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How Green is Your Renovation? March 21 2008

Over the holidays I participated in a "roundtable discussion" on green renovation that appears in the April issue of Metropolitan Home. You can read it online here: <http://www.pointclickhome.com/metropolitan_home/articles/met_eco>.

"Roundtable discussion" is in quotes because the interview was conducted via e-mail. Each of us answered questions from the interviewer and cc'd the other participants, so we had a chance to respond to the others' comments, in a way. The answers were then edited and assembled together to simulate all of us sitting around a table talking. While necessary to fit the wide range of answers into a magazine article, the editing removed some of the subtleties of all of our responses, as you will see. But it's great to see Met Home stepping up to the green table, as it were. I was an avid reader of Met Home when I lived in New York City, and have always appreciated the aesthetic sense of the editors. I'm very pleased to have been part of this!

The questions were all good ones. Here is one of my full answers:

MH: What are three very important things people should think about when they begin planning a house (or apartment) renovation?


The first question I ask a prospective client is "Have you talked to a real estate agent?" The most environmentally friendly solution to the problem of a house or apartment that doesn't fit current or future needs is to move to one that does! Chances are there is another person or family out there for whom the current house will be perfectly fine. No renovation at all has the least impact. Almost any major renovation is going to require that the owners move out of the house while the work is being done, and then move back in once the work is complete.  (Or brave the chaos and inconvenience of living in a construction zone.) Buying a new place they only need move once. A major house renovation is likely to take at least six months and probably more like a year to design and permit, and then another six months to a year to build. If they can find an appropriate place to buy, they could be into their new home and comfortable within a couple months. I suggest they take the amount of equity they have in their house, add it to the amount they were planning on spending on the renovation, and then see what they can find out there on the market for that total. Only after they've done that, and looked hard at the scope of work they're undertaking and their connection to the immediate neighborhood and local community, do we start talking about a renovation.

The second question would be "How long do you plan on living in this place?" Virtually all of my clients plan on living in their houses the rest of their lives. That suggests possibilities and considerations that wouldn't come into play if they imagined they'd be moving on to another home in five years. For example "payback period" for green choices and "resale potential" become relatively meaningless, while "aging in place" becomes quite important.

The third big question is "Should this be a renovation or should we deconstruct the house and start from scratch?" (Obviously not an issue for apartments...though there were a few in New York City I would have liked to deconstruct...) Of course I would not suggest this route to the owners of a house with significant merit, either architectural or sentimental. When I first started my practice in Seattle this was a last resort--we would do all we could to keep as much as possible of an existing house. These days I am much more likely to consider deconstruction right off the bat. Two things have changed: a sense of urgency about climate change, which suggests a rigorous consideration of the energy use of a building over its lifetime, and the spectacular increases in the cost of construction over the last four or five years. If we are extending the usefulness of a house by another hundred or so years, we had better do all we can to reduce its energy consumption over that period. The bulk of houses that are coming up for renovation these days (50's and earlier) were built at a time when energy use was not really considered. It is much easier and less expensive (even in initial capital costs) to build a high performance house from scratch than to renovate one to the same standard. The systems of these houses are reaching the end of their useful life. A renovation of a '50's or earlier house invariably includes replacing all of the main systems of the house--plumbing, heating and electrical--which require ripping in to many of the interior walls, as well as replacing or upgrading windows and roofing. We are left then, with a shell of 2x4 studs often needing considerable futzing with to accommodate the new design, a shell that can only fit R-13 insulation unless we remove the original siding to add rigid insulation on the exterior. At that point, deconstruction is a better path.

OK, if I had four questions the fourth would be "How much is enough?" But I'll leave it at that for now.

-RH