West Coast Green

This week in San Francisco is the annual West Coast Green conference. I'll be covering parts of it for green building blog Jetson Green. There promise to be lots of interesting innovations in the field of green building and design.

I'm particularly excited about seeing the SFH40 from Green Horizon Manufacturing, a self-sustaining temporary building that can be sent anywhere in a shipping container to provide emergency housing. After FEMA's mess with the trailers following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, this looks to be a major step up. It features solar panels, a fresh waster supply, waste water treatment, and is built from 100% recycled materials.

I'll also be keeping my eyes open for new do-it-yourself friendly materials and technologies. Let me know if there's anything new you've heard of that you'd like me to check out at the conference.

glacial kitchen progress

Progress on the kitchen has been slow, or at least feels that way. I've been finalizing the layout of the cabinet design and getting estimates. Since the cabinets are major part of the expense as well as the look of the kitchen, and I can't do it myself (without a major learning curve to learn cabinet making, and a lot of time), I'm getting three estimates. I can't blame the weather (which was glacial...there was ice on the bird bath the other morning), though that has kept me away from Habitat for several Fridays. I can't even blame jury duty, since the case settled while they were calling role, so it only took a few hours out of my day.

The first estimate is from Home Depot, which had a very helpful, friendly guy help me finalize some details while he was inputting the cabinet specs into their system. KraftMaid makes nice cabinets, and has taken some green steps, but doesn't specify FSC-certified lumber and would be shipping the cabinets all the way from Ohio. They ship a lot of cabinets, so there's some economy of scale, but still not the best thing.

Another estimate is from a local green home improvement store, EcoHome. They're a great shop, with a huge selection of eco-friendly paints, flooring, cabinets, countertops, etc. We got our bamboo flooring from them, as well as all the paint we've bought in the years since they opened. They have a company make the cabinets locally, using FSC-certified wood and low- and no-VOC finishes. This will definitely be the greenest option, but probably the most expensive.

The final estimate is from a local cabinet shop here in Oakland, H&H Cabinet. They were the last on my list, so the drawings were pretty complete by the time I got to them. They've got a small showroom above their shop which is only staffed some of the time, so the hardest part was getting over there when it was. This may be the cheapest option, but we'll see.

I'm hoping that EcoHome's estimate will be reasonable enough that we can go with it. They're super-knowledgeable, always looking for new and better options, and have done a lot of work figuring out the trade-offs involved in the various options. With the recession, they've been adding more variety to the products they carry. Instead of purely high-end stuff that's as green as possible, they're also carrying some more modest stuff that may not be as green. Regardless of whether we get the cabinets from them, we'll probably get the flooring (probably natural linoleum) and countertops (maybe Paperstone or Vetrazzo; the latter is made locally).

I'm also hoping this will all be reasonable enough that we can splurge a little on some art. We recently went to a local (as in around the corner) open studio. Turns out the house with the funny sculptures in front (a couple doors over from the house that burned a while back) belongs to a local artist who works with copper. Kenneth Griswa does some very high end installs, but also does some more modestly priced work, too. His portfolio includes some boffo copper backsplashes and range hoods as art. They're decorated using a variety of techniques, and are in a word, amazing.

In any event, the basic design of the kitchen is done. It's got the classic work triangle, and despite any limitations imposed by costs, it's going to be 1000% better than our old kitchen. It'll be twice as big, with lots more counter space and storage, and open to the dining room (via a large doorway and half height walls at the counters), so it'll feel even bigger.

It's Our Cats' House

Nate and Jen of Milwaukee Back House recently asked if there were pictures of some of the kitty-friendly features we'd designed into the addition.

We were inspired in no small part by The Cats' House. Alas, their website has been pretty slim for a while now, but you may be able to find a copy of their book at your local bookstore.

The loft that we can use, too, is one of the obvious features, with a sisal rope-covered ladder to make it easier for the cats to climb leading to it. They love to use the ladder to climb to the upper window to look out in the morning when the blinds are closed (since the picture was taken, I've added a little shelf from the ladder over to the window to make it safer and easier for them) as well as the loft. You can see the loft in the plans and 3D renderings here. There are a couple of less obvious features we all like, too, like the double-pane windows, extra insulation, passive solar heating and the radiant heating in the bathroom (though they'd probably prefer we left that on 24/7, and put it all over the house.)

If you look carefully in the plans, you'll notice that the new bathroom was going to be at the same level as original house, which would mean another loft above it. I ended up changing it to make the bathroom at the same level as the new bedroom, i.e., +2 feet from the original house. That made the loft above it only 2' high, so not really useful for us. (Though the part that's inside the closet makes a great place to store our camping gear, which needs a clean, dry place, but not necessarily frequent access.) But I still built the loft, and included the planned window for light and ventilation. And since the cats are considerably shorter than us, the limited height was no big deal for them. So I built a walkway between the two lofts, just for them. Using a design I saw described at The Cats' House, I routed out a groove in the top, and put a small piece of carpeting in. The groove means that you can't see the ragged edge of the carpeting, except a small section on the end (with more careful routing, that could have been avoided.)

They sometimes look out the window to see who's coming up the path, though they know they can get a better look at us coming down from the carport from the window in Katarina's office. But again inspired by The Cats' House, as well as by a design feature common in convents(!), I added a peephole from the loft out into the front hall (the one place in the addition with a 12' ceiling; the bedroom is 10'.) Rosie is our token extrovert in the household, so she's more likely to run down and greet who ever comes in. But when appropriately bribed with food, she'll look out the peephole, too. Star, being older, wiser, and considerably wussier ("Wuss in Boots"), has used the peephole in earnest a number of times. She has looked out with fear upon the marauding horde known as my nephew Jimmy. Eventually the hole will be covered with something more decorative, maybe the outline of a cat's paw, or like in The Cats' House, the outline of a cat's head.

And for any of you linguaphiles out there, Katarina and I both remember there being a word or phrase that describes this feature in a convent. It was designed to let nuns look out and see visitors without being seen themselves. While both our cats are chaste (and when Jimmy is around, chased), neither of them is very nun-like except Star's black-and-white clothing. But neither of us can remember what the word or phrase is. Anybody out there know? It's like the age-old question: how do you look up a word in the dictionary if you don't know how to spell it?

How it Began

Several years ago when I was working full-time at home and Katarina was working full-time split between home and office, we decided we needed a bit more space. I'd used the second bedroom as an office, which we shared for a while, but we decided we each needed our own space. So I set up shop in what was the dining room.

We then hired an architect and had some plans drawn up. It took a long time to get something we liked and was readily buildable (the existing foundation isn't enough to support a second story, so going up was less an option). We ended up with a great design, a pentagonal-shaped master bedroom suite offset from the existing house and connected by a hallway. Ed Soos did a great job.

Then we went to get bids from contractors. The SF Bay Area building boom was in full force, and it was difficult to find contractors. The only bid we could get was from the architect, which was a design/build firm in Berkeley. It just wasn't practical -- it was substantially more than I paid for the house and land a few years before that. So we decided to shelve the idea, and I still have my office in the dining room where I sit while typing this.

Fast forward a couple of years to about 6 months ago. We talked some more about building an addition, and I had a couple more years of volunteering with Habitat for Humanity and helping lead mission trips to Mexico. I started sketching ideas, and quickly decided to purchase a design program. After trying various options, I ended up with Home Design Pro, which is sold under the Better Homes & Garden label, but is actually created by Chief Architect, which makes high-end architecture software.

After a lot of revisions and learning the software, we ended up with something we liked, and something that I felt I could build given my experience level. The plans and some renderings are below. It adds one bedroom and bathroom, extends the dining room a bit, and moves the entryway to the addition. That allows us to expand the kitchen into what is now a recessed porch and front hall, nearly doubling the size of the kitchen. That was the one thing I didn't like back when I bought the house -- a small kitchen.






The addition and new master bedroom aren't huge, but the current house isn't very big, either (less than 1,000 sq. ft.). We included lots of windows (we particularly like the large, cross-shaped windows on the south wall) and two lofts above the dining room extension and bathroom. The addition will have 12' walls, but the bedroom will be at +21" from the existing floor level, giving about 10' walls (compared with the normal 8'). All this should give the room a bigger feel, and with windows on four sides, good light and ventilation.

And yes, those are solar panels. We haven't figured out exactly what we're going to do for those, but part of the design was to include a larger south-facing roof to allow for them in the future. We're trying to be as green as possible with our building practices as well as the design, by using as few resources as possible both during building and after the addition is built.