August 26, 2008

Green on Brownstoner #1: Salvage on a Budget

Our first installment of Green on Brownstoner finds Gennaro Brooks-Church renovating a Carroll Gardens brownstone with the environment in mind. Unable to find the kind of help he wanted, he ended up becoming a green contractor himself. If you have a tale of going green in Brooklyn, please let us know.
We were in contract for over a year because when we started it was easy to get a no doc reasonable rate loan with 10% down. By the end we were happy just to get a loan. We scraped equity lines of credit and loans together to meet the down payment and finally closed in March for $1.4 million.

The house had been cheaply renovated in the 50s and needed some work. I decided to do the job myself because I’m too experimental with out there green ideas and I knew this would cause all sorts of problems with a contractor. I got my contractor’s license, formed a company called ECO Brooklyn Inc. and started pulling stuff out. At first we were just going to pull a little bit out but the floors were full of termites and the ceilings were bowed and before we knew it the whole place was gutted. This was the first green decision we had to make: keep it or trash it.

Some considerations were:
- If it is in good condition why tear it out?
- If you just don’t like the style make sure you find somebody who can reuse it.
- Is it more sustainable to replace it with something greener or keep the one you have (a more efficient furnace for example)?
- Light, air, and nice spaces are green. It might pay to rip it out if you can increase the qualities of these elements (despite the waste).

I had nightmare experiences with my first architect. He did not get the concept that cutting down on materials does not mean cutting quality. And to him the idea of using salvaged materials was akin to reusing toilet paper. I fired him. Meanwhile I spent time in dumpsters and salvage yards. You can’t go into scrap metal yards because they won’t sell to you but I wait outside and get the junk vans before they enter the yard. I bought most of my lintels this way.

All my wood for beams has been purchased from salvaged wood yards, mostly Fine Lumber. The wood is rock hard and much better than anything you could buy today. And the price is very similar if not cheaper. The irony is that the DOB does not allow it on new construction.

I plan on cutting the salvaged wood for flooring as well unless I come across salvaged floors. Just today I arranged with a neighbor down the street who is renovating to get some of her salvaged wood flooring. Sadly she had thrown out three floors (1800 sq. ft = $7200) the day before. That wood now sits in a landfill somewhere. I would have paid her to take it. Instead she paid to get rid of it and the circle of waste continued.

I am building a green roof both for beauty and to feed the bee hive we are going to put up there. The south-facing wall will hold water heating panels. If I find the funding I will buy solar panels for electricity. I also found these cool air heating panels that pass solar heated air into the house.

The floor will be heated with radiant heating. I’m looking into building my own aluminum panels beneath the hot water tubes to avoid paying above my budget for pre-made aluminum panels.

I’ve thought of a novel way to heat the water that goes into the radiant heating. Normally the water is heated with an efficient boiler. But boilers are not as efficient as on demand heaters that heat the water only when it is needed. But on demand heaters are not traditionally used for radiant heating so I’m still trying to sort that one out. This would be the greenest solution.

For the windows I want fiberglass frame windows. This is a recent development and only a few specialty places make them. Fiberglass has better insulation qualities than wood or vinyl and uses less energy to produce than wood, vinyl or aluminum windows.

The house insulation is still up in the air. Icynene foam spray is great but costly. Recycled paper might be the best way to go in conjunction with a DIY spray foam to make things air tight. There is a company I found that sells salvaged insulation but I have a concern with how old the insulation is. If the insulation is new then it will off gas a lot of formaldehyde. If it is old then the off gassing will have passed for the most part and it might be better.

The walls will mostly be exposed brick or clay. There is good clay on the market but I am experimenting with the earth from the basement I’m digging out. It is beautiful earth and I suspect will work wonderfully. In terms of sheet rock and sound proofing I will make my own version of the very costly “Quiet Rock” but using cheaper sound proofing caulk between two layers of sheet rock.

My goal is to a make a green house within my budget. Regardless of my budget I strongly feel that a key element of green not only means it is good for the environment but that it is affordable to the mainstream. A lot of my experimentation involves studying complex and expensive designs and finding equivalent simple local solutions.

We have spent 60k so far and have an ambitious goal of spending no more than 160k more for the 4 floors, basement and roof. Other contractors laugh when I tell them this. I honestly don’t know how much it will really cost. It depends on such variables as what I find in dumpsters and whether somebody invents a viable on demand water heater for radiant heating in the next three months. The experimenting continues at a feverish race against time, mortgage payments.

Posted by lisa at 10:59 AM | Comments (25)
Categories: Environmental

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