Brooks Street

I heard from a neighbor that this was done to create an energy-efficient home. But what about tearing down a perfectly usable living space and throwing away all those materials – there were at least three large dumpster loads that I saw, during my travels up and down Brooks.

How do you know it was perfectly usable living space? We are living in a 1920s house that was probably shoddily built even by the standards of the period, also somewhat oddly arranged as the living areas transition to the bedrooms/bathroom, and undistinguished — if not downright ugly — on the outside. If we were to undertake a major renovation I can’t swear we wouldn’t go as far ourselves. Why pay that much to spruce up the appearance of an unworkable layout?

Almost all buildings eventually cost more to maintain/operate than they do to rebuild. Cost being all aspects of the home’s value (energy spent building it, etc). It’s very likely that this was a prudent use of natural resources rather than a waste of a usable home.

If we ever want to live in a country that doesn’t suck up several times its share of energy, more people will need to do this. The existing housing stock sucks.

FWIW, I don’t know that the materials weren’t reused.

I saw the dumpster loads, so I don’t think the materials were reused. Also, the neighbor lives across the street, so their information came from the owners, who wanted a “green” structure; no indication was given that the home was uninhabitable.

It just seems like in a “green” city like Ann Arbor, a true preservationist would have tried to reuse some of the materials, and that clearly wasn’t done – only the chimney remains from the original dwelling.

This is my house so I thought I would weigh in on whether it’s green or not. No, the house was not uninhabitable. But, there were enough problems with it, both functionally and aesthetically, that we wanted to remodel. We hired an architect, Michael Klement of Architectural Resource, and worked with him for months on the design. If we could have avoided the tear down, we would have. But, we couldn’t figure out a way to accomplish what we wanted, which included not only energy efficiency but aging in place, any other way.

As to the reuse of the material. It was important both to us and to our builder, Meadowlark, to reuse as much as possible. The teardown was done carefully to reclaim as much material as we could. The lumber and siding, for example, were saved and have been used, along with reclaimed material from a couple of other projects, to build a barn. The appliances were donated to the ReUse Center. We saved the hardwood floor and plan on reusing as much of it as possible in our new house. Where ever possible, we reused or recycled.

So, it may look like a waste of a perfectly good home but, in reality, the undertaking was very carefully planned and thought-out. The end result will be a home that is one of the relatively few in the nation to be certified LEED Platinum.

Congratulations. And you have also saved your beautiful perennial garden. I was impressed with how carefully that was saved.

As the other owner of this house, I would like to add my own comments concerning the definition of “green” as it applies both to building projects and other living choices.

I have found that the term “green” is frequently defined very narrowly, as in the previous comments, to mean “no waste.” As my wife pointed out, contrary to observation or the testimony of neighbors, we did in fact make every effort on our own, and through the builder, to see that “waste” was minimized. I am currently refurbishing the original solid wood garage doors in our cramped apartment in an additional attempt to keep perfectly good materials out of the waste stream.

So, while “waste” is definitly included, a true definition of “green” would also include a choice regarding the externalities of living in an old un-updated house (or partaking in any activity for which there is a more efficient alternative.) Every second our old house was still standing, we were contributing to global warming through the inefficient furnace, drafty single-pane windows, and poorly insulated walls and roof. Is it more green to let these conditions stand for the next several generations (even if partially mitigated by individual retrofits) or to do what we are doing?

I could claim that every minute you drive your non-hybrid or non-electric car, or continue to use an incandescent lightbulb instead of a compact fluorescent bulb, “green” principles are violated. In current economic theory, any existing condition would be determined a sunk cost, and therefore irrelevent to an economic choice. My choice would be: do several small upgrades and improvements or a full remodel result in the best outcome? Knowing the full measure of the recycling that would be accomplished in our remodel and the resultant energy efficiencies, the choice was clear and we acted accordingly.

From the beginning glimmer of this project, we made choices that, though perhaps more costly to us, were in the best interests of the planet. Observing the commitment of Meadowlark Builders to the same principles, we would unhesitatingly to exactly the same thing if we had to do it over again.

It is our hope, through the tour this coming weekend and through discussions such as this that we can help to educate interested parties in available alternatives, and to think about “green” in a much larger context than what might be observed in a dumpster.

Builder-guy for this house here. Thanks for the lively discussion! These type of discussions are part and parcel of what we do in planning projects all the time. There are definitely trade-offs that are made every day, and some of them are painful. We do what we can to make the right choices, but you can’t be 100% correct all of the time. The real world intervenes.

Regarding the waste and dumpster issue, I wanted to weigh in here to make sure that people understood what we do. Calvert’s, now owned by Recycle Ann Arbor, will allow us to put all recyclables in one container and landfill waste goes in another. You saw several 10-yard dumpsters, but only one of them so far has headed for the landfill. Calvert’s does an amazing job at separating and RECORDING trash that is diverted to be recycled or reused as required by the LEED for Homes program. They provide us with a great option to make a huge dent in reducing our waste generation on a building site.

For the house that was demolished, we recycled 100% of the metal, 80% of the hardwood flooring, 100% of the framing lumber over 6′ in length (now a part of a pole barn built on one of our carpenter’s property), 80% of the old siding and sheathing (pole barn again), and 100% of the concrete waste. We have no way to recycle plaster, asphalt roofing, and plywood that does not come off cleanly, but I would love it if we could.

As a carpenter in my earlier years, I can tell you that we have made great strides in the amount of waste we divert on all of our jobs, LEED or not. It’s an important goal for us, and something we try to keep improving upon. We’re not perfect, but we try hard.

As far as energy use for heating and cooling goes, about 8X less than conventional construction (very tight, very well insulated, energy recovery ventilation, geothermal heating and cooling), but other electrical use will be only about 30% reduced, so around 5X less is right in the range. About 60% less water use too!

Architect-guy for this home checking in as well. First of all, I’d like to rally behind and thank the original commentator on this thread, Jon Saalberg, for being spot on in calling attention to a very, very significant and somewhat concerning aspect of our housing situation here in North America: what exactly is it we will do with the some 120 million existing housing units ALREADY in existence, like the Ward-Folger residence. Over 70% of these homes were built before ANY energy codes were even introduced. Now that is a burdensome legacy of being one of the first of the first world countries to emerge in the “modern” era of environmental and energy irresponsibility. We did it, we built our shelters in the manner we did, simply because we could. And why not, we didn’t know any better, energy was cheap, we had little awareness of the environmental impact, and no one considered we would ever run out. When Hubbard’s Peak was first introduced by Marilyn Hubbard (ironically as a hired consultant by big oil) predicting with amazing accuracy the point at which we would hit peak oil “production”, even his employers dismissed his forecast. Whether you subscribe to the notion of our antics as a species contributing to, or in fact causing, global warming the fact remains that our housing legacy is a significant contributor to energy and resource use in America (22% of the energy and 74% of the water according to the USDOE).

So, every time we as architects are working with an older home, like the original home on 1606 Brooks, where our homeowners have significant needs that are not being met by the home functionally, we are challenged with the difficult decision of what is the most effective way to change the home from a liability to an asset; both for this era and for the next. In all of our projects, just like Scott and Kathleen’s, we first and foremost look at every manner of reusing as much of the existing home as possible, whether in place or as parts. The embodied energy, that energy that was used by nature to create the raw materials, and by man to harvest, engineer, synthesize, package, transport, store, assemble, finish and maintain, is something not to be taken lightly. In this case, even though we explored numerous design options, the carefully considered decision was made to remove and then reuse/recycle/repurpose as many of the component parts as possible. For what our homeowners wanted to accomplish for their lifestyles now as well in the future, the existing home, try as hard as we did, could not be morphed into one that would support those goals. As has been noted the majority of the home’s component parts were diverted from the land fill and have gone on to serve extended useful life’s, just not at this address. We did also work very hard to save and reuse the existing foundation basing the new home design on that existing element and adding out sparingly and only where absolutely necessary.

The changes that we were able to institute by reconstructing the building shell, beyond the efficiently laid out building plan, are going to allow this home to achieve high performance building levels that would have been very difficult, if not impossible to achieve with the original home. When we have designed high performance LEED Platinum level certified whole house remodels with existing homes which were not completely removed and recycled, two of them being right here in Ann Arbor, we encountered challenges and obstacles that indeed added significantly to the bottom line cost. This is the issue that we, all of us who live in existing homes, face. Right now there are a number of programs across the country that are mobilizing to address this very issue. The University of Minnesota is spearheading the Energy Efficient Building America Retrofit Partnership, with which we are affiliated, to research and implement advanced techniques for retrofitting existing homes. The goal is to reduce energy use in homes by 30% or more. The Building America Program is also conducting research on “deep retrofits,” retrofits that reduce an existing home’s energy use by 50% or more. This is going to be very important if we are to effectively address the legacy that I have referred to above.

With respect to how “Green” this project will eventually be recognized as being, even given the fact that we did remove much (but not all) of the existing home, don’t take our word for it. We don’t even take our own word for it… we turn instead to an independent, rigorous, third party certification system, the United States Green Building Council’s LEED for Homes Rating Program. The LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) green building rating system is an nationwide independent building evaluation system that looks at eight different areas of “greenness” including Design; Location; Site development; Water use; Energy use; Materials use; Indoor environment; and Education of the end user. Based on a scoring system, weighted by home size, a project is deemed to be either LEED Certified, Silver, Gold or Platinum, with Platinum being the highest level attainable. For this project, considering all aspects of the home in the eight comprehensive resource categories listed above, including the recycling/repurposing of a good deal of the original components, the preliminary assessment has the completed home as being certified at LEED Platinum level. Not too bad!

Thanks for all the follow up comments on the house. I hope to visit it during the advertised open house. I appreciate the thought that has gone into constructing a LEED structure, and into creating a home that fits into and enhances the neighborhood.