Entries from April 2008 ↓

Yesterday I had our second conference call with Zero Energy Design who is performing energy modeling analysis on the 100K House. Yes, they changed their name since our last meeting. They provided a list of suggested energy improvements to the home with accompanying savings that would be realized over a code built home per year. […]

This weekend I met with Mr. Matt Pappajohn of Pappajohn Woodworking to further discuss our “Urban Kitchen” design and possible materials. Matt has seen our renderings and has agreed that we can create a similar kitchen out of sustainable materials and green finishes that will fit in our budget for both homes. This makes me […]

You’ve all been patient with our decreased posting the past few weeks so ISA decided to reward you all with the first interior renderings of the home. I’ll save my thoughts for later an let you guys comment first. If you’ve always wanted to comment but never have, now’s your chance. Also, before someone mentions […]

Lately I have been a bit overwhelmed trying to run a new company while marketing and blogging for two others. My posts have dropped in frequency on this blog and all but disappeared at the Postgreen blog. Last week my good friend, Nic Darling, who is “the marketing guy” at Universe Point and has been […]

Last week I was getting nervous about our ability to incorporate all of the energy efficient features of the home in the most cost effective manner possible. I have also been pouring over other case study’s that contain very nice energy modeling data that I craved on our homes. I finally bit the bullet and […]

Just a quick note to wish everyone a happy Earth Day today. Here in PA, Earth Day is being overshadowed a bit by the primaries today but I guess that’s important for the earth as well. Even if you don’t officially celebrate Earth Day in any formal capacity, take a minute to think about what […]

Over the course of this project I have found that there are three elements to true construction costs:

The cost of the material being used.
The quantity of the material being used.
The difficulty or labor involved to build an item.

I have often heard that labor makes up 60%-70% of the cost of any constructed item from cabinets […]

…the point of this post is the plywood stairs proposed by ISA. They have gained inspiration from the plywood stairs built in the Chicken Point Cabin by OSKA Architects. Their project uses a lot simple materials such as plywood and concrete in the same theme as our project.

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Since studying the Passive House standard of energy efficient design, we have been trying to determine what we can incorporate into our project without blowing the budget. Below are some of the ideas we have so far to improve the energy efficiency of the home after consulting the Passive House Standard.
Insulation

Increase SIP wall panels to […]

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The basic idea of a Passive House is to reduce the energy usage of a home by 90% over traditional code built homes. I grabbed this definition off of a site which will hopefully become clearer later in the post: “A Passive House is a building for which thermal comfort can be achieved solely by post-heating or post-cooling of the fresh air mass, which is required to fulfill sufficient indoor air quality conditions without a need for recirculated air.” […]