Friday, April 10, 2009

It's easy being green

With apologies to everyone's favorite frog - it seems it is easy being green.

We're deep into design on our new house. I'm calling it an Eichler/Kaufmann-inpired North Carolina contemporary home (may need to shorten that a bit). We have floorplans, elevations, product specifications, a budget and a projected checklist from the NAHB website that shows we'll exceed the requirements for Gold certification if we build as planned. And the cool part is - it's all been fun. We haven't sacrificed anything to get here. Yet.

We have made a few choices that are less than perfectly green. I'll put them out there so no one thinks I've overlooked them.
  1. We're building new in a time when 1 of 9 houses (apparently) is empty. This one requires a little explanation. We didn't really set out to build. We planned to buy. And we certainly looked at just about everything on the market. But our list of needs and wants was just too long - we needed space for 3 generations, a couple horses, a grand garden, no windy mountain roads, and close to but not in town. And the property we found was just so perfect we couldn't resist.
  2. We aren't going off-grid. Our house is passive solar with active solar for heat and hot water. That accounts for a large percentage of total energy use. We aren't sure if we'll do solar for all our energy needs. At a certain point, there are trade-offs. Do we have enough room for solar hot water & solar panels? Do we want to invest in big batteries to be off-grid? Is it good enough to aggressively reduce electric use?
  3. We plan to capture and use rainwater, but we might not incorporate gray water re-use. Without getting some seriously special permits, we can only use gray water for below-ground irrigation. I'm not sure how much irrigating we'll do. If we collect rainwater, we may not have a logical use for the gray water.
  4. We aren't installing composting toilets. Sorry - just not ready for that. Dual flush, low water? No problem. But becoming our own sewage treatment system seems a little too intense.
  5. We're building a little bigger than we absolutely need. We live in 2000 square feet with 2 kids, a big dog, a cat and a guinea pig, and we work at home in 1/2 of a small garage. We've lived in 2000 square feet or less for our entire adult lives. Our new house will be about 2700 square feet, with a separate office for our business. But hey, we need room for guests!
But here's a partial list of the things we will do:
  1. We're using ICFs with about 60% recycled content. The poured concrete will contain 15 - 25% fly ash. So we use less wood and the house should last just about forever.
  2. The house uses passive & active solar design (both for hot water used in the house and for the radiant heat floors), super insulation, and loads of natural light and ventilation.
  3. All our appliances and systems will be super-efficient and wherever possible we will use recycled or renewable products.
  4. Our site is perfect for solar -- we can orient the house due south, and our property slopes up the hill to the west to naturally shade afternoon heat.
  5. We're trying to minimize the disruption to the land, and whatever we cut down we'll use or replace or both. We know we need to cut down several nice white pines. We're using them for beams, trim, and cabinets.
  6. We're planning great organic gardens and a few chickens to produce some of what we eat. We'll recycle everything we can.
And of course -- we'll compost. It all comes back to that.

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