Pam building prototype freezer organizers

Retrofit - Week 3

Pictures from the third week:

This is a shot of removing the rafters over the bedroom. It was kinda nice having the open, pergola feeling. Doesn't keep out the rain very well, though.

Water proofing membrane over the cellar entrance

Peter came up with the idea of making boxes for the windows to help align the inside wall with the outside one.

Something seems to be missing.... Oh yeah, the walls and roof where the bedroom used to be.

And after a nice, long day, we have trusses! Sweet!

Garden Gate Update

The gate is fabricated and painted. Wayne has also fabricated the rails and we are getting ready to set the posts. Jake is shown here applying cold galvanize to the welds, and also shown is the completed gate and rails.

Landscape Changes to the HUG campus IV

Jim and the grounds crew have been very busy making progress on the landscaping around campus. Things are greening up, and the area around ARC '08 has a different look and feel.

SPARC update, 07/26/2010

The SPARC is finally taking shape. The windows and patio door are installed, the upper ceiling is finishes, and the attic is insulated. M&M have also roughed in the inner walls. Next step is the plumbing and electrical.

Retrofit - Week 2

Week two saw some major cool achievements, but I didn't get to see them till Friday because I spent the week hanging out in Denver with many of the best residential energy efficient building experts in the country at a summit sponsored by the Dept of Energy and NREL. What fun company to be included in. It was encouraging that I could hold my own in conversations about building and energy and I learned a lot about the policy and political goings on. I also tried to get any feedback about what I was planning here that I could. It seems like everything looks good except for maybe settling of the cellulose wall insulation.

The major progress this week started on Friday of the first week when we got the steel for the joist hangers for the 4X12 rough sawn beams in the living room. Sam and Jake put in a long Saturday with me to get these things fabbed up in custom widths for each joist.

Then we painted them on Sunday.

Monday and Tuesday the guys removed the old beam and put in this beauty. No sagging there, boy. (Pictured here with temporary walls under the joists)

Then they spent a long day with a 7 foot long beam bender and an impact driver to put all these pretty, black, embodiments of form and function in place. Here you can see Shawn removing the temporary walls. No more staring up at the poorly spliced excuse for a beam and wondering why the joists weren't pulling more on the 3 nails in each one.

Meanwhile, Mike the Mason rebuilt the cellar door entrance and put a foundation under the corner of the porch. Very nice!

And then by the end of Friday, the roof was removed over the living room. Next week: Trusses.

Retrofit Planning: Why?

Home Remodel Project

Some key reasons why we need do something:

• Family Changes - We've added 3 kids since we moved in 8 years ago and we're living out of two bedrooms upstairs, since the kids are too small to want to be in the basement.
• Professional development - live the message. The secret to satisfaction is to find something you care about and live your life to show it.
• Some issues with the building - some things need work.
• Risk mitigation for the future - Economy, peak oil, climate change... Shit happens.

We're enjoying the house. It has great character with the large beams, nice flooring, double sided fireplace, and large, plentiful windows. The location is great - being in town, but totally surrounded by trees, near a pond, and in a nice neighborhood. Heating bills are low, but I'm hoping for performance that will never leave my family or grandkids wondering how they'll heat the place. We want to be stewards of a nice home and the land and not leave an energy suck for another owner. When energy prices rise, we'll be highly valuable if we want to sell and build something else. Retrofits are of critical importance for society and this will be an interesting experiment.

We have a $183K mortgage. We love the location. We like the style, floor plan and the 3800 sq ft of the house. If we could do a near-ARC retrofit here for $100-150K, then we'd be in a good position compared to the price of building new for a home the size we have.

Resilience Goals:

1. Make the house super insulated and easy to heat
2. Reduce heating costs and water heating costs dramatically by using the ground water heat pump to heat domestic water like in the NARC only off-peak, too
3. Retain ability to heat with the fireplace
4. Retain well in basement and add manual pump option
5. Enhance cold storage room/root cellar function
6. Reduce susceptibility to forest fire by increasing space to trees and adding cement-board siding and steel roof
7. Decrease maintenance issues with new siding/roofing
8. Increase kitchen efficiency - expanded/counter dish washing space, better dish/appliance storage, more pantry space, easier people flow around island
9. Make more bedroom space for our children
10. Increase laundry efficiency by moving it upstairs, and maybe new appliances
11. Increase hot water efficiency with recycling shower in upstairs bathroom
12. Make many productive raised bed gardens in yard to take advantage of nutrient cycle in our yard (not part of this project, though)

Retrofit Planning: Drawings and Permit

When we got to the point of having enough details conceived, I sent some crude hand sketches to Kendra Fjerstad of KDF Design.

She sent back some questions and then made some very nice drawings.

On a project like this, planning is paramount. I am keen to document this well in order to help anyone else crazy enough to try it. I also needed to convey the plan to the building inspector in order to get a permit. It worked.

Here is what we expect the outside to look like. The sunburst is kind of a Hug Home thing. I like it.

Deep Energy Retrofit: Before Pictures

Before we started this remodel, this is what the house looked like. It was a quaint saltbox style with old, red paint on it. It was built in the late 70s with 2X6 walls and 2x6 roof rafters and fiberglass insulation. When we got the place 8 years ago, it was heated with electric baseboards and a wood fireplace. about 4 or 5 years ago we put in a ground water heat pump on dual fuel with the fireplace as a backup. That paid for itself quickly.

This is the view of the East side. The single story section on the left is where a new second story will be added to make a couple bedrooms. The big brick chimney will be removed and replaced with a stainless steel chimney that won't bleed out heat so bad in the winter.

On the West side the cold, drafty main door will be replaced with two doors and my toes won't be as cold in the winter.

The north view here shows our candidate for the worst chimney in the world. It will go away. Unfortunately, we'll lose the cedar shrub, too.

Retrofit - Week 1

Allright!! kick off time. We got the project started Monday morning the 11th of July, by convening the team around the drawings and figuring out the plan of action. The Key players are:

Peter Lofstrom of Loftstrom Construction near Brainerd. He is the site supervisor and main go-to guy when it comes to figuring out how to make things really work. He is energy savvy and detail oriented when it comes to making a tight building. He was also the energy auditor who did the pre-audit and he'll do the final tests, too.

Shawn Beseth -Experienced framer, very local, and luckily for me, looking for work closer to home, even if it is temporary.

Sam Nelson - My brother in law with some good construction experience and also in between projects.

Mike Newbold - Another brother in law, fresh off of helping build his own ARC home, who is actually working for Resilient Properties Management, but this project is his assignment as an experimental deep energy retrofit.

Turns out that because of the schedule for the trusses, we decided to strip the siding for a day or two before Schrupp Excavating was available to excavate around the basement walls.

House minus the siding. The guys made quick work of this part of the project.

Below is 120 sheets of 2" foam and 1000 feet of corrugated poly pipe for the air exchanger.

We'll also put in an experimental, ground tempered air exchanger consisting of 6 corrugated tubes buried down at the foundation level almost all the way around the house.

We ran into a few little issues, like any remodel does. Some pretty good rot under the North and West doors that had to be fixed.

Second, the porch was not made with a foundation, it was slab on grade, which changed the way the way we decided to insulate around it. Then during the excavation, we cut the wire to the garage. Not biggies, just par for the course.

After that, the excavation and foaming went well. Schrupp's guys are awesome.

Around the East side, we had to deal with the cellar door. It had to be pushed out a foot to match the new wall, and it needed a thermal break to the basement walls. So we made a few cuts and the excavator made quick work of it, so the masons could rebuild it.

And this is how the air exchanger tubes look assembled.

Canopy weights

The market crew was having a problem on windy days. Their canopy tents kept thinking that they are kites, much to the frustration of those who were underneath them. Wayne had a great idea to fabricate some weights, which attach easily to the corners of the canopies and keep them in place.

New ARC'08 solar panels Installed!

M&M worked hard to get the trim done on the new solar panels. Now it is up to the engineering crew to design and finish the indoor plumbing and connect it to the existing system.

Landscape Changes to the HUG campus III

Jim and the crew has been busy on the campus grounds. The landscaping is finally taking shape and prairie wildflower and grass seed has been planted on the west end of the Mani-Shop. They are now working is front of ARC' 08.

Garden Gate

As part of our new landscaping, we are fabricating and installing a new gate to access the front of Old Main and garden. The new gate will be 30' long and nearly 7' tall. Wayne desinged the gate with a sunburst pattern, and is in the early stages of fabricating it.

Long term freezer storage

Pam is up on an internship for a few days and is working on the storage shelves for our long term freezer storage. She teaches CAD at Rochester Technical College.
She is seen here fashioning the prototype out of twin wall polycarbonate.