The Greens

Acting on a tip from my friend, Greg Merrill, I went to California Paint Company on El Camino Real in Sunnyvale, CA, to look for eco-friendly paint. Greg says that Benjamin Moore is higher rated than Kelly Moore (which I mentioned in Green Shopping) by Consumer Reports for paint quality.

At California Paint Company I talked with Thomas and he gave me a tour of the store. (He did this because I kept asking questions like, “Is that all you got that’s green?”) Benjamin Moore, like the other manufacturers, seems to be trying to eliminate VOCs from their paints. They have just replaced the Moorcraft Super Spec® line of low-VOC paints with a new Eco Spec® line of zero-VOC paints. (Of course, low/zero-VOC refers to the base, and tints can add additional VOCs.)

There are two big differences between the Eco Spec and the Super Spec paints they are designed to replace. The first is that Super Spec is designed to be low-VOC (below 100 grams/liter) and Eco Spec is designed to be zero-VOC (zero grams/liter). According to Thomas, the other is that the newer paint has the full range of colors that Benjamin Moore offers, unlike the former product. However, the Benjamin Moore literature says that Eco Spec has limited colors, so I would double-check on this before buying, although this may have changed since their brochures were printed. Colors in Eco Spec are waterborne, which means that the paint can be thinned with clean water and all you need to clean up is water.

Thomas gave me comparison prices for four different types of paint they offer. This runs the spectrum from their older Super Spec paint, bought primarily by contractors, through Regal® (the paint probably most often purchased by the public to do their own painting), to Aura® (“quite simply the finest paint we’ve ever made” according to the Benjamin Moore literature), to the new Eco Spec (again for contractors, but for green purposes maybe really the best paint of the bunch). I might note here that the literature says that Aura is also a waterborne paint that “meets the most stringent environmental regulations”. It may, but as “only” a low-VOC paint, it isn’t the most environmentally friendly.

What about price? First of all, the older Super Spec was considerably cheaper than the other paints. Just getting the contractor paint could save you 28% over getting Regal, or 44% over getting Aura, and that’s without dithering on the price. If you were a large contractor, you might be able to get a better deal. What do you give up for this? Well, one thing is the color options, which had not been as good. (But with Eco Spec, this problem apparently disappears.) For another, the consistency of the color may not be as good. You may not get exactly the color on the paint chip from the store. For a homeowner or designer trying to make their color scheme work, this could be a big consideration. But, on the other hand, Thomas told me that Super Spec tended to match better if you had to patch it.

Second, the newer Eco Spec carries a 35% premium over the older Super Spec. This is a fairly substantial premium for getting a zero-VOC base. On the other hand, Eco Spec is actually cheaper than both Regal and Aura (by 2% and 24%, respectively). So, if you are considering buying Benjamin Moore, then it is definitely worth a look.

Is this the best deal? Probably not. While Benjamin Moore might beat Kelly Moore in quality at Consumer Reports, the Eco Spec at California Paint Company was more expensive than the Green Coat at Kelly Moore. Since prices may vary considerably between stores and between projects (perhaps if you negotiate a good deal), I’m reluctant to provide a percentage comparison. You may also find that the quality matters more for your project. But, shop around, as they say.

In addition, California Paint Company carries Natura ™ zero-VOC paint, a premium waterborne paint. This wasn’t available at Sunnyvale and I didn’t get a price, but Thomas said they carry it at their Palo Alto store. This is a designer product, maybe comparable to the Yolo paint carried at Kelly Moore. In the Natura literature, it says that Natura follows the Gennex® color platform, but that Eco Spec has limited colors. It would be interesting to compare the price and quality of Yolo and Natura to see which of these might offer the best buy in this category, and to further compare them with their contractor-grade competition.

While I was at California Paint Company, I shopped for other green products. Before engaging the staff, I wandered around to see what else was available. I immediately saw a “green” paint thinner, but little else. I looked through the wood stains and noticed that a number of the cans were marked with their VOC levels. These ranged from maybe 300 to 500 grams/liter. I didn’t expect wood stains to be particularly green, so I wasn’t too surprised. After checking out the paints, I asked Thomas if he knew of any other products that had noticeably changed to greener equivalents. None came to mind.

I asked him about the green paint thinner. He said that he had had one person return it, complaining that it didn’t work. That’s kind of disappointing, but perhaps not fatal, especially if the trend is to move from oil-based paints to waterborne paints. Nevertheless, I suspect we will have oil-based paints around for a long time, so a good solvent would be a plus. On the other hand, a green thinner seems like an oxymoron.

I also asked about the wood stains. Thomas said that they didn’t have any that were low-VOC (where this means under 100 g/l), but that companies were working on that. So, we may see some waterborne stains on their shelves in the future. (I’m not knowledgeable enough to know whether waterborne stains are available generally.) Generally, if you wanted to “stain” wood in an eco-friendly way, you would probably use a wax or other natural finish. I’m not able to find a reference to the type of wax finishes I have in mind, but Aglaia Natural Finishes produces biodegradable plant- and mineral-based products with no petrochemicals or artificial resins.

One of the things I noticed about California Paint Company that I liked was that they had good information on colors and other paint factors. For example, I picked up a nice gloss level chart that shows 10 levels of gloss with paint samples (all in Hazy Blue). I also found a nice, but content free, brochure on how “the natural world can inspire a vision of the way we want our homes to look and feel”. Information on the Aura paints was particularly good, and there were good displays of color chips. They had a really excellent brochure called “Color Language: a color guide for home decorating”, which would be helpful for the non-designer to get some clues. (Designing a room so that the colors work is no small feat, and this only covers some of the basics. However, the limited advice they give is solid.) So, for the shopper who can’t afford a designer, or one that wants to independently research their facts, there was abundant material to help them out.

I also noticed that Benjamin Moore has partnered with others, such as Pottery Barn, to come up with color schemes. They had a brochure with Williamsburg colors and a corresponding brochure about visiting Williamsburg, VA. I personally find their Willamsburg color scheme particularly attractive, so it may figure in paint for our home at some point. (But I wonder how it would go with the southwestern motif I’ve got for other furnishings, like rugs. Hmmm.) Anyway, for whatever reason, I found the color options broader here.

Now, I know I’ve been remiss in not getting back to OSH HQ to find out about their green products, but I’ve still got it on my schedule. Maybe next time.

–Rich Wingerter

Clayton Homes (in Maryville, TN) builds manufactured homes, and they have now designed the iHouse, a green, energy efficient manufactured home, probably the first from a major manufacturer. They introduced their first iHouse at the Clayton home show in Knoxville, in late October, and have a possible commercial release date of various versions of the iHouse as early as May 2009.

Greenotter of Santa Fe, NM, took such a liking to the iHouse that he created the The Clayton I-House, a blog that tracks its development. He’s put together a comprehensive review, including pictures and interviews with people who have previewed models. He’s agreed to some excerpts from his blog:

From Is Clayton’s new “i-house” the Prius of homes?

I’ve been reading about manufactured homes including prefab/modular, kit houses, and green houses and conventional houses of all sorts, log, domes, yurts, for decades. I didn’t think a manufacturer would jump on green as quickly as Clayton has. GM and Ford didn’t care about fuel efficiency, and were fine with waiting to see where Toyota and Honda went with hybrids, because they were doing just fine selling trucks and SUVs. So, maybe Clayton has gotten the smart idea, that while they are doing well now, they want to be like Toyota, on top of the important green trend instead of behind it. No matter what you thought of “trailers” in the past, this step toward green is significant.

From Some photos of the Clayton i-house

From The wutizit factor of Clayton’s i-house

The iHouse has the “wutizit factor”.

It is the type of structure that might cause a passerby to say:

“What is it?”

“Some kind of single-wide right near a utility shed or phone company switching shack?”

When people are looking for a house, they don’t usually want a high wutizit factor, even if the three top priorities of “location, location, location” are perfect. If you see people pointing at your house, you want it to be because it is handsome or cute, not because they are trying to figure out what it is.

Greenotter compares the iHouse with Marianne Cusato’s “Katrina Cottage” and the Cavco solar “Freedom” park model (click through to see the pictures). This is the kind of feedback Clayton should be looking at.

From New article about the iHouse

It is time for people’s interest to shift from bigger houses and granite counter tops, to green, especially lower energy usage. Also, why can’t “future house” intersect with affordable house, as it does in the iHouse, rather than being an unaffordable architectural vision filled with expensive electronic gadgetry.

The iHouse is not the only small, green pre-fab house on the horizon, and I’d like to get more information about them on the site. Not only is the economy putting the squeeze on house sizes, but there’s a real need for affordable houses for the workers of the baby boom generation. So, I’m hoping for more articles from those of you interested in compact and affordable green houses.

–Rich Wingerter

It’s been a very intense couple of weeks as I try to establish Green Making in my “copious spare time”. To publicize the site and to build connections in the local green building community, I’ve been out to several events, including the
San Francisco Green Festival and Clean Tech Open’s Green Building Symposium (“The Future Is Energy Efficient Buildings”).

Both these proved to be great places to meet people involved in green building and learn about what local companies are promoting. I’ve put links to all the companies I encountered on the Green Making website under “Recent Finds” (in the left panel).

I’ve also met with people who are building related businesses, including Petalyn Albert of Remodeling Couples and Nils Davis of Barrier Busting.

Petalyn and I discussed some of the barriers to getting people to do green remodels. One, of course, is pricing; and that will become more of an issue as the economy struggles along. Petalyn said that there was often a split between what architects were designing, which generally on the expensive side, and what builders could build for a reasonable price. The customer might get a design from an architect with the expectation that it could be built at one price, but then not be able to get a builder to build it for anything like that price. And, because of our system of “lowest bids”, customers often got an estimate that was far from realistic, resulting in cost increases all along the way as they learned that the options they wanted always came at a higher price.

This was true of remodeling, too, where initial estimates will give way to much more expensive options once the remodeling has started. This creates distrust between the customers and contractors. But a green remodel is also the route to selling your home in a down market. Green homes are selling when their plain neighbors are not, and a green remodel (if done right) may even increase the value of the home. So, how do you do that without overspending?

My take is that many green products are within hailing distance of their traditional (let’s say “polluting” cousins). If you can do a remodel with green materials and spend no more than, say, 5% above what you would have spent anyway, then you will probably profit from the results. Are there enough green options comparable in price to reasonably do a green remodel in the Silicon Valley area? To find out, I went shopping.

I wanted to find out what kinds of green building materials I could buy and not blow my (theoretical) budget. To get started, I went to the nearest building supply store, Orchard Supply and Hardware, in Sunnyvale, CA. While this isn’t a national chain, it’s still large enough to sell all the typical building supplies, for both consumers and residential construction companies. I went to the lumber department, because I expected them to at least have certified sustainable lumber (something from sustainable resources, such as forests maintained and harvested, instead of virgin forest, something maybe with an obvious FSC-certified label). I asked what they had for green building.

The immediate answer was, “Nothing.” I was told that they don’t sell this kind of lumber, and that they didn’t know anything about it. They directed me to the commercial desk, on the theory that maybe they had something for contractors.

On the way to the commercial desk, I stopped at the paint department. I asked if they had any low-VOC paint. It turned out that they had a small section of Dutch Boy Clarity brand paint. This was apparently a low-VOC base paint. The guy in charge said that the paint starts out with no volatile organic compounds (VOCs), but that the tints add VOCs. The paints with the lightest colors have the lowest VOCs. I was able to get pricing for both the Clarity and the comparable default Dutch Boy paints. (I’ll post the results of these comparisons a little later when all the data is in, but the premiums ranged from 15 to 25%.) I was told that OSH planned to replace the Dutch Boy brand with another within about six months, so the paints and pricing will all change. But it’s a data point.

After leaving the paint department, I went down to the commercial desk and talked with someone there. I asked generally if they had any green items in the store (explaining, of course, that I was talking about eco-friendly products, not objects painted green). Blank stare. Crickets. So, we went to talk with one of the store managers, who said that they had CFLs.

Without being too hard on Orchard Supply, I was expecting more. How long has “green” been in the news? How long have people been specifically talking about green jobs (as the salvation of the economy)? How long has the environmental movement been moving, for that matter? But, the truth is (as borne out below, I think) that businesses haven’t got the message at a gut level. Major companies might know that they need to “go green”, but it hasn’t trickled down to the floor. (I can tell you that if I were running OSH, there would not be any employee who didn’t know that the first time the customer mentioned “green” that they were supposed to buttonhole them and take them on a veritable tour of all the green item for sale. It’s that or die, as a company.)

But the manager I talked with did give me all the contact information for the main office in San Jose, so I will be contacting them soon to find out what they have to sell that’s green. Also, I was reminded in the paint department that Kelly-Moore has a store in the neighborhood (right across the border in Mountain View), so I went there next.

Did Kelly-Moore have green products? Yes, they did, and they didn’t go blank when I asked. They quickly put me in touch with one of the sales reps, Brian Vonderwerth, who had a pretty good grasp of what I wanted and what they could provide. Again, their store brands had a low-VOC base but the tints had some amount of VOCs to them, and the lighter the color the less it outgases. They had an option with a zero-VOC, as well, and gave me pricing so I could compare with the default versions. In addition, they carried Yolo Colorhouse® paints, which are zero-VOC base. (Yolo notes that VOCs may be added depending on what colorant system the retail location uses. This would indicate that if you bought them at Kelly-Moore, you would likely get some VOCs added, but you might not if you bought them direct from the company.)

BTW, Kelly-Moore also had some other green products (when pressed) such as cleaners and strippers.

Brian said that Yolo provided essentially the same type of paints as they did, in that the chemicals used were the same. How true this is probably depends on where you get your Yolo paints, but given that they probably put their own colorants into the Yolo base at Kelly-Moore, that’s probably true. When pressed, he was only able to identify the brand value as being different. That is to say that Yolo is a company committed to environmental principles throughout, and part of the value of buying from them is that you are buying from a company with a commitment to the environment. This was backed up by their in-store display, apparently made from recycled paper and other materials. Their brochure (on the non-bleached paper) tells us that they use alternative energy for company headquarters, as well as bio-diesel and rail for shipping. But the paints at the Kelly-Moore end were really no different, except that Yolo was more expensive.

Okay, so why would someone buy Yolo paints? Brian says that they are specified by architects. Basically, if you go to an architect and ask them to design you a green home, they will specify real green materials. But these are typically special-order items and are not the ones that builders or stores would give you by default. And they carry a higher premium. This essentially confirmed Petalyn’s point about the difference between what architects specify and what is available at the building end.

Let’s take an example, interior acrylic flat paint (1 gallon). You can get any of the following at Kelly-Moore’s Mountain View store:

• Premium Regular
• 1500 Enviro-Cote (low-VOC base)
• Yolo (zero-VOC base)

At the prevailing price, the Enviro-Cote was actually cheaper than the “non-green” Premium Regular, and the Yolo (on sale, 20% off) was more expensive than the Enviro-Cote. Enviro-Cote was 3% cheaper than the Premium Regular and Yolo was 21% more expensive than Enviro-Cote.

While not an apples-to-apples comparison, one other option would be to use latex instead of acrylic. For those walls where this would work, you could get zero-VOC interior latex flat (2000 Green Coat) for a 24% premium over the comparable non-green “Professional” interior latex flat. (But this option is also 12% cheaper than acrylic flat Enviro-Cote.) In addition, Brian said that their acrylic will become zero-VOC by next April.

So, at least at Kelly-Moore, you could green up your remodel some by going with the low-VOC option, but if you wanted to eliminate VOCs altogether you would probably have to contact Yolo and get colorants with no VOCs and pay at least 20% more for the base.

So, here is part of the answer. Can you do a green remodel for less than a 5% premium? It depends on what you mean by “green”. If you want the Yolo level of green, then probably not. But if you just want to make your remodel “greener”, then probably yes. For this one option, it was actually cheaper to choose a green option (low-VOC paint) over the comparable non-green option. But the result is far from universal. In many cases, you could end up paying far more for the green option, so careful comparison shopping is called for if you are going to paint before you sell.

Would this result hold up if I shopped elsewhere? My next stop was Lowe’s, in Sunnyvale.

My initial experience at Lowe’s was almost identical to that at OSH. The first couple of people I encountered had no clue what I was talking about. Blank stares. Crickets. Finally, we went looking for a manager and ran into three of them. I asked them what they had at Lowe’s that was green (no, not that kind of green). You know, do you have any lumber that’s certified or cement with fly ash or… yes, it turns out that one of them was Joe Roche, a Regional Commercial Sales manager, who understood what I was looking for.

Joe was good enough to walk through part of the store with me. We went to the lumber section and looked for certified lumber. We didn’t immediately spot any, but Joe said that they often have it even if it’s not marked. He said that they had done a LEED-certified project, and they had to special order the lumber so that it all came stamped. I had him on the hook, now, so I asked about windows. Do you have any low-e windows? We went down to the windows department and took a look.

Lowe’s had at least one brand marked as low-e, ThermaStar by Pella. Joe left me to work with the windows department, and I got an estimate. (Thank you, Sandy.) There are a lot of options for windows, so I just asked for three data points to get a sense of the expenses. For the ThermaStar windows, I got prices for clear, low-e, and low-e with argon gas (between two panes of glass). It turned out that the low-e version was 15% more expensive, and the low-e with argon was 42% more expensive. So, for windows at least, it is unlikely that you could remodel for within the 5% limit I set. However, windows are one of the points where you might get a high payback. At the Green Building Symposium we learned, for instance, that the standard windows on sale (even including all the green options) rates the equivalent of about an R 2.8. In other words, putting a window in a well-insulated wall is like poking a hole through it. (New developments may lead to windows averaging more like R 5, and there are commercial windows available that rate the equivalent of R 22. I’ll try to cover this later when I catch up on the Green Building Symposium.)

After leaving the window department, I walked down through the store and spotted the appliances department. I know they have to sell EnergyStar appliances, so I went in there and talked with the department manager, Tone (one syllable). He turned out to be the most knowledge floor person I’ve encountered, so far. I asked what they had that was green, and the first thing that came up was stoves.

The hot item seems to be induction cook tops, which save considerable energy. An induction cook top works by creating fluctuating electromagnetic fields. These cause iron molecules in your cookware to oscillate, creating heat in the pans. Since the energy goes directly into the cookware without directly heating the stove top or air, it is more efficient. (These things get hot by contact with the cookware, of course.) In a way, they are analogous to microwaves in that the energy is more concentrated on heating the food (but the underlying physics is quite different.)

Not all pans will work with them. (In fact, I learned that glass cook tops in general have to be treated carefully. Copper pans heat up too much, damaging the glass, and cast iron can scratch them badly.) With induction, you have to use special cookware that has a magnetic material (like iron) embedded in it. The staff looked up prices for a regular electric cook top vs. an induction one of the same type, and we got that the induction one carried a 28% premium. (I’ll have to research how much energy savings there is for this option. Obviously, induction cooking has other benefits and probably drawbacks, so not all of the difference is just in the energy savings.)

I asked about the refrigerators, since those are well known energy hogs that are commonly EnergyStar certified. In fact, virtually all their refrigerators were EnergyStar. Tone said that EnergyStar changes each year, so that the standards get stricter. So the year of manufacture (which should be on the label inside the appliance) matters. In my test case, I picked one of the only non-EnergyStar refrigerators they had, a freezer-on-top model (so common) and one that was about the same size and otherwise identical. It turned out that the EnergyStar model was quite a bit more expensive (9%), and the advertised costs of use didn’t vary all that much. The EnergyStar model only got $3 a year in savings, hardly worth the fifty dollar premium on the model. However, most people now buy side-by-side models or even ones with pull-out freezers on the bottom. Virtually all of these are EnergyStar, and the non-certified models may simply be unavailable before long.

From there we went to look at water heaters. Here the trend is toward tankless water heaters, and many people are putting them in when their water heaters break down. The popular variety at Lowe’s were Bosch gas heaters, which come in two sizes. Since they don’t have a tank, they don’t have a volume. They are measured in how many major applications they can support simultaneously. They are more expensive than the heaters with tanks, generally by 20% for the one application variety, and much more expensive for two applications. (However, someone, probably the state, is running a $300 rebate at the moment on these, which may make their prices comparable to the “tanked” variety.) In addition, they require careful installation by a specialist, and a few hundred dollars in additional parts, typically to route the gas lines to the right places. They also need to be vented properly, so they can’t go in an arbitrary location.

Electric tankless water heaters were also available, and slightly cheaper, but I suspect that they are more expensive to operate in the Bay Area, where electric heating is generally more expensive than gas.

I think the conclusion is that green building or remodeling in the South Bay Area has not really worked its way into the popular consciousness. While companies are trying to market green building materials, and in many cases probably have them in stock, the word hasn’t really filtered down to the sales floor. I expect that to change, here, and it could well be different in other areas. My friend, Heidi, who lives in Half Moon Bay, says that the stores there may be a lot more aware of the needs of green builders. I’ll have to go over there and do some research.

–Rich Wingerter

For what seems like a very long time I’ve been shopping for real estate. This started with my parents shopping all over northeastern Ohio looking for property to buy. My mom had a fervent hope to find a good farm house somewhere and fix it up. My stepfather wanted property that he could remodel and resell, but he really wanted (and eventually found) houses that were in the city and suburbs, not farmhouses, that fit the bill.

When I first moved to Silicon Valley in the 1980s one of my friends wanted to find good farmland to buy for a vineyard so that he could grow wine grapes. We spent a lot of time searching the back country of northern California from San Luis Obispo to Mendocino and inland to the gold country looking for the right alluvial soil.

And, for many years I’ve shared my girlfriend’s search for various homes, again all over northern California, but sometimes as far away as the east coast and often up to the Canadian border. I’ve looked at hundreds of properties, and during that time I’ve developed a lot of opinions on what makes good real estate and what makes a good house.

Obviously, I’m picky. Not just that, but I have picky friends. Otherwise, all these treks would have been short.

The first thing I think about is the site. Is this a good neighborhood? If it is land, is there a suitable home site, and if it’s an existing house, did they site it correctly?

The neighborhood should be quiet. Some years ago we looked at a house that was perfectly nice, but it was about one block from the intersection of I-280 and Highway 17. The drone of traffic would make any use of the yard impossible 24-hours-a-day. I would tolerate some amount of road noise, but it would have to be low enough that it would fade to the background without trouble.

We looked at a house recently in Sequim, WA, which had about an acre and was next to a side road with some amount of traffic. The house was back from the road and the property was slightly above the road, with maybe a three-foot bank. For this, it might have been possible to put up a sound wall that would have reflected back much of the sound. I think that something with straw bale construction, faced with stucco on the road side, might have been effective, even if it were only maybe four feet high.

And, in fact, as I look at property, one of the important factors is whether the problems I see could be mitigated. It’s almost impossible to find property that has no faults. So, the main question is whether the property can be fixed within a reasonable budget.

Another factor is access to sunlight. We made the mistake of buying a house one time that was on the north side of a hill. It was also in a rainforest. While the quiet beauty of the forest was extremely attractive, the lack of sunlight made it almost impossible to enjoy the house. Recently, I’ve seen two properties (back to back, no less) that were similarly situated, forested lots on the north side of a hill. There is really no hope for these houses, unless you plan to live on the grid, burning (vicariously) a lot of coal, gas or uranium to keep them heated and properly lit.

Not that a house needs to be on the south side of the hill or in an open plain. But you can see that unless you have sufficient sun exposure you will struggle to make up the difference. In his excellent book The Solar House, Daniel Chiras suggests that there should be an unobstructed access to the sun from 9 AM to 3 PM for optimal passive solar heating. This means no trees within a 60-degree arc of dead south sighted from either front corner of the house. He suggests finding someone with a Solar Pathfinder to check out the site and make sure that there is adequate access to sun. Of course, if you plan solar panels, either PV or thermal, you would need an equivalent field of view for their operation wherever they are going to be located. Chiras devotes several pages to how to make sure your house gets adequate sun.

I’ve long thought that all houses should be built with at least consideration given to their passive heating and cooling characteristics. This energy savings comes with the one-time cost of being smart about designing the structure. After that, it delivers savings year after year. What more do you need to convince you?

And, as for sunny California, there ought to be a law that requires PV on any house built where more than half the days every year are clear. Why are we building houses in the Central Valley without PV? In the last ten years or so, Del Webb (now owned by Pulte) built Sun City Lincoln Hills with about 7,000 houses in sun-drenched cattle country. If every house had been built with a 2,000 watt system installed, that would have been 14 megawatts of power installed with essentially no delivery costs.

Here’s how I think about the sun. If you don’t have any, then there’s not much you can do about it. You will have to look for other means to heat and light your home. If you have too much sun, then you can use options to block and manage it. You can slow its heat with insulation and you can balance it with the heat-absorbing properties of the earth. You can bounce it around to get the light where you want it. I would much rather have too much sun than not enough.

There’s also the question of the lay of the land, which has a lot of ramifications. One of them is drainage. Another is the view. A third is the layout of the house. A perfectly flat piece of property presents problems, especially if it’s small and hemmed in by trees or neighboring buildings. On the other hand, an extremely steep parcel would be difficult to build on and limit the possible uses of outside spaces. So, ideally, there would be some slope, but not too much, and that slope would favor access to sun and to good views.

We looked at a great piece of property in Sequim, WA, an almost perfectly flat agricultural field. I say that it was great because it was large enough (two acres) to provide views that could not easily be blocked by neighboring buildings or plant growth, with good soil that could have been used in many ways to set up permaculture, gardens, and outside living areas. But, in order to make use of it, I think we would have had to grade it to introduce at least some height variation. In my mind, this could have been as little as about three feet to raise the house and allow for solar panels that were more contoured to the ground. A good addition might have been to build up the ground on the north side a few feet as an additional thermal barrier to protect that side of the house. Just this minor variation from a totally flat piece would have helped provide visual relief and additional drainage benefits.

In much of the western United States, rainfall is slender and should be managed. For these areas, it is very important to collect rainwater, if possible, in some kind of cistern. I recently saw a nice property in Jacksonville, OR, that had a very gentle slope that would have worked nicely to collect rainwater from the house and a separate workshop on the same property. From the lower side of the house to the site of the workshop was a rise of about ten feet, enough that a cistern dug in not far from the house could have collected rainwater entirely by gravity from both buildings.

As with food, the first bite is with the eyes. In approaching a property, my first impression is that of the neighborhood and the site of the house. I’m in search of that ideal location that is quiet, sunny and nicely sloping to provide views and natural movement of energy over the property.

–Rich Wingerter

I’ve been reading multiple books on building natural homes. But one of the frustrating things is trying to decide which options would serve best. I know I want a home that uses passive solar heating and passive cooling to cut energy bills. I also want a relatively inexpensive home with natural and non-toxic components. How do I narrow down all the choices?

For many reasons I may not be able to build my ideal home here in the Bay Area. Nevertheless, I want to design it for here because many of the areas I would choose are probably similar in their basic characteristics, even if they end up being in another state. For example, I doubt that my home will be in an area with a lot of rainfall. Most of the western U.S. is dry. But some characteristics could change quite radically. It could end up many miles north of here, where the annual variation in temperature is higher.

Even so, there are a lot of the process I expect to be the same. I would still need to work with an architect and a builder, I would still need to know about the materials available (so I could make the right selections) and I would still need to firm up many of the parameters for the home. Here are just a few of the items on my list:

• The house needs office and library space.
• The house needs a workable kitchen with plenty of storage.
• The house needs a workshop area.
• The property needs a place to garden, and I don’t want to fight the climate.
• The house should provide its own power.
• To the extent possible, the house property should provide its own water.
• The air in the house should be fresh and breathable without drafts or hot/cold spots.
• The house needs natural traffic flow paths.
• Bedrooms should be generally on the east side, to provide sunlight in the mornings. So should the breakfast area.
• It should be possible to eat outside any time of the day without freezing or burning up.
• It should not take a single paid servant to clean and care for the house.

Each of these is worth its own blog post, but I think you can see the general outlines here. I want a functional house. That is, I don’t just want a jumble of rooms where you can do various things; I want a house that matches the natural flow of life. It should feel like a resort without costing as much as one.

So, that’s the general idea. I’m going to use this site as a means to refine what I need, to create a plan that’s flexible, but definite. Please, help me build my dream house!

–Rich Wingerter