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FeedGreen House Effect
America’s most revolutionary remodel
By Alyssa Ford
Photo by David J. Turner
Inside, simple red, blue, and green pendant lights and contemporary Danish-style dining chairs set off a cozy dining area. A limestone gas fireplace anchors the living room, where two miniature dachshunds, Upa and Oliver, lie prone on a rust-colored sofa.
Really, any Twins-loving Minnesota family could live in this home of Midwestern good sense. It’s easy to imagine homework strewn across at the kitchen island, cell phones ringing, dinners being cooked, and Yahtzee dice tumbling out on the living room rug.
Underneath its everyman wrappings, though, this house is more cutting edge than the latest Frank Gehry, more out there than a geodesic dome or a rammed earth shelter. This 2,300-square-foot home in Minnetonka is the world’s first LEED platinum-level residential gut/rehab project, which means it’s got more eco cache than a Sierra Club convention.
The owners, too, are multilayered. Peter and Vivian have lived in dramatic homes designed by noted architects Ralph Rapson and Sarah Susanka. But they feared anything too “weird” would turn people off and drown out their message of sustainability. So they live in a radical remodel that looks like it would be right at home in (an upscale) Lake Wobegone.
Before this house, the word in green building circles was that the U.S Green Building Council’s LEED-H eco-rating system was too tough for a gut/rehab, particularly at the highest level, platinum. Some said it couldn’t be done.
Peter, who makes his living buying ailing businesses, rehabbing them, and selling them through the Business Development Group in Wayzata, has never shied away from a good dare. After he heard this chatter at a green-building conference he attended in 2006, he bought a mundane 1948 rambler on the Minnetonka city grid for $317,000. He and Vivian, an educational consultant, then pumped more than $1 million into the home, proving the naysayers wrong.
“They didn’t just make it platinum, they made it, like, super-platinum or ultra-platinum,” says Steve Kleineman, principal of SKD Architects in Plymouth, who designed the house. “The house got 117 LEED points, and most platinum-level new homes only get 90 or 95 points in total,” echoes Peter.
The original house presented a challenge. After knocking into the walls, the builders found a dwelling contaminated with radon, lead, and mold. Windows were installed so poorly that one egress was holding on for dear life by just a bit of insulation. They found more than two pounds of mouse fecal matter in one of the vents, and some of the wiring was held together with nothing more than masking tape.
Photo by David J. Turner
Kleineman began his redesign by adding a modest foyer to the front of the house, which allowed him to both move the staircase and protect the fireplace from unnecessary heat loss. He extruded the eaves 4 feet to give the exterior a distinct Prairie feel, while guiding snow and water away from the house and shielding it from the sun.
The home’s footprint doubled, but every detail considered the environment—even the concrete foundation included flyash, a nasty byproduct of coal-fired power plants. Keith Poets, owner of Quality Builders & Contractors in Minneapolis, used an advanced framing technique, Optimum Value Engineering, in which walls and floors use lumber studs spaced 24 inches on center, saving both labor and trees, while improving performance. Closed-cell spray foam insulates every nook, cranny, wall, and cold spot.
“This house is so tight that when they did the blower-door test, the guys could hardly believe the numbers they were getting,” says Kleineman.
One worker spent most of his time sorting wood from the old house into piles so it could be recycled back into the new spaces. Rotted or unusable lumber was ground up for mulch, and everything else was shipped off to a recycler, donated through Craigslist or Freecycle, or simply hauled off by anyone who could use it.
Four wells 130 feet deep were dug into the front yard, so the house could be heated and cooled with a geothermal system, which relies on the constant temperature of the earth below the frost line. A co-generation system produces electricity with a catalytic converter and then “scrapes off all the excess heat from the electricity to power the radiant floors,” enthuses Peter, as if he’s describing his new sports car.
Depending on the season, 60 to 90 percent of the hot water in the house comes from two solar panels installed on the west side of the roof. The home’s fluorescent and LED lights are powered by photovoltaic panels on a large post in the backyard that can be angled toward sunlight. When the sun is out, highly reflective tubes direct light through the house and into the basement.
Photo by David J. Turner
Air-infused faucets and showerheads in each of the three bathrooms provide first-class water pressure, but use far less water than traditional fixtures. Water from the showers and sinks drains to a graywater system in the lower level, where it is filtered and recycled for use in the toilets.
As Peter strolls through his new house, he points out various green amenities: tracks for the garage door made of recycled steel, insulated window treatments to increase the “r-value” or heat density of the windows, vents on timers, electronics on power strips to cut down on “phantom power loss,” and little color-coded dots on all the light switches to denote the most energy-sucking fixtures. The list goes on and on. (Peter’s PowerPoint presentation easily fills a four-hour tour with the details.)
Outside, rain gardens help mitigate runoff, and the ground is prepped for native landscaping. Professionals were even brought in to reintroduce fungal and bacterial material that would have been found in the soil 200 years ago. Permaculture gardens and newly planted fruit trees are designed to be more than pretty. “I think eventually people will have to go back to vegetable gardening, canning, and making our own preserves,” says Peter, who looks nothing like a survivalist in his crisply pressed Polo dress shirt.
So far, the radical remodel has been a wild success, with one caveat: the meter readers from Xcel accused Peter and Vivian of stealing when they saw the meters spinning backwards. “We had to explain that with the co-generation, the geothermal, and photovoltaic panels all running, we were producing more than we could use,” says Peter, grinning proudly.
Green, step-by-step
Visit www.livegreenlivesmart.org to:• See more photos.
• Sign up for tours of the house (held every Wednesday).
• Find out about all the materials in the house, and the companies that supplied them.
• Read the construction diary.
• See floorplans, blueprints, and hand-drawn diagrams of all the tech systems.
• Post photos of your own “green” house.
Alyssa Ford is an associate editor of Midwest Home.
For more information on featured products and suppliers, please see our Buyer's Guide. For local businesses and experts that can help you go green, read “Environmental Upgrade.”
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