Eco-Friendly Renovations Part 4 – Eastcliff Drive
This is the fourth in a series of articles about green building and renovating in Mount Washington. The articles were all written by Polly Bart, a PhD who has been working as a builder for more than 20 years. Polly founded Greenbuilders, Inc. in 2004. The company mission is to help change the construction industry to better preserve and restore the environment. Greenbuilders accomplishes this through “green” home renovations and additions, and through consulting on commercial projects. Each story will focus on a different project in Mount Washington; as each home and family in Mount Washington is different, so are the green choices and impacts of each of the projects. – SK
With each project completed by the team of Gabrielli and Greenbuilders, the team added to its experience and therefore to the range of options we felt confident to offer clients. One decision the team has to make together is “how green do we want to be?”
Most of our green clients want to be as green as possible, but they expect to do so within the same budget as a conventional project, and we strive to provide that. It’s what we would want for ourselves. To achieve this goal, we make careful choices.
There is some level of risk with any building project; risk of weather interfering, risk of delay, risk of a material not performing as anticipated. The added cost of a green project is primarily the cost of a new process or material. Experience makes success more sure, but if you only do what has been done before, you do not change the industry or the world. To make being innovative practical and safe for our clients, we add only one or two new techniques to each project.
Seth Knopp and Violaine Melancon are members of the world-renowned Peabody Trio. Their house on Eastcliff Drive dates from the 1960’s and has more modern lines than our previous Mt. Washington projects. For an addition to the kitchen, planned to become the center of family life, we brought our experience with straw bale walls and with small residential green roofs and put them together.
We saved what we could from the small screened porch we were replacing. While we expected the existing concrete pad to be unusable, a couple of test pits showed a rock solid base. However, the existing pad had slightly different dimensions than the planned space. The question was whether to break up and remove the existing concrete and pour a new pad. From an environmental point of view, this was a very negative outcome. Not only would we have several loads of broken concrete to dispose of, we would be pouring new cement. The production of cement provides a significant percentage of total greenhouse gas emissions and energy use. Reducing it is a Greenbuilders’ priority.
So we went to the architect and clients with a proposal. Let us keep the concrete pad and redesign the addition slightly to fit. The result would be a slight increase in square footage for the new room at no additional cost. The change meant being flexible, especially for the architect, but flexibility is a hallmark of green design teams and we all were in agreement immediately. The concrete floor was smooth and in good condition, we coated it with two layers of BioBased stain in indigo and ebony, and produced a wonderful surface that looked like polished leather. The floor had a very slight slope, or fall, as do all porch floors, but the family was not planning on rolling marbles on it and they did not mind.
Once construction had begun, we had other ideas to involve the family. We had to be careful to protect famous hands, but the whole family helped build one section of the straw bale wall, and a group of enthusiastic volunteers joined sons Olivier and Pasha in planting the green roof.
One unexpected consequence was in school, where Pasha was required to build a model of a structure he designed for his architecture class. He came home with a model including — yes, a green roof. So as parents who take an action you believe in, you never know where the positive consequences will appear.
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