Indoor air quality

I posted some of the info here on a recent post in the homeone forum http://forum.homeone.com.au/ and I thought I would post it here too.

I had flagged my blog on our low VOC paint, and somebody pointed out - quite rightly - that paint is only one of a number of things that can pollute the indoor environment.

So here's the list of the other things we are doing to try to keep our air as nice as possible:

• very low VOC kitchen
• as low VOC carpets as we can find (and only in two rooms), with E0 underlay (rubber, by Bridgestone)
• no plastics on light fittings
• Marmoleum on the upstairs floor
• all fans ducted to outside
• blinds not curtains
• wardrobes from Ikea, so E1 but better than the alternatives.

I think we are going to recover our old couch rather than buy a new one, although if I could find a new one that was E0 and comfy and under $2000, I'd buy it in a minute. (Any leads on this topic very appreciated)

And most of all, we're ready for new mattresses (ours have been trampolined beyond everyone's comfort zone) so will buy latex ones complete with pillows and have them delivered straight to the new house. The rental place we are in now is a cesspit of mould and dust, through no fault of ours. I want to leave the spoors behind! :)

Trouble spots: we want wallpaper in a few spots, and the options for low VOC are so fugly they aren't worth the effort of sticking to a wall.

And I can't seem to get a clear answer on house plants - some researchers say they clean the air, others say that potting mix and damp are inherently evil. My compromise at the moment is to have a few, but not a whole conservatory full.

What have I missed??

Paint

Martin from the Designer Paint Shop is an unlikely hero. But after literally months of agonising over what timber treatments to put on our battens and ecoply, he has saved the day.

I was futzing around with a low voc, water soluble product called Quantum, but despite the very best efforts of the lovely folks at Bristol in Clifton Hill, we just couldn't get a colour we felt happy with. Ecoply turns out to be a difficult product in that regard; it soaks up heaps of whatever you put on it, meaning that things can end up looking very dark quite quickly. As the ecoply is on our upper story on the north side (above zincalume), I didn't want anything that was going to make it too top heavy. But I kept ending up with either baby poo brown or midwestern barn red.

To complicate matters, we are using (at last count) five different timbers:

• undressed radial sawn, silvertop ash battens (these also suck up heaps of product)
• recycled karri door frames
• finger jointed hoop pine window frames
• treated pine (not the nasty stuff) exposed joists and pergola etc
• ecoply.

While I grimaced and grumbled and fretted, Rodney got on the phone to some folks in Byron, at Painted Earth: www.house-paint.com.au. Deb was incredibly helpful in talking through options for low VOC paints, and at her suggestion, we ended up at The Designer Paint Shop: www.designerpaintco.com in Surrey Hills.

Martin is a painter, and has been working with Oikos paints for over a decade (if memory serves me correctly). He very patiently brushed out - I think - six Oikos timber treatments onto ecoply on our first trip, AND a further four on ecoply, two on hoop pine and one on karri on our second trip. And then after all that, made up a special colour just for us, one that happened to turn both the hoop pine and the silvertop the exact same colour as the Karri! He said it was incredibly easy, but some people say that about surfing too.

The product we're using is actually a wax. Theoretically, unless abraded by sand or something like that, the protection will last many years, and the biggest problem we will have is that the colour will fade over time.

Here's a little spiel from the website:
NOVALIS WAX FINISH WOODSTAIN  is a a transparent, acrylic, woodstain. Its formulation allows it to protect wood from atmospheric agents, Uv rays, woodworm and fungi whilst at the same time maintaining the natural beauty of the wood. The product is available in a vast range of colours, obtained using special transparent pigments. Easy and quick to use, it is non-yellowing and since it works by penetrating into the wood and not by forming a film on the surface, there are no problems of it peeling away in time.

At Martin's suggestion, we are using a product called Archital to paint the ecoply that will be behind our battens. Our builder had suggested black, but after a discussion with Martin, we went for a deep grey/black that he invented for the job. It's already up on the eastern side, and I love it so much I nearly cancelled the battens!

On the money side of things, our exterior paint is costing us more than we budgeted for. It will come in at about $1400. We'll also need more coats than our builder costed, so there will be some extra labour costs, but more coats now means greater protection and longer re-coat time, so we will save money in the longer term on that score. And I actually think any product we used would have required more than two coats - the ecoply just slurps it up. So on a metre for metre basis, I'm not actually sure that the Oikos product is costing us much more than any other.

So that's our paint journey to date. No more sleepless nights on that score. I must say it's reassuring to know that once we find a colour we like (the hard bit, Rodney has a very complex relationship with colour!), the internals will be a cinch. Martin has a spectrometer, so we can take it to him and he will make us an internal paint to match.

Oh, and I should've said this earlier, all the above products are non-toxic, GECA certified, and low voc. That's all Oikos makes, and they've been doing it for a relatively long time. Europe is way ahead of the pack on this stuff.

If you are at all in the market for paint, go to these guys!!! They rock.


e.

Lights

Lights are the bane of my life. I never realised how much I loathe most lights. Maybe that says I don't really notice them. Hmm. That is worth thinking about, because right now, I am in a Lighting Pickle.

So our journey to now has consisted of:

• a consultancy with the Environment Shop www.enviroshop.com.au, which was a great place to start. We got all kinds of great ideas - many of which we have retained.
• a spreadsheet in which I worked out that our lighting plan was going to cost us $4,500 (admittedly including quite a few LED globes)
• visits to half a dozen lighting shops and several online shops in which it became clear that nothing, NOTHING is easy when it comes to lights. Oils, as they say, ain't oils.

Good news first. Things that appear to be working out:

• routing the bottom of our bannister and placing a line of LED strip lights so that we get a lovely wash of light down the wall and onto the stairs
• embedding another line of strip lights into the bedhead in the master bedroom
• simple pendant lights fitted with LED globes in downstairs bedrooms, lounge and dining room (latter two rooms with dimmers).

What's not working? Everything else.

I can't remember if I've written about our upstairs studio/work area. It comprises two adjoining open plan rooms, with curved ceiling (arcs up to about 3m), heaps of natural light and marmoleum floor. I make felt, so we've chosen a floor product that can withstand a fair amount of water sploshing around. It's also very good environmentally. Read more at http://www.forbo-flooring.com.au/Residential/Products/Marmoleum-Global-3/

So anyway, the lighting challenge starts here.
* Halogens will be too hot in summer (our temperature graphs show this will be the hottest part of the house in summer)
* Fluoros give off awful light and are altogether too officey (we will spend a lot of time in this space)
* Tracks with compact fluoros can't be dimmed and there's no guarantee that the fittings will be able to accommodate LED globes, even if they do have GU10 bases
* Tracks with LEDs are too expensive
* Pendants might not give us enough light for our artistic endeavours.

We are using halogen downlights in the kitchen and a couple of other strategic spots downstairs. Even though I know they are not too bad an option in our scenario (the insulation between the floors serves accoustic as well as thermal functions but is unlikely to be greatly affected by 9 downlights), I still feel that somehow I am breaking one of the golden rules of sustainable housing. I daren't confess to the folks at the ATA.

I'll spare you the details on the bathroom lighting. Suffice to say that the lights I liked most started at $365 for one light (plus globe).

Of course, it doesn't help that so many light fittings are fugly. We chose a whole suite of lights on Saturday afternoon, and then I turned around and informed Rodney that I hated them all. Lovely person that he is, he simply said, okay, let's find others. I have never appreciated him more!

Sigh. It's therapeutic to vent. Yesterday I submitted the electrical and lighting plans to the builder for the rough in. We hedged our bets by providing for four spotlights (on two switches) and two wall lights in the studio, latter with dimmer. I now understand why people just put in halogens every square meter.

So that's it for lights. For now. We are yet to choose a single fitting ...

I'm back

Hmph. I say I've worked out how to write more easily and then disappear for weeks. I've been swamped by a deluge of decisions to make about all manner of building questions, each one seemingly dependent upon the others. Teasing it all out has been almost a full time job (in addition to my regular part time job plus parenting).

Here's a brief summary of what I've been working on, which will also serve as more of an introduction to what and how we're building.

Kitchen:

We had all but decided that our kitchen was going to be our great ethical compromise. Well, not a massive one, but a compromise nevertheless.

I'm really clear that I want our house to be as non-toxic as possible. We're only using low-VOC paints and our floors will be concrete slab (downstairs) and Marmoleum (real, true blue lino!) upstairs. Locally made kitchens are typically quite high in VOCs, and I wanted none of that. We talked with a mob who do environmentally friendly kitchens, and whilst we kind of liked some of their design, we certainly couldn't afford their prices.

The alternative was Ikea: relatively low VOC (though not E zero), 25 year warranty, nice design, affordable and relatively easy to organise BUT imported. We weighed up the miles against everything else and decided that this would be our Great Compromise.

And then, a few weeks back, our builders told us they had found another (much more affordable) kitchen mob who were willing to use E0 materials. Hooray. I've since made two trecks out to their factory in Bayswater and am sufficiently pleased with them that we've now asked them to quote on vanities for both bathrooms, as well as cabinetry in the dining room to match the kitchen. Hopefully this will come in okay ... otherwise, back to Ikea for those bits and then the dilemma of how to make it all match up. :(


Benchtops:

I've had my heart set on concrete benchtops for some time. They look fantastic and you can do all sorts of interesting things with them. As well, they apparently have considerably less embodied energy than composite stone benchtops. In the last few weeks we've had a bit of an up and down thing happening about who to source from. It's all settled now (I think), but in the meantime, with uncertainty about benchtops, we couldn't make final decisions about kitchen and bathroom basin taps.


Bathroom:

Speaking of taps, we have also had a hold up with deciding on our bath taps. We are reconfiguring our upstairs bathroom at the 11th hour. It looked fine on the plans, but when I stood in the actual room, I realised that we were likely to end up with too much water from the shower splashing on the curved roof. I spoke with our (very accommodating) project manager, who then discussed it with the plumber and both agreed that this might be a problem. My proposed work around - creating a separate shower and rotating our bath 90 degrees so it's under the curved part of the roof - seemed workable. But that then needed to be checked with the building surveyor, and new drawings submitted for that room. Luckily she is okay with it and we can proceed.

I'm really happy with the new design, but with adding a separate shower, there goes another $1,200 of our contingency fund. (More on that in a future post about MONEY and costs!)


Cladding:

I feel so sorry for our builders sometimes. We have been the clients from hell when it comes to the outside of our house. Possibly in many other ways as well, but particularly on all matters to do with cladding. We simply haven't been able to decide. We have investigated every option we could think of and nothing was quite right.

We liked the look of timber but got scared off by the maintenance regime.

We thought maybe one of the trademarked fibre cement products, then discovered it was way expensive.

Traditional fibre cement just didn't cut it aesthetically.

Plywood was attractive, but not for the whole place.

Ditto colourbond, which we feared was too sea-sidey.

We have finally - after much research - opted for:
* Narrow radial sawn timber battens on the front (facing east), over ecoply
* Zincalume on the more exposed section of the downstairs northern and western sides and all of the south side (not visible from the street or yard)
* Ecoply upstairs on the rest of the northern and western sides (protected to some extent by the eaves).

Now we are trying to work out which plywood and which timber finishes.

We were planning to use the Carter Harvey Holt ecoply but then I heard that Boral Evolution Ply has a much more interesting woody look to it. This turns out to be true, but in the process of Googling, I have also found out that Boral is owned by Hancock, which has a terrible environmental track record in the Strzelecki Ranges and elsewhere. Sometimes I really wish I had care factor zero. Now am in an ethical pickle. Again.

And to compound matters, the timber finish we want to use is produced by a firm that has also makes a "nano-tinted primer". If you don't know about the problems with nano technology, visit nano.foe.org.au. The problem I have is that their sales person originally told me via email that the primer contains nano sized particles, then said in a phone conversation that they don't. I have now had to ask them what size the particles are, a question their sales folks almost certainly won't know the answer to. Of course, we could just use a different primer, but if they do use nano, I'm not really sure I want to purchase from the company at all.

But if we don't, we are back to square one with our finishes, and I fear that if I don't make a decision by mid week, our project manager might kill me (with full justification I might add).

Agggh. We have looked at all of the more "ethical" timber finishes, but they would require a lot more maintenance, which we really are not up for. :(


So. I need to stop here so that Rodney can use the computer, but I do want to finish on an up note. I popped into the house yesterday to pick up the samples of the Boral ply. Nobody else was on site, so for the first time, it was just me in our house, and it was lovely. I walked around just saying hello to things. I have been dreaming this place into being for years now, and it's just so wonderful getting to see it finally evolving into reality.

I just realised I haven't written about the other big thing that's been going on, which has been trying to finalise our kitchen design, accommodating the fact that we have no wall space to speak of.  I suspect this is a problem that lots of people have with houses that are passive solar, so I'll spend a bit of time on it in my next post.

Thanks for reading.

e.

Phew. I have worked out that I can write my blogs in Notepad and paste them into the Blogger. It's way easier. The compose function is a nightmare. :(

Expect more frequent updates now!

So I was describing the house ...

We wanted the ground floor of our house to be reasonably accessible to people with disabilities, so we enter via a ramp on the north side of the house.

In the early stages of our design, I agonised over a side not front entrance. I worry that they don't feel as safe at night, and that they don't feel as welcoming. But with a narrow building envelope, a front door was going to mean we could only have one east facing room at the front and I really wanted to maximise our access to eastern/morning light.

Thinking back, there were a million such dilemmas in the design phase ... for example:

• I wanted bedrooms to get eastern light / I wanted a front door on the front of the house (result: front door on the side but signposted by ramp)
• I didn't want to see a toilet from the bath / I didn't want an enclosed toilet because it wouldn't be accessible (result: bath upstairs / accessible loo downstairs)
• I wanted to be able to see the lounge and dining rooms from the kitchen / I didn't want a closed off kitchen (result: a major design backflip on my part last week means we have - gulp - gone entirely open plan).

I guess everyone has these kinds of decisions and compromises when they build. Ours were, I suspect, even more complex because they were informed by not one, but two sets of principles about house design:
1) passive solar
2) pattern language.

You can read about passive solar principles in lots of places. I like "Your Home, a technical manual" for starters. http://www.yourhome.gov.au/technical/index.html

Pattern Language is a set of principles for designing liveable spaces. It starts with world government (!) and goes all the way through to designing stair cases and alcoves!!! An extraordinary body of thinking and theorising by a Christopher Alexander and five colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure in Berkeley, California in the late 1970's.

Read more at: http://downlode.org/Etext/Patterns/index.html

A lot of the patterns are very culturally laden - a fact they still don't seem to acknowledge (although it's quite possible I just haven't read enough). But that aside, there's certainly a lot of food for thought, even if you don't agree with it all.


Just a few of the many 'patterns' that guided us were (I paraphrase):

• Sleep to the east
• Light on two sides of every room (OMG I just realised we have actually achieved this, except for one bathroom!!)
• Incorporate niches and nooks, especially for children
• Begin with the entrance and the most public parts of the building, then lead into the slightly more private areas, and finally to the most private domains.

Of course, there were also patterns that we chose to ignore or couldn't incorporate within our building envelop and/or budget. For example, we favoured large windows for solar access over small ones that made views more tantalising. Maybe in part because we don't have views. Well rather, we do, but they're mostly awful. }:

Aggh. It's 10:30 and I still haven't described the house. I got distracted by deciding to go back and look at patterns again ... I need to revisit them now we are in the fine detail stage; there's still a lot we could incorporate if we try.

So I will stop here. I think I might have enough brain space to try to work out the upload of the plans.
Then I won't need to describe it all in words - you can just look at the pictures.

Getting into the swing of this gig now. More later.

e.

Our roof

Aggh. I've lost the start of this post three times. Still getting the hang of this software.


So last time I wrote about our design brief. Here I want to write about what we're getting. Or rather, what we think we're getting ... I thought all the big structural decisions were made, but yesterday we got a call from our project manager to say that they have realised that the tracks for the floor to ceiling doorway between our stair well and living area - which I had been picturing more as a moveable wall - won't be able to be set fully into the ceiling cavity because the joists are running the wrong direction. Sigh. So now we are trying to decide between dropping the ceiling in the whole living area to 2630mm (from 2700mm) or having a discontinuous ceiling line. :(

I am plugging for continuity. Rodney is keen to have his 2700mm ceilings. This is pretty much our first serious disagreement about an aspect of the design, which is not bad given we've been doing this for three years. I think we may yet flip a coin.


I am hoping to post the plans for our house, but I need clean them up a bit first as they have all sorts of instructions from the engineer all over them and they're a bit hard for novices to read.

For now, a brief description will have to suffice ...

First the block, so you can get your bearings. Ours runs east:west. It's roughly 11.6m wide and about 30m long. We have a 5m setback and an easement along the back fence. Fiona's block is to the north, and she is planning to build only a small house - probably about 12m long.

Our house is sited as far south as the building regs would permit, to maximise our solar access from the north. Technically, it's a loft, because the upstairs is built into the roof cavity. Functionally, it's one and a half stories.


One of the things I love most about our house is that it has a curved roof. This is a lovely aesthetic outcome of a decision made on principle. Way before we started designing properly, I happened to have a conversation with an acquaintance who had recently had her gorgeous winter sunlight blocked out by her neighbour's extension. The construction was all completely within the building regs, and her neighbour was fully within his rights. But perhaps not very neighbourly?

So we decided that we wanted to keep as far away from the outside edge of our southern building envelope as possible, whilst still maximising our own solar gain. Whilst the current house to our immediate south has only tiny northern windows, it's a tumbledown place that's clearly going to be knocked down sooner or later. When that happens, we hope whatever replaces it will be designed along passive solar lines - obviously that can only work if we don't overshadow the whole block.

It felt unethical and unneighbourly to not give any consideration to our future neighbours' needs.

The roof line got reworked several times as we tried to find a curve that gave us sufficient head room upstairs as well as reasonable solar access to the south. As next door's block is similarly narrow, they will need to build well back from the northern fence, but that should be okay. They, like us, will need to foot the bill for swapping their driveway from the south to the north, but I reckon that's a small price to pay for a place that is significantly warmer in winter and cooler in summer! I hope they see it the same way. }:


Thinking about our neighbours also influenced our choice of roof colour. Part of our cladding is zincalume and we were planning to use the same for the roof. But we after seeing the potential reflection off that product, we decided to go for a less reflective roof, just in case there is eventually a two story house to the south. The curve would mean that there wouldn't be that much glare, but it could be an issue. We chose Colourbond Shale Grey, which I desperately hope will look okay with the zincalume cladding on the southern and northern walls.


Hmm. Best stop here. I wanted to give a basic overview of the rest of the design, but this is looking a bit long so will do that in a separate post.

I am delighted to know that I have some readers! Please let me know if you have specific questions or priorities ... happy to help out if I can.

e.

About us and our project

We are Elizabeth, Rodney and our 2.5 year old son.

We bought our little block in Preston about four years ago, and our friend Fiona bought the block next door. We're planning to share a backyard and chooks and vegie gardens, and probably dinner once every couple of weeks. Fiona is yet to decide her approach to building, but she will definitely be building a small house.

Rodney and I have been actively involved in a great range of enviromental activism over several decades. So it made sense that we would try to walk the talk when it came to building our home. We spent ages thinking, reading and plotting about sustainable house design. We lusted over the designs of several well known architects, and checked and rechecked our budget.

Ultimately, we came to the conclusion that we simply could not afford an architect designed home. Luckily, we came across a small design and build company called Positive Footprints. We met with them several times and contracted them to design the house, with a view to also building it.

The brief we gave PF was very comprehensive. This was our value statement:

We want to promote a culture of living sustainably, with an emphasis on cooperative, ethical and environmentally responsible purchasing, building and consumption. We are committed to sustainable, cooperative on-site food production, emphasising the value of living in harmony with the rest of the natural world and especially our local ecosystem and seasons. We want to live in an imaginative and ecologically sustainable building that can accommodate our family's changing physical and social needs over the years.

Further, we said:

We would like to minimise our ecological footprint by using passive solar design and resources that are low in embodied energy and renewable wherever possible. A six star energy rating is our absolute minimum, and we are hoping that we can do better than this.

We are interested in ensuring that we use materials that:

• are as least toxic as possible and cause the least harm to occupants and workers
• are locally sourced
• have low embodied energy and embodied water
• are recycled / reclaimed materials (we recognise that recycled timbers might be beyond our budget; we are very interested in using other second hand building materials)
• are low maintenance, durable and long-lasting.

We want to live in a home that is modern, organic and uncluttered. We like clean lines and minimum fuss. Texture is good, but not to the extent that it collects dust and cat hair! We are naturally messy, so Spartan or minimalist is not for us (although we do hope that with enough room and storage, we will become less messy!).

We (especially Elizabeth) have no interest in the folksy aesthetic and rough building traditionally associated with environmentally sustainable housing (we say 'no!' to the Eltham mud brick look). We equally dislike the flimsiness and superficiality of the conventional 'project home'. Aesthetically, Elizabeth is most drawn towards homes where organic and industrial can overlap, for example, where timber and metal are used together (often to be found in warehouse conversions). Rodney can't describe what he likes, but he'll know it when he sees it. We desire easy transitions between spaces, a sense of open-ness and spaciousness.

Ultimately, as I will discuss over coming weeks and months, we have ticked most of our boxes, but with a number of biggish compromises along the way.


In my next post, I'll describe the house and (hopefully) post the floor plans and elevations. Then I'll move on to the build itself. We should have a roof by next week!


e.