I've lived in apartments my entire adult life, and when we first started talking about building our own house, I pictured it pretty much like my kindergarten crayon house drawings. Four walls, a pitched roof, windows blocked out in rectangles, and flowers with giant petals lined up under a Rothko strip of sky, a perky sun plastered to the right. To build this early fantasy house, men would come in and lift up the walls and nail them against a frame. I'd seen barn raising in movies. I know how it's done.
This concept became a bit more complicated, but not by much, when we started looking at glass and steel modules designed by an architect in Minnesota and pre-made in a factory. I envisioned trucks delivering three fully loaded house boxes, which a crane would surgically pick up and drop gently into place. I'd walk in and start cooking. I wasn't totally a house moron. During college I had helped build sets one season at the Woodstock summer theater, so I knew that one had to look at floor plans and elevations to figure out where the futon and the bookcases would go. So easy peasy.
Wrong. Building a new house, and particularly a green one, is constructing a machine, with nearly every element as complicated and inter-related as a Victorian steam engine. Screwing up one part can screw up everything, so Michael and I have to understand every inch of it – and we both have to agree on it all!
Let's start with the boxes themselves. There will be three: two floors of a main house and a guest house seated on top of a garage built on site. The modules will be sided with Corten steel, a magic substance that begins rusting and then stops after a few months, the rusty layer then providing protection. At that point, they will either look like Serra sculptures or abandoned warehouses In New Jersey.
Next, comes the insulation that lines the boxes. As it turns out, every builder has a different opinion on the best type and there are dozens. We can have reflective insulating systems or fiberglass, mineral wool, and plastic or natural fibers that come rolled up in a blanket. Foam boards can attach to the walls or foam or cellulose can be blown into them. Part of the decision on what to use relies on their R value, an equation that measures their ability to block heat conduction; the higher the value the better the insulation. The ideal R values vary depend on where you live, what kind of heat source your have, and whether you're insulating walls, ceiling, floors, or crawl spaces (we can skip those). We found R-value calculators on the Great Google and were certain we wanted spray foam, which has great R numbers and seals a space beautifully, but the first factory bidding on our modules likes foam board and fiberglass all knitted together with tape. Another factory that comes in with a bid might prefer hay-stuffed walls. Whatever wins has to be right. After living through this winter in a barn with negative R values, I want a heat-holding insulation fist.
Windows naturally leak air so you want those to have good R values too, triple pane being the best. And with windows, it's not just their heat-trapping virtues, but where, how many, and what type they are. Michael would live in a glass box and I would live in a cave with a tiny skylight. We have managed to suffer through this particular pane, but now another decision awaits us. Windows no longer just go up and down, like the double hung of my youth. And they don't have to be rectangles. We can peer through round, peak or rake headed, Gothic, oval, or quadrilateral glass. They can fold out like awnings or shove out or pull in as casements. On the second floor we'll probably use the fabulous Loewen Access windows, whose gear mechanism has the complexity of an old-fashioned Swiss watch. They twirl 180 degrees, go up, go down, and if we paid enough, could probably transport us into space. On the first floor, we might go for casement windows, but whether they push out or pull in is still up for grabs.
And no one is ignoring what goes on inside those boxes. We spent a dispiriting day last week on IKEA Road in Paramus wandering among kitchen cabinets, clutching the plans we had made and printed out from the monster store's website after a few bitter fights over drawer sizes. When I checked this particular IKEA branch out on Yelp, one short comment read: "It's where relationships come to die."
By the way, it's astonishing how stupidly passionate one can get over whether kitchen cabinet doors should be white or off-white, or if a window should be pushed in or pulled out, or if the walkway is covered between two of the modules. I have been heard shrieking over whether an inside door should have one, four, or six panels, and before this process I didn't even know doors had panels. Fortunately, our marriage so far has weathered all these decisions.
And next, we view the Green Giants, the systems that will support our house machine. The engineered flooring will conceal PEX coils snaking back and forth carrying radiant heat generated by an intricate collaboration between geothermal loops dug deep into the earth and solar electricity. To figure how much solar we will need we calculated the amount of kilowatts for every single electrical device -- large and small -- that we expect to be using in our new spaceship. (The great Google has websites for doing that, too.) I now know that at .18 per kilowatt the annual cost for my toaster is $25, for the two desktop computers it's $175, and my crockpot costs me $35. However, geothermal will be the monster kilowatt sucking machine and will require about the same amount of electricity that we'll be using for the whole house. So, that means we need two giant solar slabs, and they won't just lie there sunbathing on the roof. Two trackers seated to the southeast of the house will move 40 solar panels back and forth, and up and down depending on the location of that perky sun moving across the sky.
Here's to grand adventures, friends!
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