Photo Credit: Architects Nathanael Dorent and Lily Jencks
Although there are some updated elements, the structure still sits within the original stones of the farmhouse, and is topped by a pitched roof similar to the one that would have sheltered the old Scottish house.
Source: A Modern Solar-Powered Home Built Within the Ruins of an 18th-Century Farmhouse | Colossal
Almost all the wood was certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, which verifies it was grown and harvested in local forests in a sustainable manner. The rest of the wood was either reclaimed or salvaged, including wood from a hickory tree used for flooring and wood from a cherry tree used to make the dinner table. They weren’t able to find an FSC-certified cabinet shop in Michigan, so Beacon Springs Farm became a certified site and the Burbecks hired a carpenter to specially make cabinets and doors for the home onsite. Some of the reclaimed materials in the house include a bath tub, chandeliers and light fixtures.
Source: Solar farmhouse near Ann Arbor one of world’s greenest homes | MLive.com
Image via Wikimedia Commons
A recent City Council vote gave the green light for a 9,000 solar panel array to be built across 16 acres on a shuttered dumpsite.
All it takes to make one is a bit of faith, the willpower to disengage yourself from humanity’s torrid love affair with square footage, and in the case of this 70-square-foot nomadic living pod, about $2,000. All that and a cache of reclaimed materials was all that a class from Green Mountain College in Vermont needed to build the Optimal Traveling Independent Space, or OTIS.
via Reclaimed-Material Nomadic Pod Was Built for Under $2K – Micro Homes – Curbed National.
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Dee Williams used to live in a 2,000-square-foot, 3-bedroom home. Then she traveled to Guatelama (to help build a schoolhouse) and when she came home her house felt too big so built herself a home that fit. That turned out to be a 84-square-foot foot home on wheels that cost her $10,000: $5000 for the materials (mostly salvaged) and the other half for the solar panels and low-E (low thermals emissivity) windows.
She spent 3 months building her new home in Portland, Oregon and then hitched it to her truck and parked it in the backyard of her good friends Hugh and Annie in Olympia, Washington. For the first 7 years she moved in and out (removing the back fence), but for the past two years her wheels haven’t moved.
via ▶ Micro-homesteading in WA with 10K microhome (84 sq ft) in friends’ yard – YouTube.
Brittany’s solar-powered Groundhouse – conceived over a decade by Daren Howarth and Adrianne Nortje – flips the stereotype that rammed earth homes are only fit for peace-loving hippies. Yes it’s earthy – with exterior walls comprised of no less than 150 tons of rammed earth formed by tires. But it is also so well-designed and economical that even the least eco-conscious person would enjoy living in it. Bespoke furnishings (made of mostly recycled, salvaged, local or traditional materials) and 14 solar panels that produce more energy than the home could ever use make this a winning design for people on all levels of the environmentally-aware spectrum.
When Corey and Deb Omey embarked on a major renovation of their 1925 North Portland home, they decided to forego the demolition dumpster and go ultra-green, utilizing recycled and reclaimed materials wherever possible. Many of these were “harvested” on site, including not just materials from the original home, but a cedar tree cut from the front yard (to clear solar access for the rooftop photovoltaic system) that ultimately wound up as cabinetry in the home’s bedroom closets.
Beyond that, the couple focused on procuring whatever they needed for the project through Portland’s burgeoning network of reclaimed/recycled materials, which includes such resources as The ReBuilding Center (a kind of Home Depot composed exclusively of recycled building materials), Building Material Recycling and Lovett Deconstruction. But the resources to do to the same, according to Corey Omey — a LEED-accredited architect with Ernest R. Munch Architects, as well as the project’s designer and construction coordinator — are available to just about anyone.
“We are fortunate that Portland has one of the best networks of rebuilding resources in the world,” Omey told us, “but resources like the Habitat for Humanity Re-Stores, Craigslist, Freecycle and ‘seconds’ from different types of manufacturers are available almost anywhere.” (“Seconds” consist of post-production rejects from local manufacturers.)
The result is a new home with a lot of history: the kitchen counters were once bowling alley lanes, the front walkway pavers were made from granite countertop remnants, and the main beam of the front porch was a “blowdown” from the Mount St. Helens eruption in 1980. Reused mortgage signs were used to sheath the walls, scraps of metal from a local steel yard wound up in the home’s artistic guard rails, and doors once part of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh Ranch’s hotel in Antelope, Ore., were reincarnated, so to speak, in the home’s basement.
“The materials and process personalize the house,” Omey said. “There is a story behind everything we found and incorporated into the finished product.”
Another key part of the story is the amount of labor put in by the Omeys, the contractors they worked with and their friends, as the trick to using recycled materials (which cost 50-80 percent less than new materials) is that they tend to add extra labor to a renovation project in the form of sourcing, delivering and preparing materials. The Omeys worked offset these costs with “sweat equity” on their part, volunteer labor and contractors willing to work with the materials provided.
Continue reading Extreme Recycling, PDX: Ultimate Remodel | Earthtechling