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Cottage Progress

 

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The Cottage is coming along well. Walls up, plywood on. Trusses are coming soon and the walls on the Main House will be starting tomorrow. We are doing the exterior walls as two, separate 2×4 walls with a 1″ gap between. This gives us an 8″ wall and about an R-37 insulation level.

R-values (“resistance”) are something that measures how well the house retains heat or cool inside. The higher the value, the better. Code is R-21, so we are about 60% better. This will give our tenants much lower utility costs. Our attic will have close to two feet of insulation. The floors will also have a foot of insulation.

And we are doing the same construction on the Main House.

Both houses will have a mini-split heat pump unit that will heat and cool at an incredibly high efficiency level. So combined with the added insulation, electric bills for both houses should be very low.

Well, it’s getting late. More later.

 

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Apartment Life | The First Week

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I actually thought I’d do one post on the apartment, then move back to the house. But it’s been amazing to my wife and I how many people are raising and eyebrow, asking, questioning, skeptical that we could go from a 2,750 sq ft home to a 950 sq ft apartment with little adjustment. So as I sit on my leather sectional sofa, blogging on my laptop via wi-fi and sip my mocha made with my own espresso machine, let’s take a little perspective-check.

We loved our home. It worked well for us as the kids grew up and served us well. The yard was awesome. But since the kids moved out, we really were only living on the main floor, which was about 1,800 sq ft. So the transition to the apartment was easier.

What seems interesting to me is the underlying, pervasive idea that more or bigger is necessarily better. As Americans, we seem to think that bigger cars are better (look how much larger a 2014 Honda is than a 1985 Honda), bigger houses are better (the AVERAGE new home size in the U.S. is now 2,500 sq ft), etc.

To which I say: “How much is enough?”

That phrase became apparent to us in recent weeks and maybe I’ll blog on that someday. But really, we are so blessed to be living in a 950 sq ft, 2-bedroom apartment that a good share of our furniture fits and is a standard of living that is STILL better than probably 90% of the world (i.e. running/clean/hot water, dishwasher, microwave, heat and electricity).

I can honestly say after this first week, we are enjoying this part of our adventure. The house construction is coming along well (more on that later) and we’re totally stoked about this part of our journey. So don’t think we’re covering anything up when we say we are enjoying our life in our “little” apartment. The average HOME in the U.S. just 60-70 years ago was smaller than this.

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Apartment Life – Redux

549550_10151267535645902_1427022305_nWe have made the next step in our transition. Our movers were on hyperdrive yesterday and what was going to be a two-day move to the apartment, then put the rest in storage ended up being a one-day event. We had tried to purge as much unnecessary “stuff” ahead of time and with Brenda’s awesome lead (she did most of it), we got it all done in a day.

We have moved into one of our apartments on River Road and will live here until the house is complete. We haven’t lived in an apartment since 1982, but it is quite a blessing that we have this available for us. Living on a very busy street will take some getting used to; but so far, going from 2,750 sq ft to 950 sq ft has been pretty easy.

Floor framing of the cottage started yesterday and floor framing the house probably will start today.

Today we will be organizing the apartment and getting things in their place. More later.

 

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Progress Today

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We stripped the forms on the Cottage today and started setting up forms on the house. House concrete will be poured tomorrow. Coming along nicely.

 

We are using high fly ash concrete. This recycles a waste product (coal ash from coal power pants) and results in stronger concrete.

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The Adventure Has Begun!

 

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Well, after five years and a couple of months, we have sold our Wintercreek home and have embarked on our new adventure in downtown Eugene. It’s late right now and I’m tired. But I wanted to get this started and hopefully I’ll be consistent with the updates. Time will tell.

As I recently said on my Facebook page:

“It’s a magical world, Hobbes, old buddy… let’s go exploring!” Calvin

Good night.

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The Lawrence Street House – Bidding and LEED

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. Clean the house, keep it spotless, etc. for a two to three hour window on a Sunday afternoon. So we rested that for a while.

BIDDING
I also got the drawings done and ready to go out to bid. Based on my original budget, we had our present house priced at where we needed to be for a little negotiation and be able to go straight across. Part of the triple bottom line (the three “E’s” of sustainability) is economy and we didn’t want to end up with a mortgage when it’s all said and done.

But I’ve been getting preliminary bids back and they are actually coming in under my original budget (which, frankly, was pretty generous). So now we’re starting to get pretty excited. This may actually happen! We’re also currently at 5kw for the solar and are considering 6kw. We have room on the roof and believe it’s the right thing to do.

LEED
We had our first official LEED preliminary rating meeting Friday. This is where we sat down with Eli, our LEED rater, our landscape architect and our mechanical contractor. We’ve already done the design charrette and this is to make sure the major players understand the ground rules for LEED and also what we expect. Third party verification requires some stringent guidelines and we want to do it right from from the beginning. We should easily make Platinum on each house.

We discussed the mechanical systems and how they needed to be designed and installed. The way we are insulating our house, we are foaming the tops of the roof rafters so the heat pump indoor units and the ductwork will be within the conditioned space. That way we don’t have to insulate the ducts and it also makes the system run much more efficiently. We’ll still seal the ducts (the major area of mechanical system inefficiencies) and everything will be ceiling-fed.

We’re thinking the cottage will use a mini-split unit, or ductless heat pump. This is much more efficient, especially in a 776 sq ft house. The main house will have a conventional heat pump, but just a very high efficiency one.

Our landscaping is all low irrigation demand. We discussed at length eco lawn versus regular turf versus synthetic turf. We have just about 3% lawn area, but LEED, to maximize the points, doesn’t allow irrigation or mowing, otherwise you lose those two points. I’ve said all along we won’t chase points, but this is an area we want to be sure we do it right and also have something we will enjoy. An eco lawn in the location we have this might not be what we want. Our landscape architect suggested a synthetic lawn (I know, my first thought is “Astro-Turf“). We are going to go look at one here in town, but I’m skeptical about it. The term “Fake Lawn” is what comes off my lips. I’ll keep you posted.

SUMMARY
So that’s where we’re at. I’m hopeful we’ll have the bids come in well and we can get this house sold and start building. The prime building season in Eugene (March – September) is fast approaching.

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The Lawrence Street House – Sidewalks and Urbanite

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 the roughly one third of the local waste stream that comes from construction debris or (and here’s where it gets good), we could reuse those chunks as part of our landscape plan.


It’s called “urbanite” and a good description can be found at http://tinyurl.com/yk4rmzr. So we’re working with our landscape architect on this and as Rex, from DLA’s office said “I built a patio at a previous house that way and really liked it. Saves disposal and hauling energy of the old plus new material extraction and hauling energy!”

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the Lawrence Street House – Rainwater, Part 3

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 our home to use some of the rainwater we collect to flush toilets and wash our clothes. 
We will likely have to balance the amount of rainwater we can collect with our irrigation, toilet and clothes washing demands. Our rooftop has the potential to collect far more than we can store practically, but we can’t practically store all we could collect (about 15 to 20,000 gallons), so we’re looking at where to hit that balance. I just received our irrigation estimates and, in our climate, we face the challenge of very wet winter months and pretty dry summer months. So the challenge is to know how many gallons is best overall for storage.
Plus, another challenge we’re facing is our clothes washer. Conventional wisdom (ie LEED points and marketing) says we should get rid of our 28+ year old Maytag washer that uses 40 gallons per load and get a new Energy Star washer that uses 15 to 20 gallons per load. HOWEVER, my question is what happens to our old washer (landfill or reuse?), we only run 2 to 4 loads per week (family of 2) and about half of those are  cold water, if we’re using rainwater for those cold water loads and we’ve never had a problem with our washer in those 28 years (The lonely Maytag repairman ads were right), does it make overall sense to replace our washer? Right now, we’re thinking it doesn’t. So we are probably going to forego that 0.5 point for LEED in lieu of what we feel makes more sense overall. 
I’d be interested in your opinions.
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The Lawrence Street House – Rainwater, Part 2

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 place. We’re reducing our actual lawn area to just about 100 sq ft. Lawns are the largest irrigated “crop” in the US, and we often use clean, drinking water to do it.
Then, after we reduce, we’re going to reuse (the second “r”) our rainwater that already would have fallen onto the ground where our house will be. The landscaping that needs irrigation will largely be fed by a drip system. Drip irrigation is hugely more efficient than pop-up heads.
We’re also looking at using rainwater for two of the major water-using “appliances” inside our home: our toilets and clothes washer. More on those next time.
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The Lawrence Street House – Rainwater, Part 1

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 ft.

There are several resources you can get online to calculate how many gallons of water this translates into. that’s helpful as we get into our irrigation demand and other things we might want to do with our water.
I’ve talked with the people from RainTech in Jacksonville, Oregon, just over 150 miles from here. Their system (pictured above), is called RainSpace. It’s underground, simple low-tech and just seems elegant to us. Visit their site, watch their installation video and see what we mean.
We’re hoping to use rainwater for all our irrigation and maybe even flush our toilets and wash our clothes with it. I’ll get into a bit more about that tomorrow. Meanwhile, check out RainTech, their green certifications and learn a little more about their company.