You are here: Home / Archives for green building superinsulated retrofit USGBC

From Ghastly to Green – a foreclosure purchase story (or how I spent my summer vacation)

August 15, 2012 By 1 Comment

Hi all,

This blog post was written by Shannon Tate of Beyond Green Construction (a NESEA member of course) about a deep energy retrofit my family and I are undertaking. It originally appeared on Beyond Green’ blog at http://beyondgreen.biz/2012/07/from-ghastly-to-green-a-foreclosure-purchase-story-2/.  I plan to post additional updates as they are available . . . it’s clearly still a work in progress. I’m sure the practitioners among you will be shocked . . . shocked to hear that the schedule has slipped further since the post was first written. Hoping for a September 20th move-in date at this point – fingers crossed!

 

 

Well hello and welcome to our very first blog post!  My name is Shannon Tate,
a sustainable design and green building enthusiast and newby here at Beyond Green Construction.  (That’s me over there on the left.)  Here at BGC we are passionate about doing our part to make the world a better place and healing this planet!…we feel the best way to do this is through education.  We think the best form of education that we could share would be to give you all the nitty gritty, good, bad, ugly details of our present Deep energy Retrofit projects.  It’s not easy work for us or the homeowners, but it is incredibly rewarding and life changing in the end.  Our approach is to be 100% transparent with you.  No holding back, no sugar coating.  Our blog will be presenting the real deal.  It’s especially exciting for us because we are starting our blog love with a really HUGE project that we just began work on in Deerfield.  So here we go.  Happy reading.

Meet the Marrapese family…Jennifer, Bill, their two little girls and sweet pup.  Jennifer is the Executive Director of NESEA, the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association and Bill is a nurse in Brattleboro, VT.

(This photo was taken outside their current rental in Deerfield, where they anxiously await the completion of their new home.)

Jennifer and Bill, who moved here a year ago with their family, recently purchased a 1977 ranch in foreclosure just a few blocks from their rental property in Deerfield.  The house is a fixer upper…to put it lightly.

“Sean and the inspector were with us and everyone suspected that there was going to be major work to be done”, says Bill.

“That being said…we knew it was in rough shape but it’s turned out to be in worse shape then we thought” says Jennifer.

The homes most substantial problem stems from the fact that it’s built on a high water table and “it seems that the slab was never insulated against the water coming up from underneath.  The slab was acting like a straw to suck the water up into the foundation and the walls”, says Bill.

As the reader you may be asking yourself, “why the heck didn’t they find all this out before they bought the place?”  The answer is, when purchasing a property in foreclosure, there are many things you can’t do during a home inspection.  You can’t lift up carpets, you can’t do anything that is invasive, where you’re peeling anything open or examining something from within…you can only look at the surface and take it as your eyes perceive it.  So it wasn’t until after the purchase went through that the damage could truly be assessed.  Carpets ripped up, beams exposed, and mold in clear view, everywhere.  Mold was found in the insulation, roofing, walls, carpet, tack strips, everywhere.  ”I think the homeowners believed at the time of purchase that they could do a lot of the demo work themselves, but once they started removing carpet, they realized how dangerous that would be,” says Jeffords.

A secondary problem of the home is that it has a sunroom addition on the back which was done extremely poorly.  Bill calling it a “Ham and egg job….or I’ll give you a pizza, you give me an addition.”  That explains it pretty perfectly.  After the purchase went through, the BGC team came in and realized that adding to the already lengthy list of problems, the floor in the addition was about to cave in as well. 

Even with all of its problems, this home does have its charms.  The homeowners had their hearts set on this neighborhood and this particular street when their search began.  They were serendipitously invited to a barbecue on an earlier visit, which happened to be on the very street they purchased on.  ”We met a lot of people on the street who we ended up clicking with” says Jennifer.  ”It’s a dead end street, it’s sunny so immediately we both looked at each other and said this is the street we want to live on.  So when the house came up in foreclosure, we thought it was the perfect opportunity, especially since we knew we wanted to do energy work and we didn’t want to pay extra for a house that we were going to have to rip up anyway.”  There were also many other plus’s on Jennifer and Bill’s list.  ”We have some land, it’s perfectly suited for solar and we paid probably $45K less than if we had purchased it from an owner, ” Bill says of the house.  Jennifer adds “and there’s farmland behind the property and it’s protected”  ”It’s still a little bit of a scary investment”, she admits.

The couple says that although they wouldn’t call themselves “sustainability experts”, that for a very long time, sustainability has been a part of their daily practice and a part of their values.  ”We’re really excited to take this project as an opportunity to explore and live into that”, says Jennifer.

Even with all of the lists of “green building experts” at her disposal through NESEA, Jennifer says that they really “didn’t do a lot of interviews for the job” and that she chose the BGC team “largely on reputation within the community” and that Jeffords was very familiar with how to go about finding monetary incentives through the energy companies, theirs being Western Mass Electric…which the couple will be receiving $19K in incentive money from.  (If you’re interested in looking into incentives for your green project, go to www.masssave.com to learn more.)

The couple closed on the house in April with hopes to acquire a building permit quickly and start work with the BGC team.  But, like many projects, things didn’t move along as quickly as hoped.  The couple, along with the BGC team lost 6 weeks of time after the building inspector thought they needed to bring the project plans to the conservation committee for additional approval.  He came to this conclusion because the home has an intermittent stream on the property and they needed to be sure wasn’t a part of the wetlands.  They eventually were given a negative determination and could move forward without any additional approvals, but that was 6 weeks lost.  The Marrapese’s found this difficult as they were already paying the mortgage and had to add on two additional months in their rental…not to mention that Jeffords had his team ready to go.  It was a set back, but they put that time to good use, making sure all their plans were in place and were sure of exactly how they would proceed with the project.

The plans are a pretty huge undertaking in and of themselves.  After determining how extensive the moisture problems were and that the source was the foundation, BGC’s engineer, Chris Vreeland from Precision Decisions Inc. devised a plan to actually lift the house off of the foundation with a series of jacks that will be attached to the foundation wall and a piece of “4x”6 angle iron bolted into each and every wall stud.  The house will be lifted 8 inches off the slab and then a moisture and thermal barrier will be created with high-density foam topped with 4 inches of concrete that has radiant floor tubing imbedded into it.  This will stop the mold and moisture problems at their source, so that when they re-insulate the house and tighten it all up, the indoor air quality will be healthy for the family.  Also included in the plans are the installation of a Solar Thermal System with electric back-up and a wood stove for an alternative heat source on the off chance that they would lose electricity because of a storm or power outage.

As you can imagine, this is not a cheap project.  We have a budget to work with of $100 per square foot (brand new builds on average are $150 + per square foot) and with the home at nearly two thousand square-feet, we’re nearing $200K.  That being said the couple says they’re just “makin’ it happen”, doing what they have to do with  their own saved money, a line of credit, borrowing from family…they are determined to make it happen within their budget.

Their budget is being helped greatly with the resource of the Eco Building Bargains in Springfield, where they bought used solid oak kitchen cabinets and laminate countertops for only $1400.  They plan on getting their bathroom fixtures from there as well and found a great deal on flooring through Hampton Carpet.

In the end the Marrapese’s will have a super energy efficient, healthy house for their family.

With the August 31st move in date quickly approaching the BGC team needs to work smart and fast.  We’ll give you more of the details next week!  Until then, have a good one.

 

 

 

Filed Under: deep energy retrofit, NESEA Members Tagged With: , , ,

Dietz & Co. Architects Project Achieves LEED Gold Certification

January 10, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Great news from the NESEA membership! Congratulations to Dietz & Company Architects on receiving the LEED Gold Certification for their work on a project with the YWCA! This is especially exiting news because Marc Sternick, VP of Dietz & Co, is on our Board of Directors and the firm is a local, NESEA business member.

The full press release is included here:

Springfield, Mass. – Dietz & Company Architects, Inc. has received LEED for Homes Gold certification from USGBC (the U.S. Green Building Council) for the recently completed units at the YWCA’s Campus of Hope. These new units provide housing that serves to transition women from domestic violence shelters to longer-term living facilities. The 32,000 square foot project is made up of 20 apartments and eight congregate housing units within its walls. This project was part of the larger Campus of Hope initiative
that was started more than 10 years ago for which Dietz & Company Architects was the master planner. Dietz & Company Architects also
designed the first phase of this campus: a 60,000 square foot building that includes administrative offices, meeting and classrooms as well as an on-site shelter.

In the finest tradition of the YWCA, this project features cutting edge technology in Green construction, women-owned partnerships and the
overwhelming support of the community it seeks to serve. The project, originally designed to achieve LEED for Homes Silver certification level, exceeded that level by achieving Gold certification.

Several factors that supported the LEED for Homes Gold Certification include: super-insulated walls and airtight construction, efficient mechanical systems that include roof-mounted photovoltaic panels for electricity, sustainable site design and the use of green construction materials. A healthy indoor environment, pollution reduction and lower utility/maintenance costs are also key elements of this certification. This highly efficient building is expected to reduce water and energy consumption by 20 to 30 percent over typical code compliant construction.

NL Construction was the general contractor for this project and the project was supported by the LEED for Homes Provider, CET. 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.

 

Filed Under: Communications, Green Building, NESEA, NESEA Members, Sustainable Building Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Getting Serious About Energy In Public Buildings

April 5, 2009 By 9 Comments

Here in Rhode Island, as elsewhere, well-intentioned people are proposing legislation that would mandate that any public building or any building receiving public subsidy be LEED rated. I already addressed my concerns with that proposal in “Legislating Greenness”. The problems include:

1) Empowering a single private out of state organization with essentially unregulated monopoly powers to define, change, certify and charge for greenness certification, which is effectively being mandated as a building code standard.

2) Eliminating market based competition and real market signals for defining, evolving and improving green building standards.

3) In the only study ever done on LEED buildings, when rigorous statistical analysis was applied to the data in an independent review, it ended up that at least to date, LEED buildings actually have used more energy than typical buildings.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that rating systems like LEED add more layers of complexity and more fees for LEED professionals, architects, engineers and construction managers, but they don’t add any meaningful accountability to the system. That’s exactly why LEED buildings can use more energy than conventional buildings and why LEED rated skyscrapers can leave their lights on all night when nobody is in the building. Once the rating is determined based on design, the building can call itself green no matter how poorly it actually performs.

With the economic situation we are in, the goal of green building advocates has to go beyond putting plaques on walls and having nice things to say in the press. We know that real green buildings actually save energy and save significant amounts of money in their operation. We need real accountability and serious incentives to make that happen.

So lets stop counting points and instead focus peoples attention much more clearly with a measurement we all understand very well – dollars.

The way states fund new buildings needs to be changed. Rather than coming in as an allocation or grant of cash, half the funding should be delivered as it is now under current funding mechanisms and the other half should be delivered to the agency or municipality building the building as a short term zero interest loan with a two year balloon payment. That loan would be forgiven if after two years of operation gas, oil and electric bills are 25% lower in energy units used per square foot than on comparable existing buildings in the state. If the building doesn’t meet this goal, the agency, municipality or other recipient of the funds would have have to repay the loan in full.

Such serious incentive would focus attention on what actually matters far more than counting greenness points.

With financial incentives that are clear and serious, the building procurement process for new buildings would quickly evolve to requiring energy performance bonds from architects and general contractors which would focus their attention very clearly. Architects and contractors would quickly become more serious about details. Schools would have to start training architects and engineers on issues that actually matter. Companies that failed to deliver would have a hard time getting energy performance bonds for future projects. The market would start providing real significant rewards for real green building.

Building operations and maintenance staffs would have more prestige and be considered a far more important part of organizational management with serious money on the line for real measured building performance.

Among other benefits, this kind of legislation would require getting baseline data on the existing building stock. The process of collecting and comparing real baseline data would get the state and municipalities comparing their existing buildings to each other on very simple and easy to calculate metrics – annual therms, gallons of oil and kWh per square foot. It would immediately become very obvious which buildings need to be fixed.

Both through improving the worst performing buildings and building new buildings that use 25% less energy than baseline, the goals and minimum performance levels constantly and automatically reset higher toward better performing buildings.

Such a system doesn’t need “Accredited Professionals” using abstract rating systems to count points. All that is needed is the utility bills that get delivered every month anyway.

Henry Gifford deserves credit for inspiring the concept that buildings should be rated on actual performance as measured by utility bills. All that is needed is to add some real accountability to that very clear and simple rating system.

The situation our country is in regarding energy, the environment and the economy is serious. We need serious incentives to drive serious solutions.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,

Green building is dead—its time has passed

March 14, 2009 By 20 Comments

Green building is dead. Its time has passed. We lie to ourselves when we think we can build any number of new buildings in a green, environmentally sustainable way. We need to acknowledge that every building is an unnatural act. We want a building to be warm when it’s cold outside, cool when it’s warm outside, dry when it’s wet outside, and light when it’s dark outside. Although rot and decay is the essential refueling mechanism in nature, in a building, rot and decay is the surest sign that something has gone seriously wrong. Looked at this way, every building is an environmental mugging.

Don’t get me wrong. I live in a building, I work in a building, and my whole livelihood depends on there being buildings. I’m generally in favor of buildings. I just don’t think we should delude ourselves into thinking that they can possibly be “green” in any meaningful way. The best we can do is to make the mugging that each building represents as gentle as possible. The USGBC should re-name itself the US Gentle Mugging Council, in my opinion.

Why do such semantics matter? They matter because if you understand that each building is an act of environmental violence (gentle or not), then you look at our building needs very differently. “Green building” becomes the belief that our buildings should be as few, as small, and as efficient as possible. This in turn means that any new construction becomes an absolute last resort. The 4000-square-foot seasonal vacation home becomes an impossibility. An addition becomes necessary only if absolutely everything else has failed. The first choice always will be making the best use of what we already have—and making what we already have as efficient and adaptable as possible becomes the most important endeavor we can undertake.

Deep energy reductions to existing structures pose serious challenges—both technical and economic. As one who tries to sell and implement such retrofits at market rates, I am more keenly aware than anyone of both the short- and the long-term challenges. In future posts I will outlines these challenges, as well as possible ways to confont them successfully.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: