Oprah At Home in the Eco-Shed

The new issue of Oprah at Home magazine devotes three pages to the Eco-Shed, and includes a jaunty 700-word piece by yours truly, adapted from ALMOST GREEN. Here’s a scan of the opener… and speaking of Media Mega-Divas, I’ve guesting on Martha Stewart Radio next week, Sirius XM Radio 112, Tuesday Sept 16 10AM Eastern. Give it a listen!

Have an Eco-Shed Weekend

It’s the gag kicker of the YouTube trailer, but it’s also true: You really can rent The Eco-Shed, the Bowen Island, B.C. building at the center of my forthcoming book ALMOST GREEN. We’re making the space available to overnight guests, and have already taken a few reservations.

Below, a peek at what awaits. Trip on over to The Eco-Shed’s dedicated site to get the full scoop.

Almost Green Storms YouTube

Here’s the first of what I hope will be several trailers for ALMOST GREEN. It’s called “Creative Financing,” and my pal Cam Hayduk produced it. Enjoy!

Signed, Sealed, Delivered

Happy Canada Day. I’m celebrating more than just my nation’s birthday today: The Eco-Shed is finished. There are towels on the shelves. There’s a pound of fresh-ground island-roasted coffee in a jar on the counter. It’s been almost two years, but my studio and guest house is pretty much ready for guests (and by the way, if you’d like to come spend a green weekend on spectacular Bowen Island, the relevant details are at Eco-Shed.ca).

Here in Canada, the book is printed and working its way to warehouses and the like in advance of its official August 22 launch. I have a copy in my hands, and the matte Naomi MacDougall cover is fantastic; it has a great tone, feels fun and intriguing. I’ll be reading in front of my first live audience at the opening night of the Write on Bowen festival here on the island, July 11.

Patience, my American friends; the U.S. edition is following close behind.

I have coverage of the book and the project cued up with Oprah at Home magazine—which shot the place last month—plus Outside, This Old House, and a slew of others. To keep the momentum rolling, later this week, my buddy Cam and I will begin shooting a series of YouTube trailers. We’re going to have some jolly good fun.

Finally, today’s the day British Columbians start paying a new Carbon Tax. Personal income taxes will be reduced across the board while gasoline, diesel, propane, and all other fossil fuels will cost a few cents more. It’s a bold step in the right direction.

Let There Be Lighting

So, here’s one of the two lighting fixtures I installed today; it’s a Artemide Talo, a fluorescent wall light over the desk. Looks nice, but it was a pain in the ass to install. There was supposed to be an adaptor plate in the box to make this eurolamp fit onto a standard US-Canadian receptacle box, but it wasn’t there. The company was not helpful, insisting that the plate is always in the box. (Wait, didn’t I just blow more than — *cough* — $400 on your product?) So I whipped up a little sketch of what I needed and took it to Peter Ryan of Ryan Metalworks here on the island. He fabbed it in 45 minutes, for $15. Local wins my heart again!

Oh, here’s the other, this is a “monopoint” from MP Lighting, based in Vancouver.

This beauty runs an MR16 halogen bulb. I looked into MP’s new uber-efficient LED lighting. It costs a fortune. This should work nicely; it highlights the woodstove, a piece of art in of itself. All I now need is the shower door — coming next week — and the electrician to connect the last circuits. Then I’m ready for an occupancy permit. Anyone out there want to stay here? I’m renting it over the summer to eco-tourists who want to get away from the city without getting too far away. Web site coming soon!

Down to The Details

It’s been a while since I fired up a MAPP Gas torch. But there I was the other day, kneeling on the floor of the Eco-Shed and blasting a 3/4-inch copper elbow with what wikipedia tells me is a 2927 °C flame (that’s 5301 °F) for you down yonder. I was sweating together a few bits of pipe to connect my Bosch PowerStar on-demand hot water heater to the supply stubouts under the sink in my kitchenette.

I’ve worked copper in the past, when I was adding a half-bath to my place back in Santa Fe, so I know what I’m doing. Well, mostly. Normally I let the plumbers do this sort of thing. But my pipe dude wouldn’t touch my Aquastar. “I’m not even going to take it out of the box,” he told me flatly.

Why? One word: liability. My plumber won’t shake a spanner at any appliance that doesn’t have a Canadian Standards Association (CSA) certification. The PowerStar has an Underwriters’ Laboratories of Canada (ULC) rating, but that’s not good enough for my man’s insurance. If the thing blows up, which it won’t, his insurance company won’t cover him in the event that I try to take him to court. So he left a couple of capped pipes under the sink and said nothing more.

“I can’t sue myself,” I told him, after making another snide comment about how lawyers are just making life harder for everyone these days. Anyway, here’s a little snap of the cut pipe, fittings, and a couple of the tools I used for the job.

In other news, I trimmed out the windows. I used MDF made of 100 percent pre-consumer wood waste, ie mill sawdust. It’s not FSC certified, and probably has formaldehyde in the glue. (So sue me!) The window ledge is FSC spruce from Tembec, some of the stock left over from framing. Three coats of Broda water-based low-VOC urethane on there, from CBR Products. Looks nice, eh? This bugger is almost ready for it’s close-up, which is good, because the cameras are circling….

Back On the Grid

I’m back on the grid with a few choice tidbits regarding the book and the seemingly unending Eco-Shed studio project.

• First of all, I must salute my friend Robert Ouimet of Bigsnit, for the many hours he invested relaunching this site. After you’re done here, go over there and hire him for some stuff.
• I’ve added the book’s prologue to this site as an excerpt. Hit the tab up there in the toolbar to check it out.
• ALMOST GREEN is done and on the launch pad. I’m really pleased with the way it finally came together, and I hope you will be too. Keeners out there can pre-order it today through Amazon.com, Chapters.ca, or from your favorite local independent bookseller. (And for those of you lucky enough to live here with me on Bowen Island that is, of course, Phoenix. Julia tells me they’ve started a list…)
• I’ll be reading from ALMOST GREEN and speaking at the opening-night festivities of Write On Bowen, a new writers and readers festival going down right here on Bowen Island, B.C., July 11-13.
• The Eco-Shed is almost done. The cabinets and countertop went in today and they look fantastic. That’s a detail above from my new $40 recycled “lab-bench” sink-and-taps combo, which my dad picked up at a salvage yard. It’s not always a good idea to re-use old faucets—they can be water hogs—but the aerator on this modern beauty is rated to 2.2 gallons per minute, which certainly qualifies as “low flow.”
• I’m going to trim out the windows and doors in the next 10 days, and perhaps even build a bed out of the last of the reclaimed fir. Anyone out there got a used thickness planer they want to unload? Update: We’re going with “reclaimed Ikea.” Thanks, craigslist!

“What’s An Eco-Shed?”

No, really, what is it? Where is it and how does it work? Good questions, all. Here’s the full scoop on my “new model home in miniature.”

OK, I’ve been on sabbatical in Ghana for the past two years. What’s the Eco-Shed?

It’s a 260-square-foot sustainably designed writing studio and overnight guest suite that I’ve been building in my front yard since early 2007. It’s essentially one big room with a built-in desk, kitchenette area, and small 3/4 bath.

What’s the deal with the book?

In Canada, it will come out August 22 and the title is ALMOST GREEN: How I Built an Eco-Shed, Ditched my SUV, Alienated the Inlaws, and Changed my Life Forever (Greystone). Meanwhile, my American pals will get it September 9, and there the book will be called ALMOST GREEN: How I Saved 1/6th of a Billionth of the Planet (Skyhorse/Norton).

What makes the Eco-Shed green?

 

•  Passive solar design, which is actually sort of pointless, given that it rains on Bowen Island just about every day between October and April. But on those cold-season days when ol’ sol does decide to shine on my little corner of crust, the Eco-Shed is designed to soak up and retain the heat.
• Ventilation system delivers constant supply of fresh filtered outside air.
•  Better-than-code insulation in combination with a double-framed north wall. A double wall eliminates the “thermal bridge” that lets heat “wick” through two-by-six walls.
• Electrically-fired hot water on demand system for shower and sink.
• All framing and 98 percent of the finishing lumber is either reclaimed or certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. Essentially, “FSC” means the trees were harvested from responsibly managed forests. The P5140020roof joists were remilled from giant timbers that supported a logging-railroad trestle in the Comox Valley on Vancouver Island, BC. The roof decking supported the second floor of a dry-goods store that was dismantled in the Fraser Valley east of Vancouver. The clear-grain cedar siding was mostly re-milled from pilings and timbers that originated in log-booming grounds near the mouth of the Fraser River. Finally, the framing lumber itself is spruce, harvested from FSC forestlands managed by Tembec.
• High-fly-ash concrete. This means that the concrete poured for the studio’s foundation contained a high proportion of fly ash, which is in turn made from the incinerated remains of ground-up flies and other insects. Actually, that’s not true. The gunk is a waste product that is scrubbed from the stacks of coal-fired power plants, and used, in this case, to displace portland cement from concrete mix. The less portland cement we use in our concrete, the bettter, because cement is made in kilns fired with tonnes of coal. (And no, I don’t mean “clean” coal…)
• We have a rainwater harvesting system; water landing on the Eco-Shed’s roof ends up in a gigantic plastic cistern I call the Tankosaurus. It’s under our main home’s deck to the east. From there, it will feed our edible garden. The raised garden beds were built with island-sourced stone, and the deer fence was split from mostly beach-harvested cedar. (The guy who built it collects cedar logs off the Bowen Island shoreline by canoe.)
• About a dozen other things that I will add here when I remember them.

 

Why did you build it? Wouldn’t the greenest choice be to build nothing at all?

The truth is, I’ve always been a closet architect, and I wanted to create a kind of a miniature-scale “new model home” to teach myself how sustainable buildings actually get that way, and also find out if it P6100005would be possible for a middle-class family to build green without spending a fortune. Plus, we already had the foundation in the front yard. When our tract home was built in 2005, we asked the builder to pour the concrete slab for a future studio that would serve as an overnight guest suite and home office. We spent two years staring at that foundation, and one day, we got the idea that it represented an opportunity–to break out of the mold, to do what should’ve been done with our main house in the first place. Our bank was happy to loan us the rope we needed to hang ourselves with.

How much did you involve yourself in the design and construction?

The Eco-Shed was truly a team effort: I served as general contractor, grunt worker, researcher, and details man; Bowen Island-based architect Dan Parke (Salal Architecture) designed the building, tolerating a great many tweaks and annoying questions from my end all the way through. Finish carpenter Jeremy Galpin actually swung the hammer, with help from me lifting rafters, planing siding, denailing and sanding reclaimed wood, and so on.

Why didn’t you built it with straw/rammed earth/cob/hemp? That’s a far more sustainable material/approach!

Yup, we greenies sure feel passionate about their straw/cob/hemp, etc. We went with recycled and certified wood for reasons of site suitability, cost, and localism. We had on the site an existing 14 x 20 foundation pad to work with–originally designed for a stick-frame building–that we wanted to use. It is a bit of a tight footprint, and we had to rearrange some other pieces of the puzzle to make it work. (This is where the “alienating the inlaws” bit comes in…) Straw works best at a bigger scale, and even though there are two straw-bale buildings on my island, I concluded that the material is perhaps better suited to drier, interior climates. If we were starting today with a blank slate and without any limitations of cost or site, I personally believe insulated rammed earth is probably the best building system for Howe Sound. That said, it remains well beyond the price range of most, including me. Problem is, you can only justify the cost of rammed earth for larger structures. Ours was too small to make it work.

What did it cost?

So far, about CAD$85,000. You can do the math yourself on a per-square-foot figure, but the result will not be a useful number because the building is so small. Such calculations make sense when we’re talking about large homes, and the Eco-Shed afforded us no “economies of scale.” For example, the ventilation system we installed will cost the same as one designed for a 2,000-square-foot home.

OK, so how much more than a “standard” studio is that?

It’s roughly twice the circa late-2004 estimated cost of the studio that was originally drawn up for the site by the design-builder who did our house. But the figure doesn’t include life-cycle costs. This is getting to be a bit of a chestnut, but it’s the central conundrum of green buildings and my book. Like organic groceries, green costs more at the outset–for a very complex set of reasons having to do with subsidized oil and other delightful realities–and saves you in the long run. The project has gone absurdly over budget, but still feels worth every penny. It will probably pay for itself in, um, around 2076… give or take a decade….

What was the hardest part?

Paying for it. (Still working on this!)

What would you have done differently?

A number of complicated, specific, small things that impact the overall energy performance of the space. Example: I might have reconsidered the insulation scheme–we went with a spray-in-place Icynene foam insulationfoam, which has terrific air-sealing qualities, but carries both financial and ecological burdens. Our wood stove doesn’t have a connection on a damper to fresh makeup air, which means that code required us to punch a six-inch-diameter hole in our otherwise totally-bomber building envelope to provide replacement combustion air. These missteps would likely have been avoided with an integrated design process. We wanted to take this approach for the Eco-Shed, but couldn’t convince anyone to show up for the meetings. Our project is tiny, and the folks who should have been there from the word go–like our mechanicals guy, our electrician, our building inspector–were all way, way, way, way, way, too occupied with far more lucrative projects than mine. There just wasn’t enough in it for them to give up an hour or two of work time in one of the hottest construction markets in Canadian history. So we did our best to anticipate goofs, but hey, no biggies have emerged yet. We’ve done pretty well. This is cutting edge stuff here!

Are you applying for LEED certification or BuiltGreen?

No. The Canada and U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED system is a terrific program that is driving a lot of innovation, but it’s not appropriate for what we’ve done. We’d spend almost as much getting the supporting documentation just to apply as we have on the whole building. That said, I did sit down and add up the points that we would have scored had we applied under the LEED Homes program; we end up around a theoretical gold level.

Where Does the Project Stand Today?

The book is finished; look for it in Canada toward the end of August and in the U.S. in September. It’s hilarious! Just like me! Honest! The Eco-Shed, on the other hand, though sealed up and sexy-looking, is still not quite ready for its close-up. We emptied our piggybank, and still need a few things wrapped up, like, er, tile, bathroom fixtures, ventilation system, boiler for in-slab hydronic heat, millwork, trim, final electrical… Anyone got a spare $15,000 kicking around? How about corporate sponsors? The “B.C. Hydro PowerSmart Eco-Shed,” anyone? How about the “Lululemon Eco-Studio”…? Anyone? Hello?

Why did you do [xxx] with [yyy?] Don’t you understand that [insert situation] is going to [wildly speculative forecast of world events]?

Good one! If you’ve been harboring this or any other infrequently asked questions, don’t be shy. Go ahead, ask them via [james at glave dot com], and I will be happy to fill you in and share the answer here. Unless it’s about my inlaws and how I alienated them… I’m still not talking about that. You’ll all have to wait for the book. Sorry.