Category: Lawrence Street

In addition to the LED lights, which use about 1/4 to 1/3 the electricity of an incandescent, we will be using energy-efficient appliances in our homes. When people think about energy efficient appliances, they usually think about Energy Star.

And while Energy Star is a factor in our decisions, it is a voluntary program. So as we’ve made our selections and decisions, we have looked a little deeper into the REAL energy savings. An example is our refrigerator in the main house.

We have selected a Whirlpool refrigerator that is NOT Energy Star. However, the energy use guide shows it will use the same amount (or less) of electricity as a comparably-sized Energy Star refrigerator. Our dishwasher will be Energy Star.

The most exciting appliance, however, is our water heater. Yeah, I know, who gets excited over a water heater? But this one uses an estimated $214 of electricity a year versus a standard electric water heater using over $500 per year.

And this is where I want to talk about our culture and the shift that is happening and I hope continues to happen.

We hopefully are changing our perspective to look at the longer term when we make purchases. In my last post, I talked about LED lights. Yes, they cost more initially, but use WAY less electricity and last much longer. So in that longer term, they are less expensive. Same thing with appliances that use less energy and specifically this water heater.

This water heater cost us about $400 more than a standard water heater. Or double the cost, if you’re into that perspective. But what that means is after the first year of investment, we will be saving money. Almost all the extra money in the first year. And energy savings the rest of the life of the heater. When we looked at it that way, we had to ask why WOULDN’T we do this?

I really hope our culture grasps this concept. Because it is what’s at the heart of true sustainability.

Not much visible from the exterior has been happening on our house lately. So I haven’t been blogging. But Brenda suggested I talk about some of the aspects of our new home like LED lights, energy-efficient appliances, sustainable materials.

I married a smart woman.

To start, we are going to use LED lights in our house. Everywhere. No incandescent “heaters”. In the picture with this post is the new CREE bulb that just came out.

It weighs just 2 ounces. It uses just 11 watts of energy and is the equivalent to a 60 watt incandescent bulb. Cost is $8. It should last virtually forever (expected life is just over 22 years). It has a color rendering of 2700K (what we would call a “soft white” or “warm white”). It puts out 815 lumens.

And those last two notes are where I want to focus my discussion about LEDs. There are a lot of LED bulbs out there and probably the two most misunderstood, overlooked and disappointing aspects are the color and the lumens.

A typical incandescent “soft white” or “warm white” bulb is about 2700K. The “K” stands for Kelvin. White light really has a range of reds and blues. If you ever notice some of the really really white LEDs, they are probably closer to 5000K (lots of blue hue), which is supposed to simulate natural daylight, although I’ve never thought natural daylight was that harsh. What most of us seem to like in our homes is a warmer, more “comfortable” color of white nearer the 2700K to 2800K range with more of the red hues. So when you go to buy an LED bulb, check the color temperature and look for the K value.

The other aspect is lumens. Lumens are not as readily advertised with LEDs, but are just as important a factor as the hue. A lumen is “the SI unit of luminous flux, equal to the amount of light emitted per second in a unit solid angle of one steradian from a uniform source of one candela.” Like that’s helpful to anyone but physicists. Bottom line is it’s a measured unit of light output. It’s helpful because some LEDs are advertised as a “60 watt equivalent” but may only put out 400 lumens (closer to a 40 watt equivalent). A typical 60 watt incandescent bulb will put out about 650-800 lumens.

Some advice, then, as you look to purchase LEDs: check color and lumens. If you’re wanting to keep the incandescent “feel”, make sure the color is between 2700K to 3000K (which closer to a halogen color). Then make sure you’re getting adequate lumens. A 40 watt incandescent will put out 400-450 lumens, a 60 watt 650-800 lumens, a 75 watt 1,000-1,100 lumens, and a 100 watt about 1,400-1,600 lumens. Since most of us are familiar with the “feel” of incandescent, this is a good measuring tool as our conversion to LEDs happens.

In our Lawrence Street House, we will be using quite a few of these new CREE bulbs. We’ll also be using a fairly new Juno brand 2″ recessed spot. It is a 10 watt LED that puts out 650 lumens at 2700K. We also have some halogen replacements coming that put out 400 lumens using just 5 watts. We’re excited about the lighting and the energy savings we’ll see by using all LEDs.

 

Before and after. Read more at: The Front Porch and the Garden.

Hard to believe it’s been almost a month since I’ve posted on our progress. Part of that has been the busy-ness of work (architecture, my day job) and of general contracting. But we have been making progress; some visual, some not.

Probably the most visual so far has been the windows, siding and the arbors. There’s a lot of detail there. But, like the stepped fascias, the critical part of a design (beyond its functionality) is in the details. For instance, we have lap siding (gold in the picture) below shingle siding (grey in the picture), separated by a trim board. That trim board lines up with the grids in the windows. It’s those “little” things that I believe separate a good design from a great design.

From here on for a while, the exterior won’t look a lot different (unless we get some good weather and can get the outside painted soon, which will NOT be gold and grey). Gutters come tomorrow as do the two sump pumps to help keep the crawl spaces dry. We have a high water table and poor soils.

Most of our work now will be inside.

Our cabinet maker is getting started. I think I mentioned in a previous post that the cabinet wood we fell in love with was Peruvian Walnut. Well, obviously that wasn’t going to work, so we started looking for alternatives. We did look at a domestic Black Walnut, but the grain was too busy for our floors, which are Forest Stewardship Council Costa Rica Teak (plantation-grown, not rain forest wood); it has a very busy grain pattern. And we ended up right back at “home” with vertical grain Douglas Fir. It stains beautifully and gives us the look and contrast we want, which is very similar to the Peruvian Walnut.

We’ve met with our electrician and gone over our lighting. Juno brand has a brand new, cool LED recess spot light that we’re going to use in a lot of areas in both houses. It’s a 10 watt, 2″ spot that puts out the same amount of light as a 65 watt incandescent fixture. We are trying to use  LED lighting everywhere. They last longer, don’t have the mercury issues a compact fluorescent has and aren’t mini-heaters, like incandescent bulbs are.

We also have our painter on board and will be using zero or low VOC paints throughout the interior. The rough plumbing is in and the central vacuum system is piped. The rough piping for our Heat Recovery Ventilators is in and we have ordered our heat pump water heaters (with the incentives and EWEB rebates, they only cost $699 each and use 1/3 the electricity, so our payback on the extra cost will be about a year).

There are a lot of parts and pieces to make it all come together. It’s pretty exciting and each day we are getting more and more anxious to get moved in.

Soon. Very soon.

There hasn’t been much visible to post, so I thought I’d show some recent progress (and Hannah is helping with this post; she’s used to this, I think, because her other set of gaga’s are building right now, too).

We have the garage slabs poured and covered, the rough plumbing mostly in and are just finishing the underground utilities (electrical, cable, sewer). Sidewalks get repaired and repoured tomorrow and we start work on the soffits tomorrow, too.

Roofs are completely on and after the soffits, we will start on the windows and getting things enclosed so we can start the electrical. We want to wait so our wiring doesn’t walk off (a common occurrence these days). The crawl spaces are relatively dry (no standing water) and we are installing a french drain at the north side of the house, probably tomorrow or Wednesday just because.

It’s a short work week this week because of Thanksgiving. And we are thankful for so many things: construction has really been going very smooth, bids are coming in close to where we need them to be, we are blessed to even be building a new home and our granddaughter came down to visit, so we gave her the tour.

We hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving. Be grateful for everything you have and everything you are.

We have had rain and more rain. The fans in the crawl spaces ended up sitting in about 6″ to 8″ of water. Argh…

So we have a pump in the crawl space now and are pumping out the water. Now that the roofs are on (or at least dried in) we should be in better shape on this front.

I’m talking to my plumber about putting in permanent sump pumps at each house to keep the crawl spaces dry.

But the bright spot in all this is the roof. The latest round of heavy rains hit yesterday (Thursday) and my roofer was originally scheduled for Thursday to dry in the main house. BUT, River Roofing came out on Wednesday and got us dried in BEFORE the latest round of rain. And that’s why I use and recommend them. They are awesome, they think ahead and they will bend over backward for you.

I also met with the mechanical people today (Comfort Flow Heating) and went over the locations for our mini-split heat pump units and the heat recovery ventilator (HRV) vent locations. Another top-notch company. They care about where the vents go, how it all goes together and how it looks as well as how it works.

That’s the latest update; more later.

 

With the roof trusses up and the eaves and fascias and barge boards going up, the houses are really, really feeling good to us.

The overhang framing adds such a dimension to the houses and the curb appeal. The stacked, double 2×8 fascias add a sense of mass to the houses that, I feel, is critical. One pet peeve I have as an architect is wimpy overhangs and fascias that are barely larger than the gutters; you can barely see that they’re even there!

The roofs are going on; the cottage has the felt paper and the main house is getting close.

We are also starting to make some of our selections of materials, even though we’ve had most everything picked for four years. We had a walnut selected for our cabinets that we LOVED. The grain, the hue (a very dark walnut) were perfect. Except. The sample was Peruvian Walnut. As in rain forest walnut.

So we’re rethinking the walnut and looking at a domestic Black Walnut. Aside from the rain forest issue, my concern was the way walnut fades. We had cherry floors in our previous house and cherry darkens with age; no problem. In fact, it looked better and better year after year. But walnut fading doesn’t excite us too much.

So I Googled it. (Google is a verb now). And I found that walnut apparently really only fades in direct sunlight and/or UV. Well, none of our cabinets will see any direct sunlight. They are all internal to the house or under a large porch overhang. So I think we’re good.

If you click on the picture above, you can see both houses. I did a panorama and it doesn’t fit well in my blog format.

 

 

 

The trusses were delivered this week and the houses are really taking shape now. We are getting a feel for how the houses’ room sizes and relationships to the neighborhood will be.

And we love it.

The way the houses sit on the lot and relate to each other is exactly as we pictured in our minds. The porches – the main entry porch at 15th and Lawrence, where we plan on a couple of chairs to sit and drink coffee on Saturday mornings, the BBQ porch at the other side of the main house and the entry porch and patio at the cottage, all feel wonderful.

These next few days will see the rest of the roof going on, the fascias and barge boards (extra-wide for added character) and the roof plywood (so we can FINALLY get things drying out).

So I’ll keep posting. We are taking pictures for a slide show sequence when this is all complete; likely early in the Spring 2015.

 

 

It’s been about a week and a half since I’ve done an update.

Sorry about that, but I’ve been really busy at work and things visually hadn’t changed much.

We have all of the walls now framed and are close to getting trusses delivered. My mason is installing the porch posts and cheek walls for the three porches so we can get the posts in to support the beams to support the trusses. We should be seeing some more visible progress by the end of next week.

You’ll also notice the excavator in the middle of the picture; we’re backfilling around the house and getting some of the gravel down for the patios and garages.

The small pile of wood in the foreground is about half of the waste so far. I took a 300# load to EcoSort about a week ago and about 95% of that was recyclable. If you’re not familiar with EcoSort, I encourage you to look at their website via the link; they are a local service that sorts construction waste and recycles what can be recycled. Our first load was largely small pieces of wood, cardboard and similar material. The next load will be similar.

We’ve also enjoyed meeting a lot of our neighbors. It seems like every time we are on site, we meet a new neighbor. I think we’ve now met every one of the immediate neighbors; they seem very friendly and we think we’re going to really enjoy living in the neighborhood.

The only downside we can see so far (if it is a downside), is Cornucopia is just three blocks away.

And that could prove VERY dangerous…