More Thoughts on Our Green Home

In response to some questions about our green plans for our home, here goes:

We're doing rainwater harvesting and geothermal, and possibly solar water heating, from the start (geothermal should work particularly well for us because, the more contact the coils have with groundwater, the more effective the installation, and the groundwater is just below the surface on our lot). PV electrical will have to wait until later, but we'll put the necessary conduit and brackets in place so it's not a radical renovation if and when we do add them. It looks like wind power is not a viable option in our area right now, but we'll be ready for it if that should change in the future. And should we put the juice into batteries, or have it grid-tied? How about hydrogen fuel cells! I'm actually most interested in doing something with that in the future.

We will make the envelope of the house as tight as possible and incorporate passive solar principles, including thermal mass. We hope to use structural insulated panels, which make a really tight wall, not to mention it moves a lot of the construction into a factory and minimizes waste. The foundation will be insulated concrete forms. We hope to install heat exchangers to keep the heat energy from hot air and water leaving the house.

Finally, we're planning on using as many reclaimed supplies as we can find. We're also planning on low VOC-paint (actually, tinted clay plaster), reclaimed wood and tiles etc., whenever we can. We'll start looking for that stuff when the floor plan is finished.

WI has good rebate and incentive programs available for homeowners using renewable energy, but we don't know a ton about it so we're going to hire a consultant to help with all that.

New Plans from Gary

Anne was sick on Wednesday night, so I went to yoga alone and called our architect afterward to ask if I could come over and bother him while he was working on our plans. He had these drawings ready for us when I got there.

The drawing up to the right is the main floor, and the one below to the left is the upstairs. In addition to a lot of little changes, the big revisions over the last plans include 1) the pantry off the kitchen, which also creates a better space in the living room; 2) the large closet and small office between the master bedroom and the staircase and 3) a staircase going up from the bedroom floor which will lead to the "tower."

Gary also showed me his arrowhead collection--he farms a ton of land and all of his employees know that he'll trade a 12-pack of beer for any arrowheads they dig up. He's got some specimens that might be up to 12,000 years old, according to an archaeologist he's consulted with. Interestingly, a lot of the arrowheads around here are made from chert that's only found in Missouri. The theory is that the material was brought up here by young traders, but nobody knows what they would have traded for since it would have to be something easy to carry back to Missouri.

Back in Blog!

We're reviving this blog now that we're getting closer to starting construction on our new home. For the last 14 months or so we've worked with two architects--the last 6 months with Gary Kincaid, a local architect and renaissance man. Our approach so far hasn't been totally focused, but now we're getting serious about things. So serious, in fact, that Saturday we hired a builder. His name is Scott Ehlert, and he is the builder who did the interior renovation of our current house. We spoke with a couple other builders, but we decided to go with Scott because we and others we know have worked with him in the past and have been very happy with the results. He is very conscientious, his work is top-quality and he has proven, reliable subs. The decision for us boiled down to why mess with a (really) good thing.

The only reason we considered anybody else, in fact, is because we are planning to do some non-traditional stuff with our house, things like a green roof, ICFs & SIPs, passive & active solar, rain harvesting, that kind of thing. Scott expressed some caution about our crazy ideas, and we misinterpreted his caution as a lack of interest. We have cleared that up, and now it's full speed ahead!

The next step is to finalize our floor plans and then get them to Scott's draftsperson for value engineering. We hope to have the floor plans finalized in the next couple of weeks. Both Scott and Gary think breaking ground in May is a reasonable goal.

So, check back here for more updates. Or better still, minimize your hassle and subscribe to the RSS feed! Stay tuned....