Staying Warm

Dear Tree-Huggers,

So it turns out, the way you heat your house is a big deal.  Not only that, but when you build a super insulated home, you should have an efficient system that doesn't give you more than you need.  The most efficient and most comfortable way to heat a home is with in-floor radiant.

Our lovely mountain town has harsh winters - it snows a lot and temperatures regularly fall below freezing.  Therefore, it's particularly important to stay toasty.  Conventional construction usually defaults to a forced air system.  This has its advantages: first, there is only one set of ducts and you can run warm air or cool air through them depending on the season; second (which is related to the firsts since you save on materials and labor), they're the cheapest.

We are, if you haven't already realized this, totally unconventional. And I think forced air sucks.  It's not efficient and it's not comfortable.  It heats the air in a space but not the objects in a space.  Have you ever stood in a room that's measuring 70 degrees by the thermostat, but still feels cold?  Yeah. That's what forced air is like.

Radiant is just superior.  Image courtesy of www.bobvila.com

Green construction usually heats with radiant for a lot of good reasons.  So that's what we're going to do.  Yes, it's more money to install, but over time this type of heat saves money on utility bills.

We had the opportunity to demolish the slab and start again, using a blanket of both rigid and soft insulation with a total R-value of around 12.  On top of that, the plumber lays polyethelene tubing which will be hooked up to pumps, manifolds, and a boiler:

No popsicle toes allowed!

Once the pressure test is completed, the concrete trucks will arrive and pour the slab.  This is what we've been waiting for all these weeks!  After we have a floor, the framers can get to work and we'll really get a sense that things are progressing.

Oh - and I ordered a camera.  It's a time-lapse construction camera that I'll be hanging up at the job site.  Once the shell goes up, I'll be able to upload a quick movie and y'all will be able to see the thing take shape in minutes!

Greenly Yours,

Parker

The Windows are the Eyes to the ... Front Yard?

Dear Tree-Huggers,

It's been a long time.  I know, I know.  I'm a terrible person.  Not really, but I have gotten very behind on writing posts.  Anyway, the progress on the house has been slow.  After the demo, they dug footings.  Yay, footings! You know, those concrete things that hold up the foundations, and therefore the rest of the house?

Inspector-In-Chief

Yeah.  It's important to get those right.  But they're pretty boring to look at.  And the bad news is that weather delays mean that it's unlikely we'll be moving in by June.

After the footings got dug, inspected, poured, dried, and backfilled, they brought in the plumber for the rough.  It only took a day to rough in the drains.  I don't have any pictures of that.

Now, we're waiting on the radiant heat guy to show up and do the install.  Toasty concrete floors are a must, and radiant is the greenest way to heat your house (aside from passive solar gain, of course).  I am looking forward to seeing how all seven of those zones get laid out!

In the meantime, we're finalizing the window order.  We'll be putting in triple paned European windows from an outfit called ZOLA.  They are custom sizes (they can make really big ones), they are built in a factory in Poland, and they're going to make the house look SWEET.  Are they expensive?  The answer is you'll have to sell your firstborn.  Just kidding.  But close.  You'll have to sell their future by spending the college fund.  But it's totally worth it.  These babies not only look good, but they perform!

R-11 Glass, for a total U value of 0.14.  That's tight!  Image courtesy of zola.com

Since most of the heat in your house escapes through the windows, it's going to save you money to have well-insulated, well-made windows.  Standing next to a standard double-pane window installed in a standard wall, you will notice a draft on a cold day.  This means your house is leaking.  By contrast, standing next to a Zola UPVC window feels like standing next to a wall.  It doesn't get drafty.  You don't lose heat.  Which means you're saving money and you're helping to save the planet.

I recently heard a report on the radio that the air in Salt Lake City is one of the 10 worst cities in the U.S.  Most of that pollution is caused by cars and by coal (power plants and mining).  But some of it is caused by our heaters in our homes.  And the less I have to run ours, the better I'll feel about preserving the air in Park City.

The windows will take 8-14 weeks to arrive after they're ordered, so I'll be posting about them again after the arrive, and then again after they're installed.  Installation will include a double-height atrium in the front of the house, and a 12-foot high, 30 foot long lift/slide glass wall out the back.  It's going to be pretty rad.  Check back for awesome pics!

Greenly Yours,

Parker

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Dear Tree-Huggers,

I don't know if I've shared this with you yet, but our goal with this house is to move in by June.  Well, fingers crossed!  But since we're still waiting on our building permit, it may be a fairly ambitious goal.  Time will tell whether it's TOO ambitious:

Demo:  See how they raze that roof.

In the meantime, I'll be posting about the demo process.  Since we bought a house that was designed in the seventies to the standards of a party-house-cum-ski-chalet (think Hugh Heffner goes skiing in the swiss alps), we have decided to demolish most of it and start again.

But here's the rub:  Demolishing a house with a wrecking ball and dumpster would result in a huge amount of trash, and putting stuff in landfills is really bad for the planet.  In fact, construction waste accounts for approximately 40% of consumer waste in our landfills.  That's too much by anyone's standards.

So, to square this project with our sustainable ethos, most of our old house is going to have a second life in someone else's project.  We are doing good, and also doing well (because we get a nifty tax credit out of it).  To accomplish this gorgeous act of re-incarnative sleight-of-hand, we've engaged the Daniel Salmon from The ReUse People.  They're good people, the ReUse people.

Daniel and his team will take the house apart, piece by piece, and donate it to the Habitat for Humanity ReStore.  The bits that can't be salvaged will end up in a dumpster, but that's only a small percentage of the overall.

Panoramic view - the upstairs rooms (before they're removed completely)

So each day when I drive by, the house is less and less of itself.  First, the finishes got taken out.  The furniture, the artwork, the odd and dated kitchen crockery, and the mirrors packed up and hauled away.  Next, the cabinets, the light fixtures, and the plumbing fixtures, got taken down and hauled away.  Then they took out the boiler, the furnaces, the laundry machines, and the pool heater.  Finally, they took each piece of wooden trim away from the windows and doors.

When the first layer of re-usable stuff was taken out, they rolled up the carpets and peeled back the sheetrock.  That stuff got tossed into a dumpster - I guess one can't reuse it no matter how much one wishes to.  Then they stripped out the wiring and the plumbing - any metal or plastic was sent to the recycling center.  The wooden studs were removed, nails taken out, and the 2x4's stacked for reuse.  The windows were removed carefully and stacked against a wall.  The fireplaces in the upstairs bedrooms had their fascias removed and were taken out whole - destined to heat another's home.

And then they went to work on the roof.  They brought in a genie, and started pulling off the shingles.  As for the decking - who knows?  It's pretty old and rotten.  At the moment, they still haven't started deconstructing the pool or the huge fireplace in the living room - those are going to take special attention, I would imagine.  And so it goes.

And then ... the indoor pool.  Welp, that bad boy didn't even fit through the door, so:

It's like, hot tub sized!  But destined for the dumpster.

We have a meeting with the builder and the architect tomorrow - perhaps we'll have the building permit by then!

Greenly Yours,

Parker