In October of last year we bought our first house in Edmonton--and we've been renovating ever since.  Sound familiar?

Our initial attraction to the property was it's three-fold potential:

•  Potential to make this old house (1942) into a energy-efficient family home (hopefully for many years to come);

•  Potential to make this huge double lot (8000+ square feet) into a more environmentally sensitive/edible landscape (we love growing our own food); and finally,

•  The potential (and challenge) of being good neighbors/citizens in an older and struggling North Edmonton community (Build better communities, stop urban-sprawl, "improve, don't move", etc.).

Idealistic? Yes, whatever...

One of the biggest challenges to renovations and landscaping we are constantly up against is cost. Not making a lot of money, the cost of creating a space we can enjoy without guilt has called for some genuine creative thinking... and I hope some of the ideas we've come up with will be of interest to readers who can relate.  read more... »

Embodied Energy

    the available energy that was used in the work of making a product (from Wikipedia)

Once we use energy to make something, we should keep using that thing as long as possible. It provides a service to us, and once we stop using it to provide that service we generally need to spend more energy to create whatever replaces it. Home Re-use-ables exists to extend the life of building products – to maximize the value that we get from their embodied energy.

This is Sherry at Home Re-use-ables. It’s located at 8832 62 Avenue, and it may just have what you’re looking for for our next renovation project.  read more... »

The construction of today’s modern house expends a lot of energy and creates a lot of waste. We’ve worked hard to reduce waste while building the Mill Creek NetZero Home.

Wood

Green Door Builders framed the home, and along with building us a very airtight double-walled system, they were extremely conscientious about keeping their waste to a minimum. Here is a picture of 100% of the OSB waste that they created:

(a tiny pile of OSB waste, considering that a 2000+ sq. ft. home was framed with OSB sheathing)

Our LEED inspector was very impressed with this tiny pile.  read more... »

We have trusses, and we'll have a roof by tomorrow. Nick and Adam of Green Door Builders are doing a great job of framing the house. Peter is always amazed at how little waste they create. They're only throwing out little toothpicks of plywood. On top of that they are dipping into a pile of reusable lumber that I set aside for them:

A 2x6 left behind by the cribbing crew (up top, covered with a light coating of concrete) was conscientiously reused during framing  read more... »

The Mill Creek NetZero Home (MCNZH) will have very heavy floors. The concrete top coats applied to the main and second floors (in order to add thermal mass to the home) will each contain about 200 cubic feet of concrete. At about 145 pounds per cubic foot, we're talking 29,000 pounds, or over 13 metric tonnes of concrete, on each floor.  read more... »

I was relieved to see the the house at 9805 - 84th Avenue get torn down a couple of weeks ago. Once it was gone, I figured, I wouldn't be obsessively compelled to recycle it anymore.

The day before the tear down, though, Peter Amerongen started talking about reusing the foundation bricks as a mass wall inside the Mill Creek NetZero Home (MCNZH). I had raised the idea a few times previously, and he hadn't seemed all that enthusiastic, so I was going to let it go. He's the expert at reusing old material, after all.

The night of the demolition, this is what the site looked like:  read more... »

100 year old houses are relatively convenient to take apart because the original structure contains no screws. Two by fours will come out just by being banged with a sledgehammer if there are no screws. My friend Ed and I saved about 50 2x4 studs from the old pink house that stood at 9805 - 84th Avenue until last week.  read more... »

Maple Leaf Metals is located at 4510 - 68 Avenue. They are the place to bring scrap metals of all kinds. I had heard that they pay the best money for the scrap, and overall I was happy with my MLM experience.

Last week I borrowed the Habitat Studios truck and loaded up the metallic material that I collected out of the house that stood at 9805 - 84th Avenue.  read more... »

Man, there was a lot of wood around when they built the pink house at 9805 - 84th Avenue in 1916. It turns out that the pink paint on its exterior is covering cedar siding. 

So as part of deconstructing the 100-year old house that the Mill Creek NetZero Home (MCNZH) will replace, I've been removing the cedar siding.  read more... »

Peter Amerongen is fond of saying "concrete is one of the most energy intensive things we do".  Or something to that effect.  By "we", he means humanity, and he's right:  read more... »