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.

It all starts with the compost

This isn't really about gardening, though I'm sure that will come in somewhere. It's about our family, and the start of an adventure, and a latent desire to set down roots. To provide our children with some of the freedom we had as kids and to instill in them a love of this earth. It's about a trip some 2400 miles along Route 40, from Pasadena CA to Asheville NC.

And it all starts with the compost.

My husband and I are Iowa-raised. New York City lured us straight from college. A bit of my heart will always be there. A desire for adventure and job opportunities brought us to Southern California. A dozen years, some wonderful friends, a house, a dog and two great kids. But somehow - Pasadena has always felt transitional - a stop along the way. A few years ago, we started thinking about where we would go if we could go anywhere. In the age of google, it's easy to dream. Input the things we need -- good schools, a moderate climate, access to an airport - and the things we want -- culture, mountains, outdoor recreation, good restaurants. Templeton, California was tempting. Ashland Oregon was lovely. But not quite right.

But back to the compost. We were still in Pasadena, and we needed to get our hands dirty. We needed to grow stuff. And we needed compost. It's amazing how much stuff can go in a simple compost bin! We have the happiest worms in Pasadena.

But composting is good for more than the garden. It gets you dreaming of more space, a simpler life, a better balance. It got me searching for green homes (of course there's a website for that). And that led to Asheville. A lovely small city in Western North Carolina, in the mountains, with good schools, a local airport, great outdoor recreation, and a rich history of art and culture. And a thriving green building, sustainable living culture.

Since this is all past - I'll make it quick. We found almost 12 acres of land in Arden, just south of Asheville. We close on it in a week. We're under contract to sell our house and plan to leave mid-June. We found a builder and we're working on plans for our green dream home. My parents may join us - but that's for another post. It's all just falling into place.

So now I have to figure out what to do with all that compost.