Carolyn Street
Posted on Aug 9th, 2009 by Doug Marsh VP, CR, CAPS, GBP | 1 Comments
Carolyn Street Project
This is a great project. It is wonderful to work with Clients who were relatively unaware of a Green rating but willing to cooperate on building a project that would have good green practices: great envelope; energy star windows; sustainable floors; low voc finishes including special MDF; HVAC design and testing. We are going for a 4 star rating with the Austin Energy Green Building Program.
This project is a complete remodel of 1400 square feet with 1100 square feet added as a second floor over existing. The project was designed by Ann Patterson and together we tweaked the original plans to comply with the McMansion ordinance to allow us to get an extra 8" in length on the second story as well as meeting with the HVAC Contractor to work the AC equipment, design, and ducting into the Architectural design. We completed a soil testing report and created a foundation design that had to work with the existing foundation. This is a brick bungalow built in the 20's with a, what I feel is unusual, foundation in that it is entirely built of brick on a footing about 3'deep. At the normal 7' spacing, including the corners, were large brick columns supporting the floor frame with a double brick wall between providing closure and skirting to the crawl space. The veneer has numerous cracks and was actually in jeopardy. The Soil Engineer called for drilled 10' deep piers on the entire perimeter including numerous interior piers to take the shake out of the floor with a large steel beam in the middle as a shaker beam plus a few doubled LVL's around the stairs for increased loading.
I ordered the floor trusses to cantilever over the brick so that the new banding could cap the brick all the way around except on the north side where the existing steep roof came against the new 2 story wall. We were only able to use an 8' wall on the second floor because of the McMansion Ordinance. This created some window sizing problems as well because of the egress requirements on double 2nd floor windows which we were attempting to stack over the existing downstairs windows. We ended up using egress hinges on double casement windows to get the right size under a regular header on an eight foot wall while remaining under 24" off the floor to beat the tempering requirement. We used Kolbe and Kolbe primed wood windows as new units upstairs and wood sash replacements downstairs. This allowed the Client to pick the exterior color they wanted on the window sashes. All of these units are Energy Star rated.
We used raised heel roof trusses which gave us our needed insulation thickness over the 2nd floor wall plate and designed these trusses for an equipment area for the new 90% sealed combustion furnace. We shot 5" of 1/2 lb foam against the roof deck (we skipped radiant decking)- unvented attic and used total fill "bibs" application blown insulation in the new walls. The HVAC was fully designed and is an up and down zoned system with a filtered fresh air duct into the return grill.
All the flooring in the house except 3 bedrooms is natural stone, tile or hardwoods (existing white oak), oak stair way. The 3 bedrooms will be a wool fiber. There are ceiling fans in every bedroom and office.
August 10th
We just received our 4 star rating for this project. On October 22nd 09 this project will be open to the public on the Nari tour.
Comments
On Jul 23rd, 2009 Ric Fox said:
A few years ago, Marsh/Voorspan remodeled our home. The result was a 3-star green rating, which was an added bonus. But the real value has been in the energy savings and lower maintenance costs. Plus, I think the rating may help us when we go to sell the house.