Salvage=green

I've been remiss in not mentioning one of my favorite stores in all of Vermont...Mason Brothers Salvage in Essex Junction. I can spend hours strolling through their collections of architecturally salvaged doors, sinks, light fixtures, etc. It's a treasure trove of goodness. Plus, using salvaged products is green because it doesn't require the production of new materials or the transportation of goods from far off places. Here's a short article about the green properties of salvaged materials that includes a list of salvage spots around the country.

Since Vermont has one of the oldest housing stocks in the country, salvage shops in this area are overflowing with excellent, one-of-a-kind pieces. And the guys at Mason Bros. are great. They always know the history of the items they sell and are really committed to protecting them by giving them a new home. We've actually purchased several things from them already, mainly two matching wall-mounted sinks for our master bathroom (I'll take and post a pic soon--they're in storage right now.) Both were made in the 1950s and were salvaged from dormitories at Middlebury College! So cool.

So my sis (who is the awesomest shopper ever--I love picking out home stuff with her) and I went to Mason Brothers this week and took lots of pictures to give you a sense of what's available. We didn't make any purchases because I've found that the hubby likes input. But we might go back on Saturday and choose a pedestal sink for the guest bathroom. I also adore their glass door knobs and am thinking about using those throughout the house.

Gray kitchens

So I thought I wanted a super mod white kitchen but I've really warmed up to gray cabinets. Check out these gorgeous ones from Swedish company Kvänum.




By the way, my little sis is in town this week and we're headed up to Montreal tomorrow to make an IKEA run and to explore the famed Amherst St., source of many mid-century modern antique stores. My friend Teal first told me about this find in Montreal and I'm so excited to go! Check out this Flikr set from someone's trip. And here's a fellow blogger's recommendations for the best stores.

Beautiful home

I fell in love with this house tour featured on apartmenttherapy. It's definitely more traditional than we will probably go but has such a nice, crisp look to it. And I adore all the white walls. I think it captures a refined farmhouse (cottage?) feel...and check out that bathroom!

See the full photo tour here.

Change of plans (literally)

So this is the new information I referenced in my last post. Did you like the tease? And no, mom, I'm not pregnant. Sorry :)

So after a lot of thought and deliberation, Ryan and I have made the radical decision to ditch our original house plans. It was hard because we spent the better part of last year developing them (with the incredibly talented Lori Buxton, a local draftsperson). Lori did a great job and produced exactly what we requested. But we've come to realize that the house is too big and too expensive.

We originally developed the plans when the economy wasn't in the toilet and when we were living large. (Well, not really. We've never lived large. But we certainly had more job security.) In addition, over the past few months, we have spent an unfortunate amount of money on trying to meet the requirments of the DRB including hiring a civil engineer, a hydrogeologist, and an attorney. Let's just say that the process has not been cheap. And the bids we received for materials like siding, roofing, windows, etc. were higher than we could really afford. It became clear that the best thing to do was reduce the size of the house.

The more we thought about the prospect, the more excited we got. We are all about going green and yet we missed the most obvious strategy of all...reduce the building's footprint. In addition to cutting the materials needed for construction and thus saving resources, a smaller house means lower energy usage. It also means disrupting a smaller part of the site.

So we are excited to share our new house plans. We think they retain the farmhouse aesthetic we like but in a smaller package (1568 sq. feet). This represents a 27 percent reduction from our original house plans (2160 sq. feet)and is 40 percent smaller than the average house size in the Northeast (2601 sq. feet). Not bad, eh?

And the plans still meet our primary design objective: open, communal living/dining/kitchen area with smaller private spaces. The addition of the wraparound front porch is lovely. It will be like a second living room in the summer months. As for exterior colors, they will remain the same: white Hardieplank siding with a silver standing seam metal roof.

And the best part about these new plans? By dropping our window count from 30 to 20, we think we will be able to afford the Marvin Integrity fiberglass windows we so desperately wanted.

Let us know what you think...

Good news!!!

I feel like I've been waiting my whole life to write this blog post...we were *finally* approved by the Review Board at last night's meeting. WOOHOO! We're so happy. The unfortunate news is that they have asked us to address several more conditions and meet with them one more time. But I don't think this final meeting will be anything like previous meetings; it should be pretty cut and dry. Because of that requirement, though, our timeline has been pushed back. We anticipate breaking ground in mid-July. This is much later than we had hoped because we really want to take advantage of the $8000 new homebuyer tax credit (which requires you to occupy new construction by Dec. 1, 2009). I don't think we'll make it. But we can try. That money was going to help tremendously with our solar hot water. Oh, well! The most important thing is that we're building at all!

And thanks to everyone for their love and support! It felt good to go into last night's meeting knowing that there were at least a handful of people outside our close friends and family who cared about the outcome!

And I will be updating the blog soon with some surprising new information...stay tuned...

Update

I've been feeling bad about ignoring our blog. On the other hand, I have been doing my best to not think about anything house-related because everything has been thrown into doubt by our last meeting with the Williston Development Review Board. This last month has been like torture for us. We were going 100 mph on house work...picking out wallpaper, soliciting bids from subcontractors, talking snow guards with our roof installer, deliberating natural or painted sashes for the windows, explaining our heating system to plumbers....only to have everything come to a screeching halt on March 24th. It has been very difficult to adjust to this new reality of not knowing whether our project will move forward.

But a lot has happened since March 24th. We have had a professional hydrogeologist conduct an analysis of the well yields in our area and he concluded that we will have no problem getting the water we need without adversely affecting our neighbors. Whew. We also had a local landscape artist develop a landscaping plan for the site, which the town required. And we asked water quality experts at the state to weigh in on the appropriateness (and environmental impact) of our proposed septic system design. (If you can tell, these were the major issues the board raised at the meeting.) We feel confident that, on all fronts, we have addressed the board's concerns. We even wrote an impassioned letter to the board explaining how incredibly conscious we are of the ecological footprint our house...and how hard we've worked from day one to mitigate its impact--both to the land and to our future neighbors. We sincerely hope that this letter coupled with the professional opinions of a slew of experts will convince the board to give us the green light.

So for the first three weeks post-board meeting, I actually did a pretty good job of pretending like we weren't building a house. Driving past Home Depot and not stopping in to price out door handles? No problem. Avoiding the architectural salvage shop even though I know they recently merged with another store and have a deliciously large amount of new inventory? Didn't faze me. Getting repeated calls from subcontractors wondering what the $%jf*@ happened to me? Difficult, but manageable.

What made me fall off the wagon, you say? Hearing about a new store in Utah that sells fabulous MCM-inspired couches that are super eco-friendly. Green furniture...gets me every time.

So we meet with the board again this Tuesday (April 28th) and we're feeling *cautiously* optimistic. To celebrate our (measured) optimism, I've decided to get back into the swing of things and research this new couch find.

If you've been following this blog, you know that we've been searching for the perfect modern, green, affordable couch...for awhile. We first made a purchase from greensofas.com only to have the company return our money several months later because of production problems. D'oh! Then we thought we found it with the Giselle from Boston Interiors....only to learn out that their delivery charges to northern Vermont ran almost as much as the couch itself. Grr. We strongly considered some of the options from Crate and Barrel since many of their sofas are certified sustainable by the Forest Stewardship Council and their cushions use soy-based foam. But few of them (except maybe the "Petrie") really had that mid-century modern look we covet. Then I read about Lofgren's, a furniture store based in Salt Lake City, Utah that makes great looking pieces that are environmentally friendly as well. Delivery charges aren't exorbitant. And their entire upholstery line is green. Here is a run-down of their eco-friendly features:

Certified sustainable kiln-dried hardwood frame
Soy or plant-based foam
Padding materials: 100% recycled polyester fibers
Waterbased finishes and glues
95% recycled metal springs and components

Oh, and they're not terribly expensive...well, they're expensive. But for a green, stylish sofa, I don't think they're that bad. The last one is probably out of our price range but I like it anyway.

Here are the four we like. I have my favorite (which, of course, is not Ryan's favorite) but I'm curious to hear what others think. Which would get your vote? Maybe the blogosphere can help us decide...

Option 1: "The Tate" ($1349)
86"


Option 2: "The Aero" ($1499)
86"


Option 3: "The Dakota" ($1399)
81"


Option 4: "The Copenhagen" ($1999)
91"

Running into a stiff head wind....

Those were the words the chair of our town's Development Review Board uttered at our discretionary permit review meeting last week about the fate of our project. We were shocked. We were under the impression that we had everything in order to be approved to move forward and hoped (planned!) to break ground in May. But our meeting with the DRB last week revealed that there are several unresolved issues that must be addressed before they will grant us a permit. We are working feverishly to resolve those before our next meeting at the end of this month. So I apologize if there are no new posts between now and then. The worry with which we're now consumed about making sure we can build at all has taken all the fun out of deliberating over wallpaper...

I'll keep everyone posted on how things go at the next meeting. Here's hoping...

Cole & Son woods wallpaper

So I think you all have sufficiently talked me out of corrugated metal for the great room ceiling. I'm still enamored of it but see the drawbacks. I'm not giving up on using it somewhere in the house, though. I love it too much. Any good ideas for placement? Maybe as wainscoting in the guest bathroom?

Speaking of interior materials, I wanted to share another recent obsession of mine...Cole & Son's woods wallpaper. This stuff is popping up all over the place (design mags, blogs, etc.) but I never seem to get sick of seeing it. It is so serene and hauntingly beautiful. I feel calmer every time I look at it. I think I want to put this on the north wall of our master bedroom, behind our bed. The window centered on that wall will look across the field to the woods so it seems like an appropriate spot for it. I'll probably buy it from the Anthropolgie website.

Corrugated metal ceiling?

I have been trying to visualize our great room for awhile now. Most nights before I fall asleep, I pretend that I'm walking into the house. I normally make it through the mudroom into the dining area before conking out. Sad, I know. Therefore, the ceiling in the great room has never revealed itself to me. What do you see when you look up? Is it a great expanse of drywall? (The good: reflects light nicely, quite modern and minimalist; The bad: could be a LOT of white, very bland) Well, luckily for our new house, I wasn't all that tired last night when I climbed into bed and managed to actually make it through the snooze-inducing entrance and into the great room. Whew. And when I looked up, I was surprised to see corrugated metal! It's probably due to my near obsession with Blake Dollahite's house.

So here are some inspiration shots. You tell me. Am I nuts or should our great room ceiling be corrugated metal?

Blake Dollahite House


Dorval-Hall House (Keith Moskow, architect)




Lami Design Colorado Plat House

SIPs it is

The purpose of this post is to correct a huge oversight on my part and I want to thank poster "Mario in VT" for bringing it to our attention....we never shared our decision re: SIPs vs. ICFs! Oops. It's a minor decision, really. It's only our entire wall system (!) So sorry for that omission. Apparently I've been much more worried about critical issues like whether to purchase a refrigerator with a top or bottom freezer.

Anyway, we have decided to go with SIPs. We actually really wanted a full ICF house. There has been some debate about whether ICFs truly offer a tighter envelope over SIPs. I think what attracted us to ICFs is that in addition to the (potentially slight) advantage in terms of insulating power over SIPs, we also liked the idea of not using any wood. Over time, that wood will begin to decay and concrete is here to stay. It also seemed like a good way to avoid using any more natural resources. Then again, producing concrete is very taxing to the environment. So we explored using a large percentage of fly ash, a waste product that is harmful when released into the atmosphere. Using fly ash also decreases the amount of damaging-to-produce concrete. Anyway, we were leaning towards ICFs although it certainly wasn't an emotionally wrenching decision to choose SIPs instead. We basically want the tightest building envelope that our budget will buy. And once we received the bids back (two from ICF companies and two from SIP companies), it became obvious that SIPs were more budget friendly. I will say that there wasn't a huge difference. But the difference was big enough that we couldn't justify choosing ICFs over SIPs. However, we will be using ICFs from Vermont ICF for our basement.

We are buying our SIPs from Panel Pros out of Keene, New Hampshire. These will be 6.5" Insulspan panels, R-26. So far, Panel Pros has been great to work with. Our total panel package came to around $27,000 without installation. This price includes structural design and delivery. With Al's help, we are going to install them ourselves. Panel Pros also quoted us on a SIP roof but because of cost constraints, we are going to go with a traditional truss roof and blown-in insulation.

Here is a link to Insulspan's website that has some great, basic information on SIPs. Fine Homebuilding has a nice overview article, too. This is the most basic diagram I could find of a SIP. Also, check out this ridiculous YouTube video (the music is classic) of the guys at Insulspan putting up a SIP building. Okay, and this one is just weird. It's called: Insulspan SIPs & ICFs used to build "The Moon." I don't get it. And yet I watched it. I really have too much time on my hands.