Reams have been written about green building from scratch, and renovations that are essentially from scratch (like gut-jobs and pop-tops). Checklists and wish-lists of eco-friendly building features and renovation practices abound, including the USGBC’s ReGreen guidelines and my own Sustainable Staging article, but what does a sustainable renovation actually look like?

This isn’t a trivial question. Reimagining existing suburban neighborhoods (as in the current ReBurbia contest from Dwell and Inhabitat, deadline for entry is Friday July 31st) is a crucial step toward building more sustainable cities. Furthermore, decreasing the environmental footprint of our existing housing stock is critical if we’re going to tackle the  anthropogenic climate change crisis. (Our buildings are currently estimated to be responsible for 35% of North American greenhouse gas emissions, with about 20% of emissions coming from home energy use.)

There’s also another factor at work. Many, perhaps most, of us North Americans purchased our current homes with a single phase of our lives in mind, intending to move from house to house as our lives changed, with return-on-investment meaning a simple extrapolation from point-of-purchase to point-of-resale. The current economic heebie-jeebies mean we have a new frame of reference. We’re thinking harder about operating costs now, and return-on-investment has come to include the payback period for installation of energy- and water-saving devices. Many of us will be living in our homes for considerably longer periods than expected. It’s no longer desirable or acceptable to treat our dwellings as disposable commodities – if it ever was.

So, in this series of posts, I’ll round up some of the most inspirational eco-reno case studies available online, ones that fit a handful of criteria. A crucial renovation goal will have to be active conservation of resources – which means doing that energy audit and implementing the auditor’s suggestions for improving your home’s insulation, but also means going deeper with energy & water efficiency measures, and when possible planning to add microgeneration to the mix. Renovating sustainably also requires minimizing our use of materials by reusing and recycling whatever materials we safely can from our existing site, and by not increasing the home’s square footage but instead using smart design principles (like those covered by Sarah Susanka’s Not-So-Big books and website) to meet our needs. We also need to renovate our homes with an eye for suitability for lifetime use, which means both durability* and timelessness, and easy & (relatively) inexpensive customization & alteration of colour and texture. I think it’s especially important to show strategies that work in cold climates, and that can be implemented a little at a time.

* Here’s a thought-provoking discussion of the pros and cons of durability in building materials.

My favorite case study that I’ve seen online (via JetsonGreen) to date is a Boulder, Colorado 1960s-era split-level, with a similar floorplan to the suburban 1970s model I grew up in, and all the changes they made are doable on a limited budget, in several stages, over time. Here’s a fairly complete list of what they did, gleaned from following all the links and studying the photos:

• not popping the top allowed renovation on a much lower budget
• the altered roofline appears to include rainwater/greywater collection as future option
• improved envelope with new windows and icynene insulation
• improved HVAC, plumbing, wiring, and lighting
• new metal siding and exterior stucco
  
• removed some interior walls to open the floorplan – but did not gut the home and start over
• (urea-formaldehyde free?) cabinetry from Ikea
• Forbo’s Marmoleum in kitchen and bathroom
• refinished oak floors with FLOR carpet tiles used as area rugs
• natural wool carpeting in bedrooms? (not sure about this, no pics)
• low-VOC paints and coatings
• recycled glass mosaic tile
• dual-flush, low-flow toilet
• Energy Star appliances
• In the photos and video tour linked from the article, the front-yard relandscaping hasn’t been completed. I’d expect that they’re doing permaculture, and probably facing the concrete planters with reclaimed brick to match the rest of the home.

JetsonGreen also profiled a more ambitious (LEED Platinum!) green gut-renovation of an 1959 home in Portland, Oregon, including geothermal and solar PV, and moving an internal staircase. As part of the renovation, they replaced the windows, reinsulated, added an air exchanger, and used FSC-certified wood and Energy Star appliances. (I’m pretty sure those are Bedrock’s Blazestone recycled-glass tile used as the kitchen backsplash. Yum.) LEED-for-Homes-certified renos are almost always going to be gut jobs, since they need to have their outer envelope exposed from either the outside or inside to meet LEED’s stringent documentation requirements, and it’s often easiest to do both. But, as Preston writes, this house offers some great lessons:

Just look at the before and after photos of this green home and you’ll see a couple critical renovation strategies: (1) get rid of water-sucking grass without making your landscaping look crazy, and (2) keep the same size and scale of your home rather than building it into a monstrosity.

Green Building Advisor also profiles similar LEED-certified green renovations from time to time, like this gut renovation of a 19th-century home in Ann Arbor, Michigan. For this renovation, the team reinsulated, replaced windows with argon-filled low-e models and exterior siding with fiber-cement siding, and installed a ground-source heat pump and a tankless hot water heater. A small addition was built using ICF blocks, and the lot was relandscaped using permeable paving and rain and vegetable gardens.  I found the reuse of wood (salvaged from walls removed during the reno) to build the new floating staircase really inspiring.

But it really isn’t necessary to gut-renovate a home in order to do a deep energy retrofit. I was fortunate to see a local renovation of a 1949 stucco bungalow typical of many of Edmonton’s inner-ring postwar suburbs on the 2009 Eco-Solar Home Tour, and the owners have also documented their renovations year-by-year online. To summarize what they did:

• installed geothermal heat pump, and relandscaped
• replaced aging water heater with efficient solar (not tankless) model
• installed heat recovery ventilator
• improved envelope with argon-filled vinyl windows, new doors, blown-in cellulose insulation, new roof, draftstopping membrane
• LED lighting in backyard that runs off a solar panel on the detached garage

Also via Green Building Advisor, this is a 1970s ranch home in Boulder, Colorado that has undergone a deep energy retrofit and the addition of solar PV and hot water on the roof to create a net-zero-energy home. Impressive.

Finally, I’d like to call attention to the Humphrey House blog from Chicago, Illinois. The La Fleurs have been gradually renovating their 1912 Craftsman bungalow to an eco-envy inducing state, without sacrificing its historic character (swoon) or overspending, have done most of the work themselves,and have blogged every step of the way. Their home now features tubular skylights, salvaged interior doors and appliances, water-efficient fixtures, low-VOC paints and stains, Zodiaq recycled-content kitchen counters, soy-foam insulation, a tankless water heater, and an air recirculation system (a complete list of their green features as of last Sept is in this post). Their current project is relandscaping their backyard to include a veggie garden, reclaimed-concrete pavers, compost area, and more rain barrels. Oh, and do you notice what’s not in the list? Expensive big-ticket items like solar PV or hot water, or geothermal heating.

Now that’s inspirational.

What eco-renovations are you planning for your home?

Has anyone else been sick for most of the winter? We’ve had the flu run through our home twice. (But I still strongly believe in vaccination. Sorry, Jenny McCarthy.) This means I’ve been a slacker about blogging, and meanwhile, the world has kept turning. Let’s catch up with it, shall we?

New Year’s always means decor trend predictions. My predictions? People are hungry for meaning and security as we navigate the most turbulent economy in 80 years, and this means we’ll want our homes to reflect our deepest values. We’ll still be eager for style and beauty, but less impressed by fashion, and our luxuries will be smaller, more sentimental, more likely to be handmade. “Democratic decorating”, supporting emerging designers on Etsy (like Keith Moore’s bamboo clocks – mmmmm) and at local craft fairs, idiosyncratic mixing of styles and periods, and choosing the most Earth-friendly products will be as important as ever. We’ll still want our homes to be serene, abundant havens, and as a reaction to consumerism, many people will want to declutter and simplify.

Sadly, Domino magazine is no longer here to champion that vision of modern, eclectic, sustainable design; legions of decor bloggers are carrying that torch now.

I’ve been waiting to write about this story for months now. As reported on pages 40-41 of Green Living Online’s Fall 2008 edition, Canada’s Building Codes get only failing-to-poor grades on energy efficiency and sustainability issues, with Alberta failing with the second-lowest grade at 42% (after Nunavut at 40%). No province scored higher than a C. The report itself has not been released by Environmental Defence Canada to date, and I wonder now if it will be. Since it was drafted, parliament has been prorogued and reassembled, Obama has taken office as President, the North American economy has gone from having foreclosure jitters to a full-blown recession, and Environmental Defence appear to have concentrated their resources on the Alberta’s Tar/Oilsands and bisphenol A stories. Meanwhile, this page linking to their May 2008 Green Building Benchmarks seems to be the one to watch for further news on this front: http://environmentaldefence.ca/greencodes/index.php

Alberta’s building codes may not be green enough, but local business in Edmonton is getting greener all the time. The past couple of months have seen local mainstream media coverage of local & organic foodies d’Lish, green home decor & gift destination Carbon Environmental Boutique, and brand new eco-spa/salon The Beauty Parlour. The inexhaustible Jessie Radies (of Keep Edmonton Original and the Blue Pear) is starting to organize a local organic food co-op. E-SAGE hosted a series of fascinating talks by local economies expert Michael H. Shuman, available for download on their website, and are creating a sustainable business directory.

We’ve also seen prominent coverage of the CMHC’s NetZero demonstration homes, though unfortunately CBC emphasized how unaffordable green building is, instead of contextualizing net-zero as being part of a broad continuum of options. As inspiring as the NetZero homes and this LEED-Platinum reno of a 1915 Craftsman bungalow are, you don’t need to go to that extreme to make your home greener. But you knew that, right?

Reports of Compact Fluorescent Lamps causing migraines and skin rashes got a wide airing in late January. I’m still recommending them, for all the reasons I always did, plus one more: I’m skeptical of these claims. The idea that compact fluorescents cause migraines dates from the days before manufacturers switched to electronic ballasts for them, when once in a while you’d find one that flickered a bit – and the well-documented problem of the flickering of their non-compact relatives acting as a migraine trigger in some susceptible individuals. Newer bulbs don’t flicker. As for the skin rashes, it seems unlikely that they are UV burns as claimed, since the spirals are made of UV-blocking glass – and the bulbs I prefer (Philips Marathon in Soft White, and Ikea’s, which both have excellent colour rendition) have the spirals enclosed in frosted Edison-style glass bulbs to diffuse the light. I’m glad that it’s being investigated, though — it’ll be easier to discuss this once we have actual data instead of just anecdotes.

Furthermore, the UK recommendation now is to stay more than 30 cm from bare CFLs. How many bulbs in your house are naked, instead of hidden behind a shade or a frosted Edison-style bulb? How many are 12 inches or less away from you? There aren’t any that answer that description in my home, and chances are there aren’t any in your home either, so there’s no need to panic and change them all back.

Besides, have you seen the new LED LACK pendant lamps at Ikea? In another five-to-ten years we’ll probably be able to replace our burnt-out CFLs with even-more-efficient LED bulbs and this whole discussion will become moot. These ones have the nicest LED light I’ve seen yet, without that extreme blue tinge you so often see. If only they were bright enough to provide task lighting.

While the press widely reported the CFL anecdotes, the ever-reliable-and-inspiring WorldChanging noted that US media almost completely ignored the latest climate science predictions regarding business-as-usual global warming. Of course, science reporting in general is abysmal, but ignorance of the newest climate data has criminal consequences:

“That means ultimate sea level rise of 250 feet, with the best current projection being 5 feet by 2100, rising thereafter 10 to 20 inches a decade (or more) for centuries.”

Wow. Nova Scotia becomes a chain of small islands, most of the world’s major cities are gradually (or not so gradually) swallowed by the ocean, economic & social implications enough to keep anyone awake at night. Maybe Jon Stewart should go after the media’s willful ignorance of climate science next?

Finally, the planting of an organic vegetable garden at the White House has everyone thinking about starting seeds and dreaming of spring: let me leave you with inspiration from a less famous Victory Garden.