and last has seen a dramatic change to the interior of our house. The gypsum board (aka sheetrock) has gone up and we now have defined rooms. Now that we are not able to see from space to space (at the upper floor) we are getting used to the final sizes of the rooms. Some of the bedrooms are quite small, but we’re reminding ourselves that that was intentional and kids don’t really need double beds anyway, right?

In Mazzy's bedroom, looking to her closet.
Gypsum board has been the industry standard for about 50 years. By 1955, an estimated 50 percent of new homes were built using gypsum wallboard; the other 50 percent with built with gypsum lath and plaster. Gypsum board, or drywall, is typically made with 100% recycled, unbleached paper facings that are bonded without adhesives onto a gypsum core. Though mined virgin gypsum is still widely used in gypsum board production, recycled and synthetic gypsum comprise an increasing portion of product manufacturing. Another potential issue with gypsum board is mold growth in conditions of high humidity and low air circulation.

There are some options to gypsum board are out there. Magnesium oxide board “MgO board” does not have the paper face, thus will not promote mold growth. It’s extremely hard, but can’t be easily scored and snapped like gypsum board. One MgO board is called “Dragonboard”. http://www.dragonboard.com/ They make the dramatic claim that “No energy is consumed in manufacturing DRAGONBOARD.” That statement is simply untrue. Everything takes energy to produce. The manufacturing process takes place at room temperature which is great, but exactly how they can get by without consuming energy? There are lights on in the building, machinery involved in the extractions, manufacture and shipping. Energy is used.

Green E-board http://www.greeneboard.com/ is another MgO board that is marketed by Southern Cross Technologies in Florida. Don’t be fooled by the USGBC’s logo on the front of the web page however. The USGBC doesn’t approve or certify products. It's unclear where the product is made, but it doesn't appear to be local to us.

Most of the MgO board comes from overseas (mainly Asia) at this point. Which translates into significant embodied energy in its production (coal burning energy sources) and transportation and does not benefit the local economy. If this were to change, with more plants available across the country, MgO board might become a more viable green alternative. As for now, it’s hard to compete with gypsum board that has manufacturing plants regionally.

We are using dens gold gypsum board (no paper - fiberglass faced) at all bathroom and potentially damp areas. (We’re using cement board behind tiled areas such as the tub and shower.) Everywhere else, we are using 5/8” FX (fire resistive) gypsum board on both walls and ceilings. Standard thickness is ½” (and sometimes even 3/8”) in residential construction but we went thicker for better stability. And yes, the extra 1/8” thickness means we’re using a bit more material resources than typical, but the gypsum board we’ve got from USG contains a minimum of 25-45% recycled content and it comes from a few miles away.

In kitchen with island kneewall to the left. Looking towards door to basement.

South and west windows in the kitchen.

Living rooms window on left with view to backyard. Opening to mudroom/back entry on right.

Finding Ways to Spend Money

2008-04-14T00:38:00.000-07:00

Here is an ode to the vagaries of remodeling. Re-using existing structures is generally better for the environment than building something new (embodied energy). It also generally allows one to save money, as foundations, walls and finishes are already installed. However, working within an existing house can often be difficult - finding ways to snake piping, wiring, ductwork and the likes through walls, joists and other elements isn't always easy and often leads to solutions that wouldn't be required in new construction. Sometimes those solutions are brilliantly achieved, graceful things. Sometimes they're not. And sometimes, they cost more than you'd like - especially when they are unexpected. It's the opposite of finding a jam jar full of money hidden in the wall. (You know, that just doesn't happen often enough, does it?)

First of all, let me say this to all the Code Officials and Building Inspectors out there in the world. "I love you. I love you all". I do. I promise. The work you do is important and keeps the rest of us from doing stupid things to our houses - making sure that they are safe and well constructed. The construction industry would be a far sight poorer without your presence and conscientious work.

We had several inspections last week - one for general framing and construction, one for electrical, one for plumbing and one for insulation. As a result of our framing inspection, we need to replace the glass in two windows (one new, one existing) with tempered glass. Tempered glass is stronger than regular glass. The existing window is too close to the new door and so would be better if it were tempered glass - to keep it from shattering when our kids turn teenagers and slam the door on their way out of the house after an argument about the clothes they're wearing (the code isn't quite that descriptive). The new window needing replacing is a 2'x2' window about four and a half feet above the floor. It also happens to be above a bathtub. This is a bathtub only and not a shower. The code requires that any glazing less than 60" above the bottom of a tub be tempered glass. The idea (and it makes sense) is that it is possible that while one is having the odd shower, one might slip on the soap and careen into the glass, shattering it with one's elbow - necessitating a visit to the emergency room (37 stitches) in the middle of a blizzard - the tub filling up with ice and snow, the sub-zero temps funneling through the now open window causing the pipes to burst because one is in the emergency room rather than fixing the window. Later, you fall off the ladder fixing the same window - requiring another trip to the emergency room and a back brace. Sounds bad.

We didn't originally have a tub in that particular bathroom so there was no issue when we placed the window order. We later added the bathtub (no shower) and forgot to consider the code regarding glazing above tubs. Our fault. The fact that the tub is a tub and the window will be above our heads as we won't be standing while bathing does not matter. Tempered it is. It's our mistake and we'll pay the few hundred dollars it will take to order new sashes with tempered glass.

A view of some plumbing done right with the window in question in the background.
You can see the framing for the tub if you look hard enough.

Less enjoyable are the changes we needed to make to most of the existing plumbing in the house. The previous plumbing in the recently remodeled downstairs bath and the sump pump - did not meet code. (The 1 1/2" vent pipe wasn't a 2" vent pipe, the 3" soil stack wasn't a 4" pipe and the sump pump can't be connected to the waste lines inside the house) So, our plumber had to re-plumb the bath supply, shower pressure balancing valve, venting and connections to the sump pump. The existing water heater (installed just a few years ago) vents into an unlined chimney (apparently, venting hot combustion air from a water heater into a chimney is more of a fire hazard than burning wood in the fireplace) and so we need to either power vent to the exterior or replace it with a sealed combustion unit. We're looking at pricing now, and determining how best to coordinate this with our solar hot water storage tank, but we are considerably less happy spending this money - correcting deficiencies in the existing work. We'd rather spend it elsewhere, like furniture, window treatment or planting a money tree. Oh well.

Lighting Selections

2008-04-10T20:38:00.000-07:00

It is the 2nd week in April and winter is STILL rearing its ugly head. We were at the house meeting a reporter from the Pioneer Press when the winds started blowing and snow started falling. Now (11 pm), we're getting a weird combination of thunder, lightning, snow and sleet. Old Man Winter is like some tortured soul that won't be put to rest without a fight.

So, the word is getting out on EcoDEEP Haus. There was an article in the local newspaper, the Highland Villager a few weeks back. The green resource website JetsonGreen, http://www.jetsongreen.com/ recently featured the project and the St. Paul Pioneer Press will have an article in their April 21 issue. Also, look for us in Architecture MN magazine May issue.

As we were at the house on this gray, blizzardy April day (something is just wrong about the word blizzard and April in the same sentence), we noticed how light-filled this house is, even in these adverse conditions. Even when we’ve been at the house in the early evening, we’ve been amazed by how well-lit the spaces are. There is no lighting or power in place yet but soon they will begin fixture installation.

Picking out lighting fixtures can be a daunting task. The lighting budget can very quickly get out of control, as something like a dining room fixture can cost anywhere from $150 to thousands and more. (And it turns out we usually prefer the most expensive ones! Go figure.) We started out with a very modest lighting budget, so we’re doing the best we can with what we have. But it’s very difficult to judge quality from a small picture viewed on the web!

In addition to the budget constraint, the MN Green Star program we are following has some tough guidelines on lighting. They give credit for use of CFLs, halogens and LEDs. They also give points for “no recessed lights in insulated ceilings”. This requirement made lighting selections difficult for some spaces on the upper floor of the house- namely the bathrooms and hallways where you’d usually see recessed can fixtures.

We found this fixture, which is a halogen fixture by WAC, and used it in a variety of ways. It’s adjustable, comes in several colors of shades and can either be wall or ceiling mounted. We used it above the kitchen sink/counter along the exterior wall, in the upper floor corridor ceiling, on the walls of the “hole” (opening between 2nd and 1st floor) and at the bridge walkway ceiling. We were also going to use it above the bathtub- but Mr. Code Official said no to that. http://www.waclighting.com/USA/products/?categoryid=218&productid=950

This fixture will be used in the bathroom ceilings as general illumination. There’s a fine line between too fussy and clean/modern fixtures. We’re hoping this one will pass muster when we see it in real life.

http://www.formplusfunction.com/12333.htm

This is what we selected for the bathroom vanities. It’s a halogen display light with an adjustable arm. We have one of these in our attic space and love the clean, industrial look of it. The bathroom vanity light might be the most difficult light fixture to select. Most of the options available are way too fussy and ornamental for us.
http://www.techlighting.com/default.asp?page=products&subpage=systemselect&sysid=7

This simple George Kovacs ceiling fixture will be used for all the bedroom ceilings. In this case (and many other fixtures in the house), we order them with standard lamping, but will use CFLs.
http://www.allmodernlighting.com/George-Kovacs-by-Minka-P852-044-gkv1442.html

This is another George Kovacs fixture for use over the dining room table. This one will set you back about $200.
http://www.allmodernlighting.com/asp/print_detail.asp?sku=gkv1368

This is the pendant by Vado for the Kitchen countertop. Simple and won’t compete with out Apple Martini Countertop!
http://www.lightinguniverse.com/products/view.aspx?sku=771845&linkLoc=

This fixture is for the exterior overhead soffits at the front and back door. It’s a standard fixture that's been around for years.

You can get it at a number of places. Here is one:

http://www.lampclick.com/lighting/item/9103-20296/13/Access_Lighting_Nauticus_Contemporary_Outdoor_Bulkhead_Wall_Sconce.html

Insulation - A Home's Long Underwear

2008-04-06T18:25:00.001-07:00

Just as the weather is turning slightly warmer - we're able to insulate our house. This is a big deal -as strange as it may sound, it is one of the most important aspects of the house. A well insulated and well sealed house is far more energy efficient and comfortable than homes that are poorly insulated. Insulation remains a critically important component of any green building—whether residential or commercial. No matter the type of insulation used, if it is used appropriately, its environmental benefits over a building’s life will almost certainly far outweigh any negatives—and dwarf any environmental differences among the alternative materials.

Our insulation contractor - Homeco Insulation - was on site last week preparing for and then installing the insulation in the walls, roof decks, rim joists and attic spaces.

We've used a few different approaches to insulation in this house. The common denominator being spray foam insulation. This insulation type is an expanding insulation that seals gaps, cracks and joints within the cavity it's filling, hardens into a strong shell and acts as its own vapor barrier. It carries a true R Value of R6 per inch and so we're able to achieve a wall system of R28 (closer to R30 if we count sheathing and air films, etc) in our walls. The walls will actually perform at that level too - unlike many fiberglass insulation installs that perform well below their label of R19. In order to combat the effect of potential thermal bridging through the studs -we used the dri-side clip system and air space behind our siding (R2). Another way to do this would be to install rigid insulation sheathing (or to have used structural insulated panels) but our builder wasn't comfortable with that approach - given that the hardie plank siding is heavy and he worried about screw length and weight and the ravages of time.

In the new walls (and accessible existing walls), we used a closed cell spray foam insulation at all wall cavities and rim joists (read more about the differing types of insulation down below) and in the existing walls we cored from the exterior, filled the cavities with dense pack cellulose and used a bio-based expanding foam to plug the holes.

A view of the insulation in the walls and roof deck. Note the yellow post it note I've left the insulators where I think the fill is a bit too shallow. Just like proofreading a document, you need to walk back through an installation after it's complete to make sure everything is filled just so because the foam expands during installation and takes a bit of time to cure.

On the roof decks and ceiling - we had originally planned to use 8" of spray foam at the bottom of the roof deck to get an R50+ rating (the higher the R value the better). However, we needed to trim a little $$ from our budget and so worked with Homeco Insulators to come up with a sensible alternative without compromising quality or performance. Because our roof trusses are 14" deep, and have no light fixtures in our insulated ceilings, we had plenty of space to fill. We used 2" of spray foam against the roof deck and then did a "net and blow" installation of 12" of dense fiberglass fill (virgin wool - Insulsafe SP) with a poly sheet vapor barrier.There is also varying thicknesses of rigid insulation on top of the roof deck (and below the fully adhered roof membrane) to help direct water flow to the roof drains. The combination of these systems produces an R value of R50+ in the roof at less cost. At soffit areas and overhangs, we sprayed 10" of spray foam for and R60 rating. Working with our insulators from start to finish was great - they offered the best solutions for the challenges of this house and did a top-notch job. The 3rd party energy modeler and testing agent for the Greenstar and Energy Star program gave the installation an "A".

A look at the "net and blow" fiberglass installation below the roof decks. Note how all seams and penetrations (electrical boxes and bathroom fans) are taped and sealed. The fiberglass will be pushed up against the spray foam above by the gypboard at the ceilings.

In the attic space below the existing gable roof, we added vents, air chutes and enough of the same fiberglass insulation used elsewhere to achieve R50+.

On our foundation walls and under the new slabs, we used several inches of rigid, high r value XPS insulation to keep heat from migrating to the earth through our floors. This helps keep our feet warmer in the winter.

Not bored yet? Here are some brief summary notes about some of the different types of insulation available today. [Source - Environmental Building Newsletter V14.1]

To really understand insulation materials kind and gentle reader, you have to understand the basics of heat flow. As you will no doubt remember from your high school physics class, there are three primary mechanisms of heat flow: conduction, convection, and radiation. Conduction is the movement of heat from direct contact, usually through solid matter—the handle of a hot frying pan conducting its heat to your hand, for example—but thermal conduction also occurs with liquids and gases (think boiling water or oil splattering on your hands at the stovetop).
Convection is the transfer of heat in liquids and gases by the movement of those molecules from one place to another. As air is warmed, it expands, becomes more buoyant, and rises—a process called natural convection. Forced convection is the distribution of warm air by use of a fan or air handler.
Finally, radiation is the transfer of heat from one body to another via the propagation of electromagnetic waves. Heat moves from warmth to cold. When you sit in front of a fireplace and look into the fire, your face is warmed by the radiant transfer of energy from that heat source to your face. That radiant energy is not affected by air currents - you can still get sunburned on the beach even when there is a breeze. Most insulation materials function by slowing the conductive flow of heat. Materials with low thermal conductivity more effectively block heat flow than materials with high thermal conductivity. The R-value of an insulation material measures its resistance to heat flow.

Note that air leakage is a type of convection. Air leakage allows conditioned air to leak out of a building and unconditioned air to leak in—bypassing the insulated portions of the envelope. In older homes air leakage around windows, through poorly fitting doors, and across poorly detailed walls can sometimes account for over half of the total wintertime heat loss! Air leakage can also occur through an insulation material, which can reduce that material’s effective R-value. Loose-fill fiberglass, for example, usually allows more airflow than does cellulose insulation.

Fiberglass: The most prevalent type of insulation in North America, fiberglass is produced from silica sand with various additives, including boron. Most fiberglass also contains a fairly high percentage of recycled glass. Scratchy and almost never installed correctly, fiberglass batt insulation for wall cavities is pretty low on my list of acceptable insulation products. The dense pack fiberglass fill is much better- especially when cavities can be sealed in another way- either by caulking or spray foaming.

Cellulose: Offering better R Values than fiberglass and without the scratchiness, Cellulose insulation is made primarily from post-consumer recycled newspaper, with up to 20% ammonium sulfate and/or borate flame retardants.

Mineral Wool: For cavity-fill and attic applications, rock wool and slag wool are similar to fiberglass in look and feel, though the density is greater and the sound control better. The fire resistance of mineral wool is also significantly better than that of fiberglass, because of both the higher density and the significantly higher temperatures required for melting. Mineral wool can also come in the form of rigid board insulation - especially useful for below grade installations.

Cotton Insulation. Cotton insulation is batt insulation made from pre-consumer recycled denim scrap. The cotton or cotton-polyester fibers are treated with a nonhalogenated flame retardant. The big plus here is that it is of high recycled content and doesn't scratch your lungs eyes or skin when installing it. It feels like your favorite old pair of jeans.

Spray Foam Insulation:

Closed-cell polyurethane - Closed-cell, high-density polyurethane is a very good performer owing to the low-conductivity gas in the cellular structure. It is used both for cavity installation and as an insulating roofing material, which is typically referred to as spray polyurethane foam or SPF. The closed-cell structure gives SPF structural properties. There should be no significant impact on R-value with the shift to non-ozone-depleting HFC-245fa blowing agent (ozone depletion potential = zero) , which is becoming the industry standard. Polyurethane also exhibits superb adhesive properties and good compressive strength.

Open-cell polyurethane. Open-cell polyurethane is most commonly installed into open cavities, though formulations are available for filling closed cavities from holes at the top. This is a nonstructural foam, though these materials seal very well, and their flexibility allows for some movement of the framing materials as shrinkage and expansion occur. These properties make them very effective insulation materials for older buildings. Some open cell polyurethanes are made from bio-based materials such as soy beans. Think of fluffy tofu.

Both closed-cell and open-cell polyurethane must be installed by trained professionals. Special care is required to ensure the safety of insulation installers working with these materials; other people should not be in the space while polyurethane insulation is being installed. Once cured, polyurethane insulation is considered by most IAQ experts to be quite inert. Closed cell offers better R values than does open cell.

Okay?

Metal Walls

2008-04-06T08:05:00.000-07:00

This has been another big week for work at the HAUS. All trades completed their rough-ins, had their inspections and insulation was installed in the wall and roof cavities. Look for another post mid-week on Insulation and Plumbing Inspections. There are some good stories to tell there.

The house is beginning to look more like itself with each passing week. We're excited to see the metal wall panel installation beginning to occur around the West and North sides of the house. The crew is doing a nice job keeping panels in alignment, fasteners equally spaced and aligned and trim and drip caps at corners and windows water tight and sealed. The metal you see installed is a 7/8" corrugated metal panel from Metal Sales (local to Minnesota but with mills and manufacturing sites elsewhere in the U.S.). This metal panel is typically used in agricultural structures (pole barns, sheds. etc.) but we like the texture and the price! The panel comes in 34" wide sheets cut to length, is fastened through the ribs with pan head fasteners and self-sealing neoprene washers and comes complete with foam closures at top and bottom along with trim and drip edges to manage water and keep out insects and the like. It also has a 45 year warranty on the paint finish (charcoal gray). Some colors meet Energy Star and Cool Roof Council Rating criteria which were not a strong consideration in this application as we are using it on the walls.

View of the Northwest corner of the house. We plan on replacing the garage in the foreground in a couple of years.

A look at the ribbing, corner trim, metal drip edge and fastener spacing.

A good shot of how our windows are detailed. We used a narrowline brickmold at all windows. The drip cap and sill at top and bottom give a nice long shadow line across the elevation and keeps the opening simple and clean. The light gray material on either side of the window is Hardie Panel - a durable fiber cement board product we're using selectively around the house.
It will be painted some bright color - yet to be determined. I'm sure we'll change our minds several times before deciding.

The first bit of our composite wood decking found it's way onto the site late this week. We're using this at both entry stairs and the balcony off the guest room. We like composite wood decking because of its durability, low maintenance, color fastness and high recycled content (made from recycled wood fiber and plastic that would otherwise end up in landfills). There are many composite woods available on the market today - but we chose Trex (brasilia cayenne) - it's rich color will be a nice match for the Ipe/Ironwood exterior sunshades/trellises we're using above the windows on the south side of the house. Trex won't splinter or crack in the hot summers and cold winters, doesn't need sanding, staining or sealing and can be cut and installed just like wood.

A view of the decking at our small balcony.

Family Outing to the Job Site

2008-03-30T20:30:00.000-07:00

A lot of progress happened this week at the house. All the building trades were there doing their rough-ins and working toward an inspection on Monday. We were surprised to find Nate, one of the plumbers there on both Saturday and Sunday trying to get all of his work done. This is the reason we are not trying to GC this project ourselves.....Our GC, Leon Michlitsch, has the amazing ability to get all the subs to meet the schedule.
It was a great spring day in the Twin Cities, so our family took a little outing to the house to verify all the rough-ins and finalize blocking locations. Our friends, the Kosirs stopped in for a tour as well.

The house is now all wrapped in a futuristic-looking silvery Tyveck thermawrap. This drainwrap protects the sheathing from water penetration but is vapor permeable so it allows water vapor from the inside of the house escape. This is a good thing. We don't want mold growing behind out wallboard or exterior siding. It also acts as an extra thermal barrier. We've combined with the "dri-side" clip system so that there is an air space between the back of our siding and the membrane - allowing for better venting and slightly better thermal performance - giving us an extra R2 value on the exterior wall. Combined with the spray foam insulation - we'll have R30 walls and an R50 roof system. The window installation is complete. The sunshades (to be installed just above the windows on the front/south side) are fabricated and ready to be sealed and installed next week. Metal siding should start going up next week also.

The Profilit glass channel window (salvaged pieces from WL Hall's boneyard) by the entry was installed, along with a side wall where the entry stair will be. The gas meter below the window will be moved soon, so the front stair can be installed.

View towards the kitchen. Opening to 2nd floor is on the left side.

Kevin checks out the rough ins for the future flat screen tv (which he hates the idea of), while Cormac is amazed by the extra large sandbox. This area will have a finished concrete floor. It's hard to protect a concrete floor during construction, so they will wait to pour this floor until after sheetrocking has been done.

Kevin and Mazzy check all the outlets in her bedroom. Mazzy is impressed with the 5 outlets in her room.

Declan and Cormac check out the major windows in their room.

The backyard is a major mudpit these days.

Notice the lovely extremely large electrical meter to the right of the large windows. The overhead wires will be put underground in April, but the meter box is there to stay. URRRGGH! We're already planning ways to camouflage this baby.......

Call this the week of "Electrically-created design challenges."

Refrigerator Dilemnas

2008-03-29T11:53:00.001-07:00

When we first started planning our house and thinking about the kitchen, we thought we’d get a built-in refrigerator. Not that we want the fridge to disappear (with wood panels to match casework), but I don’t like to see the exposed sides and it looks better when integrated with the cabinetry. I like the grills on the top or bottom and it can give the kitchen a commercial feel, which is what I prefer. A built-in fridge like this 42” model from Dacor pictured above will set you back a mere $6800. I also drooled over these wine columns from Bosch.Once we added up all the items in our budget, we quickly came to the realization we needed to do some serious cutting and the built-in refrigerator didn't seem so important after all. The next path we went down was to look for a “counter-depth “ refrigerator model. It makes a lot of sense. How often do the leftovers get trapped in the back of the fridge, only to be discovered weeks later? The counter-depth refrigerator allows it to be flush with the cabinetry and makes the space within the fridge more functional. Sounds like a winner? Almost. When we looked at the prices, we discovered that the counter-depth models were at least $250 more than than the same version in a full-depth model. The typical depth model has about 25 cubic feet, whereas the counter depth has just less than 21 cubic feet. So, for less cubic square footage, you have to spend more. This does not sit right with me and the bargain-hunting gene I inherited from my mother.. So, we narrowed the search to full depth models. The French door style appeal to us because we will get extra width in both the freezer and fridge, versus the side-by-side models. Not all manufacturers make the French door style, so that automatically limited our choices. We started with the LG model pictured above, as the price was reasonable (at $1400 or so), but we were told by several salespeople that because the LGs are so popular, people are having a difficult time getting parts and having them serviced. I like the LG styling, but this repair/maintenance issue bothered me, so I spent considerable time looking for an alternative.

Appliance Research
A website that I used often when researching appliances is http://www.ajmadison.com/.
Although I hadn’t planned on purchasing appliances thru this company, it has a very comprehensive search of most all brands of appliances. You can narrow down the options and make sure it's within your price range on this site.

There is, however, nothing like seeing appliances in real life. That is somewhat hard to do these days, as there are so many different models and even the largest showrooms don’t have all models. In the Twin Cities, there is Warner Stellian, Guyer’s, and ALL Inc. Fortunately, ALL Inc. http://www.allinc.com/ is located right by Harriet Island in St. Paul and only about .5 miles from our house. They have a pretty large showroom, with all ranges of appliances from the large walk-in wine vault to the standard refrigerators. We got prices from all 3 companies and ALL had the best pricing.

While Kevin focused on energy usse and Energy Star ratings of the appliances, the thing that I really got hung up was the handle design. Many people order all the same brand of appliances just to get the matching handles. Most of our appliances are Bosch, but Bosch has exterior ice/water in all their doors, so we needed to look elsewhere. I wanted a more commercial feeling handle and was just not finding it in a French door model. GE refrigerators are well-rated but the curved handle design drives me crazy. I also considered KitchenAid and Whirlpool- but they were just not quite right. All the options we were looking for were EnergyStar rated, with little or no difference in energy use, so that wasn't a differentiator.

We ended up with this Jenn-Air model with Pro-Style handles JFD2589KE. It costs a bit more (at about $1900)- but is still considerably less than the built-in models we were looking for. Our friends, the Fredrickson's have the same model and love it, so that is a good sign. We got the look in the handles we want and because of the location of the fridge by the pantry, we are able to recess the wall behind the fridge, so it will be flush with the cabinets. The appliances are now finalized and the order was placed this week. Whew! Another decision done!.

A Rant about Electrical Codes

2008-03-26T20:09:00.000-07:00

First of all, here is a disclaimer. I am no electrical engineer. The following comments are based on what the electrician is telling us is code. I haven’t personally memorized the entire code, so I probably shouldn’t be complaining. But I will anyway. I am used to dealing with life safety/building codes. They can often be maddening, but for the most part, you can understand that the intent is to save peoples lives in case of a fire or other emergency.

Electrical codes are also for public safety, but we’ve come across a few items that don’t seem to be about safety, but rather about making sure electricians have plenty of work!
After meeting with the electrician and going over all the outlets and switches, we’ve had to add a number of outlets to meet code. For a household that is trying to reduce energy use and limit outlets in the exterior walls, this is a bit frustrating. We’ll get over it someday, but meanwhile, here’s my complaint list:

#1. We laid out the outlets at the kitchen countertops to avoid having outlets under the windows. There is minimal space between the countertop backsplash and the window sill, so we kept the outlets to the sides of the windows. According to “code”, we need to have outlets on either side of the sink, so we now have 4 outlets under the windows where we didn't want them and don't need them. Exactly what would I be plugging in so close to the sink and why is that safe?

#2: Code requires a whole lot of outlets along counters within a kitchen- every 4’. Just how many small appliances do they think we have? We have a toaster and a food processer- but that’s about it. The microwave is built-in. Kevin doesn’t believe in using a electric hand mixer and I can forget about ever getting a breadmaker because of his feelings on that... Why would we need so many outlets? I know the intent is to avoid extension cords, but this is excessive I think.

#3: We have a wall in the dining room that will be for side board storage cabinets. We didn’t want outlets behind the storage, so we planned on putting one above the top of the cabinet. This apparently doesn’t meet code, they need to be at least every 10’ and high outlets don’t count. Why not?

#4: Closet lighting. Exposed bulbs and pull chain fixtures are not allowed. So in a couple of existing closets in our house, the electrician had to remove the fixtures. These small closets don’t really warrant a switched fixture, so we’re just going to have to have dark closets. I understand this is about fire safety, but I wonder how many fires have started from light bulbs in closets?

#5: Bathroom lighting. Only recessed light fixtures can be installed above a bath tub. Our bathtub is separate from the shower, so there is really no way that water from the tub could reach the light fixture. We are trying to avoid recessed light fixtures where the ceiling is insulated (MN GreenStar item), so we have not choice but to eliminate the fixtures over the bathtub. Why is a recessed fixture over the tub safe, while a surface-mounted fixture isn't?

Okay, that’s enough ranting for now. Please feel free to enlighten me!

Here is a link to some of the residential electrical requirements that might be helpful to those planning a project.
http://www.electricity.state.mn.us/Ele_insp/Insp_bul/H_owner/rei_inspection_checklist.pdf
Quote from the office today: "Photoshop was invented because of electrical wires."

Countertop Selections

2008-03-23T21:28:00.000-07:00

In the last 5 years, we have seen a tremendous growth in the development and availability green products, including many types of new sustainable countertop materials. Because of all the options available and our goal to demonstrate new materials in EcoDEEP Haus, we will have 3 different types of countertops. For our kitchen, we have selected CaesarStone- see previous post Coloring our World. For the bathrooms, we wanted to select equally durable surfaces that showcase innovative sustainable strategies.

One of the increasingly popular countertop choices are those made of recycled paper. PaperStone is one of the more well-known brands. http://paperstoneproducts.com/
PaperStone products are made from post-consumer waste, recycled paper and proprietary, petroleum-free, phenolic resins. This product is so durable and stable, that it can be used as an exterior rain-screen material. It comes in a variety of great color and a couple of options for recycled content. For us, the down-side of PaperStone are that it’s manufactured in the state of Washington and must be shipped here. It comes in sheets 60” x 144”, which is much larger than our bathroom vanities, so it’s not too practical for small projects.

Recycled paper counters can be worked with regular wordworking tools.

Another more local option is Shetka Stone. http://www.shetkastone.com/ It is made in LeCenter MN. There are less color options, but there is this funky shredded money option. Talk about a conversation-starter! I’m not sure what kind of message is sent by having countertops made of shredded money?

Our cabinetry makers, Eastvold Custom, introduced the idea of going with a Richlite laminate. Richlite is also a recycled paper product and has been around for decades in such uses as skate board park surfaces. http://www.richlite.com/
We are going to use a black ¼” surface laminated to a high density substrate for our master bathroom. The substrate and core material at this countertop and all our cabinetry is no environmental slouch either - as we are using the "Sky Blend" family of products - SCS and EPP certified and free of formaldehyde among other little nasties.

For the shared bathroom, we are splurging a bit on a recycled glass terrazzo countertop (at $75/square foot). Natural Built Home, http://www.naturalbuilthome.com/products/counter_tops_7/
carries many green countertop materials, including PaperStone and two types of recycled glass countertops. We are going to go with the locally produced, Element Surfaces recycled glass terrazzo countertops. http://www.elementsurfaces.com/
In addition to using recycled glass aggregates in our castings, the resins are free of volatile organic compounds, and off-gas no fumes or chemicals during or after curing. We are able to totally customize this countertop by selecting the glass chip color, the size and percentage of each. This sample was created for us based on a mix of gray, clear, orange and amber glass in a gray matrix. It’s pretty close, but for the final, we will tweak the sizing and percentages a bit. I think it will look great with the gray floor tile and orange glass tile.

Rough-Ins are GO!

2008-03-21T13:49:00.000-07:00

Looking from living space towards kitchen

This week was an important week. Today was an important day, and next week will see five more of the same. This week saw us get the house fully enclosed and secure so that the balance of the demolition could occur and make the house ready to start roughing in all electrical, ventilation, plumbing and solar work. Today we met with all the various trades and walked through the house with the plans and made sure things could be done the way we intended. Old houses can be tricky, and we've have had to make a few adjustments, but for the most part, we're right on track. The plumbers, electrician, HVAC and solar guys and gals all need to coordinate their work and pathways and needs with each other so they can work fast and furiously next week as Leon the builder wants to get his final framing inspection completed.

It can be a little chaotic with 4 or 5 trades combing through the house, running up and down the stairs and asking lots of questions as they try to find they best and simplest way to get their wires, pipes, conduits, raceways, boxes, grilles, ductwork and equipment installed in a way that be functional and attractive. Lots of issues come up that need to be resolved. "If we do this, then... But the code says we need...Usually we do it this way but you want it done this way instead and so we need to..." In the end, somehow it always works out.

Matt Eastvold, the cabinet maker, was also here this week, taking measurements so they know how their cabinets will fit, determining if we need extra blocking here or there, or where outlets and conduit might need to pass through and behind their work.

I've spent the better part of the last two days working through this coordination effort and it has been time consuming - keeping me away from my real job and serving other clients' needs. But I'm comforted by the fact that the time spent coordinating all of this work now will pay for itself later with a finely tuned house. Changes can be kept to a minimum. Things shouldn't need to get ripped out and reinstalled or have to be moved to allow something else to get by. This will be good.

In dining area, looking towards living (to the left) and mud room (straight ahead). There was a closet in the mud room that we removed to get this connection to the new space.
Here I'm standing in the kitchen. The living space has the corner window looking towards our picturesque backyard (more of a mud pit with a pile of brick pavers right now). The dining room has grown (in our minds) and now seems like it will be finely sized. The grey steel column holds up the existing corner of the house.

Windows Are In

2008-03-16T18:58:00.001-07:00

After a bit of delay, the Inline fiberglass windows were almost all installed on Friday. The front door has also been relocated. We went with white windows to match the existing windows. The existing windows were replaced relatively recently, so we decided to keep them. It will be interesting to see how the new windows measure against the existing, as far as heat loss.

Mazzy and Cormac are hanging out in Kerstin's bedroom. I love the great window wall and balcony! As much as we hate to think about window treatments, we just might have to have something, otherwise our house might be a very popular tourist attraction.

This is the corner window at the living room. Because the windows are installed from the exterior, this space is only accessible now to those who can squeeze through a crack about 10" wide. (Thus, this photo was taken by Mazzy) I imagine that Michlitsch Brothers will be removing the corner of the existing house on Monday to open up this space to the existing house spaces. They were waiting for more enclosure on the new spaces before exposing all the existing spaces to this great MN weather.

View towards kitchen windows from new dining room. The wall the left is the existing wall that will be removed. The back left corner is the 10" gap that Mazzy fit through.

Okay - I have to add a bit more information to this post to make it more than a newsflash.

If you read one of our earlier blogposts about window selection, you know that we spent quite a bit of time researching window options, manufacturers and installers. After we selected Inline Fiberglass, our work continued. We spent time working with the glazing gurus at Inline to select the right type of glass and low-e coatings for each of the windows - depending on orientation, function, amount of shading and desired performance characteristics. In general, Low-E coatings come in 2 types, hard coat and soft coat. They each do different things, or rather, the same thing differently, relative to improving energy performance of the windows. On the North facing glass we are not concerned about solar heat gain but rather are concerned about heat loss. So we have two soft coat low-e coatings one of which is positioned to reflect heat back into the interior of the house. On the East and South facing windows, we are trying to use the windows for some passive solar heat gain collection in the winter- and the windows are well protected/shaded in the summer, so we are using hard coat low-e coatings (2 coats on the east and 1 on the south). On the west facing windows, we are using 2 soft coat low-e coatings (but differently than on the North) in order to reflect heat away from to glass as it is unprotected and the sun angle is generally very low in the evenings. This all means that we will have excellent U Values - in the .17 to .21 range for the entire assembly, not just center of glass - depending on orientation and if they are fixed or operable. This will dramatically improve the windows' performance - especially in tough Minnesota winters. They would have done so already - just with standard coatings available, but working with Inline to spectrally select the glazing and low-e coatings helped to squeeze all the energy savings we can possibly get out of the windows. This is a no-brainer. We're paying for the windows anyway, we don't have to pay extra for a hard coat vs a soft coat, so we might as well design the glass to work as well as it can - helping us to be as energy efficient as possible. You should all try that too.

Flat Roof, Green Roof, Metal Roof, Woof Woof!

2008-03-13T22:32:00.000-07:00

Well folks - at long last, our roof is on! We were able to get it installed just before the snow fell last week and so now our house is nearly fully enclosed.
Here's a little information on our roof system. In keeping with our modern aesthetic, we elected to use a flat roof. Many people are afraid of flat roofs in climates with lots of snow or heavy precipitation - but there's really no reason to be. Look at all the commercial buildings out there that have - guess what - flat roofs. You just don't see them on houses very often.

There are a number of reasons why flat roofs make sense.

First of all, the roof isn't actually flat. The top chords of our trusses slope slightly (1/4" per foot) to ensure proper drainage away from the center of the roof area and is directed to the roof drains and downspouts with some tapered roof insulation and "crickets" - built up areas of the roof to direct water flow. Leaky roofs are usually due to poor installation rather than poor design.

Flat roofs are usually better insulated than pitched or gabled roofs. This leads to a reduction in the heating and cooling needs of the house.

Flat roofs also usually last longer - and so have a lower embodied energy that their traditional gabled counterparts. They also are less likely to be damaged in a hailstorm.

Our white membrane roof during installation on a cold day.

We've elected to use a fully adhered TPO white reflective membrane from Firestone (Ultraply TPO 60 mil). It features a very high solar reflectance index - which means it is reflecting heat away from the house and that will lower our cooling needs in the summer. (The ultraply product comes with an Energy Star rating - and so we'll get a nice little tax rebate as well) Shouldn't we want our rooftop to absorb heat in the winter? Not really, because since our house is going to be very well insulated (14" of spray foam and fiberglass) it wouldn't have as much of an impact in the winter. The white membrane also will reflect light back up onto the solar panels - slightly improving their performance.

We've designed the roof to carry the weight of a green vegetated roof system - even when the soil and plant materials is fully saturated with water. We are still in the process of selecting the green roof manufacturer but we can tell you that it will be an interlocking grid and tray system that can go right over the top of our membrane - no issues. The system will be pre-planted with native plant species appropriate to our microclimate and site exposure. We expect to have about 4" of soil depth and grow wildflowers, grasses and sedums in our trays. We're looking forward to how this roof system will help absorb and manage stormwater, suck up CO2 from atmosphere., sequester carbon, provide habitat for butterflies, improve air quality, further reduce the temperature of the roof, improve acoustics and insulation value and in general be a pretty darn cool thing.

This is how our green roof and solar panels should look when complete!

A small area of rooftop on the existing house will remain as a gable roof - rather than using asphalt shingles here, we've decided to use a standing seam metal (steel) roof on this area of the house. The paint finish on the metal roof is also energy star rated and comes with a pretty darn good warranty. 45 and 50 year warranties are pretty typical for metal roofs and very many last quite a bit longer than that. By the time our roofs need to be replaced, I hope to be well in my cups. Happiness is never having to reshingle your house.

A Little Riff on Wood

2008-03-08T07:12:00.000-08:00

A lot of people ask me - "Hey Kevin, what do you know about wood? " I smile a knowing smile and nod my head slightly. "Not enough" I say. But here are some interesting things to know about the wood that we've used on the framing and structure of our house.

Now, a lot of folks feel that too much wood is used in the construction industry. And that's true, generally. Wood shrinks, swells, twists, pops, absorbs moisture, is a food source for insects, is flammable and isn't always the best choice for a building material. Wood has the benefit of sequestering carbon, is renewable, readily available (in the Midwest), pretty forgiving and when used thoughtfully and appropriately, a fine material to use in construction. We considered (and if we were located in the South we'd probably use) metal studs. We also considered using Structural Insulated Panels and Insulated Concrete Forms, but each of those systems proved to be not quite right for our remodeling. So, we went back to good old wood. It's simple. Everyone understands it.

We've taken great care to reduce the amount of lumber used in the construction of our house by the following actions:

Use of engineered wood products (trusses, beams, sheathing) to take the place of dimensional lumber wherever possible. This reduces the amount of virgin material required as the products can be made from reclaimed scrap and smaller pieces of wood.

Alignment of Trusses and Wall studs. (This aligns structural loading so that post sizes and walls needn't be oversized to distribute loads - meaning less material is used)

Non-load bearing walls have studs spaced at 24" on center instead of 16" on center, and the elimination of headers at openings in all non-load bearing walls. (Again, this means less material is used)

We've also committed to using FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) certified and SmartWood wood products wherever possible on the project. All framing lumber, sheathing and decking on the house is certified wood product. The exception to this rule are the trusses (couldn't get the trusses with an FSC chain of custody #) and some of the roof decking (our supplier, Certified Wood Products - tragically ran out of FSC plywood decking and we had to buy the regular stuff as we were a few pieces short.).

It's important for us to use FSC and SmartWood products because the wood and forests it grows in is sustainably managed and harvested. The carpenters liked working with it because it was of very high quality, straight, true and dense. It cut and nailed and screwed just the same as normal wood because it IS normal wood - but better. I like it because it's environmentally responsible and it costs the same as the usual stuff you might otherwise buy. We're fortunate here in the Midwest because over 50% of the FSC Certified Forests are located in the Upper Midwest - Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan. So, that means that the wood products are local and (usually) readily available. http://www.truenorthwoods.com/,

Recon Wood

2008-03-07T20:47:00.000-08:00

This is been one hard, cruel winter. The temperature has averaged 2.3 degrees below normal for an average temperature of 17.3 degrees according to Sven from KARE-11. This has not been the ideal winter for a construction project. We are about 1 week behind schedule because of the frigid weather, which is not too alarming for us considering the fact we haven’t even gotten our current home ready to put on the market yet. (We are about 3 weeks behind that schedule).

The new fiberglass windows are enroute from Canada and should arrive next week. Once they put the windows in, they can open up the existing corner of the house, without exposing everything to the elements. Until then, they have started to wrap our house with Tyvek, making it look windowless.

Meanwhile, we’ve been working with Eastvold Custom Woodworks on the kitchen and bathroom cabinets. One of the choices we’ve been deliberating is the wood finish for the casework. Matt Eastvold introduced us to “recon” veneer. Reconstituted veneer is man made veneer which uses real wood fiber, such as rotary sliced Italian Poplar, and embosses the wood with grain, color and texture to simulate a wide variety of species.. Brookside Veneers is one of the companies that offers “recon” veneer. http://www.veneers.com/

So, in addition to the traditional choices of oak, maple and mahogany, we can pick from somewhat exotic species as Sapele, Makore and Bubinga. Once again, what used to be a fairly simple choice has become one of infinite choices! We can also sleep better at night knowing that we have not contributed to the clear cutting of rainforests.

We like the linear quality of quarter sawn woods. The term quarter sawn describes how the veneer is cut from the tree. The wild grain oak that is commonly seen in inexpensive cabinets is usually rotary sawn. Quartered or rift cuts are more expensive, but depending on the wood species, will produces a straighter grain pattern.

For the kitchen cabinets, we are looking at a quartered South American Rosewood (recon veneer). We like the deep, rich color and the variation between lighter and darker grains. Although strongly striped grains such as Zebrawood or Ebony have been the latest fashion trend in wood, we want a slightly calmer wood because we’re combining a number of colors and materials in the kitchen already.

We fell in love with vertical grained, clear Douglas Fir when we saw the Disney Concert Hall. This softwood is used for the organ and all the interior wood cladding in the concert hall and it’s absolutely gorgeous, both visually and acoustically. What better place to use this beautiful wood than in the “most important room in the house”- the bathrooms. We will use the douglas fir veneer at both of the bathroom vanities. The lighter wood will add a warm touch to the cooler grey and white tiles we have selected.

Building Bedrooms

2008-03-02T20:39:00.000-08:00

This week saw major progress to the upper floor, the bedrooms, in our house.Working on renovating an existing house is sure to bring some surprises and changes as construction progresses. Our first change came this week, as we realized the existing stair was about 1 foot further south than what we had drawn. We had taken pretty thorough measurements of the house and drawn the existing plans in autocad, but we were bound to be off a bit here and there.

The downside of this change is that our extra bedroom (to be used by our aupair Kerstin) now has no closet. The actual stair location left only 18” to access the space for the closet. Now, she’s pretty skinny, but 18” just doesn’t cut it for closet access. So, we are foregoing the closet in that room and going to buy an Ikea wardrobe. (The boys are coming out way ahead in this deal, as they now have a huge closet.)

With all the great Ikea wardrobes available, it’s a wonder that people are still building closets for bedrooms at all. Earlier plans for our house (when we were looking at a entirely new house on an empty lot) had moveable wardrobes planned for all bedrooms except the master. Some would say that this is an issue, as closet-less rooms cannot be considered bedrooms. This is a commonly-held assumption, but in my research it is not necessarily true. The building code (at least in MN) doesn’t require a closet for bedrooms. It might be an appraiser requirement, which may lower our bedroom count- but this is an issue I’m still trying to get to the bottom of.

The existing house had a bedroom in the basement with an egress window and closet. But with concrete floors and walls, we will be using this as a storage room, not a bedroom. The main floor has a bedroom which Kevin will be using for EcoDEEP studio. Then we have 4 new bedrooms on the upper floor- (shared one for the boys, one for Mazzy and one for aupair Kerstin). Thus, technically, our house would have 6 bedrooms. This might seem a bit excessive, but we have a history of family members (or almost family) coming to live with us for extended periods of time.This 2nd floor window will have a great view of the green roof.

One of our goals is to make sure this house is adaptable to our living situation in the future. One of the future possibilities we wanted to make sure we could accommodate is if one of our parents would need to live with us. Thus, Kevin’s office/studio could be convertible to become bedroom/in-law apartment in the future. Because of this, we needed to find a relatively flat site and make sure there was a full bathroom on the ground floor. This self-imposed requirement frustrated us at times when we were looking in Highland Park (which is full of split-levels and tuck-under garages) – but we’re happy that we stuck to our guns on that issue.

View from the front. The closet-less bedroom is on the front left. It might not have a closet, but it does have a HUGE window and balcony!

View from the back alley.

Down the Drain

2008-02-28T21:03:00.000-08:00

In Minnesota, the land of 10,000 lakes, we don’t often talk about limited water supply, but other regions aren’t so lucky. When I was in Atlanta in November, everyone was talking about the drought and there was an actual count down in number of days until the water supply ran out. Other desert cities such as Las Vegas and Phoenix are facing a major water crisis as their population grows and they scramble to find water. It can't all come from the Colorado River forever. The fight over water rights is predicted to be as big or bigger than current fights over oil in the future, as we continue to build cities in deserts. The problem is that the people with most oil and economic power will likely win the war over water. Stay Tuned.

Even though water is relatively inexpensive and plentiful now, it is still our goal to reduce our water use in our new home. There are several resources we are using that provide water reduction strategies. The MN GreenStar program http://www.mngreenstar.org/ lists a number of water reduction strategies that we are following and the EPA’s WaterSense program has created a label for water efficient fixtures.
http://www.epa.gov/watersense/

In my experience researching plumbing fixtures the last couple of months, it seems to be relatively easy to find water efficient toilets these days, but much more difficult to find faucets that are low-flow - at least for residential applications. There are plenty commercial fixtrues available that meet the requirements. I spent hours researching and trying to find low flow fixtures that would meet our esthetic goals with little or no luck. Although there are products available, I was trying to select compatible or matching faucets, shower heads and control valves for two different bathrooms. I had almost given up on the low-flow aspect until Kevin drew his line in the sand and demanded that we do better. I decided to stay with the fixtures we had selected for esthetic reasons and research switching the aerators. I finally e-mailed the technical support for both Grohe and Toto to request low-flow aerators. In both the case of Toto and Grohe, they were able to supply a 1.5 GPM low flow aerator for the faucet, no problem. (Most standard fixtures meet a 2.2 GPM flow rate). Neither Toto or Grohe advertised or had information on their websites about their low flow aerator options, which surprised me. My guess is that there is currently not the demand for this option, but this will be changing in the future. We will likely purchase and use the 1.5 gpm aerators for the kitchen sink, but will inevitably change out the aerators to a .5 gpm aerator in the bathroom lavatories. We'll leave the tub alone, as lwering th flow rate simply increases the length of time it will take to fill the tub for a bath.

Grohe Concetto faucet and Toto Nexus faucet

The biggest water hog and last fixture to get a water efficiency makeover is the showerhead. In fact, the current trend is new-fangled features that actually increase water use. Performance showering” is a tempting trend, which includes multiple shower heads, rain-shower heads, pulsating and variable sprays- but the downside is the isignificantly increased water use (including longer time spent in the shower, I’m sure!) Since Kevin believes in the 2 minute shower, this is not the direction we will pursue.

Finding low-flow shower heads is even more difficult than the faucets. The WaterSense program does not have shower heads labeled yet, but is intending to develop a specification for one. So expect some changes in this are in the next couple of years. Until then, we are going to add the low-flow aerator by Delta to our new showerheads. We're able to purchase these low flow aerators at Natural Built Home in Minneapolis for the price of a couple of pizzas. http://www.naturalbuilthome.com/products/water_saving_fixtures_139/

Phoenix Rising!

2008-02-24T19:09:00.000-08:00

Exterior walls going up on Friday morning.

Okay, maybe our project isn’t as dramatic as a supernatural creature arising from the ashes, but we’ve finally gotten to the point of making positive progress on the project, rather than demolition and we’re kinda excited about it!

The framing on the upper floor began this week, so the exterior walls on the upper floor are nearly complete. The temperature finally rose above freezing toward the end of the week. We hope, for our contractor’s sake, that the next week will bring warmer weather as well.

Picture from Saturday morning. Nearly all the exterior walls are up.

View from the back yard.

As I was at the house this weekend, I was asked by a neighbor if we were going to triple the size of the house. I wonder if they are looking out their windows wondering if they will be getting a McMansion on the block? The term “McMansion” is commonly used in the Linden Hills neighborhood of Minneapolis, where gynormous houses are sprouting up on small lots, overshadowing their neighbors and leaving little open yard space.

It’s important for us to be a good neighbor, so to ease the neighbor’s fears, we tried to meet many of them and let them know about the project before we began. We also have taken a lot of care to minimize the footprint and volume of the house. For starters, the width of the lot is 100’ wide, so even with the addition, there is still plenty of breathing room in the yard and between neighbors.

Here’s the numbers:
- The existing house was 1676 SF plus 635 SF in the basement.
- After project completion, it will be 3006 SF (plus an additional 625 SF in basement)
- 835 SF of the original house is not being altered.

The 3006 SF will have 4 bedrooms, 2.75 bathrooms and a studio/office, which could be a 5th bedroom.

Inside the addition, this is the view from the kitchen- dining is on the left and large corner windows in the living room.

Measuring the Forest and the Trees. Or, How Green is Our Valley?

2008-02-20T21:50:00.000-08:00

As you no doubt know by now, it's important to us that this project have as little impact on the environment as it can and yet still be within the realm of achievement for the average family - who may not be as eco-geeky as we are but are interested in doing as much as they can. It's pretty easy to make claims about environmental stewardship and responsibility and quite another to carry them out. How do we measure our success? How do we quantify our energy efficiency and environmental performance?

First, this is important to us so we spend a great deal of time researching materials and systems and choosing the ones that are both environmentally preferable and economically viable. We don't do the things we can't afford - but this doesn't mean taking the least expensive option on the table. Rather, we look at the environmental and economic balanced value of our choices. We're willing to pay more for high performance windows, insulation and equipment because we know that it will reduce our long term maintenance and energy costs. The savings we garner from lower utility bills will pay for those very slight upfront costs many times over during the life of the home. In order to determine this we need to look at the lifecycle of the material or system, its performance and cost. We've hired the Neighborhood Energy Connection (http://www.thenec.org/) to do an energy model. This helps determine what our expected energy load and performance will be - based on our design and materials and systems selection. We can play around with variables during the design and determine the approach with the best return for our investment, and the least environmental impact. At the end of construction - we'll test and commission the systems to make sure they perform up to expectations. It's a balancing act. Because we plan on owning this home for a long time, we have no problem accepting paybacks as long as 20 -30 years on some items. But most of the things we're doing offer paybacks of 6 years or less. We'll monitor our performance and energy bills on an ongoing basis to ensure top notch performance as well.

Our decisions are not driven by paybacks alone. Sometimes you just have to do what's right. For instance, there is no significant economic payback for using less water or for using no VOC paints, etc. But it's the right thing to do. Also, looking at the results of our energy model alone, tells us that we really only needed to use triple glazed windows on the north side of the house. But, the energy model software doesn't really account for all conditions equally, and experience tells us that triple glazed windows make sense and will provide better comfort - so, that's what we're doing.

We are also getting an objective 3rd party to validate our claims. We're in the pilot phase of a design guideline and rating system called the Minnesota Greenstar Program (http://www.mngreenstar.org/). There are a number of great guidelines out there - Green Home Guide (http://www.greenhomeguide.org/), ReGreen, Built Green, LEED for Homes (developed by the U.S. Green Building Council) and many more. We selected the Minnesota Greenstar Program for many reasons. First, it's a guideline that is designed to be applicable to the microclimate in our cold climate as it features regional strategies that make sense here in Minnesota - rather than Florida. Different climate, different needs. Unlike LEED and other guidleines, the Greenstar program is specific to remodeling projects and contains different Tiers and requirements based on the actual scope of the remodeling project. It's a point based system with specific prescriptive requirements and options within each of the tiers. You collect points based on the strategies implemented (proof of achievement required) and at the end of the day your project gets a rating of Bronze, Silver or Gold in ascending order. We're expecting to achieve a very high Gold rating. Even though some of the documentation is cumbersome (it has a 47 page checklist!) we like the fact that it requires a holistic approach to design and implementation. It addresses everything from plant species used on site, water and energy efficiency, waste reduction, material use, indoor air quality, lighting, and equipment selections.

The LEED guideline (and others) are organized in a similar fashion, but are geared more toward new construction (ReGreen being the exception). LEED can be used on remodels but effectively requires that you strip everything down to the studs and start over in order to achieve the energy ratings required. That's simply not feasible on most remodeling projects - and Greenstar accounts for the variety of remodeling projects one might undertake and partners that with strategies appropriate for our region and microclimate. Yippee!

In the end, we'll have a measurement of our "green" achievements that can withstand scrutiny and the burden of proof. We'll know if we diverted 71% of of construction and demolition debris from the landfill or 77%. We'll know how much energy we're supposed to use and how much we actually use. Our claims will have weight and merit and will be a good baseline against which other projects might measure themselves and hopefully surpass our achievements!

No Going Back Now

2008-02-13T18:57:00.000-08:00

We are definitely at the point of no return on this project. I guess we’ve been there awhile, but when I stopped by the house this morning and saw this- it really became absolutely clear to me! It also became clear just how crazy we are to be doing this project….. Craziness has always been seen as a virtue in our household -not in a Running-with-Scissors-kind-of-way, but more of a My-Name-is-Earl kind of crazy. (This could be debatable, but we do love that tv show...)
Yesterday, it seemed like a great idea to remove the upper floor of the house this week. Now, with 3-4 inches of snow on the way tonight, we’re not so sure. But we’ve learned a long time ago to not worry too much about things we have no control over and this might be one of those times. And better snow than rain, right?

The Atomic Waste folks were busy today hauling away multiple dumpsters. http://www.atomicwaste.com/ Not only do they have a super cool logo, but they also recycle.

Kitchen or Cucina?

2008-02-11T21:56:00.000-08:00

The centerpiece of our house is going to be the kitchen. Its footprint straddles between the old and new space and even though the existing house wall hasn’t been removed yet, you can start to get a sense of the new kitchen space- open to living and dining rooms with large windows facing south and west.

Anyone who knows our family, knows that Kevin is a fantastic cook. He is not afraid of trying new recipes (even on guests) and is bold enough to change recipes the first time he tries them. I, however, tend to trust the recipe and am therefore am more of a baker than a cook. When we entertain, we hang out in the kitchen because Kevin is the center of the performance- he is in his element. An island cooktop which would allow Kevin to be on stage while visiting with guests, was a major factor in the design of the kitchen.

We love the clean lines of this Valcucine kitchen.

We spent months determining who we would use for kitchen cabinetry. Because of our love for finely designed Italian objects, we seriously considered Valcucine http://www.valcucinena.com/, along with other Italian kitchens such as Berloni and Scavolini.The Valcucine showroom at International Market Square in Minneapolis has kitchens to lust over. They are meticulously detailed with clean, simple lines and tactile surfaces. Their Riciclantica line is based on dematerialization and recyclability. The doors are made with minimal materials and are built with non-toxic materials & finishes and are built for durability. All good things, but in the end, the strong euro/weak dollar made us look for a kitchen rather than a cucina.

Henrybuilt kitchen

Being a late evening internet researcher/shopper lead me to discover Henrybuilt cabinets. http://www.henrybuilt.com/ They have a clean, modern esthetic and I found their designers to be very helpful. I sent them my very rough first draft kitchen elevations and they responded with sketches and very thoughtful suggestions. At one point, I felt like they had spent more time thinking about our kitchen than I had. The only downside is that they are located in Seattle and New York- but not in the Midwest. Natural Built Home Eco-Cabinetry

We also seriously considered the cabinets from Natural Built Home http://www.naturalbuilthome.com/ They carry both Neil Kelly cabinetry and a locally produced line of environmentally-friendly cabinetry.

Eastvold Kitchen

Eastvold Custom Cabinetry http://www.eastvoldcustom.com/
was on our list because Kevin had met Matt Eastvold at the Living Green Expo last year. His cabinet shop is in Dennison MN and has an emphasis on custom, sustainable solutions. We like the idea of being able to create a custom design and work closely with the cabinet makers and designers. They understand modern kitchen design and are able to tailor the design to meet our needs and suggest alternative solutions to help us meet our budget. Our contractor, Michlitsch Brothers, has worked with Eastvold before, with glowing reviews. So, we have decided to go with the proven quantity and work with Eastvold. No worries, Italian will still be spoken in our kitchen in the form of Kevin’s homemade pasta.

Some Progress and Some Decisions

2008-02-08T20:29:00.000-08:00

This week seemed like a bit of a slow week at the job site. There were some winter flu bugs and the contractor was waiting for floor joists and for a stretch of days before taking apart too much of the existing house. There is a lot of demolition that will happen at the existing house- removing the roof, removing the upper floor walls and removing the corner at the addition. Once this happens, the new second floor framing will need to happen very quickly, so the existing house isn't left exposed to the elements for too long. This phase of the construction will start at the beginning of a week so that it can be mostly enclosed before the weekend. The demolition will be exciting, as the house will really start the transformation- but it will also be very scary to see the existing structure dismantled.

The spaces in the addition are now a little better defined as the sheathing is going up. There is no second floor yet, but with the joists now delivered, the 2nd floor framing should start next week. The steel column and beams are in to support the load of the existing house as the corner is removed.

Progress on the house means that Kevin and I have to get serious about finalizing decisions. Without deadlines, we tend to put off making decisions. We once debated the carpet selection for our attic project for about 2 years. It wasn't until we had a guest coming for the summer and absolutely needed the attic space, that we made the decision. Yes, we need deadlines. One of the decisions we had to make this week was exterior siding and colors. We had done studies on this before with the help of a Google Sketchup model. Sketchup is a great tool for quick studies on colors and materials.

We had started looking at muted colors with a few bold color accents.

Although we liked the understated quality of muted grays, we were concerned it would look a bit too industrial for our neighborhood. We thought about how this would look on a snowy day, and it just seemed to heavy.

The top is a corrugated metal siding from Metal Sales. http://www.metalsales.us.com/ The bottom is HardiBoard cement board siding. We wanted to make the house as low maintenance as possible, so we are going with a prefinished cement board. This prefinished board can be painted another color in the future- because of this we started looking at using white.This was our preferred option from a couple of months ago. When we started looking at the exact metal color samples, there was 2 greys to choose from. One was a dark cooler grey and the other was a warm lighter gray. We were hoping for something in the middle- but no such luck. We were concerned about the lighter gray becoming taupe in the bright sun. Unfortunately, we have not seen any direct sun this week to test the samples out!

After much debate, we are going with the darker gray metal panel. This is a bolder move that we're excited about. The metal roof on the office (to the right) will be Galvalume (aluminum color). We still have decisions to make on the colored panels- but these will just be painted, not prefinished, so the deadline for that decision is not imminent. We'll see how long we can put that one off!

Amore quelli italiani!

2008-02-02T20:21:00.000-08:00

We love those Italians.
There are so many places in the world to see, but Italy is one of those places we could never get tired of. They have wonderful food, architecture (both historic and modern), art and product design. Some Italian things we love are:

Leather shoes

Gelato

Renaissance Art

Modern kitchens

Pizza (the real, wood-burning oven variety

and Ceramic Tile

Yes, the Italians are always on the cutting edge when it comes to ceramic tile. When confronted with a plethora of tile, we are always drawn to those from Italy. Some of the current trends for tile are: porcelain tile that looks like metal or wood, glass tiles and tiles with images imprinted or embossed. There are so many great tiles out there, it can be mind-boggling to make a choice.

A few weeks ago, we spent a couple of hours at the Kate-Lo showroom in Plymouth. http://www.katelotile.com/ When we walked into the showroom, my immediate thought was that Kevin and I would NEVER be able to make a decision because there are so many choices and that any decisions could likely take all day. (Although it’s easy for Architects to make decisions for other people, it’s really hard to make decisions for ourselves…..) We were fortunate enough to get help from Diane with Kate-Lo. She listened carefully and was able to focus us in on some beautiful options. Within two hours, we left with nearly all our decisions made. ( a miracle of sorts!)

We first started with looking at Crossville’s Eco series. This tile contains 40% recycled content, but the rustic,earthy look is not what we were looking for in a tile. All ceramic tiles have sustainable qualities, in that they have a long life cycle, are inert and odorless.. They are made from natural clay baked at very high temperatures. Some of the issues are in the manufacturer of tiles, but most manufacturers are addressing the environmental issues and trying to lessen the impact on the environment.

We had seen a beautiful tile on display at the Kate-Lo booth at the AIA convention this year and wanted to see if we could use it for our project. The tile is 12”x24” in size and is called Glow by Atlas Concorde (Italian company) It has a linear, rough texture and metallic sheen that makes it look like silk fabric. We're going to use the dark grey color.The great thing about this tile is that it has a coordinating small mosaic tile that can be used in the shower, so that the floor tile will all look consistent. (shower tile must be smaller in size so that they can be installed to slope to the drain).
For the master bath shower wall, we are going to use a white tile that looks like metal. Our original choice is to use the 1.5” x 4” tile laid in a vertical stacked bond. The larger 13” x 13” tile in this same color is quite a bit less expensive, so depending on where our budget lands, we might use the large tile.

The tile at the other shared bathroom will be similar neutral colors with a grey ColorBlox 6"x12" tile on the floor and a coordinating 3”x3” grey tile for the shower. The walls will be the 13” x13” white metal-look tile, like the master bath. There will be one bold color wall with orange glass tile.

Crossville ColorBlox & GlassBlox

We are really excited about these tiles and can’t wait to get the project to the point when they can be installed. Pazienza è necessaria.

Coulda Woulda Shoulda

2008-01-28T19:37:00.000-08:00

One thing that is a bit intimidating about designing our own house and being architects, is that we don’t want to make any mistakes - we’re not perfect; and we know whatever we do here will require us to live with it for a long time to come. If it was someone else’s design, we could write it off as someone else’s poor planning on their part. Not so in this case. Architects tend to be critical perfectionists and we are often our own worst clients.

This weekend, as we were checking out the framing going up at the house, we made the realization that we may regret one of our cost-cutting decisions. In our quest to take a sizable chunk of money out of the project, we reduced the dining room space by 6 feet. Because our 1st and 2nd floor align, this also reduced the size of the upper floor, thus saving us quite a bit of money (theoretically). We tested the plan with several furniture layouts and thought it was workable and felt right on paper. But as we were looking at the framed-in area, well, the dining room seems downright tiny. This, we must warn you, is a typical reaction of nearly everyone who builds a home – “Oh, it seems smaller than I thought it would.” Yet even armed with this knowledge, it turns out we were not immune. View thru living room to kitchen subflooring. The dining room is to the right of kitchen.

The dining room seemed on the small side. We measured the space and checked the plans just to make sure there wasn’t a mistake made in the field. Nope, it was built as per our plans. At the time, I think we made the right decision - our money tree isn’t that large. Now, we’re just trying to reconcile the fact that this new dining room will actually be smaller than the one in our existing home, which is small enough. The more we consider this, the more we think it will be okay – quality of space over quantity, you know? Or, perhaps this is just Susankian rationalization? Time will tell.

Part of sustainability is the deliberate act of minimizing one’s footprint, and doing more with less. Our dining room – and the rest our house for that matter – is designed to be just big enough and no bigger. We’ve actually designed a couple of spaces in our new home a bit smaller than we’re accustomed to and a fair shake smaller than the predominant standard in current American “give me more” housing. The reason why the smaller room will work well in our new home is that it is open to both the kitchen and living room area, so there is some flexibility in the arrangement and use of space. Each room can and will be used as part of the other from time to time. Large dinner parties just may take over not only the dining room but the living room as well.

To all our friends who expect to have a sit-down dinner at the new house - how about a buffet-style grazing around the kitchen island instead?

Magic Lighting

2008-01-25T20:17:00.000-08:00

This week I spent a little time in New York City and experienced first hand the magic of LED lighting as used in retail spaces. LED (light emitting diode) lighting technology has been around for awhile, but hasn’t been perfected for all residential applications yet. LEDs are small in size and give a directional light, but can be grouped together for higher intensity applications. They use much less energy than incandescent or fluorescent lighting and don’t give off heat like incandescents. An LED can last up to 60,000 hours. (that translates to 6.8 years-with the light on 24 hrs/day or 20 plus years of typical use).

This Nokia store in Manhatten has translucent panels with LEDs behind them. They are programmed to change colors- from blue to red, yellow, white and green. It's almost mesmerizing enough to spend that $10,000 for a custom leather/diamond phone (NOT really- but it is a beautiful store)

The FAO Schwartz store has LEDs in the ceiling that also change colors and patterns.

In the plaza in front of the FAO store stands the Apple Store entry. It’s a minimalist glass cube with meticulously detailed round glass elevator and staircase. Like everything that Apple designs, it’s absolutely gorgeous.

Although LED seems to be the way of the future, we are a few years away from affordable, well-designed LEDs for general residential applications. Word on the street is that incandescent lights will be banned in the near future (they are already in Australia for 2009) and there will need to be viable alternatives. There has been a big emphasis on CFLs (Compact Fluorescents)- but they have some major downsides, namely light quality and the fact that they contain mercury leads to disposal issues.

As we researched lighting solutions for our new home, we started looking first at EnergyStar rated fixtures. We quickly found that the design options were very limited, they are all lamped for only fluorescent bulbs and they are a bit more expensive than a similar incandescent-lamped fixture. We decided to use standard fixtures, but switch out the bulb to CFLs for storage rooms, bedrooms and closets. In living spaces, we are using halogen fixtures on dimmers to reduce energy use and be able to tailor the lighting for various situations.

At Lappin Lighting, we were able to find a LED version of a recessed can light http://www.llfinc.com/index.aspx
It inserts into a typical housing, so it can be retrofitted or used for new installations. It is dimmable and the LED can be ordered in a white light or warmer version 2700K (what I prefer). These are about 3-4 times the cost of a standard recessed halogen model, but we are going to try 3 of these fixtures in our living area.
We were hoping to also have LED pendant fixtures for our kitchen island. Bruck http://www.brucklightingsystems.com/ is a German company that has quite a few LED light options, including some great-looking pendant lights. Although the German-quality might be worth it, our budget just can’t fit them in at the moment. We always have the option of trying a LED bulb that screws into a standard Edison socket (for about $26) http://www.theledlight.com/

The Most Important Room(s) in the House

2008-01-20T21:37:00.000-08:00

The bathrooms might be some of the smaller rooms in the house, but per square foot, they take the cake on design time- no question about it. The existing house has a recently remodeled full bathroom on the first level, so that has saved us some design time and money. The only work we will do in that bathroom is to replace the toilet with a dual flush Toto Aquia dual flush unit. The dual flush toilet has both a .9 gallon per flush option and a 1.6 gallon per flush option and it looks pretty sleek as well.

The upper 2 bathrooms have gone through dozens of iterations. We originally tried to salvage the existing bathroom on the upper floor. It has the original 1940’s tile and tub. This proved to be too limiting to the rest of the upper floor plan, as the existing 3’ wide corridor would prevent us from getting most of our furniture to the upper floor. Once we decided to demolish the existing bathroom, it opened up a whole series of options on bathroom arrangement for us.

The plan we settled on for the bid documents has the master bedroom toilet and shared bathroom back to back. This allows for a common plumbing wall, which is a very efficient approach. We have a compartmentalized design for the shared bath, so someone (who shall remain nameless) can spend as much time as he needs on the toilet, while others could still have access to the sink and toothbrushing. We initially had only a shower for the master bathroom and a tub/shower for the shared bathroom.

The tub/shower combination is what we have in our current house, but I wanted a better solution to the shower curtain problem. I hate having a curtain and don’t want a shower door that makes the tub impossible to clean. There doesn’t seem to be any good solutions out there, except to separate the shower and the bath. So much to Kevin’s chagrin, I reworked the shared bathroom to include a separate bath. (Men just don’t seem to appreciate the importance of a good bubble bath.) This reworking of the shared bath did result in Mazzy losing a bit of her closet space, but given the increase in size over her existing 3’ closet, I don’t think it will be a problem.

For the shared bathroom, we are going with the entire Nexus suite from Toto. We are working with Ratieken Sales in Minnetonka for both Toto and Grohe fixtures. http://www.raksales.com/ The Eco-Nexus toilet has a 1.28 gallons per minute single flush. The air bath has warm air jets that will give you a heated massage. (yeah!) I have told Kevin that once he tries our new Toto Nexus Air Bath, he will likely break down crying and thank me for insisting on it!

In the Master bathroom, we are specifying another Aquia dual flush and a Toto square vessel sink with Grohe faucets. Look for a posting soon on the exciting tile selections!

A Good Foundation

2008-01-17T20:53:00.000-08:00

A good foundation is important in just about everything, from the type of bread one uses for a sandwich to concrete piers. Even in spite of the bad soils we needed to deal with we have a good foundation in place now and will begin framing up walls in the next couple of days.

We had initially planned to use insulated concrete forms (ICF's) for our foundation walls - these are essentially a lightweight formwork that is made from rigid insulation, filled with steel reinforcing and concrete. It is high in insulating R Values, is easy to install and an all around great system. It can be used for whole house construction and many people do just that. We've used it as a foundation wall before on an addition to our current home and like it just swell, spanky.

So of course for this house project - we changed our minds. We needed to save a little money, and talked things over with our builder and mason, "Buck" from Buck-Crete (651-739-3160). We ended up using an 8" reinforced cmu wall with 2" of rigid insulation on each side - giving us the same r-value as the ICF's at a lower cost. And, because the foundation walls are covered up with dirt, well, we didn't feel bad about using concrete blocks. We used Masterblock cmu's - they make a nice product called Enviroblock that contains fly-ash and other recycled content that is a bit friendlier to the environment than typical concrete blocks, as the fly ash replaces some of the portland cement the mix. An added benefit is that the fly-ash (a by -product of burning coal) doesn't end up in the landfill. We save a bit on the extraction of virgin portland cement and eliminate some landfill. So now, when we're down crawling around in our crawl space, wondering where our basement went, we'll have that going for us, which is nice.

Coloring our World

2008-01-14T20:00:00.000-08:00

Have you ever noticed that most architects wear black most of the time? Black is always in style. It’s safe and easy. It’s doesn’t take a lot of effort to coordinate black with black, or black with white, or black with grey. Black, white and grey are the colors of choice in our world. Each day, we are forced to make so many design decisions for others that when it comes to clothing, we just don’t want to be bothered. Plus, if you spill red wine on yourself it won't show too badly.

As we start to select colors for our house, we are once again, leaning towards white, greys and black. It’s not that we like a monochromatic world, it just that we want to be selective in our use of color. And then where we do use color, to make it bold.

One opportunity for some bold moves is in the kitchen. The kitchen is the center of our house, the hub and command central. For our kitchen countertops, we are going with CaesarStone quartz manufactured stone http://www.caesarstoneus.com/ from Capital Granite http://www.capitalgranite.com/. We are looking for a durable material that will look as beautiful in 20 years as it does now. Quartz composite countertops are one of the more expensive materials, but you are buying durability and ease of maintenance and they never have to be sealed. Although they have colors that look like granite, we’re tired of the granite look and are looking for something more consistent in texture and color.

The majority of the countertops will be this concrete color.

This is the bold color move for either the island or just the bar countertop, depending on how daring we feel. Who doesn’t love a name like “Apple Martini Green”? How does that look when spilled on a black shirt?

Getting Busy

2008-01-11T19:36:00.000-08:00

It was a busy day today. I took the day off work in order to run around town and get some house project errands done. There are so many showrooms that have limited hours, with no hours on weekends or nights, that I decided the only way to get there was to take the entire day off. Up until now, I had been relying on the internet to do the majority of product selections. That can only get you so far, before you have to meet with live people and see live samples.

We met with Electrical Visions Inc. (lighting supplier), stopped by Industrial and Lappin Lighting, selected tile at the Kate-Lo showroom, went to Capital Granite to look at the CaesarStone countertop colors and a quick trip to Lowes to see their line of refrigerators all before picking the kids up from school at 2:50. Not a bad day’s work.

The masonry/concrete subcontractor was also busy today. We stopped by a noon and they were cruising on the block work.

This view above makes the addition look pretty small. We had to check the plans to assure ourselves that what we're doing is big enough. It is. It will just be a bit deceiving until the corner of the existing house is opened up.

The big yard doesn't look very big anymore, with all the construction equipment and big pile of dirt.

Digging Holes

2008-01-10T20:18:00.000-08:00

One day I was listening to a program on MPR where the guest was talking about he loved to dig holes in the yard when he was a little boy. In fact, he loved to dig so much that his dad had him dig a hole big enough to bury an old family car. (That is one big hole for a small boy to dig!) Many years later, he went back to his old neighborhood in LA to talk to the owners of his childhood home. Turns out, they had discovered the buried car in the back yard. They were able to sell it as an antique as it was in near-mint condition.

I thought about this buried car as we got the news from the excavator that they encountered bad soils. By the time the news got to me, the message was “construction debris was found”. This was just a classic example of what happens in the game “telephone’ where the message gets distorted the more times it’s repeated, as it wasn’t debris or even a car that they found. It was just mucky, yucky, loose clay.
The excavator had to dig out all the bad soils, so there is quite a big pile of dirt in the yard- almost big enough for a couple of old Chevys….. or at least a basement. We were planning just a crawl space but when this amount of excavation had to happen, we took a look at adding a basement. Because of the location of this space on the other side of the utility room, this space would never become more than storage or another utility-type space. (We are trying to not go overboard with storage space that will just get filled with more & more stuff). We would also have to enlarge foundation walls and add another slab. (We are trying to reduce the budget at the moment, so another add would be painful). So, no basement it is - we've ended up filling that big hole back up with compacted sand fill - dig a hole and fill it up! It's a great way to spend $8,000. We will of course keep the crawl space. It's a good place for Kevin and the kids to practice their Spiderman exercises.

Groundbreaking!

2008-01-07T20:04:00.000-08:00

We forgot to plan the elaborate ceremony….the hardhats, the gold shovels, the tent and the speeches. We didn’t have any of that. We didn’t even have a camera for pictures! But the groundbreaking happened despite ourselves.

The mid-winter thaw happened exactly on cue. With temperatures well-above freezing, the excavation started. The insulating blankets we had put down to keep ot the frost worked wonders. The 8 - 10 inches of snow on top of them helped a lot too. When we scraped the snow and pulled the blankets, there wasn't a bit of frost in the ground. This is good. It's the middle of January for crying out loud! The numerous brick pavers came up relatively easy, so we are going to be able to stockpile them and reuse them for landscaping later.

We were only able to relish in the thought of our project starting for a few hours before Kevin got a call from our contractor about bad soils. Seems like there is construction debris in the ground where the foundations are to go. Kevin will meet at the site tomorrow with the testing company to check it out. We might need to excavate and remove the bad soils and bring in new to get the proper bearing capacity for foundations. The party is officially over and it appears that we have encountered the first problem.

The plan is for the construction project to take about 5 months, so once the foundations start going in, the project will really start to roll. We have to be ready to make a lot of decisions quickly. In order to get a good bid, we put a lot of time and energy into the drawings. But now as it’s becoming real, we have to finalize product choices. That work usually happens during our night shift- from 9 to midnight (or later!). I can’t imagine how we’d ever get this project done without around the clock internet access!

The Simple Life

2008-01-04T19:30:00.000-08:00

When Kevin and I had our first child, a good friend of mine, Jennifer, gave us a book called “Simplify Your Life with Kids”. I remember this book being chock full of good tips on how to minimize complications by minimizing possessions and various other ideas on keeping your life simple. The book is now missing- likely hiding amongst all the stuff, things and clutter that has accumulated in our house over the past 12 years.

This idea of simple is quite popular these days. From the magazine REAL SIMPLE, to the new book “The Simple Home” by our colleague Sarah (Sally) Nettleton.
http://www.sarah-architects.com/simple-home/about-the-book.html
Sally’s concept of the simple home is not about a style, but rather about a personal approach. It’s about being discovering your own “simple” and designing your home to be true to that vision. The design of your home should be flexible, thrifty, sustainable and timeless.

I love the idea of simple, unadorned, modern, clean home. In my mind, our new home will be entirely clutterless. (Listen for the sound of Kevin laughing out loud.) No knick-knacks, bric-a-brac or any other objects worthy of such peculiar & bizarre names. We will have designed in systems to keep the clutter at bay and can relax every day in this clean, comforting, simple environment.

Okay, this is not exactly the way we live now. This is what our kitchen countertop usually looks like. I’m not saying good design can solve all of our problems, but a good purging, thoughtful storage and a commitment to simplifying things should go a long way to creating a more calming environment. We hope.

Some REALLY Cool Glass

2007-12-29T19:22:00.000-08:00

One product that we are really excited about using is the Pilkington Profilit Glass Channels. As architects, we often flip through the glossy architecture magazines and are seduced by some new product or material. We file it under “To Use on Next Project” in our minds and then when an appropriate application comes along, we try to incorporate it. The Profilit Glass Channel is just one of those alluring, sexy materials that we’ve tried many times, in vain, to use on projects. Finally, we will have an opportunity to use it and we have the control to make sure it stays in the project, in lieu of being “value-engineered” out.

The Profilit Glass Channel is a self-supporting cast glass channel 10” wide. They can be double glazed, with channels placed leg to leg and interlocking. The glass has a light-transmitting obscuring effect that glows at night. It can be used either horizontally or vertically, but is more commonly seen vertically.

We are working with locally with WL Hall Company to use the glass both at our front entry and at an upper level walkway. The entry location is a perfect application for the glass channels. If this were clear glass, you would be able to see through the entire house, which might be kind of cool, but also a little too revealing at times. I like the idea of being able to go to answer the front door without feeling like I'm on display. This glazing will allow light to shine during the day and will glow at night. It will become a main feature of the entry, which will allow us to downplay the front door with something very simple and basic.

The other location we are using this is at the master bedroom “bridge” to the master bathroom. We’ve debated how much privacy we need in this location. It might appear to be private in the plan, but it is open to the kitchen area and to the upper hallway. It might be quite thrilling to make a naked mad dash here, but the rest of the household might not always agree. Although privacy is needed, this is also a source of light for the upper level hallway and “away space”, so a translucent solution is needed. We were originally planning on using 3Form, another very cool product that is a translucent resin panel available in a plethora of great colors and patterns. We’ll have to save that cool product in the mental file cabinet for now.

www.tgpamerica.com/structural-glass/pilkington-profilit/

Everything but the Kitchen Sink

2007-12-26T20:18:00.000-08:00

As we were hosting the family for Christmas this year, I tried to pay extra attention to how we were using our kitchen sink and how a different sink might work better and improve our lives. Really. I’m quite obsessed with finding the perfect new sink for our kitchen. I’ve spent countless hours researching this topic and it’s about time I make a decision and move on.

A decade ago, one would just go to Home Depot or another such store and pick from their 10-20 selections. These days, there are thousands of choices at your fingertips. There are forums to ask questions to other homeowners and numerous resources for researching. There is almost too much information out there, especially given the fact that the kitchen sink is only one of many choices we will have to make.

In our current house, we have the old standby equal double compartment stainless steel sink. I’ve never really had any issues with how this type of sink functions, so our initial (and quick) choice was this Kohler Toccata model. But as I’ve had more time to contemplate the choice, I’m still curious to see if we can do better.

I love the look of the square edge stainless steel sinks like this Blanco sink- but I’m nervous about giving up the second sink and know that the first scratch in the stainless will be painful. An alternative material was suggested by Rakieten Sales- a composite material made by Astracast. As I researched this material, it became apparent that this product is more common in the UK than the US. So I contacted my good friend, Fiona who is an interior designer in Scotland and asked her if she had experience with it. She had just spec’ed a similar material for a house- the Carron Phoenix ZX pictured below.

As I washed all the pots and pans from the Christmas dinner, it occurred to me that an ideal solution might be 3 sinks- one for rinsing dirty dishes, one for dishwater/washing and the other for draining. Unfortunately, I would blow the entire plumbing fixture budget if we were to go to this solution, so I’ll have to compromise and find the most flexible solution.

This Astracast model has some great accessories that make it more functional and I love the dark gray color with small metallic flecks and square drain detail. We have a sample of the material that we are putting through the ringer and its holding up to our abuses. From a sustainable point of view, this sink will fulfill our requirement of durability. For flexibility, the accessories, such as a small bowl that fits into a cutting board will expand the possibilities and quell my nervousness over the single compartment sink. Now it’s on to the perfect faucet………….

A Big Present

2007-12-22T21:24:00.001-08:00

We got an early Christmas present this year. We were finally able to close on our house last week! A special thanks goes out to Rita Brooks with Prime Mortgage and Brian Johnson with Edina Realty for their perseverance on this one. We are NOT easy clients for them and by buying the house with a construction loan, it made for a tricky loan process. Our closing took nearly 3 hours and at times, we weren’t even sure it was all going to get done. During the time we were held captive in the closers office, we were able to get to know the current owners and learn a little about the history of the house. Turns out it was one of the first houses on the block and that explains why this property is so much larger than other lots on the block. Apparently there are old aerial photos that show this. It is better known as the “Brown” house, as the first owners, the Browns, lived there for quite some time.

The current owners handed us over a large file for the house, with warranties and instruction manuals for appliances. The file also included a detailed map of the trees for the property, which shows types and when they were planted. The owners had a background in forestry, so they planted quite a few different species of trees. I was really excited about this information, as it allows us to know how old the trees and what smaller trees can be relocated if necessary. For the most part, our construction will not be affecting the major trees.

We officially own two houses now, which means that we have two sets of sidewalks to shovel.

Since the permit is all set and ready to go, we can begin construction anytime. Only thing is, we are now in the midst of the holidays and vacations and time off. So it looks like we might be able to start excavation about Jan 7. Maybe we can get some of the demolition of the interiors started prior to that.

Our kids haven’t even seen the interior of the house yet. I think we’ll go over there tomorrow, let the kids check out the project in it’s “before state” and shovel the sidewalks.

Here Comes the Sun

2007-12-18T21:07:00.000-08:00

Solar Power is a must for this project - we'd rather be energy producers than energy buyers, and producing our own power (or at least a good portion of it) removes us from the volatility of the energy market and reduces our dependence on coal produced electricity and natural gas. A solar heating system is a great investment because your property value increases when you become your own power producer.

First - let's dispel the notion that solar power doesn't make sense in Minnesota. We see as many solar days as much of the south - Texas, Florida, California. One of the advantages of living in a cold climate is that we often have very clear skies during the winter months.

We're working with Mario of Best Power International to design our systems - we selected Mario over other renewable energy specialists for a few reasons - 1. He returned our phone calls, 2. He's a neighbor and 3. He's very knowledgeable and professional. We like him.

We've decided to use a hybrid system - both solar hot water and solar electric (PV). Our water heating needs for our home will be taken care of by 2 flat plate collectors angled at about 45 degrees facing true south. These will be mounted on our roof top along with a 2 rows of solar PV modules which will produce upwards of 50% of our electrical needs (more if we can get our kids to turn the lights off) annually, on average. The system is designed to be expandable, and hopefully we'll be able to add more modules as our finances allow in the future. The PV modules will be tied back to the utility grid, so that on very sunny days and times when our system is producing more power than we are using - we will be selling that power back to the utility provider. At night, or at high energy demands - we'll be taking power back off the grid. We opted not to do battery storage in favor of the grid tied system for a few reasons - of which I'll tell when I'm good and ready. We do have a small inverter and battery sub-panel for those times when the power goes out and we want our sump pump and refrigerator to stay running.

We plan to do energy monitoring to track the systems performances over time.

The solar hot water and PV systems are eligible for State rebates and Federal Tax credits - which helps bring our costs down by about 25% and helps decrease the payback period on the systems.

We are also looking at connecting a small, vertical axis wind turbine to this system (http://www.pacwind.net/) These turbines are very efficient at low wind speeds and will produce power any time the wind is blowing - at night and on cloudy days! We expect that the turbine could produce the balance of our electrical needs. Net zero energy here we come! We're still working out the design integration of the system, so we'll report back with news when we have it.

Drawing Windows

2007-12-13T22:20:00.000-08:00

One of Kevin's favorite books is the "children's" book "Harold and the Purple Crayon". Harold was able to draw his world, including his house, bed and windows. If a monster started to chase him - all he had to do was draw his way out of it. If he wanted some pie, a few marks with the crayon and voila, he was hungry no more. Sometimes being an architect is just like that- you just draw the picture and it will eventually become real. But most of the time it takes a whole lot of drawing, erasing, drawing and erasing.

One of the things we've been drawing and erasing are the windows for our new house. In our perspective, windows are a crucial element that we won’t cut corners on. They must meet both our esthetic and performance goals. They must be energy star rated. We’ve looked at Marvin Integrity, Accurate Dorwin and Fibertec and InLine Windows. These are all pultruded fiberglass windows, which we are selecting for their strength, durability and great performance from an environmental and energy point of view.

The Marvin windows were in the original bid, but we realized that they do not have the awning and casement windows we need. We are going with a white frame to match the existing windows and to create a modern, clean interior look. If we went with wood clad, they do have the types of windows in that line, but we don’t want wood - wood warps our current wood clad windows don't perform as well as we'd like them to.

The Accurate Dorwin windows are out of Canada they are a great window- but the lead times are crazy right now. It would be 12-14 weeks out and we just can’t afford that kind of time.

Inline and Fibertec windows are also out of Canada and have great performance. It will come down to a question of pricing and schedule.
http://www.inlinefiberglass.com/
http://www.fibertec.com/ (Don’t be scared off by the castle-like monster home on their web home page!) We’ve gone back and forth with them to establish the size and functioning of the windows and have learned a few lessons:
1. Customize glazing and Low E coatings depending on the orientation of the window: We are likely going to go with triple glazed units with 2 low e coatings and argon filled cavities. On the north facing units (very few of those) we may use 3 low e coatings on different surfaces of the glass. The low e coatings will be slightly different, depending on the direction they face. The goal is to optimize the window's performance depending on the orientation and what we hope to accomplish - passive solar gain in the winter from the south is critical - so we're fine tuning the glazing to make sure that happens. The cost increase appears to be minimal to move from double glased to triple glazed units and as we will own this house for a long time, we want the extra performance - even if the payback in energy savings is 10 years out. Our triple glazed units will feature u values in the .15 to .20 range which gives us and Rvalue of R6 in most cases.
We shouldn't feel a draft off these windows at all - even on the coldest Minnesota winter days.
2. Think carefully where you need operable windows. We were originally showing nearly all windows being operable. For example on a typical casement window of 48” wide x 36” high, we were showing 2 operable sides. By having only 1 operable side, it saves over $500 per window.
2. Consolidate. Less is more (and it will cost you less). We had 4 small operable windows. Each of them was over $800 each. We combined them into 2 larger windows and will save significantly. We don’t want all the design decisions to be driven by cost, but “simple” usually means less cost and “simple” is often the better design decision.
3. The weak dollar sucks. The price for products from outside the US have increased significantly due to the weak dollar.

Look for some revised elevations soon!

Not-so Patiently Waiting

2007-12-11T19:29:00.000-08:00

The real estate, mortgage lending and construction loan business are such a mystery to me. Every time we have gone to buy a house, it has seemed we are the first people ever to be buying a house with a mortgage- like we are inventing and testing the process which is changing as we go along and is excruciatingly painful.

We were supposed to close on our house today and it didn’t happen. It’s frustrating having absolutely no control. I believe our mortgage broker and realtor are doing everything they can to make it happen, but the forces are against them.

Lesson #1: We originally wrote our purchase agreement to close 4 weeks from the date of the offer. We wanted to start construction before the ground froze and the sellers agreed. In the process of finding the best loan for our situation, we quickly realized that we needed about 8 weeks. We had to agree to pay the sellers a per diem amount for every day beyond the original close day we suggested. Next time (although there won’t be a next time), we would just use the standard 8 weeks and then work to move it up if possible.

Lesson #2: The closing cost will always go up.

On a good note, the drawings were submitted to the city for permit review. There were a few calls and comments, but nothing too major yet. They were curious why the roof was structured for such a heavy load. I think they thought we were going to be hosting parties up there. It’s actually structured for an addition 29 lbs per square foot for the green roof.