Lawrence Street

The Lawrence Street House – Bidding and LEED

January 30, 2011

I know it’s been a little while since I gave you all an update on the Lawrence House. With the holidays, I took a bit longer finishing the drawings and we really didn’t want to have to be doing open houses during the Thanksgiving and Christmas season. Open Houses are actually kind of a pain. [...]

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The Lawrence Street House – Sidewalks and Urbanite

August 20, 2010

Our lot is 60 x 150 feet. The 150 foot side has a fairly new sidewalk, but the 60 foot side on Lawrence Street, I think may have the original sidewalk from 1940. It’s worn, broken, heaving and needs to be replaced.Now, we could chop it up, haul it to the dump and contribute to [...]

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the Lawrence Street House – Rainwater, Part 3

July 24, 2010

Another area we are looking at to save water is our toilets and clothes washer. These two appliances probably use the most water inside the home as any other. And they are easy “targets” for rainwater use. That’s because they don’t need to use drinking water to be effective. Our thought is to also plumb [...]

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The Lawrence Street House – Rainwater, Part 2

July 23, 2010

Our primary us for rainwater will be for landscape irrigation. We’re designing our landscape first to need less water to start with. That’s the way it is with good design in anything, reduce is the first “r”. So we’re being strategic in our plant selection, using the concept of the right plant in the right [...]

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The Lawrence Street House – Rainwater, Part 1

July 22, 2010

In addition to harvesting the solar on our site, we are seriously considering harvesting our rainwater. Eugene gets about 50 inches of rain each year. The rooftop of our main house is about 3,400 sq ft (remember, this includes porches and the garage), and our secondary unit has a roof area of about 1,570 sq [...]

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The Lawrence Street House – Solar Electric [update]

June 27, 2010

[added revised pricing on solar hot water system and total cost; even better than I originally thought] In addition to thinking about our landscape design, finishing the structural plans and selecting some of our finishes (more on those to come), we’ve been looking at our solar configuration(s). Typically, you’ll do a 2 or 3 KW [...]

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The Lawrence Street House – Front Porch continued…

June 18, 2010

I know it’s been a while since my last post. There are a couple of reasons for that. First, I’ve been in the final stages of completing my Sustainable Building Advisor class and the last part of the class got even more intense. Second, we’ve been also finishing the working drawings so we can get [...]

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The Front Porch and "The Garden"

April 8, 2010

HISTORY As an architect, the design of place has always held an incredible fascination to me. To be able to be a part of creating a built environment that is beautiful and useful has always held an appeal that is hard to describe. I first wanted to be an architect when I was in fifth [...]

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The Lawrence Street House – LEED for Homes

March 20, 2010

We have officially registered our home with the US Green Building Council. This is the first step in pursuing LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Certification. In addition to this registration, we hire a LEED rater — Earth Advantage from P-Town. Our local rater is Eli and he worked with us on theSAGE. He [...]

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The Lawrence Street House – SDU (finally)

March 6, 2010

Finally. We have the design for our secondary dwelling unit (aka SDU). It’s amazing how challenging it has been to design a two-bedroom, one bath home in under 800 square feet. City of Eugene code allows for a second dwelling on the same property if the lot is large enough (it is), if the owner [...]

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