From Wasting to Saving
by Veronique Leblanc
In 2006, when we bought our house at 505 Alda Rd, Mamaroneck NY, it was all about location: views on Mamaroneck Harbor and Orienta, South facing orientation, proximity of the train station and village’s main shopping street, Shore Acres Club a 100 yards away and the ability to have a decent sailing boat moored in deep water across the street and winterized at the shipyard next door.
The house was a run down wreck from the 1960’s, extended in the 70’s and poorly maintained. It seems former owners used it for a summer cottage. In addition, we had a terrible surveyor that failed to see: leaking flat roof, blocked and leaking gutters, mold, unmanaged humidity in the basement, bad ventilation, leaking dishwasher, no gutter leaders to drive storm water away from the house foundations, termites that had destroyed a major supporting beam in crawl space and squirrels in the master bedroom attic. For starters…
Sunset view from west (House is south-facing)
Lesson No1: Make sure your surveyor gets dirty in crawl spaces and attics before you exchange contracts!
For 3 months, I was converted into a fireman trying to patch up every problem emerging each day. We knew we wanted to renovate and expand the house but we wanted first to live in it for a while in order to understand how it could be better used in summer AND winter.
We have lived in the house for 5 years before being able to find the right team to renovate it. The annual energy cost of the gas operated HVAC system and all electric load for 2 to 3 people (our daughter was in college in Maine so visiting occasionally) in the 3000sqft house including finished basement was about 10K$ a year. Meanwhile, the house was not comfortable at all: the great room with the best living space and views was terribly cold in winter and a furnace in summer.
There was no insulation whatsoever anywhere: none in the roof (the exposed beams in the sitting room that looked like a design feature where the actual roof rafters!), none in the attics nor in crawl spaces and the 1970’s Andersen double pane windows. The doors towards outside were naturally ventilated by the dominating Western wind to the point that the blinds were flying while all windows and doors were closed!
Our initial take on renovation was not that green, to be honest: expansion with South facing solar gains and big overhangs a la Frank Lloyd Wright and some solar panels to the South to produce the 10Kwh of running appliances and lighting. We struggled a bit with the roof orientation. There was some tension between the architect and the solar energy engineer about the design and its sustainability.
No insulation in the former sitting room, beams were the actual roof rafters!
My mistake and lesson No2: hire experts in what you want to do. People won’t train for you! They train themselves for themselves!
Lesson No3: hire a team not individuals. You don’t want to be the ham in their sandwich…
A year later, I switched to another architect who was highly recommended by a good friend. I was stupid enough to trust him (and her statement: ‘he has been sticking to the budget to the penny!”) and to accept his request of a contract without budget limitation while my 4 pages written brief did mention the construction budget in addition to all space and living requirements.
That architect did create a design that ended up costing twice the budget, not respecting any of the costal lines limitations and their requirements, and not being able to carry any decent green features to reduce energy consumption while tripling the footprint…and its attached taxes! I keep reading and learning about green building…
House to be reconstructed, picture taken from the
backyard.
Lesson No4: make a contract and include your brief and budget in the contract.
Lesson No5: amend AIA contracts to rebalance them as they are designed by architects for architects. The time you spend on negotiating a contract is more valuable than the contract itself as you’ll both get to assess crisis situations and their resolution before they happen. It works like a “prenup” in a way: what if?…
Designer No3 was recommended by same energy engineer I had from the start: he owned a framing company, worked with his father who was a licensed architect and could sign all plans for him, and worked with his wife on the design. He had agreed and signed a letter of intent with defined fees, construction costs and deliverables. The whole team could never fit the
construction budget eventually! So green…However, thanks to that German Engineer, the concept of Passive House started revolving in my head as the way to go versus Energy Star and LEED.
Lesson No6: Beware of the “yes we can” people! There are many around… Plus, a team is not enough! You need an A team that has already done it before and wants to do it again…
Architect No4 came again highly recommended by an Interior Designer friend of mine whom I hired to help me find the right people in the USA, thinking my foreign culture was making me fail in that task. That architect had just completed a brand new Energy Star house of 4500sqft+ finished basement across the Hudson River for 1M$ all included. He was interested in upgrading from Energy Star to Passive House for the next project. Logic you would think, no? NO! He had also worked with my Interior designer friend to remodel and merge 2 apartments into one and my friend only had good things to say about him. Good reference, no? NO!
Comfortable sitting room, too bad it has awful
insulation!
Lesson No7: do not forget lesson No6!
Lesson No8: Never deal with friends’ friends: you may lose your friends on the way…
It ends up 9 months later in a total fiasco: the architect cashes the latest check, thanks me for “taking him off the ledger” when he asked to stop the project unilaterally and I asked him to try and complete the project which he agrees on, does not attend the Portland, OR. PH conference I attend with my friend (by the end of it, I have become addicted to Passive House), disappears, does not answer any email nor phone call, finally resuscitates from the dead to send me a nasty email accusing me of being a “fraud” and refuses to give any further explanation, let alone an apology… Nice to meet you!
Lesson No9: Be fair but not stupidly nice. Some people cry on your shoulder to better shoot you in the back! Let them crash before they take you down with them…
It’s Spring 2011: 4 years have gone by and a lot of time and money has been wasted. And I have given up! Yes, I have to confess I had given up!!! I am no quitter but after all this mess, it is understandable that one thinks there is a bad karma on this project and that it is not meant to happen. So I plan for my traditional spring holiday in my favorite part of the world: Mallorca, Spain. Only, before I leave, because I had registered to a NYPH Meet up in Soho, NY and because this group has always given me energy (yes, now I think about it from my Hong Kong residence, it sounds right to spare energy from house usage while channeling it to humans…), I attend the Meet Up. In my mind, this is my goodbye but not farewell meeting to PH. I need a break.
New York Passive House. Join Now!
All these great men and women from NYPH are real pioneers: they are creating the new frontier of energy efficient building in a totally disbelieving society. How many times have I heard people around me , including close friends, consider it is too early, too expensive vs cheap energy, too risky to cut energy consumption at the expense of economic growth, blahblahbah. With that group at NYPH, I have found my Parish: they believe and they make their belief happen! Everyone with their own twist: multifamily social housing, no waste homes, town buildings, residential houses, you name it. They look at their own realizations
and make a constructive critic of it with pros and cons in front of their colleagues: yes, it makes the case for me. When I registered in November 2010, we were 30 members, now 150.
During that Meet up, Andreas comes to say hi and asks how my project is going and I just state that I have given up and going away for a break. He suggests I let him have a look at it when I come back. During my retreat in Spain, I sent him the basic info for him to think if there is a solution to my equation or not. And here we are: a year later: we hit the ground to build the first Mamaroneck Passive House!
In the meantime, I have moved to Hong Kong for my husband’s business. A problem? No, not with a great A team! Andreas brought Dom and Dave on board from Huntington, Long Island, just across the Sound from us in Oyster Bay. They want to specialize on Passive Houses. Plus, we have Skype to the rescue!
Who knew one day I would be more excited about getting a building permit and triple pane windows than Prada shoes?!!!
Lesson 10: Things happen when you don’t expect them to happen! Take a break…in Mallorca!
Conclusion:
Andreas the Architect vs. Dave the Contractor
Building 101 crash course: you only learn well from your mistakes because you remember the pain!