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Greenway Townhouses are Complete!

Come with me as I take you on a tour of our Greenway Townhouses. Located at 785 River Road in Eugene, Oregon, we built an 11-apartment project on a previously-developed site. As you can see in this photo, each apartment has its own private south-facing courtyard. Durable materials such as galvanized siding and concrete patios add to the low-maintenance exteriors.

Landscaping, once established, will not need irrigation. And all our rainwater from the roofs, the sidewalks and parking lot stays on site in our large rain garden. No storm water goes into the City storm system.

We achieved Earth Advantage Platinum rating and are targeting LEED Gold.

For rental information, contact:

Principle Property Management, 4710 Village Plaza Loop, Suite 220, Eugene, Oregon 97401. 541-345-6789.

Or contact Dan Hill at 541-913-0016 or Bill Randall at 541-517-2223.

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The Carpet and The Dust Mite

For many years, the concept of wall-to-wall carpeting was marketed to us for our homes. The truly cool, hip homes had carpeting everywhere. Soft, warm and conducive to walking around barefoot, carpet was the status symbol of the 1970s and 1980s.

I remember the house I grew up in. It had linoleum in the bathrooms, kitchen and family room and wood flooring in the rest of the house. I guess in the early 1960s in Oregon, wood floors were cheap. Well, inexpensive at least. When I was in Junior High (Middle School for those of you younger than 45), my parents decided to join the “wave” and carpet the whole house. I resisted. I liked my wood floor. It was a beautiful, warm reddish-brown. And it was easy to keep clean. Not that cleaning my floor was anything I ever really did (I was 13, after all). So, after much prodding and stubbornness on my part, I convinced my parents that while they were going to carpet the rest of the house, they should leave my bedroom the wood floor. And I won.

So the entire time I lived at home (which was until I finished college and got married), my bedroom had a wood floor. I’d like to say I was smart and ahead of my time and all that, but really I just liked the wood floor.

Since then, I have learned that carpeting is probably one of the dirtiest, hazardous-to-your-health aspects of our homes. We spend almost 90% of our time indoors, so the indoor environmental quality (IEQ) of our homes is very important. And in a study “Allergy-Resistant Housing – Principles and Practice”, common allergens in the home list dust mites, pollen, pet dander and fungi and molds high on the list of importance related to the effects these things have on our health. Dust mites feed on human skin flakes and live and breed predominately in our carpets. Pollens get tracked in on our shoes and clothes and can easily be transferred to our carpets.

Cleaning carpet is an interesting concept. Most vacuum cleaners just stir the dirt, dust and mites around. Have you ever seen a vacuum when you first turn it on have that “puff” of dust and dirt go flying around? Think about that for a minute then tell me if you think it’s really doing any good, serious cleaning. We have a central vacuum system in our current home so at least the dirt goes outside our home into a canister in the garage.

But the wake up call or realization or whatever you may want to call it came the first time we had the carpet professionally cleaned. The extractor water was black. And I’m thinking “I’m walking on this, laying on this to watch TV, breathing this.” And while we have some wood floors in our home, most is still carpet. The other thing we’ve noticed is when we dust mop or simply sweep the wood floors, there is an incredible amount of dust and dirt. And my wife and I think “this is also throughout our carpets…”

You may notice in my posts that we are designing a new, smaller home. We are also targeting a LEED Platinum rating. LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) is a third-party rating system for sustainability and healthy buildings. One of the LEED emphases is hard-surface flooring. They, too, recognize the health benefits to not using carpet.

So as we are designing our new home (view the Lawrence Street House posts), we’ve committed to using all hardwood floors. Everywhere. We will have no carpet. If we have rugs, they will be throw rugs that can be removed and cleaned periodically. And we will have a healthier home.

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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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theFERN – latest picture

stucco and roof are on theFERN in Marathon, Texas
Steven Jones sent us the latest picture of his version of theFERN that he’s building in Marathon, Texas. His comment: “I love it!”
Thanks, Steven, we’re looking forward to seeing it completed.
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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.
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The Lawrence Street House – Solar Electric [update]

[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 photovoltaic and a separate hot water system. This maximizes tax credits and utility incentives and generates a lot of electricity and hot water. Photovoltaic systems are still expensive and the cells are getting more efficient, but they’re still relatively inefficient. HOWEVER, they are still worth it in my book.
Hot water systems typically generate a lot of hot water for a relatively low cost. As a point of comparison, a 2 KW equivalent hot water system will cost about $8,000 to $9,000 where a 2 KW stand-alone pv will be in the $13,000 neighborhood. Both of those are before credits and incentives.
But our LEED rater, Eli, has a friend who is an engineering type who had a thought. This, of course can sometimes be dangerous (engineers having thoughts can be kind of like architects having an idea). But the more I’ve considered his thought, the more it makes sense to me.
What he observed is during the summer, a typical solar hot water system will heat a normal 120 gallon solar water tank up to maximum temperature, then shut off. Two “problems” with that. First, 120 gallons is more water than most people use (a typical home has a 52 gallon water heater). Second, when it shuts off, in the time of year when you get the most solar, you are basically throwing away that extra energy by not collecting it. Two very intriguing points.
So his thought is to bag the solar hot water system with its oversized tank, pumps, plumbing, etc and put that money into upsizing your photovoltaic system. So I got some preliminary pricing on upsized pv. A 2.1 KW system is about $13,500 ($1,200 net after credits), a 3.2 KW $20,000 ($4,500 net) and a 4.9 KW system $29,400 ($9,500 net). A hot water system nets out at about $4,200 after credits. So a 3 KW plus hot water system nets at about $8,700 but boosting it up to almost 5 KW (3 KW plus the 2 KW hot water) nets at $9,500. And, during the summer, we can sell the extra back to our utility and build a credit for the winter.
We’re strongly leaning toward the 4.9 KW system. We’ll couple that with a small, 40 gallon high efficiency water heater (like the Rheem Marathon). I have Eli checking to see how much energy we should actually save (which is more important to us than the tax credits) and I’ll report how that pencils out.
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The Lawrence Street House – Front Porch continued…

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 bids and find out just where we’re at on our budget.

In this post, I want to kind of tag on to my Front Porch article previously in April. This has been a huge part of my wife and my personal culture shift and paradigm that it became a major part of our design. It is also a major part of our landscaping layout. Thankfully, our landscape architect, David Dougherty (Dougherty Landscape Architects), who designed our landscaping in our present house 11 years ago was called into service to design our new one. David understands our desires (our current landscaping is incredible), sustainability and front porch philosophy.
Because our house faces probably the major bike and pedestrian east-west connection through town, we wanted to have our house relate well to that. It’s interesting that our City code allows us, because we are on a corner lot, to pick one side as the “front” and the other one as the “side”. This means, if we wanted to, we could build a 6′ high, solid wood fence the entire 150 foot length of our lot along this wonderful ped/bike corridor. Real neighborly, huh?
Of course, that would be totally contrary to what we envision for this house. We want to be part of the neighborhood, not project this idea that “this is my space; stay out.” Yet, because we are on a major circulation path, we do want some level of privacy for our outdoor living space. From the street as well as from the secondary home. Therein lies the challenge.
And David met that challenge. The image above is a segment of our conceptual plan, showing the porch and the yard. You can download a full size plan by clicking here, but I want to focus my discussion today on just the front porch and the yard.
I’ll start with the yard first. As I said, we wanted some level of privacy when we’re out having a barbecue or family gathering. After all, this is a major circulation path. Not a wood fence or hedge of arborvitae. This isn’t a major path for cars. We were mowing our lot the other day and in a fifteen minute period or so, I counted 22 bikes, 6 pedestrians and 2 cars passing by. So sound privacy isn’t much of an issue. We also don’t want to be completely on display. David captured that essence wonderfully and we are now taking this conceptual plan to that next level with only minor changes. We are reducing the lawn size even more (that IS our only lawn area — about 250 sq ft on a 9,000 sq ft lot) and providing some more patio for our outdoor table, chairs and umbrella. I’ll go into more detail as this progresses in a later post.
If you’ve read my April post about front porches, you’ll understand why our front porch is the way it is; if you haven’t read it, do that now, then return to this spot. We are envisioning some stone insets between the porch steps and the sidewalk wrapping around the corner. This allows people to cut the corner walking from 15th to Lawrence (they will anyway, so why not go with it?) and makes a hugely-inviting “front” to our home. My wife and I can see ourselves sitting out on the front porch on a Saturday morning, greeting passersby and maybe even inviting them up for a cup of coffee or ice tea (if summer ever arrives…). Neighborhood is all about this interaction and that is some of what we’ve lost in our recent trends in house and subdivision design.
That’s probably enough information for anyone to process in one sitting. As I mentioned, I’ll talk in more detail about some of our other landscape ideas later.
But this parting thought: most people design a house, get everything done, sometimes even start construction, THEN think about colors, plants, patios, etc. It needs to happen sooner, in this earlier stage of design, so the indoors and outdoors have some cohesive connection (and so it fits into the budget). Good design is comprehensive.