Hammond Forever House – Page 34 – turning a beloved heritage house into the low energy home of our dreams

The Bathroom Plan

My Dad knew an architect who is good at working with heritage houses, Annabel Vaughan. Annabel was nice enough to give the District of Maple Ridge a call to find out about building permits.

The building dept. said they couldn’t issue a building permit.

Huh?

Apparently, the two houses on our double lot are lying smack on top of the property line dividing the two lots!

See the two houses? See that line that runs vertically straight through them? Yup.

So what do you do when the building dept. says no?

You call the heritage department, and that’s what Annabel did. Lisa Zosiak, Heritage Planner at the DMR, told Annabel about a new Heritage Revitalization Agreement they had developed that would let us renovate and preserve the houses for generations.

The HRA meant that our reno plans would go through District Council for approval. After that, we would need a Heritage Alteration Permit to make further changes to the “character-defining elements”. We decided to plan out everything we want to do to the house, not just the bathroom, and get everything approved at once.

This really appeals to me because I grew up in a house that was never quite finished.

Annabel worked with us and this is what we came up with for the bathroom.

First, here is the existing bathroom again:

This is the bathroom as it is. It is next to the master bedroom and the office (once the pantry with the kitchen sink before we updated the kitchen). Where the wall notches in at the closet is the source of the foundation problems. — It’s actually a very square room.

And here’s what Annabel came back with:

I guess you may notice the extra 10 feet added on to the back of the house. More on that another time... — I guess you may notice the extra 10 feet added on to the back of the house. More on that another time…

We love this design!

A guiding principle to our vision is to create the house we want to live in for the rest of our lives. A forever house.

The bathtub and shower will be separated, probably by glass, from the rest of the room so that less humidity escapes.

We love the double sinks, the space for linen and the toilet tucked around the corner.

And we love love love the walk-in closet with it’s window to let in natural light. That is a north-facing wall so it will not be direct sunlight, but at least we’ll see our clothes in their true colours. The bedroom is small, and the original closet is tiny, dark and cold. At the moment our clothes are cluttering up our bedroom in a dresser and free-standing wardrobe. –OK, let’s be honest: our clean clothes are usually left in a laundry basket on the bedroom floor because we don’t have time to put them away. There, I said it.

By paying attention to details that are important to us, we will add another natural step in the evolution of this house and ensure that it is preserved as a beautiful, comfortable, sustainable home.

The Fossil Fuels in the Basement

Since we insulated the walls and attic spaces in 2009, we don’t buy fuel oil as often. –That’s right, I said fuel oil.

There is a big ol’ tank of oil in our basement!

So while it’s a good thing we don’t have to buy as much oil, the fact remains that oil furnaces are about the least efficient space heaters around. Oh, and they pollute and release a lot of CO2 etc. into the atmosphere.

It lurks in the corner like a time-bomb of atmospheric carbon.

Every spring we look forward to the day when we can turn off the ‘heat’ function on the thermostat for the summer. This year, as I watched the fuel gauge fall toward ’empty’ I was really hoping we would never have to fill it again.

Sadly, it looks like the renovation and retrofit will not happen before the weather gets colder again and the furnace kicks on again and we smell that familiar smell of burnt dust–the dust that builds up over the summer and burns off on that first day of heating.
Deep sigh.

Buying fuel oil for people like us who are fully awake to the realities of climate change is like a vegan buying a fast food burger.

We’ve done some research and we have some ideas which I will share soon, but we haven’t decided what system to replace the oil furnace with. There are many choices which can be lumped into two categories: 1. pay a lot now, pollute less and save money later or 2. pay less now but pollute more and get stuck with high fuel bills.

What do you think we should do?

One interesting question is whether we should switch to natural gas or go 100% electric. Examples of pure electric options are air-source heat pumps or ground source heat pumps. Natural gas is pretty cheap right now and more efficient than oil but it is still a fossil fuel.

My dilemma is that I want Hammond Forever House to lead the charge on sustainable retrofits so I am loathe to simply switch to another fossil fuel. If we were rich, it would be easy (ground-source heat pumps for EVERYBODY!)

In a nutshell, this is the challenge I am blogging about. How many other people are in the same position?

The Good Life – The Green Life

This film is gently revolutionary. It was an honour to be chosen to participate and such a pleasure to be part of the team.

You can watch it here: The Good Life – The Green Life or click on the link under “Friends” on the home page.

We heard about it from Jenny Rustemeyer who inspired us so much with The Clean Bin Project. For that film, she and her partner, Grant Baldwin, competed for one year to see who could produce the least waste.

Now they have a new film out, about the food we waste, called Just Eat It. Anything Jen and Grant tell us about we take a close look at.

We’re faced with these facts about Climate Change and we know we had better do something about it. Then we look around and it seems like nobody is talking about it. Everyone is too busy or the problem is too enormous or maybe we’re just being too polite. We begin to doubt that this is really a thing. If it were a thing, wouldn’t other people be doing something? Wouldn’t the governments be doing something? They wouldn’t mislead us, would they?

If I’m the only one doing anything, well, that won’t be enough, will it? Then I will have changed my life for nothing. We are uncomfortable with change and our assumption is that change will be bad. We will have to give up things we like and do things we don’t like.

As part of this project we met seven other people who are awake to the reality of human-caused climate change and are willing to do something. We discovered that there are a lot of us out there and that felt awesome.

Leanne and I love recycling and, in planning the renovation of our house, I’ve been pushing the idea of a community-scale project to retrofit existing houses to save energy, money and the planet. I certainly went in to this film project hoping to get the word out. I was surprised that was not the most valuable thing I took away.

The film gave Leanne and I some time with these inspiring people to discuss the future and what we can do to impact it. That feeling I had of isolation and futility is gone forever. The sense that we are on the right side of history, that a gentle revolution is fully underway and that the wise are on our side was much more valuable than any amount of publicity for my pet project. That knowledge of solidarity will power me through a lot of setbacks and frustrations that may lie ahead.

I hope that people watching can experience the same hope I felt and choose to take some action, any action, no matter how small.

Look for a screening of The Good Life – The Green Life at the Rio Theatre (at Commercial and Broadway in East Vancouver) in July along with another film about climate change. Details to follow…

The Technology Arrives

Colin and Nicole are students in the Building Sciences Dept. at BCIT — Colin and Nichole are students in the Building Sciences Dept. at BCIT

Leanne and I are lucky enough to have attracted the interest of the Rodrigo Mora, of the Building Sciences department at the British Columbia Institute of Technology. One of his students, Colin Tougas, is interested in doing a project on our project and another, Nichole Wapple (pictured) is thinking about doing another project on our project separate from Colin’s project.

Most people who renovate their homes can barely afford the basic cost, let alone energy-saving choices. Livesmart BC grants encourage us to use the opportunity to reduce our energy bills and reduce greenhouse gas emissions and dependence on fossil fuels. But how many people can afford to do what Livesmart BC was intended to encourage–a complete retrofit of a whole house? Well, not us, but we’re going to try anyway and hope our story helps others do the same.

Even the most basic opportunistic retrofits produce results that are difficult to quantify. How much money, energy and emissions are we really saving? Will these upgrades pay for themselves in 5 years? 10 years? Ever?

Rodrigo said, “There is a wide range of research problems in which Colin could get involved., including: monitoring, energy analysis, developing retrofit alternatives, indoor environmental quality, life-cycle cost analysis, etc. ”

Colin holds the kitchen temperature and relative humidity sensor. This is called a "hobo" — Colin holds the kitchen temperature and relative humidity sensor. This is called a “hobo”

Yesterday Colin and Nichole distributed some sensors around the house to measure temperature and relative humidity. They also placed one carbon dioxide sensor in the kitchen. Nichole is looking at doing an air-quality project. She told me that if the CO2 doesn’t look good, there may be other air-quality issues. Then tests for other specific problems would be done.

Here is Colin showing you the sensors in the kitchen.

The CO2 sensor is plugged into the wall, but the “Hobos” are battery powered. They collect temperature and relative humidity levels until someone plugs them into a computer and collects the information.

After the renovation, we’ll see exactly how these readings changed which will help us see how much better the world is.