EcoEnovation - Denver

Home Stretch

2006-12-20T11:53:00.000-07:00

Happy Holidays!

We awoke to a Front Range Blizzard this morning that swirled up from the Gulf of Mexico to dump up to two feet of plump, puffy, powder on the Colorado capital... Hey, A little bit of alliteration never nusanced no one.

So after doing a little shoveling and grabbing a Duffy roll, we buttoned in to finish hanging drywall, fire off a blog entry, and enjoy the warmth of hydronic radiant heating flowing beneath our feet.

Zach and I have been joined for the last month by our old friend Brandon from college. Brandon is the funny looking guy with the "Del Soto Bail Bonds" sweatshirt holding the tape. Brandon just got out of the Army in September, went on a little road trip, and got married to his wife Larisa for the second time down in Costa Rica (it has been observed that lots of Army couples elope). He arrived in the mile high city in Novemeber and became the company's first payroll employee.

Brandon's arrival to the team has been motivating. We've powered through buttoning up the bathroom, finishing and staining the concrete slab, insulating the entire house (we used among a few other kinds of insulation a product called "Ultratouch" made from recycled Blue Jean Cotton), sealing air leaks with foam, and lofting the kitchen ceiling (a massive task worthy of a special nod from the guy who worked on the computer while Brandon and Zach magically built another little house inside this little house). We passed our final rough electrical inspection last week and have been hanging drywall ever since. Lights, switches, a shower, a toilet, heat, and a few clean surfaces to look at! Now for the custom bamboo cabinets being crafted by our friend and neighbor Martin Shea, an esteemed, local cabinet maker who's really helped us out.

The concrete slab went in a few weeks ago, and its four inches of thermal mass store the heat of the hot water running through the tubes to provide a smooth-feeling, long-lasting, and highly-efficient form of heating. The biggest efficiency comes from how this heating system interacts with the people that live in the home. Radiant in-floor heating is designed to warm the occupants of the room, rather than the room itself. Hot water running through the tubes radiates heat directly into the your feet and warms the body from the inside rather than having to force hot air to warm the body from the outside through a pretty thick skin (in some).

The heat is provided right now by a Nortitz "on-demand" type water heater that's capable of providing up to 193,000 BTUs at up to 5 gallons per minute. This little guy (it's a 2'x3' box that mounts on the wall) is impressive! It provides enough hot water to heat the floors and take care of all the domestic hot water demands. The best part is that there aren't 60 or 80 gallons of hot water down there constantly dissipating heat and constantly needing to be warmed up again wasting fuel. This Noritz only kicks on "on demand", thus representing a huge efficiency in energy use.

Things are looking good here at the bungalow. She's starting to show her beautiful face. Now we just have to dress her up for the ball.

A floor that shares heat.

2006-11-09T14:26:00.000-07:00

Hanna typing: One of the biggest undertakings of the project has been achieved. After months of working on preparation for our radiant floor installation all the pieces finally came together a couple of weeks ago. Jonathan spent close to a week under the floor joists of two rooms installing the plastic tubing amidst dirt and limited space. Later, Zach helped install the tubes over a metal mesh grid that held them in place in what is to become the dining room and kitchen. When they were done the floors looked like an amazing art installation piece, ready for presentation in any contemporary art museum!

Today the achievement in the house is even greater. Two weeks ago concrete was poured over the tubes and mesh and tubes in the soon to be dining room and kitchen. A dark charcoal grey was chosen for the floor--this is a color that will show off both the tone of the to-be installed cabinets and the exposed brick that has been unearthed in these two rooms.

A powerful heat system has been purchased and is now running. The house is heated from the floor up, and it is warm and cozy even on the second floor.

We are now working on pouring a concrete wall in the bathroom and tiling two of the walls with some beautiful gray slate. High-efficiency Daphne plumbing fixtures have been purchased and are soon to be installed.

The days are shorter now here in Denver but they are still filled with excitement and progress at 1834 S. Clarkson Street.

mid september

2006-09-21T21:31:00.000-06:00

Zach typing: greetings from sunny colorado. we've had our first snow up in the high country!! the mountains are snow capped but it still feels like summer down here in Denver. i'm fresh back from a surf trip to baja, and jon really came through while i was away. i returned to find the radiant floor system design complete as well as a friendly electrician added to our team. Good help is hard to find, and we are now poised to execute all of the plans we've been setting up for the last month.

These are the most recent pictures from in the house.

you can see we removed the ceiling above the kitchen to expose the vaulted roof to the ridge, and the brick arch has been repaired. the natural wood will not be featured in the final design because we need to add framing and drywall to create space for insulation. We will create an 18 inch recess with this framing that we will fill with cellulose to give the roof an insulation value of R-60. To give you an idea, most houses have a roof insulation value of R-40. We are utilizing this beefed up insulation to capture the energy from the radiant floor and keep utility costs to an absolute minimum.

we are getting very excited now that all of our prep work is beginning to position us to reach a few milestones. The radiant floor will be complete in the next two weeks with the rough electric finishing right behind. we then move directly into finishing the bathroom and beginning construction of the kitchen cabinets. check back next week and we'll have some pictures of the radiant system equipment and a visual of the final prep for the radiant floor in the kitchen and dining room. write us a note and ask us some questions because i'm sure i've left something out. see you later

Vaulted Kitchen Ceiling

2006-08-17T18:42:00.000-06:00

zach typing: hey there, sorry for taking so long to get this blog up. fortunately we havn't forgotten to take some pictures while we were down in the trenches doing some things worth blogging about. We've made some serious headway since the last entry. As of today we have taken out the kitchen ceiling and made room for a vaulted ceiling. below, you can see the joists just before we cut them out. last week we moved the bathroom and vaulted the ceiling above the new shower. above is a picture of me laying out one of the hip joists for the new ceiling.
here is a picture of the scrap yard where we recycle the iron, brass, aluminium, and copper we take out of the house. This way we keep the scap metal out of the landfill and get to add a few dollars to the coffer as well.
another shot of me laying out the new bathroom ceiling. We've designed the bathroom with a slanted twelve foot high ceiling with a sun tube to allow for some natural light. stay tuned for more pictures as this promises to be one of the hottest bathrooms in the neighborhood.
after a long day we like to take advantage of the beautiful weather here in colorado, and there's no better way than a plate of brie and french bread served up in the garden. come on over and enjoy the scene-hope to see you soon!

a picture from above the kitchen before we deconstructed the planks and cut out the joists. all of the wood here is being reused on-site for bracing and miscelaneous framing. it takes longer to drive to the lumber yard than it does to pull out the nails.

Updated Floorplan

2006-07-29T20:28:00.000-06:00

This is an updated picture of the floor plan. Zach and I have been grinding through the utility cellar and have thoroughly enjoyed working with the greenblocks and will soon be working above ground on forming the finished concrete slab. Mike, our engineer, came up with the great idea to pour our 4" insulated radiant slab directly on grade rather than suspending it on joists above a problematic, building-code intensive crawl space. Not only does this save resources mostly in the form of lumber, but it also allows us to raise and lower the final floor elevation without any more effort than what it takes to shovel the dirt (which is just a free workout as far as we're concerned). So we've opted to lower the dining room floor height about 7" below the kitchen floor height while finishing both surfaces and the step between them in polished and dyed concrete. The idea is to "compress" anyone entering the house when they stand on the entry platform so that the full effect of a ten foot ceiling in the dining room can be contrasted before stepping down.

The breakfast bar will act to divide the space between the dining room and the kitchen in an open floor plan concept. The diffierent elevations will allow for a nice, tall bar for visitors to saddle up to from the dining room side while also providing a sizeable countertop workspace for whoever is cooking. We designed the bar to follow a curve based on the Fibonacci sequence, a natural pattern that occurs in nature countless times in forms like a nautilus shell or a fern. We worked this into the design to give a nod to the concept of biomimicry - the idea of using nature as an ecological standard to judge the "rightness" of our innovations. After 3.8 billion years of evolution, nature has learned what works and it is our belief that such an intricate blueprint leads to aesthetic beauty.

Onward and Upward

2006-07-22T09:43:00.000-06:00

This is a picture of the lowest point we will reach in the renovation. Yesterday, Zach and I mixed 30 bags of concrete and poured this 8"x16" reinforced concrete footing. These first 8 inches of upward progress will support a 6 foot ICF wall (Insulated Concrete Form), and a 4" concrete slab to be formed and poured in the coming week.

Zach and I are enthused to try out a relatively new and emerging green building product in the form of our ICF utility cellar.
ICFs are made from expanded polystyrene (EPS - same stuff they make Styrofoam coffee cups out of), but they represent a huge energy savings with insulating values of up to R-50, and provide amazing strength with a perfect and continuous reinforced concrete form. EPS is not our favorite green insulator considering some of the biodegradeable alternatives (recycled cotton, recycled newspapers, soy, and straw to name a few), but EPS has come a long way.

We chose a company called Greenblock, whose simple leggo-like assembly system, high R-values, and handy embedded furring strips made for a perfect combination. Additionally, although Greenblock is a world-wide manufacturer that has been used as a standard European building system for over 30 years, they have a small local distributor in Woodland Park. Zach and I were pleased to be greeted by a professional and friendly old hammer swinger named Jeff who graciously agreed to hang out and wait for us after hours to sell us the meager two-bundle order we were requesting. We were treated to a full introductory class in Jeff's office and later followed it with a quick wall building tutorial in the warehouse. We certainly didn't feel like we were dealing with a multi-national corporation. Jeff made it easy for us to choose Greenblock, and we hope to host him for an ICF class in Denver on our next project this fall.

The ICFs, which come in 4'x1'x11.25" blocks, will be stacked like a brick wall on top of our new concrete footings at the bottom of the cellar and braced with standard framing lumber for support. We will then pump 4000 psi concrete with a mixture of %20 fly-ash (to replace some of the Portland cement - a diminishing resource in increasingly high demand as China and India pour more concrete foundations and walls than we can imagine) into the bottom of the forms and fill them like a pudding cup. It's a clever and elegant system. We're excited to move forward.

This is a huge project for a two person crew, and at times it can get a little daunting. Fortunately, our requirement to recycle or reuse no less than 75% of the waste materials from the project has facilitated the building of a few morale boosters in the form of landscaping. In order to collect the rubble and dirt from our demolition, we built outdoor planter boxes out of FSC-certified (Forestry Stewardship Council) 2x6s and brick posts. The boxes we've built so far have provided a need for over 10 cubic yards of landscaping fill. The rest we take to recycling facilities first, and landfill last. I'm proud to say that we've only taken three trailer-loads of waste to the landfill so far, and I feel confident we will make our goal of 75%.

Now that the boxes are filled, Hanna and Malin have started to gather a collection of beautiful native grasses, shrubs, and flowers and have started to implement a drought-resistant and low water use landscape design. The house is whirring with a wonderful feeling of progress. Although it may look like a bunch of vagrants and hippies are camping out waiting for Phish tickets, this EcoEnovation is in full swing, and before we know it, it will be time to dress her up and present her to the neighbors. Until then, we persevere!

Back to Work

2006-07-08T11:27:00.000-06:00

Hanna and I have just returned from the East coast where we had a wonderful hiatus from the tasks at hand awaiting us in Denver. Work resumes next week with the arrival of our old friend Zach from San Diego. Zach is a proffessional carpenter, a surfer, and a journeyman who has graciously offered us the better part of his summer to join us in building the "EcoEnovation". With his help, we hope to quicken the pace as we move from the demolition and deconstruction phase into the rebuilding phase.

We will start by first building Zach's and Hanna's sister Malin's sleeping quarters in the garage. I like to call the garage (which is unrealistically small for our Outback) our new "bunk house". The EcoEnovation is turning into a real barn building party with friends and relatives passing through Denver all summer, and with the house in a constant state of flux, accomodations are limited. The garage is clean and dry with electricity and is therefore a perfect candidate to provide a bunk house to our transient guests. We've also placed our new refridgerator in there with our microwave on top rendering the space into a rustic kitchen. There are two tiny tiny rooms adjoining the main bay of the garage that could be used as a mud room or utility closet, but instead, we will install a few sleeping platforms to constitute what Malin calls the sorority and the fraternity house.

There is a small 5 foot wide outdoor corridor between the garage and the house that we have transformed into an outdoor hygiene facility. With the help of my good friend Adrian, we installed a custom door and frame to form the corridor into an outdoor room. The door was composed of deconstructed floor joists and 2x4s, sheet metal from the old air ducting system, and a series of beautiful cedar slats recovered from one of the many floor decks we removed. Inside the private space created we have placed a solar shower on a pulley system, and set up a dishwashing station in lieu of not having a functioning indoor shower or kitchen. We love the solar shower so much, we've decided to add a permanent outdoor shower to the plan.

After completeing the bunk house and moving Zach and Malin into it, we will rip the rest of the floors and framing out of the 1st floor. We need to have the entire inside gutted down to the dirt below the old rotting floor joists so that we can bring in our structural contractor to poor two grade beams along the entire length of the foundation. We will then install new floor joists on the new beams inside the old brick foundation and build our radiant slab on top. We're all getting excited to start building upward from a level and square platform. Things are proceeding in style!

Floor Plan

2006-06-12T13:55:00.000-06:00

This is a very basic drawing of the floor plan. The renovation involves ripping all of the many floor decks up and starting over from the joists by building a thin concrete slab with radiant pex tubing running hot water throughout the floor provided by solar hot water panels and a high-efficiency gas hot water heater (the combination will be used to provide domestic hot water as well).

The South side will be significantly opened to passive solar light and heating by installing a 9 foot, 3-panel, low-e glass slider off the kitchen, and a new 4'x6', 3-panel, low-e glass window off the dining room. We will also be insulating both the crawl-space and the roof for the first time in this house's life, adding up to serious energy savings and a federal tax credit!

Good News and Bad

2006-06-11T11:29:00.000-06:00

Over the last week we were visited at the house by quite a few experts to help us move forward. On Monday, one of the guys from Olshan Foundation Repair came by and told me he didn't think the almost 100 year old brick foundation looked to be in terrible shape. In fact, he told me, a lot of the houses he goes to built in the 80's and 90's have horrendous foundation problems, but the old ones tend to hold up well. He told us that he would love to get the work if a structural engineer deemed it necessary, but the helical pier system they use would almost certainly be unnecessary. We appreciated his honesty and looked forward to talking with our structural engineer the next day.

Mike Coyle of Coyle Inspection Engineers stopped by the next morning to assess the foundation and give us an initial consultation. Mike's a great guy with a laid back and proffessional demeanor. He walked through the old 1914 brick bungalow with us and climbed down into the crawl space to get a closer look. By the end of his visit, we were convinced that all we needed to do to firm up the foundation and floor joists was to place blocks between them and install a beam to bisect the meager 12 ft span. The beam will be placed on posts anchored to concrete spread footings on grade. It's a necessary repair for two reasons: 1) the floor joists are only 2x6s and 2) we plan to pour a 3" concrete slab, and will need the extra support. Finally, we will need to build a retaining wall around the dirt pit that was dug out of the crawl space to accomodate the furnace, and we plan to take it a little further and build a small basement utility room to house the radiant floor heat plumbing manifold, and the hot water heater. It was a very eventful and positive consultation. We look forward to working with Mike as we move forward into the construction phase.

Just as Mike was leaving, Julie from Namaste Solar out of Boulder came by to do a site survey. Our original plan was to have both solar hot water panels and a PV system to take advantage of the fantastic federal tax credits and Xcel energy clean energy rebates provided this year. In order to qualify for Xcel's rebate, you need to have 100% solar exposure form 9AM to 3PM, and unfortunately the neighbor's beautiful birch allows us only 80%. Julie was very helpful and encouraged us to favor the solar hot water panels over any PV system since the hot water panels aren't nearly as vulnerable to shading as the PV systems. Although she and Namaste were not going to do business on our house, Julie and Mike exchanged cards and discussed Mike's own home system requirements. Mike even crawled up onto the roof with us to get a look at Julie's nifty device that proved we didn't have enough exposure. So instead of solar electricity we will have 100% wind power provided to us from Xcel's Windsource renewable energy program.

The rest of the week was spent making contact with electrical, plumbing, and structural repair contractors. Although it was a bummer to find out we wouldn't get to turn the little bungalow into its own renewable energy powerplant feeding clean solar power back to the grid, it does free up some money in the budget to include some of the higher end finish materials. But the incentives provided by both the federal government and the state regulated utility for solar electricity are enough to cover at least half of the cost of installation (looking at a payback period of around 5 to 8 years when pegged to the current energy prices - after that, FREE energy) and should be considered by any and every home on the grid in Colorado. We will still receive a $2000 federal tax credit for the solar hot water panels, and a few hundred bucks back from the water utility for installing ultra low flush (ULF) toilets and an energy star rated washing machine. If you're interested in how to make these incentives work for you, go to our website to learn more and sign up for a free initial consultation.

Demolition and Deconstruction

2006-06-01T08:41:00.000-06:00

Our design and plan for this total green renovation is being accomplished with the guidance of the United States Green Building Council's LEED standards. The LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Green Building Rating System® is a voluntary, consensus-based national standard for developing high-performance, sustainable buildings. Sustainable Urban Village is a proud member of the USGBC because we believe that terms like "green building" and "sustainable development" only have true meaning when there are industry-wide standards discussed, agreed upon, and adhered to.

It's not enough just to say you're a green builder any more. Instead, with guided planning and strict analysis of green build projects, the USGBC provides a framework and point system to describe just how green your project really is. It let's us quantify what "green" really means through metrics of energy use, resource depletion, site impact, occupant health, and waste generation to name a few. What's more, the USGBC encases its prescribed strategies for sustainable development in an economic argument. If you go to the USGBC Home Page, you'll see that they are presently offering five new examples of recent green build projects that actually saved the building owners money. Economic Prosperity. Ecological Wisdom.

In following the LEED standards, we are currently endeavoring to minimize our waste streams during the demolition by deconstructing as much usable material as possible. So far we've managed to salvage almost a dozen 2x4 studs that we'll later use for interior wall framing, and a kitchen sink that will be donated to the Habitat for Humanity Outlet Store along with a garbage disposal and some kitchen cabinetry. Additionally, we've separated all of the old wooden lathe slats that were used to form the original walls and ceiling from the tons of plaster that bound them, and have donated them as firewood to eager takers through Craig's List. We offered the plaster as well through Craig's List as "excellent landscaping fill" to any would-be takers, and found a wonderful recipient. We brought one full trailer-load of plaster rubble to a woman who was growing wild mushrooms that called for a high level of gypsum in her compost. One man's trash is another man's treasure!

Deconstruction and demolition should be complete by the end of the week. We hope to use most of the rest of the "waste" for our own landscaping and firewood needs, and will continue to endeavor to avoid the landfill as much as is feasible. Once the house is stripped down to its strong brick-walled bones, we'll be able to address any structural repair needed on the foundation from above, and start building a beautiful new home inside this charming old shell - the ultimate recycling in home building!

Sustainable Design Starts with the Location

2006-05-22T10:55:00.000-06:00

On April 27th, my wife Hanna and I purchased a small bungalow in Denver’s emerging Platt Park neighborhood with the intention of demonstrating both the economic and environmental effectiveness of what is becoming known as “green building”. Sustainable Urban Village is a green design consultant and sustainable development company we founded in order to further the gathering efforts of establishing an infrastructure for the future that is economically efficient, ecologically sensitive, and truly sustainable. We don’t believe that these dynamics are at odds. In fact, we intend to demonstrate that with the right design and implementation, building “green” can be simpler and far more cost effective than traditional contemporary standards.

The small 1,000 sq ft house we bought sits nestled 38 feet back from one of the many tree-lined streets that compose this quiet urban neighborhood. The original brick structure was built in 1914 during a time before the automobile had become ubiquitous, and neighborhoods were designed to a pedestrian scale. A few blocks to the West is a quaint commercial strip called South Pearl Street that provides a vibrance of cultural expression in comforting local forms like a coffee shop called Stella’s that offers a sun-drenched deck, a comfy book-bordered living room setting complete with couches, and free wireless internet. Pearl Street is home to some of the finest restaurants in town, a used book shop, and a small bike store to name just a few of the many locally-owned establishments that compose the neighborhood’s character. You won’t find any franchises or fast food joints here, and that’s what people like about it.

The Platt Park neighborhood represents one of the the first aspects of what it means to build sustainably. In November of this year, the city of Denver will open a new light-rail station a few blocks to the North of our house allowing pedestrian or bike access to the entire regional transportation system to include Denver International Airport. By simply walking out our door, we are offered the entirety of the city’s resources without the use of a car. And if we want to be really pure about it, we can pedal our way through Denver’s network of bike trails. At over $3/gal and climbing for gasoline, this isn’t just an environmentalist’s issue anymore. Being able to integrate with the urban fabric for the necessities of day to day life without the use of a car speaks to the bottom line of family finance.

We bought this house at a major discount due to the fact that it’s in pretty rough shape. The original brick foundation has deteriorated over the years, and the space enclosed above it consists of clogged pipes, rotted out bathroom walls, and an outdated electrical system. Despite its blemishes, the structure has solid bones, and a natural turn of the century charm. It’s a perfect candidate for a ground-up renovation that will preserve its character while updating the space for modern urban living.

Rather than opting to "scrape" the property as many developers choose to do in the area, we are planning to revive and possibly expand the property, a core principle of sustainable development. Our plan is to accomplish a complete “Eco-Enovation” by the end of the summer. Many aspects of the design will remain in flux until the demolition is finished and we can assess the integrity of the foundation more thoroughly, but at present we plan to integrate the following aspects of green design and building techniques:

1) Salvage and recycle as many building materials as possible - i.e. deconstruct rather than demolish.
2) Install large low-e glass windows and doors on the south wall to capture passive solar heat, provide natural lighting, and improve insulation in the structure.
3) Install a radiant floor heating system in a thin cement slab to heat the space and its occupants most efficiently.
4) Install at least one solar hot water panel to provide some or all of the domestic hot water and floor heating requirements.
5) Employ sustainable and healthy building materials such as architectural salvage, bamboo flooring, countertops made from recycled paper, Eco-Spec paints, recycled cotton insulation, and sustainably harvested lumber certified by the Forestry Stewardship Council (FSC) to name a few.
6) Install EnergyStar rated appliances and replace all bulbs with high-efficiency halogen bulbs.
7) Install a grid-tied photo-voltaic electrical system to minimize the energy foot-print of the house and feed clean, renewable electricity back to the grid when it is not being used.

We will strive to accomplish these goals at every juncture within the smallest radius allowable, thereby minimizing the total energy footprint of the project and contributing as much as possible to the local economy.

We will use this blog to document and share what we learn during the process of the renovation. Presently, we have obtained the initial required permits and have started the demolition process to include deconstruction of reusable resources like framing lumber, fixtures, and appliances - a “green” technique in that we’re recycling, but also in that we don’t pay a dime for these resources, leaving more “green” in the budget later for things like solar panels and EnergyStar appliances. We plan to update the blog weekly and welcome any questions or comments. Enjoy!