If you ever want to feel the meaning of footprint in all its emotional and physical impact – build a house. We have forms. With it we can see the beginning of the home take shape in terms of proportion and scale – an amazing feeling of reality and familiarity with a floor plan shape we’ve stared at for years on paper now sitting in the ground at hundreds of times larger than we’re used to seeing. Tomorrow, concrete.
You’d never think a hole in the ground was so exciting. Yes, it is. Foundation digging started today and should complete in another with forms arriving sometime day 9. As we expected from the Soil Engineer’s guestimate, there is water sitting on clay. Consequently we will be using a series of technologies to keep the basement dry. First under the slab we’ll use a system of water collection tubes to direct the flow away or toward the two sump pumps. See system plan by AMEC. Next, the walls will be sealed and insulated from cold and moisture using Tremco’s TUFF-N-DRI® Basement Waterproofing System. This system dissuades water from sitting against the absorbent concrete foundation wall and moves it down and under the floor slab into the tubes.
The foundation walls are also sealed with Watchdog Waterproofing making them impervious to moisture. The combined system apparently provides a thermal break of R12 from the grade down. This combination should guarantee the basement is dry for at least 10 years. What? Only 10 years? This is the sad state of basement guarantees – if you believe you’re about to get better, read the fine print.
Irony. Tear down an old house, weigh all the stuff that you toss, recycle what you can and then commend yourself for what you diverted from landfill. So let’s. Apparently we diverted over 80% of the demo from Landfill – and this is good. Really though, destruction aside, waste diversion, or avoidance, is a key to efficient construction and should be achieved in a number of different ways starting with building simply.
Complexity leads to waste, in odd cuts of materials, re-dos, or excess layers of finishes, veneers and hidden materials. Mike Leyer, our build foreman might have a alternate view on our “simple” house design however.
Next, use everything for something. Since we are all amazed at how much material could be recycled from the demolition, imagine how much easier it is to use the waste from new materials. The secret is to plan ahead — choosing materials that are recyclable (cut studs used as framing blocks or cabinet filler) or at least down-cyclable (off cut studs sent though the chipper as mulch). Next a waste plan is needed to ensure material waste is sorted when created, not later. Later means labour waste and labour waste is money burned and that means… (see Sustainable Costs)
Don’t invite waste. While working with a client on green initiatives, we looked at their waste problem and suggested something simple to us but apparently revolutionary to them. “Hey, don’t invite waste by allowing suppliers to bring more than they need and certainly no packaging”. What this means is every time an outsider from your site or company brings a coffee cup, lunch, packaging for their material or good, or excess beyond what’s ordered, you have to deal with it and it costs you and the environment. It’s easy. If they can’t bring it, they won’t. And if they can’t bring it they’ll change their policies to deal with their wasteful ways – perhaps by initiating methods for delivering goods sans package, or in re-suable containers. The dam of resistance forces pressure upstream.
Certainly if they are forced to take back packaging and incur the cost of waste, one of a few things will happen. They will reduce packaging to reduce costs. They will become efficient at recycling waste from packaging as an economies of scale will be achieved. They will begin to develop products that don’t require packaging or overages. And, they might even start carrying a travel mug.
Build with prefabricated materials. This is a way to combine two ideas – a supplier that plans, brings only what they require as per your design and doesn’t need packaging. Pre-fabricated house components are a growing trend in building with everything from radiant floor sections, walls (SIPs), foundation components (ICFs) and even entire house sections. The idea is that from plan, sections of the home are made off-site with precision in ideal conditions using labour achieving an economies of scale. The finished components are shipped to the site and installed in less time compared to building from scratch in less than ideal situations.
Our goal, and the goal of LEEDs, is to have very little, if any, material waste enter or leave the site. Except for those appliance boxes we’ll convert into condos for the kids.
Years of dreaming, planning, designing and preparation and we’re finally here. Demolition day – the beginning of a schedule to build our home. We watched the bullish efficiency of the demo and could only think – we’re committed now. Hopefully the remainder of the project will go with such apparent confidence and ease.
People share an intangible relationship with trees. Not only do they function as our house keepers, cleaning the air and managing our climate and water table, they are simply beautiful. Consequently we were sad to cut a few down that were in the center of the property where designing around them wasn’t an option for us. These trees were carefully downed to be made into lumber for use in the house for either millwork or other projects.
Chris Weatherman of Weatherhead Tree Service skillfully dropped the trees around our structures and chipped all branches. This mulch was then used as tree protection and nutrients for the remaining trees. In preparation for the construction we are setting up tree protection zones, combining mulch cover and fencing so that we don’t chance losing any more trees to carelessness or stress from heavy machinery on the roots.
This is not only common sense, it’s a fundamental component to LEEDs site management.
