Landscaping: Where the Checklist Meets the Road

I’m told that Europeans don’t use checklists to achieve resource-efficient building the way we do in the U.S. Perhaps they’ve been doing it so long, they don’t need to.
The U.S. covers a lot of area, and our site requirements might vary so widely that we’re reduced to checklists. Still, some don’t make sense. I’m reviewing my landscape designer, Fran Abel’s (www.franabelonwhidbey.blogspot.com) comments on items that get property owner’s points on the Skagit-Island County Builder’s Association (SICBA) Built Green checklist.

Item 2-37 Use slow-release organic fertilizers to establish vegetation. FRAN: I don’t use any fertilizers for native plants as they’re not recommended. I like to follow the rule of ‘Feed the soil, not the plant.’ If necessary I add aged manure and sawdust to the existing soil for my planting mix. LB: We didn’t achieve 2 points for using slow-release organic fertilizer. No points for no fertilizer unfortunately.

Item 2-63 Work with WSU (Washington State University) Master Gardener Volunteer to develop landscape design and implementation plan. FRAN: Well, I’m not a Master Gardener and refuse to be a Master Gardener because they focus too strongly on chemicals, so I don’t agree with what they preach. I think this is poor advice for that reason. LB: We didn’t achieve 1 point for working with a WSU Master Gardener.

Item 2-65 Install rain barrels to store rainwater for reuse. FRAN: This is minimally helpful in the Pacific Northwest. We get lots of rain in the winter, and rain barrels overflow. In the summer – when we need the water for irrigation – we don’t actually get that much rain. If not properly covered, they create a mosquito problem. LB: I have no need of irrigation water, as I’m a firm believer in tough love for plants. If they can’t survive beyond first watering, they’re dead.

That said, Chris Onstad with Whidbey Artisan, whidbeyartisan@hotmail.com, did a great job of hand building the rock wall and manhandling some of the larger rhodies into place. On time and under budget. What more could an owner want?

Take Away

On November 15th, Robert Drucker Architects, Jade Craftsman Builders and I hosted an open house for people in our area interested in green building.

Robert prepared a "take away" information sheet summarizing the project's environmental pluses. It's reproduced below.

Our Goal is Delight
In 2007, after a falling tree crushed her car, the Client hired Lydia Marshall and Robert Drucker Architects to design a guest house with a garage. The Owner, Architects, and Builder wanted to create a bright, healthy, and efficient apartment. We incorporated the quality and detailing of the main house. The Client wanted the guest house to match the assymetry and surprise of her house, and to incorporate green building principles.

Lydia and Do2 Architects had designed the main house in 2000. Lydia and Robert, Certified Sustainable Building Advisors, and Jade Craftsman Builders, are leading the project to a Five-Star Built Green certification.

Proper Siting makes Green Easy
The Guest House takes advantage of the site’s southern exposure with passive solar warmth and daylighting in every room.

Careful Construction Saves the Land
In addition to documenting the home's health and energy efficiency, the Built Green program is concerned with preserving the land, as are we. After construction the soils will be amended with compost and the land will be restored with meadow grass, native salal, and evergreen huckleberry that do not require irrigation.

Efficient Design Saves Money
The building footprint is 616 square feet, placed on a ‘brownfield’ part of the site that has been the parking area for seven years. The apartment includes a galley kitchen, full bath, laundry, and storage. The living areas are flexible and multi-use. This saves money, energy, and maintenance.

Sustainable Building Techniques Save Money
The house uses advanced framing and is super-insulated. Daylighting was physically modeled and is combined with efficient lighting and managed solar gain. The house is pre-wired for future photovoltaic panels. O’Brien & Company used REM-Rate software to model the building’s energy use, which could be 16% less than Washington State Energy Code.

Materials Selection makes the House Healthy
The interior and exterior materials include recycled or recyclable content. The finish floors are exterior grade fir plywood without urea-formaldehyde. The cabinets use formaldehyde-free particle board, The paint is zero-VOC. The bathroom floor is true, natural linoleum.

Home Energy Rating Test

The Blower Door Test

On October 9th we scheduled the Blower Door Test – an energy efficiency rating conducted by Colleen Groll of Seattle’s O’Brien & Company, http://www.obrienandco.com/. Its aim is to tell you how tight your building is and to locate air leakage sites. A blower door consists of a calibrated fan for measuring an airflow rate, and a pressure-sensing device to measure the air pressure created by the fan flow. The combination of pressure and fan-flow measurements is used to determine the building’s air tightness.

The blower-door fan is temporarily sealed into an exterior doorway using the door-panel system. The fan is used to blow air out of the building, which creates a small pressure difference between inside and outside. This pressure difference forces air through all holes and penetrations in the building enclosure. The tighter the building (e.g. fewer holes), the less air is needed from the blower door fan to create a change in building pressure.

After much sealing of light and plumbing fixture outlets, we succeeded in conducting our test that revealed a reading of 1.94. According to Colleen, the apartment might be too tightly built for adequate outdoor air circulation. Robert pointed out that the exterior air vent had been sealed during the test, so that probably would not be the case.

The blower door test is one part of a home energy rating – an analysis of a home’s construction plans and onsite inspections. Certified energy-efficient homes qualify their eligible contractors for a credit of up to $2,000. Most builders will pass this credit along to their clients.

The Skin of Our Building

Architects use the word cladding to describe what covers a building’s exterior. When we use metaphors to equate a house to a person, we speak of windows as eyes, doors as mouths, cladding as skin.

We used Hardi panel cement board in 4’ x 8’ painted sheets to cover the exterior of both my home and the new garage/apartment. It is a composite material made up of cement and recycled cellulose that is heavy, but extremely durable. In the six years since my home was built, all I’ve done is to wash down the siding with soapy water to cleanse it of bird droppings and slug trails. Long-lasting materials like cement board not only require fewer resources for replacement, but also reduce maintenance and repair costs.

According to the Web site, http://www.jameshardie.com/, Hardi panel is endorsed by the National Association of Home Builders and James Hardie Company is a member of the U.S. Green Building Council. Hardi panel resists damage from wet, humid environments, wind impact, insects and fire. It also holds paint well.

James Hardie has 10 manufacturing facilities around the country – the nearest to us in the Pacific Northwest is Tacoma, WA – which reduce long-distance materials transport. The materials themselves, wood pulp, cement, sand and water, are low in toxicity.

On the down side, I’ve never met a builder that didn’t complain about how difficult it is to cut. That adds time to your labor costs, so Robert and Lydia drew the panel layout carefully to minimize cuts. On this project, we bedded the edges of each panel in sealant and concealed them in an aluminum trim piece.

building wraps

Perhaps it hasn’t been 40 days and 40 nights of deluge here in the Pacific Northwest, but it sure feels like it. All the rain and cloudy days get on peoples’ nerves. It’s slug nirvana. Weather like this makes the Jade Craftsman Builders’ motto, “Think like a drip,” seem particularly astute. Our construction schedule is delayed a week due to the soggy weather. Robert said, “For many of us whose work never takes us away from our desks, this is a reminder that there is a natural world out there.”

This week the builders are beginning to wrap my garage/apartment in a black thermal paper produced by Fortifiber. According to their Web site, Super Jumbo Tex 60 Minute is used in production, custom residential and commercial construction needing a high performance weather-resistive barrier. It delivers over six times the water protection of standard Grade "D" paper and provides optimal breathability to prevent moisture condensation within exterior walls. More, it resists tearing and puncturing on the jobsite while providing an effective air barrier to reduce energy leakage.

“Is this stuff more durable than Tyvek?” I asked the head carpenter, Chuck, yesterday morning. “Much better,” Chuck said. He thinks that Tyvek doesn’t work well against cedar.

Our new project manager, Mark Clark, plans to use electric heat to dry the interior of the building to 10% moisture content prior to enclosing the walls – an increase of at least 5% over typical standards.

Recycling Building Materials

As the roof trusses were going up, the builder enclosed an adjacent hemlock with protective tape to keep workmen from parking or piling heavy materials above its root system. He also posted a recycling checklist of how to segregate and recycle different building materials. It included addresses of local recycling centers and what materials each one accepted.

Lydia and Robert came out on Monday to take stock of their creation. Robert particularly liked the long, horizontal window that you look through as you drive into the garage. I think we need to plant something spectacular there. They checked measurements and we agreed that a medicine cabinet was needed if there were to be no storage drawers in the vanity. And Robert told a funny story about anchor bolts, the metal strips that connect the foundation with the framework of the house. It seems another architect friend designed a home for a family in Michigan. Visiting the site, he noticed the contractor hadn’t installed them.

“Where are the anchor bolts,” Marvin asked.

“What are anchor bolts?” said the contractor.

“They’re the things that keep a house from shifting off its foundation.”

“Oh,” said the builder. “We don’t have much of a problem with houses shifting off their foundations. Out here in Michigan, we just use gravity.”

An Interlude

I love the humility of my original home’s site in the cup of two slopes. Rather than parading itself at the land's highest point, it became part of my 5 acres by backing up against hillsides of second-story forest growth. It looks uphill at old logging road clearings and west toward wetlands pioneered by alders.

When I woke this morning, the second story south wall was underway. It looked huge and looming from my home’s living room windows. Lydia Marshall (Drucker Architects) and Dan Neumeyer (Jade Craftsman Builders) arrived soon after for a budget and what-happens-next meeting. Lydia said she was forever thankful to the cedar we’d protected that will visually break up the south façade of the building as you drive in. Its two-stories don’t look so intimidating from that approach, but seem enormous as I gaze uphill at them from my house.

Part of that is the bright color of the new wood, which will be clad in HardiPanel painted Ranger Green like my house – blending with its cedar and hemlock backdrop. Much of its bulk will disappear in the trees.

Lydia asked today if I’d climbed to the 2nd story. I did that after work, but didn’t have the nerve to step off the ladder onto the new footing. There was a bad experience from my own roof, not being able to find the first step of the ladder on the way back down. Even so, I gazed out from 2nd floor level and saw this will be a tree house. Perched a third of the way up 30-60’ cedars, occupants will see robin nests, barred owl perches. Coyotes and black tail deer trotting by at dawn and dusk. It will be a good place to live.