Interior Finishes A House Tour Room by Room

Parlor

Hearth means home and so we permitted ourselves to have a fireplace. Not just any fireplace - but a Belgian highly efficient wood stove made by STUV. This suits us fine. It burns super clean, is beautiful to look at and properly scaled to the room (13 by 13 feet). Belgium is one of our very favorite places. Our career in beer consisted principally of singing the praises of the great beers of Belgium. (We were rewarded in our work by being the first Americans inducted into the Belgian Brewers Guild in its 500 year history.) No doubt our aesthetic of combining old and new was honed in Belgium where this is done with great artistry and sophistication. For a sense of the rough yet refined vibe of so much beautiful Belgian design see this Remodelista overview We removed the original mantle and brick chimney. Those bricks were made at a brickyard in the neighborhood. We will be re-using them in landscaping.

Wallcoverings - This room hues most closely to the spirit of the house circa 1912 when new. David Scott chose a William Morris wallpaper from Finest Wallpapers - classic pattern from the late 1800’s - new color combinations soft grey with a hint of silver and blue. Finest Wallpapers is based in Vancouver, founded by a Brit who is a great devotee of one of our favorite Arts & Crafts architects Charles Voysey. Learn all about the Voysey wallpapers that Finest makes on 100 year old equipment in England

A very proper parlor - not of course the one we shall be able to afford - near North Bovey

A Passive House on Fifth Street and Camas Seeds

Over the weekend I volunteered to collect camas seeds in Uplands Park under the direction of Margaret Lidkea and in the company of nearly a dozen volunteers. Margaret is the head honcho of the Friends of Uplands Park. She has won awards for her work - most recently the BC Provincial Award for Community Activity. Over the decades Margaret and the 550 or so members of the Friend of Uplands Park have labored mightily to remove invasive species and in so doing helped to restore the park eco system: Garry Oak meadow, wildflowers and grasslands on the land the Songhees people cultivated for thousands of years.

It was a lot of fun and I learned a good deal about the park on that day. Learning of my interest in green buildings, Margaret clued me into a Passivehaus that was built by the son and daughter-in-law of her friend, the notable Oak Bay architect, Allan Cassidy. See this nice Times Colonist feature story about the house on 5th Street and its inspiration. Reed Cassidy went to the Winter Olympics at Whistler and took note of Austria House - a Passivhaus. He built his house in 2017 and now has his own energy advising business.

In the class with the U Vic students a map template was created to identify local sustainable buildings and resources. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a self-guided walking tour of them one of these days? If you come across an interesting project, drop me a line. We’ll be glad to add it to the roster.

Deep Energy Retrofits should be a National Priority and Are a Great Way to Jump Start the Economy in a Healthy Way

It should be blazingly obvious by now that in order to meet green house gas emission reduction targets we need to get serious about deep energy retrofitting of existing homes. The home owner cannot be expected to foot the bill for this alone. It needs to be a national priority here - as it already is in Germany and Norway. Creative models for financing exist - such as PACE an acronym for Properly Assessed Clean Energy Financing. in which the money is given interest-free to renovators for upgrades in efficiency which are then gradually paid back over time in the form of property taxes. Investors have put billions into the idea. It will take trillions to retrofit all the housing stock in North America. So be it - better than an investment in war.

Pembina Institute has an opinion piece on their blog this month. It is worth a look. Betsy Agar over at Pembina has expressed interest in our project and since learning of her work I have kept an eye on Pembina writings.

Building Green has been exploring the concept for a good long time. In a 2008 article Alex Wilson and Allyson Wendt report on some case studies, provide a Low-Energy Retrofits - Priority Checklist and assert what we have experienced firsthand in our Fernwood project:

The biggest challenges are cost and skilled labor. To address these, EBN’s editorial this month (see An Environmental Service Corps for America) presents the concept of an Environmental Service Corps to focus on home energy retrofits along with such other activities as ecological restoration and invasive species control. A program like this—as bold and unlikely as it seems—would provide only part of the answer to bring about widespread energy retrofitting. We will also need to encourage the use of energy-efficient mortgages and home loans, subsidized low-interest loans, outright grants, and performance-based tax incentives.

Amen and agreed. Along with a Green New Deal and a Just Recovery for All.

““The greenest building is the one that is already built.”
Architect Carl Elefante - Director of Sustainable Design at Qunin Evans Architects in Washington, D.C.”

Making what’s old new again (and energy efficient at the same time). We have no more time to waste.

Botanic Gardens I have known and loved

We built our senior gap year trip round travel by ship and on foot and with stops at many botanic gardens. I lived near the New York Botanic Garden in the Bronx and also Lincoln Park’s Caldwell Lily Pool. Neighborhoods immediately surrounding botanic gardens are invariably intriguing and enriched by proximity to green space. Here’s some garden eye candy from a few I have spent time in.

The Knot gate at the National Botanic Garden of Wales in Carmarthenshire.

Lincoln Park Conservatory Palm Court

Crazy Chihuly Sculpture at the New York Botanic Garden in the Bronx

Birmingham Alabama Botanic Garden the only one in the United States with a public library on the premises.

Llanathney Wales - The National Botanic Garden

National Botanic Garden in Dublin - this meadow is part of the Viking House & Garden where flax, madder and weld grow.

Botanic Garden of the University of Coimbra in Portugal

Porto’s Botanic Garden - Macau Gate

An important example of Prairie School landscape design - Caldwell Lily Pool in Chicago’s Lincoln Park - was designed by Alfred Caldwell who worked under Jens Jensen. It is one of my favorite places in Chicago.

The Botanic Garden in Dublin - I love this landscape and it is most definitely inspiration for my back yard.

Haint Blue

The ceiling of the front porch is going to be painted a soft blue-green (Benjamin Moore’s Smoke 2122-40). When I was a child family vacations were spent on a barrier island off the Coast of South Carolina. It is most likely some deep-seated memory of total bliss - lying in a Pawleys’ Island hammock rocking, while staring up at the ceiling - that made me want to use this treatment on our porch in Victoria. Thought to be America’s first beach resort, during the colonial period indigo and rice plantation owners “repaired” to Pawleys Island to escape mosquitoes bearing malaria and yellow fever. When blue paints were first used they were usually milk paints, with indigo and lye mixed into the composition. Lye is a known insect repellent, which would explain why insects would avoid nesting on a painted porch ceiling or ledge. Blue connotes sky.

The term for this soft blue in the Low Country of South Carolina is “Haint Blue”. The term Haint comes from Gullah (a dialect incorporating words from many African languages & English) used by enslaved West Africans from the Windward Coast - meaning haunt. The Haints are restless spirits who have not moved on beyond their physical worlds. Haint blue paint is meant to protect a house from evil.

The light blue hue gives the illusion of making the the daylight last longer. That will be nice come late October.

See more on Haint Blue and Gullah traditions. This entry is being posted on my mom’s birthday - were she still with us she would be 94 today. She and my dad went on their honeymoon to Pawleys. It is one of our most favorite places on earth. May her spirit be at peace. Just this week, Don found a story from Atlas Obscura about the complicated history of indigo that is well worth a read.

Dad Pawleys Honeymoon 1950

Mom at Pawleys on honeymoon

Rebates and How to Get Them

I suspect this will be one of the topics of greatest interest. The information I can offer is pertinent to our specific case here in a deep renovation in Victoria, BC. I hope all the hunting and pecking I have done as an amateur renovator over the course of nearly 2 years will reduce the amount of time you have to spend compiling your list. Bookmark your stuff. You’ll be glad you did. The more you learn the more sense this will all make. And as the bills pile up you’ll be glad to be able to look forward to getting some of your money back.

Timing is important. You need to file for a rebate quickly - usually within 6 months of doing the work in a given area. This may seem generous, but if you are in the middle of a reno, I assure you other things tend to take precedence and six months can fly by. It is important to keep tidy and complete records of what you or your contractor did. You need to be able to back up the invoices from the contractor with all their bills for material and equipment from vendors. In the case of windows this verges on the absurd (see windows and doors section) You need to take a picture of the sticker on every window in place - scan the complete set and submit them to see if each window qualifies for either a Tier 1 or Tier 2 rebate.

Luckily, the province has created one handy dandy CleanBCBetterHomes website to go to to submit info so you can qualify with the various rebate programs. Our energy coach made an application template for us which we are delighted to share with you. (TEMPLATE cleanBCBetterHomes)

You will find information about specific types of rebates on the pages for each category - ie insulation, heating, insulation, windows, water use and special equipment (in our case solar). But in this one spot I attempt to list all the rebates you can ask for. Remember to begin with a blower door test so you can establish your base point of “home leakiness’ and build your improvements around making the place tighter and more efficient.

At the outset here’s where we expected to get rebates and the maximum allowable amount that was offered at the time (2018). We’re filing in 2020

Fuel Switching $3000

City & CRD add on $2000 and $350 respectively for primary heating source upgrade)

Window Upgrades $2000*

Insulation $5500**

High Efficiency Water Heater $1000

EnerChoice Fireplace $300

Sub Total $13500 to $13850

Bonus for Multiple Upgrades $2000

Solar?

Possible Total of Nearly $16000

Additionally look for additional rebates through Heritage Victoria.

* (($1000 for Tier 1 and $2000 for Tier 2)

**(Attic $900, Exterior Wall Cavity $1200, Exterior Wall Sheathing Insulation $1200, Other insulation $1000 insulation, Basement/crawlspace walls insulation $1200)

We later learned that there are additional bonus rebates based on the number of upgrades and energy improvements if you complete 3 bonus eligible upgrades. The maximum is $2000 ($20per % gigajoule improvement in your home’s Energuide report.

Organizations to Turn to for Net Zero and Sustainable Practices

This list will be added to by me and contributors as the site develops. If you have sources to recommend - send them along - by all means

Stop waste.org

Boulder Green Building Guide

City Green

California Build it Green program

Master Builders Association of Seattle

Solar Energy International

International's Living Building Institute

Energy Literacy.com

BALLE Business Alliance for Local Living Economies 9 a consortium of over 80 cities and towns)

Longfellow Clubs - Laury Hammel - triple bottom line - people, planet before profits

Chronology of Events Affecting Victoria's Homeowners & Neighborhoods (up to 2013) Including Outbreaks of Disease

I went looking for information on the Parfitt Brothers construction company yesterday morning but got waylaid by the chronology at the front of This Old House (Victoria’s Heritage Neighborhoods - Volume One - Fernwood & Victoria West). A recurring feature is outbreaks of diseases important enough to disrupt the economy.

We are living through the first epidemic/global pandemic to hit the region hard since 1953. Up til then (the timeline begins in 1850) something sinister and sickening swept through the community about once a decade. No wonder people wore gloves, grocers had clerks to handle the produce, and children were kept home until two days after their fevers subsided as a matter of course,

Long before Victoria was settled - but after the arrival of Europeans - the smallpox epidemic of 1633-34 reduced the population of Native Americans by 70% in one year. Indigenous peoples are at higher risk to the Coronavirus Covid 19.

Epidemics in Victoria

• 1848 Measles and influenza

• 1862-63 Smallpox carried by a miner from San Francisco

• 1864 Diptheria

• 1872 Smallpox

• 1888 Diptheria

• 1892 Smallpox

• 1897 Typhoid fever

• 1911 Diptheria

• 1918 Spanish Influenza (October & November (forces closure of public places kills more people than World War I)

• 1927 Smallpox

• 1934 Smallpox

• 1953 Polio epidemic (worst in Canada) the Salk vaccine introduced the following year

• 2020 Coronavirus Covid 19

Learn more about epidemics see this BBC story, summary of the worst disease outbreaks in history from Healthline and on the eradication of smallpox considered the greatest achievement in the history of world health.

The Integral Urban House - The bible for Urban Homesteading

One afternoon in the winter of 2020, back before Sophie Gregoire Trudeau was among the first hundred or so Canadians to test positive for Corona virus, I ambled downtown to Russell Books - a local landmark for books: used, rare, antiquarian and new. Since my last visit, before leaving for Chicago, the staff had moved more than one half million books across Fort Street to new digs. I went in search of titles on sustainability to stock our book house that was/is to sit on the front lawn as a free library for green thinking. I found a gem.

If Iceland holds the record for percentage of citizens who are published authors, Victoria should get the prize for best town for book lovers. According to my informal survey the number, caliber and scope of bookstores, libraries & book boxes is beyond compare. No wonder ABE Books ( https://www.abebooks.com/rare-books/most-expensive-sales/ever.shtml) based itself here. Russell was one of ABE’s first suppliers. On this visit, still kicking myself for not having bought a vintage Whole Earth Catalogue in my local thrift shop, I spied a cover that looked like same illustrator had had a hand in its design. It was The Integral Urban House. How had I not not known about this seminal work before now? It is the bible of urban homesteading. IUH spoke to me. It must have inspired or influenced someone (maybe Paul Phillip’s) who came to Fernwood in the 1970’s and established the vibe - which the neighborhood has retained to a higher degree than most urban neighborhoods in North America. We devoutly hope out house is an extension of this vision.

What’s not to love (except ourselves for conveniently ignoring what we have known for more half a century) about how to live well and self-sufficiently in the city while consuming less? The instruction manual is here! I went online to look for wrote-ups on the book:

“The history of the IUH (Integral Urban Home) begins in 1972, on the cusp of the impending energy crisis and coinciding with a burgeoning optimism for sustainable living in the post-industrial era. That fall, at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design, architects Sim Van der Ryn, Jim Campe, and Carl Anthony developed a novel architectural studio course titled “Natural Energy Design.” Focused on using quantitative studies of natural resources as the “raw data” of architectural design, the course resulted in the publication of the Natural Energy Design Handbook, a guidebook for creating sustainable architecture based on the cycles of energy found in the environment. It was also through the development of this course that Sim Van der Ryn advanced his proposal for an urban ecology movement in architecture he called Whole Systems Design. Within the framework of Whole Systems Design, if the environment could be reduced to a measurable system of resources, architecture could then function as a self-contained ecology within the larger environment, engineered to provide sustainable habitat by utilizing the existing flows of energy between the environment and its inhabitants. Van der Ryn represented his ideas through a number of schematic illustrations and charts, in particular a diagram titled “Energy Flows in A Closed System Habitat,” which represented abstract nutrient, energy, and waste cycles in a closed environment. “ (source: Critical Sustainabilities ). Van der Ryn is among us. The house in West Berkeley where the integral design experiment took place still exists, but the neighborhood has been wildly gentrified. A champion of the eco-frontier, Van der Ryn deserves to be better known. Read more about this remarkable West Berkeley experiment and Vander Ryn in this World Shapers article by Sabrina Richard. And here are the books he published.

I realize that the energy modeling we’re doing is a stripped down version of what Van der Ryn fought for back in 1972.

Construction Begins - 09/27/2019

The renovation began on September 27, 2019 - right in the middle of the United Nations Global Climate Action Week. We did not plan that - but it seemed like a good omen.

We started late because we were confronted with a higher than expected budget estimate. Oh dear. It’s not sustainable if it’s not affordable. It took the better part of a month to work through options to scale down the build and so trim the budget. Specific solutions are dealt with in metrics and systems.