Lake Claire LEED

Everyone these day has a green product or story, but what really makes it green?  For flooring, I have been working with some of my vendors to green their process.  One in particular has done a great job with the task at hand.

Here is post that I had on our other blog about flooring: green flooring

On Lake Claire LEED we were able to save most of the flooring in the house and where we had to refinish the floors we used zero VOC finishes in order to preserve indoor air quality.

This is the dining room wall being carefully taken apart.

This is the dining room wall taken apart and collected into tidy piles of lathes and studs and plaster.

This is a pile of chunked concrete removed from the uneven otherwise mostly red clay basement floor. It has been hauled away and ground into gravel.

This is the gravel used to level the basement floor before the concrete is poured.

Now all of these posts are gone from the basement, but they are still around, waiting to be milled into wood for a table and a slatted wall, which will be held together with nails pulled from the lathes.

These are doors, removed from the walls that were taken down. And they will be doors again in the basement or elsewhere upstairs.

This is old asbestos covered ductwork, now properly disposed of, never to be heard from again.

Hey, you can’t reuse everything, but we are having fun trying.

Many years ago a friend remarked that a person’s keychain could tell a lot about him, specifically that the more keys the chain holds, the more complicated one’s life is. As we sat around the other night revisiting why it was in the first place that we wanted to build an eco-house, as we named the idea many years ago, I was reminded of this sentiment by my husband. “It’s like taking keys off your keychain,” he said. To simplify things and not create waste or use more than you need to is a main force driving our thought process concerning the renovation of our old bungalow. If the sun is there, use it to heat your water or power your appliances. If the ground will offer up its constant temperature efficiently, then harvest it to heat and cool your house. Take that rainwater and at least use it to water your plants, and if you can, use it to wash your clothes or even drink! It is not quite as simple as that, I know, but we are trying to do as much as we can along these lines. I was thinking about these ideas this morning, as my husband rode off to work on his bike in the rain. Uncomplicated self-propulsion is an efficient and beautiful thing.

When we last sat down to look at the points for Lake Claire LEED on the LEED for Homes worksheet we added them up and it looked like we should get at least LEED Gold which is very good!  However, we reviewed a couple of areas with the homeowners last week and it looks like Platinum is a possibility.  The house was going to be very efficient so there was not much more that we could do there, so we looked to the landscaping.  Since we are looking to use native plants, rain harvesting, and smart planting we should get enough points in Site Development to push us into the Platinum point range.

Towards the end of the project, we will post the complete point sheet so we can see how we managed the project to be more sustainable.