Turning a House into an Eco-Home
Picking a good locating and rating its green potential will help with your green renovation.
November/December 2006
By Carol Venolia
After decades of designing homes for other people, this year I finally was able to create my own home. Because all those years left me questioning just how green it is to tear up undeveloped land to build an "eco-home," I looked for an existing home that would benefit from my touch-one I could uplift into the realm of ecological sanity. It took lots of thought and searching.
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The most productive work begins before you even start looking at houses, and it helps to start by deciding what greening a home means to you: Declaring independence from the power grid? Surrounding yourself with low-water, edible habitat gardens? Healing a fixer-upper with serious problems? Improving daylighting? Creating a healthy oasis? With unlimited time and funds, you can do it all. However, most of us have constraints that give each eco-remodeling project a particular character. And different priorities mean different scouting criteria.
Start with a plan
If you begin without a vision, doing a little of this and a little of that, you may or may not actually improve the quality of life in your home. You might even end up in trouble. A woman I know bought a little house in the country and started replacing tired materials with greener alternatives. Bamboo took the place of old carpet, salvaged granite edged out ruined laminate countertops, natural paints and earthen plasters brought life to the walls. Unfortunately, something else was bringing life to the walls: mold. Her house was in a moist, forested canyon that received little sunlight; it wasn't built to discourage moisture buildup, and ventilation was poor. She ended up abandoning the house and still suffers from health problems as a result of mold exposure.
My own interest was in transforming a simple home into an environmentally responsible paradise. I wanted to show the world that it's possible-with a modest budget and small steps over time-to turn a context-ignorant home into a place that restores human oneness with the rest of nature. My intentions included:
™ Blurring the indoor/outdoor boundaries by opening the house to naturally heated and cooled outdoor rooms, surrounded by solar-powered fountains and wildlife-friendly gardens.
™ Observing local breezes and patterns of sun and shadow, then making simple modifications to increase the house's daylighting, natural ventilation, winter solar heating and summer shading.
™ Selecting finish materials-such as flooring, wallcoverings and countertops-based on my natural heating and cooling strategies, emphasizing the lush beauty of earthen plasters as thermal mass.
™ Using rainwater in the landscape, conserving water in and around the house, reusing graywater and recharging the aquifer.
™ Growing food in a garden near the kitchen, composting food scraps and feeding the garden with compost.
™ Choosing materials based on low toxicity, low embodied energy, salvaged content, durability and beauty.
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