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?

SCOOPED limited-edition pendant lamp, 1/20, colour: Spring, of discarded laundry detergent scoops, photographed without flash

SCOOPED 2/20, colour: Stripe, installed in its permanent home at Lucid Lifestyle

I’m excited to have recently added handmade pendant lamps created from upcycled materials to my portfolio. (Most materials are “downcycled”, degrading in quality and value, as they are recycled into new products – an oft-cited example of downcycling is the recycling of paper fibres from cardboard into office paper into toilet paper. “Upcycling” is the opposite of this, creating an object of beauty and increased value from a material that would otherwise be discarded.)

VESSEL:FLARE limited edition pendant light, 1/30, colour: Clear

While my creations are available in my Etsy shop, I’m only one person, and there’s a lot of discarded plastic and glass out there waiting for a new life. So, to celebrate Earth Day, I’m posting photos and instructions for creating your own lamps created from reclaimed materials readily available in your local thrift shops and reuse centres. (more…)