People…

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A house is made up of glass and concrete and steel and wood (well, not ours) and a host of other materials.  You assemble the pieces and you “build”.  But it’s the people involved in the project, that can set it apart.  The people either rise to meet the challenges or they produce the minimum they can to get by and don’t inspire others, and likely don’t garner a lot of personal satisfaction from their “job”.

Think Big!

Think Big!

We’ve been very fortunate on this project to have met some incredible people.  People who’s skill and caring have helped us realize this crazy dream.  People who took at little extra time to understand what we’ve been trying to do, and figured out creative ways to help meet the goal.  They’ve stepped outside their personal or professional, comfort zones and took us seriously when we asked ‘why not?’.

We hope that we can partner with some of these folks as we move through the process and at project completion when we do “the fun stuff” – like the open house tours with NC Modernist Houses, or open house required by LEED, or maybe the Green Home Tour (although no sure I’ll be spending the money to put our house on the tour…)

The house is “stuff”, but the process is people.  And continue to be pleased and comforted by the folks who are passionate about what they do – and strive to differentiate themselves against “the rest”.

LEED for Homes 4, Passive House, Energy Star, DOE Challenge Home, and and and…

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There seems to be a decent amount of alphabet soup or certification “choice” when it comes to energy efficiency and measuring your “green-ness” – but realistically, what does it mean and what is it worth?  We’ve already established that the mortgage industry and the appraisal system doesn’t give it a hoot, and since we’re not a builder – what the heck does any of this stuff MEAN to us?  Overall, nothing.  Well, that’s not entirely true – it should result in lower operating costs and a “better” home.  But at what cost?  What’s the payback calculation?  There’s no way in Hades that we’ll ever pay for our uber windows in energy savings with anything close to the current rates for power in the US. So why do it?

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Maybe we’re looking at this wrong.  It’s not about the certifications, (although we believe they DO have value for both builders and suppliers of the materials for the project) it’s about building the High Performance Home.  THAT’S my new personal certification – HPH.  Everyone else seems to have a certification program – why not me?  HPH fits a theme here – we have high performance “stuff”.  My daily driver car is a 469 HP station wagon.  It’s not the highest HP car out there – but in it’s class, it’s top of the heap.   Henry drives a Dodge Cummins diesel dually pickup.  All the wheels and all the torque – a high performance towing machine.  We have a little vice in that we drive Dodge / SRT Vipers.  Very high performance American muscle.  This level of high performance may not be necessary, but it’s pretty cool when you can achieve it.  And ultimately, that’s what we want for our house: quite simply, a house that performs to the level of the rest of our lives.

But- since HPH is not a globally recognized certification (yet), what are our options?

LEED can be regarded as being a little prescriptive  and judgmental (after all – what the hell would we do with an electric car charging station? Unless I get a Tesla) and there’s a lot of focus on stuff we can’t control – we’re not an infill lot and our “walkability” score is pretty low.  But then DOES cover things like Indoor Air Quality which we believe to be a real benefit to living better.  LEED incorporates this measure, and also Energy Star into its rating system, so you are getting a little more bang for your buck here.  And maybe feeling that you are looking at your home’ performance from a multifaceted approach, and building a High Performance Home.

But then you look at Passive House – I call this the Engineer’s certification.  It’s VERY much performance based and focused on energy usage, and not wasting energy.  This certification becomes very much a numbers game.   Without being all that smart on Passive House – it’s close to saying that your energy usage is about 10% of something “normal” for your home’s size and location.  It also says that you take advantage of passive means to heat (and cool or avoid heat) the home – so using solar warming of a slab concrete floor, for example.  In this regard, Passive House is right up our alley.  They are VERY interested in building envelope performance- with requirements for multipoint blower door tests and other more stringent qualifications.  The other good news is that Passive House seems to be “flexible” in how you meet the requirements – and for an out of the box project like this – that’s GOOD news.  So – this very much works with the High Performance Home theme.  Passive House also incorporates the Department of Energy’s Challenge Home criteria – so again – more recognized certs as part of a higher level program.

With this in mind, we’re going to see if we can meet Passive House without any major design or building plan changes, as it’s highly regarded as a standard for PERFORMANCE.  Once we know if we can pre-certify – we’ll show you the numbers and talk about it more and see if it really makes sense to got for the full certification process or just “built to the Passive House standard” that often gets used instead.  In the meantime – let’s hope we can nail a high performance BUDGET…

If all goes well, we’ll be able to move to submit for our building permit this week – another milestone we need to make.  Onward!

P.S.  What do you think of the new rendering???

It’s alive!

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On January 31st, at 3 PM, we finally closed on a construction loan.

finally

3 different banks.  3 appraisals.  Hundreds of hours of documentation submissions, faxing, follow ups, conditional approvals, changing conditions, new players and levels of frustration that have increased my already enormous library of swear words.

I know our project is “different”.  It’s large and we’re asking for a pretty good chunk of change – money-wise.  However, 2 counterpoints to this concern:  we have VERY good credit and have never not fulfilled a financial obligation.  Ever.  Also, data published not too long ago says that jumbo loans and mortgages are MORE reliable than conforming loans.  It’s never been a discussion about “ability to pay” but more trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

And yes – we’re “green”.  Big deal.  Despite claims from the appraiser to be able to attribute value to green features, she did not. The process to refute an appraisal is amazingly flawed.  And because the appraisers are so sheltered from interaction with banks (trust us, it’s for your protection – says the government) there’s no accountability.

Energy costs in the US are really low.  And ultimately, rising energy costs are the only things that will drive REAL value into the appraisal process.  As long as we have artificially low energy costs, there’s little incentive to build greener and even less incentive for banks to value green.

One thing that seems to be rather positive, is that more folks in the Western United States are building new buildings with their latest tech earnings.  However instead of creating an ostentatious palace on the side of a mountain in San Francisco, they are pouring money into DETAILS – and one big detail is tech / energy efficiency.  A LEED Platinum or a Passive House certification is a geek badge of honor and an outlet for a couple hundred dollars per square foot.

So- we are BACK.  tonic construction will be getting the permit.  We’re back working with International Precast.  I might get to go see my windows.  I bought yet ANOTHER Grohe F1 faucet on eBay.  I need to procure the remaining appliances and hoping I can finally find a deal on my Gaggenau induction cooktop.

Logically, this should be a “simple” house to build. (Note I did not say easy…)  We’ve tried to minimize the subcontractors, we’re not talking about a bunch of “fussy” finishes, and greeting dried in should be reasonably quick.  As always, the devil will be in the details, but we’ve assembled a damn good team – and we’re in it together.

Alexhouse – Personal

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Alex - The little dude...

Alex – The little dude…

We’ve joked that we’re simply building a very expensive dog house.  And maybe we’re not joking.   After spending many years doing animal rescue work (specifically Cocker Spaniels- but we’ve had a Chow here and a pitbull there….) you realize that how a dog ages provides a micro level view on how WE age.  The only thing that is different, is that dog’s just “get on with it” and don’t go through the whiny stage.

We’ve had dogs with all sorts of infirmities – deaf dogs, blind dogs, dogs with heart problems, joint problems, skin issues, etc.  They all adapted.  They just go about their day to day routines and adapt.  No complaining, no feeling sorry for themselves – just “being”.  And one particular little dog was extra special.

Alex came into our lives when a client of our veterinarian could no longer care for him.  He was VERY thin, and blind from cataracts.  At only 6 years old – he was far too young to be in such rough shape.  Her office called and said “Dr Grant has a dog for you”…  And so it was.  Alex joined the family.

Turns out he was thin only because the other dog in the house was bullying him for food.  And – one cataract was operable.  The other was not – his retina was shot and it was starting to cause him pain as it developed glaucoma.  So – we did surgery in 2005, restored his sight in one eye, and installed a prosthesis in the other eye.  Alex was visual again.  Sadly, it didn’t last.  After developing glaucoma (more surgery, more meds), detaching a retina (laser retinal reattachment surgery, more meds) we finally lost the battle and he was blind. Permanently.

Honestly- he didn’t care.  He used his other senses to get around, and when he bumped into things, he just readjusted and moved on. We called him our little Roomba. Everywhere around the house, we had / have nose prints about a foot off the floor.  Stainless steel and scrubbable flat latex paint are our friends.

Alex died 2 weeks ago.  Suddenly, and really without warning.  He looked “off” Friday night, I took him to NCSU’s Vet School ER, and he was dead within an hour and a half.

We never anticipated it – he was “only” 13.  We designed the house for our older dogs with various infirmities.  What we found out, is that in doing that – we were using many of the principles of universal design.  THEY taught US.  One level, low maintenance, self cleaning roof, wide hallways, no curb on the shower, zero thresholds at the doorways – all things that would help our little blind dog.  We knew he’d love wandering around in the safe, level, fenced back yard.  And now he won’t.

We’re still shophouse, but we’re just as much Alexhouse.  Rest in Peace little buddy…

Good, Fast, Cheap… Pick 2

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As promised – here’s a silver lining posting.

It seems like we’ve been working on this project forever – and while that can be frustrating – it’s also good.  Why?  Well, because we can look around for good deals on “things” for the house.  For example – and this is a small one – I have a really funky duvet that was on sale that I am saving to break out for the new master bedroom space.  Or – we bought an amazing Italian dining room table that totally does not fit in the existing house but will be stellar in the new house.  And it’s sitting in the basement.

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See? told you it was awesome…

I’ve always liked a good deal.  Not cheap, necessarily, but frugal.  And so goes the title.  We could wait until it was crunch time to buy stuff and you could get good stuff fast, but it won’t be cheap.  It’s much nicer to take things a little slower, but pay a lot less.  And deals are out there if you are patient and persistent.  For example – even before we started this journey, we saw a faucet that we decided was the sexiest piece of bathroom hardware we’d ever seen.  And it was extra cool that it was Grohe (our fave bath fixture manufacturer) and is the Porsche Designed.  The first purchase was a roman tub filler thermostatic trim (easy for me to type…).  But it was a REALLY good deal – and we had always planned to add a tub into our master bath (current house) so….  this began the saga to try to find the rest of these Grohe F1 fixtures to at least do the master bath, but then maybe all the baths, because, yes, the fixtures are that cool.  And they WERE insanely expensive.  Like $1300+ for a single bathroom faucet.

So far – we’ve amassed all the faucets we need – centersets (picture), widesets and even a wall mount / vessel.  We also have towel bars, shower bars, tub spouts, robe hooks some on / off valves, and a shower diverter – but we are still looking on ebay for some specific part numbers.  Will we be entirely successful?  Who knows.  But – we’re saving a TON of money and it will allow us to finish the house to a level that we’d never be able to if we didn’t take the initiative and get these really good deals.  We have all the kitchen faucets, kitchen and laundry room sinks, laundry room fixtures and more.  It’s also been slightly less painful just spending a little every month before we start carrying a construction loan and totally freaking out.

So – there is a silver lining to having things take a little (ha!) longer and it can and does pay off to do a bunch of the legwork on finishes and other items yourself.  No one watches over your money as well as you do!  Thanks for reading.

Next up – appliances and universal design…  and my cheap gene…..

Deep dive – everything you possibly want to know about concrete sandwich panels

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So at a more detailed level – what are concrete sandwich panels??  Basically they are panels consisting of concrete as the “bread” of the sandwich with insulation as the “meat” of the sandwich.  In the case of the panels offered by International Precast they consist of 3” thick high psi reinforced concrete wythes of concrete with either 2” or 4” of Polyisocyanurate insulation as the interior.

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A surprising and very important differentiator of the International Precast concrete sandwich panels is that International Precast claimed that they could deliver panels where the interior and exterior wythes are not connected by any thermal bridging material – they would be completely isolated by the interior insulation.  We quizzed them at length on this claim but they were able to demonstrate to our satisfaction that they could indeed deliver on this claim.  This opened up the possibility of completely isolating the interior and exterior of the house from one another with insulating material and eliminating all thermal bridges.  There would be no through concrete in the panels!!  This started the thought of the house as a cooler – more on this later.

The concrete wythes would be connected via non-conductive cast-in wythe to wythe fasteners.  These are described by their suppliers as being made from “high performance heat and alkaline resistant engineered polymers” or “high-strength, low-conductivity, not-corrosive and chemically resistant” polymers.   These are spaced at defined intervals in the panels per well tested engineering specifications.  They are poked through the insulation at the center of the sandwich panels and have heads that end up being embedded in the concrete with a very small diameter high strength fibrous material connecting the heads together.  These connectors work in tension to prevent any wythe movement under load – basically keeping the exterior concrete surfaces from moving relative to one another under loads and enabling bending loads to be shared between the 2 wythes.  To be 100% technically correct these panels are referred to as “structurally composite concrete sandwich panels” because both the interior and exterior wythes act compositely to carry the external gravity and lateral loads.

 

The concrete itself is high psi concrete with reinforcing wire and rebar embedded in each of the wythes to enable the concrete wythes to carry structural loads.  Both the interior and exterior wythes are reinforced so both can carry structural loads – this would turn out to be a key factor in enabling thermal isolation for other parts of the house such as the roof.

Financing the Energy Efficient Home – Saga Part 4

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frustrationHonestly, I am at the end of my “playing nice” rope.  Appraisal saga continues.  As noted before – we had some issues in the comps – specifically the Energy Efficiency line item for comparison vs other new homes that do not appear to have any energy efficiency features AT ALL.

We’re 3 weeks into trying to determine the process to ask for a review of the appraisal and no one seems to know how to do this.  Seriously.

The Appraiser said she couldn’t speak to us, since the bank was ‘the customer’.  The bank then tries to speak with her (after a vacation, and another week of issues where the Appraiser can’t meet / teleconference) and then are told that any questions need to be addressed through the 3rd party quality control group and that direct contact is against their guidelines.

Is there any reason this little tidbit couldn’t have been shared 3 weeks ago?

I don’t mind “the process”.  I don’t mind that I have to use a 3rd party to ask questions and have them ensure that we’re not trying to unduly influence the appraiser and to make sure that any changes are in line with facts / data, etc.  In fact, I LIKE process.  I am usually a pretty orderly person.  What drives me absolutely batshit crazy is the total lack of urgency on anything.  ANYTHING.

We’ve now submitted our concerns and supporting documentation (including filling out the 5 pages addendum ourselves) and we’re waiting for a revision.  And as far as I know, no one makes a commitment on the time this will take to turn this work around, etc.  THAT is what drives me nuts.  This is not particularly complex.  It does not involve questioning the comps themselves, or even multiple line items – just ONE FACET of the entire appraisal.  The facet that we specifically required that the Appraiser have experience / certification with assessing value to green / energy efficiency features.

Thankfully the bank is processing our approval with the “value” being blank (hopefully at an “up to but not to exceed” number, so we can plug it in and close as soon as we’re done with this exercise.  Because – we’ve continued to fund the project out of pocket.  And that we paid the Austrian window and door company almost the entire balance of a pretty large sum.  (It kinda freaked me out – but hey – it’s only money, right?)

lucyI would like to get back to the “fun” stuff.  Some more design decisions, envisioning how we’re going to finish the rooms – bathrooms, kitchen, etc.  And I would REALLY like to see some dirt moving.  I think that once that happens, I will know it’s real.  And it will be easier to engage with the rest of the suppliers, ask for best and final pricing, and nail down some details.  It’s hard to maintain focus on the project until this financials are done and WORK starts.  I know Tonic is eager to start too – and are feeling a little bit like Charlie Brown and the football.

I can’t believe how amazingly painful this has been and how time consuming.  Not the real amount of “work”, but the amount of dead time between any activity.  Painfully slow.  Excruciatingly slow.  It’s amazing that anyone builds anything and handles the construction financing.  It’s also pretty easy to see why so many leave this to the large production builders who take care of all this and pump out maximum square footage / code built / neighborhoods of “pick plan A, B or C” houses.

Next Financing post will be the end of the saga (until I freak out over budgets…)  I promise.  But until then – I think I’ll get myself back in the groove and blog about how we got here and why we’re making the decisions we are – not technical like the other half – but more emotional.  (and unfiltered!)  Thanks for reading.

Why concrete sandwich panels for our exterior walls? Part 3 – Step 2 toward concrete sandwich panels – the interior walls

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Having bought into the concept and design aesthetic of concrete exterior walls we started brainstorming about interior walls surfaces.  Out initial thoughts were to use wood to warm up the interior of the house and avoid the dreaded sheetrock as a wall material.  We bounced around a lot of ideas on how to execute interior wood walls while keeping with the evolving design aesthetics.  We came to the conclusion that it would be better to use wood as warming / accent material via furniture, cabinets, doors, etc. where it made logical sense to use it.  This then led to the crazy, wild assed idea of using concrete on the interior walls – an idea that grew on us after initially us being skeptical about it.  So why not??

In parallel with our discussions on interior wall materials we had continued our internet search for precast concrete wall manufacturers.  And during this we stumbled across a company that claimed that they made concrete sandwich panels – panels that had both a concrete exterior surface (known in the trade as a “wythe”) and a concrete interior surface or “wythe”.  And it turned out that this company, International Precast, was fairly local to us – offering the ability to meet with them in person, see their facility, etc.  The fact that they were local also helped from a LEED perspective as it minimized the environmental and cost impacts of shipping the finished panels.

So our next steps were an initial telephone call and then a visit to International Precast.  IP_SampleThe net out of these discussions and site tour was that it appeared that they could do exactly what they claimed they could do – deliver concrete sandwich panels that could form the outer walls for both buildings for our project.  So our crazy wild assed idea to use concrete on our interior walls was actually possible.  Not only was it possible – it seemed that properly executed concrete sandwich panels would deliver both our interior and exterior finished walls in a single product.

Why concrete sandwich panels for our exterior walls? Part 2 – Step 1 toward concrete sandwich panels – the exterior walls

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In considering the wide variety of exterior materials that we could use I half jokingly made the statement that I wanted a house built of concrete, steel and glass (design aesthetic #1).  Note that all of these are lousy insulating materials.  So why these materials??  From my personal perspective these were part of the commercial / industrial / modernist design aesthetic (we can call this design aesthetic #2) that I like.  So we asked ourselves why not a concrete exterior to the house??  Properly mixed and cured concrete certainly is a very durable, low maintenance cost material that does not require any exterior finishing as is proven in the millions of commercial buildings that are built out of concrete.  And if it is used without trying to make it look like something that it isn’t then it meets a design aesthetic of “truth in materials” (design aesthetic #3) – it is what it is so don’t try to hide this.  And if we use it this way we get the bonus of not having any additional cost for exterior finishing.

concrete exterior

So how could we execute concrete exterior walls??  Certainly we could do poured in place walls – but these required lots of work in on site forms, dealing with all of the quality issues caused by weather, variations in concrete batches, etc.  Our architect / builder had done poured in place walls on a previous project so they were very aware of the issues with using them.  In particular the waste material from building custom wood forms was an issue.

The next thought was precast walls that could be cast in more controlled conditions that would then be set in place on site.  We looked at these fairly closely and even visited a factory where they were manufacturing walls that had a concrete exterior and were fitted with various materials to serve as studs in conventional walls.  We were convinced that we were on the right track on finding a material and method of making walls that met our exterior requirements – the panels would be “cool” as a way to meet our evolving design aesthetic and accomplish the our exterior durability / minimal maintenance goals  .

Further analysis showed that these panels that we had found still had some issues that we needed to consider.  First, they would still require insulation and interior finishing.  In that sense they solved our exterior goals but not our interior goals.  And they did not achieve the goal of thermally isolating the exterior and interior surfaces – we would still have to accomplish this.  They were clearly a big step away from conventional 2×4 construction – but were they a big enough step away??  Another concern was with this particular company’s ability to execute the panels to the detail and precision that we expected our project to require.

Coming up next – Why concrete sandwich panels for our exterior walls? Part 3 – Step 2 toward concrete sandwich panels – the interior walls

Why concrete sandwich panels for our exterior walls? Part 1

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This is the first post from the engineering geek guy for our ShopHouse project.  I will be explaining some of the more technical reasons for the design and material decisions that we are making as a couple for this project.

So why build using concrete sandwich panels for our exterior walls??  There are a  variety of reasons but this decision started as a desire to find a better way to build a house and shop.  And a better way to achieve our goals of having the lowest possible operating cost and the lowest possible maintenance cost.

wood framingI look at conventional 2×4 construction as “lowest common denominator” construction – while it is cost effective I find it to be incredibly wasteful and sloppy.  It also has a fundamental problem that we needed to avoid to achieve our “cooler” concept of thermally isolating the inside of the house from the outside as much as possible.  Every 2×4 creates thermal paths between inside and outside surfaces, thus creating thousands of holes in the thermally isolated “bucket” that we are trying to achieve.

There are certainly a number of ways to reduce the thermal  paths or bridges between the inside and outside surfaces but these add complication and cost to the building process.  One way is to build 2 separate walls so that there is insulation between the inside and outside surfaces.  Again this can give a good thermal result but essentially you are building 2 separate houses, one inside of the other.

Another factor with conventional 2×4 construction is that exterior wall surface materials must be added to project the exterior surface from the elements.  The exterior sheathing, typically plywood or OSB, must be covered to prevent degradation from rain, sun, etc.  There are obviously a very wide variety of materials to use but most are susceptible to damage from the elements and require some level of maintenance.  Brick can be used as an exterior material but you are again essentially building multiple walls in order to achieve the desired end result.

In almost all cases conventional 2×4 construction assumes sheet rock for the interior wall surface.  I find this to be another “lowest common denominator” construction material.  It is very forgiving of construction errors, easy to find people to install and finish, etc but I personally find it to be a material that I would like to avoid if at all possible.  It is messy to install and finish, susceptible to damage from everyday household activities (and especially damage from dogs!), and difficult to hang items from the walls because of its low structural strength.

The net out of wanting to find a better way to build a house is that I challenged the architect/builders that we considered to design a house with no 2×4’s and no sheetrock.  Needless to say the reactions were interesting.  I think that most didn’t believe that I was serious – but at least one took it to heart and embraced the philosophy that this challenge required.

Coming up next – Why concrete sandwich panels for our exterior walls? Part 2 – Step 1 toward concrete sandwich panels – the exterior walls