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... »

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... »

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... »

I've been working like a donkey on deconstructing the house that now stands on the site of the Mill Creek NetZero Home. I'd love to pull every single 2x4 out that of that house by hand, but I have a raging case of tendonitis - it seems that the impact of swinging a sledge hammer can hurt your arms after a while. Who knew?

Anyway, we have a demolition date. First thing Monday morning, the pink house at 9805 - 84th Avenue is coming down. If you have kids, feel free to bring them to the show. 

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... »

Metals are easier to recycle than many other substances. They can usually be melted down, and the quality of the end product is very high. This contrasts sharply with plastics, which always degrade to a substantailly lower-valued product when recycled.

Recycling metal is much more energy-efficient than mining it from scratch, so "mining" it from a house that's going to landfill is the right thing to do.

I've spent the past two workdays ripping metallic things out of the house that the Mill Creek NetZero Home will replace.  It's dirty work that pays very little.  read more... »

The Edmonton Earthcycle network is an unheralded success story. It's been around for years now, as a way to give and get free, unwanted things. With over 12,000 members and 200-250 messages (either offerings or request), it diverts an amazing amount of stuff from the landfill. And just imagine all of the great karma that it helps create!  read more... »

The old house at 9805 - 84th Avenue was built in 1910, so the property title says. Those were different and amazing times - I'm guessing that most houses had no indoor plumbing, and all heating was done by burning wood or coal in stoves.

As I deconstruct this house to make way for the Mill Creek NetZero Home (MCNZH), I've been encountering a lot of history. For example, when it was originally built, every square inch of the house was covered in 15-foot long, 3.25-inch wide planks of old-growth Douglas-fir.  read more... »