Tag Archives: Not So Big

Virtual Tour of a High Performance Green Home

Posted on March 3, 2009 by | Leave a comment

High Peformance Green HomeA great way to get ideas for making your home more eco-friendly, or building your dream green home, is to tour other green homes.  So I couldn’t resist the opportunity to make a video tour of a beautiful home that Barry Schram, owner of Lamar Valley Craftsman, just completed for one of my clients (video at bottom of this post). 

 

Barry’s business is founded on a strong environmental ethic, a passion for creating high performance structures, and a special talent for building homes that satisfy the soul.  Like us, he was and still is inspired by Sarah Susanka’s Not So Big House body of work.  Fortunately for the planet, more and more builders are starting to think and operate like Barry as more and more of us start to demand homes built with sustainability in mind.

 

My clients were an excellent fit to work with Barry.  They had very specific desires for their dream home’s feel, performance, and environmental footprint.  Some highlights of the home that they collaborated to create include:

  • Concrete floors with in-floor radiant heat and Buderus high efficiency boiler.
  • Heat recovery ventilation system.
  • Passive solar design and Tamarack whole house fan to eliminate the need for air conditioning.
  • Energy efficient appliances and lighting.
  • Sierra Pacific aluminum clad exterior low-e windows.
  • Optimized natural lighting including Solatube Daylighting System.
  • Lots of thoughtful Not So Big details including a special window detail for growing herbs, built in bookshelves and window seats.
  • Other sustainable building materials including locally sourced beetle kill pine for exterior soffits, MDF trim to minimize use of harvested timber, and recycled content decking.

 

It is also worth noting that this house is an infill project in Old Town Fort Collins on a lot previously occupied by a 1920’s-built cottage that was beyond rehabilitation.  

 

The home has a great open floor plan, with 4 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms, plus an office/away room.  It has about 3,100 total square feet – about 2,100 above ground with another 1,000 at a “garden level”.  It also has a detached 2 car garage with alley entry. 

So I hope you enjoy the video tour and hearing more about this great home from the builder himself.  If it whets your appetite for some in-person touring, the American Solar Energy Society now facilitates a nationwide grass roots solar tour, and the Parade of HomesTM events around the country are getting greener every year (just Google green parade of homes).

 

Don’t miss your chance to build the green home of your dreams at Midori – a new green neighborhood in Fort Collins.

 

 

 

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Not So Big Living = Green Living

Posted on February 8, 2009 by | 2 Comments

One of the simplest strategies for living a greener life in a more eco-friendly home is to subscribe to the teachings of architect Sarah Susanka.  Susanka is the author of the bestselling “The Not So Big House” series, in which she makes the compelling case for choosing quality and efficiency of space over square footage.  Her upshot – a smaller, carefully planned home will always feel more comfortable and cozy than the vacuous expanses of your typical McMansion or Starter Castle.  From an environmental perspective, the benefits of not so big are obvious…a smaller home requires fewer resources and less embodied energy to build, and generally consumes less energy to heat, cool and illuminate. 

 

Dave and I live in a 1,200 square foot house built in 1952.  Now, in the interest of full disclosure, it is quite energy-inefficient (we’ll be working on that, one project at a time) and we do have a long-range plan to expand our livable square footage to approximately 1,900.  We have lots of family and friends visiting us in Colorado, and putting visitors up in my office with an inflatable mattress on the floor and sharing a single bathroom with all of them is a true test of family and friendship bonds.  Of course, we’ll be blogging about our energy efficiency improvements and sustainable remodeling project efforts along the way.

 

So if you are thinking about a new home, think about how not so big principles could help you buy or build less house than you might otherwise have done.  Better still, think about how you might implement not so big to stay in your current home and make it work for you.  In particular, Susanka’s books “Not So Big Remodeling…” and “Not So Big Solutions for Your Home” can help you be happy staying put.  Your soul and your wallet will thank you. 

 

What?  You say need room for all of your stuff?  Re-think that too.   We’ve all fallen into the trap of filling up space with stuff we rarely (if ever) use.  A move to a new home can be a great time to sort and shed stuff (be sure to google “donate used your city” to locate organizations who can put everything from eyeglasses to clothes to sports gear to vehicles to productive re-use).  It is also an excellent opportunity to start a new habit of buying and accumulating less.   Look to George Carlin for humorous inspiration .  On the serious side, consider Annie Leonard’s “The Story of Stuff”. 

 

So, get inspired to live larger by living not so big – dig into Sarah Susanka’s great work, and check out the quick video below which shows an example of not so big put into practice in our home.

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Posted in Simple Starts

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