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 #### - ## 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 #### - ## 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 #### - ## Avenue.  read more... »