Green on Brownstoner: Creative Reuse in Kensington

[nggallery id=”23948″ template=galleryview]

Our second installment of Green on Brownstoner finds architect Ryan Enschede maximizing daylight in a Kensington Victorian.If you have a tale of going green in Brooklyn, please let us know.
The owners of a recently-purchased house in Kensington asked me to help them make renovations to the ground floor. The project included replacing the non-functioning kitchen, adding a ground-floor bathroom, and replacing the collapsing steps to the rear yard. In addition they wanted to incorporate green construction methods, increase daylight in the kitchen, open the kitchen to the dining room to allow daylight further into the center of the house, and maximize the usability and connection to the small rear yard. The new work was designed in a “traditional” style to integrate with the original details remaining in the balance of the house, and the final design for the backyard steps incorporated an unusual solution for the basement hatch, which was also a project goal.

The green-ness of this project represents an accumulation of relatively small choices across all the aspects of the work. All of the green materials we chose are readily available, with the possible exception of the FSC-certified wood products, and did not require any special sources to obtain. To allow a wider range of decorative choices, we specified light fixtures designed for regular bulbs and inserted retrofit-type compact fluorescent lamps. Many excellent dual-flush and low-flow toilets are available with no cost premium, and many good low-VOC paints are widely available: we used Benjamin Moore Eco-spec and AFM Safecoat.

Although much of the house was beyond the project scope, we nonetheless took care to upgrade the portion within the work area to current best energy-conserving practices, including tight windows and doors, air sealing at the exterior walls, and making sure insulation was installed on the hot-water pipes.

Most of these measures were incorporated into the project fairly easily. Probably the most challenging area for a small scale renovations remains waste disposal. Good options just don’t exist to divert small quantities of re-usable but low-value materials like scrap gypsum wallboard from landfill. A good outlet for re-usable scrap and demolition material is Build it Green in Astoria, however there are limits to what they will take. For the time being, creative on-site re-use seems to be the most promising avenue to pursue. The contractor (J. Fitzsimmons Building, LLC) and subcontractors were willing to work with us to try new things and remained concerned with maintaining the quality of the finished product, however in general the reluctance of the construction industry to adopt green construction methods also remains a challenge. In particular, the cabinetmaker (Eric Zezerkowski) was willing to experiment with wheatboard and to source FSC plywood. The flooring subcontractor (Verrazano Flooring) was able to find FSC flooring, and they did a very nice job making the worn-out original parquet floor usable and attractive again.

Sustainable measures:
re-use of salvaged framing lumber
installation of kitchen and shed skylights
repair of existing wood parquet flooring
recycled cotton insulation
FSC-certified flooring and cabinet bodies
recycled glass countertops
low-flow toilet
compact fluorescent lighting
low-voc paints and floor finish