It's getting easier being green

Just Ask Juli and Jeff Smith of Kaiser

The great room was created to fit the Smiths’ easygoing lifestyle and their goal of a green, energy efficient home. Virtually all the wood in the home from beams to bookcases was harvested from the site or from Juli’s parents farm near Columbia.

Today, being green is about a lot of things.
For Juli and Jeff Smith it is about conservation of natural resources and chemical-free air inside their 4,400 square-foot home.
“It’s all about priorities,” Julie Smith says. For the Smiths, the first priority was “outgassing” the home’s air to address Juli’s sensitivity to chemicals.
Next on their list was better use of natural resources both for building materials and for the house’s ultimate energy efficiency.
Those were their official priorities when they set about to build a green house at the Lake. Another priority was to create a home that welcomed and enveloped them, their children and their lifestyle in such a way that they would rather be there than anywhere else.
Today, nearly two years after moving into their earth-colored stucco Energy Star-5+ -rated home on three wooded acres near Kaiser, Juli will tell you that they have met their goals.
The four-bedroom home exudes warmth and a sense of the people who live there, from the red and yellow earth tones that dominate the décor, to comfortable furniture, bookcases, photographs and an open floor plan that allows kids, mom and dad to be in the same space without ever feeling crowded.
And while they love to show off their home, Juli will be the first to tell you that, well, it wasn’t easy building green.

“An enormous amount of planning and work went into the building of our house,” says Juli, who focuses her life around her husband and two children, Isabella, 9, and Ashton, 5. “I can't tell you how many times during planning and construction I heard comments like, ‘Can't you just do things like other people do?’ or ‘What's wrong with normal countertops?’ or even ‘Can't you just build a normal house?’”
In a word, NO, they couldn’t.
“Years before we even had concrete plans to build a home,” Juli says.
“I was collecting pictures, quotations, phrases that were important to me in the creation of my future home. I put them on a bulletin board, and in fact, that bulletin board still hangs in my office. It has pictures of beautiful spaces, both indoor and out; homes that feel of the earth, not on it; landscaping that extends the spirit of the home and blends with the surroundings.”
From the pictures and articles came ideas, a jointly developed plan, and then, a year and a half of construction.

The Smith's green home.

By December 2008 when the Smiths moved in, they had employed two different builders, chopped down majestic and already-dead trees on a Columbia farm, reclaimed trees cut on their own property, hired a custom sawyer and miller, discovered that Tung oil was an old-fashioned wood preservative that works just fine, found a painting company that was willing to embrace their interest in healthy zero-VOC paint, put Isabella and Ashton to work helping peel the giant tree trunk that would become the fireplace mantle, and begun a program to create a no-mow landscape based on native plants.
Their first builder handled the excavating, exterior framing and framing of all the interior walls in the house. In this case, it meant building a foundation from insulated concrete forms which Juli described as “giant Legos™” pumped full of concrete, then working with factory made structural insulated panels for walls and roof. Each wall panel consisted of six inches of recycled expanded polystyrene foam between two layers of oriented strand board. The roofing panels were even more energy efficient with ten inches of foam between two layers of OSB. The rest of the interior insulation, as per Juli’s goal, is all blown cellulose and wool batting – no fiberglass in the house.
The second contractor, Dave Perdue of Perdue Construction, finished the house, including figuring out how to do a lot of things the Smiths had in mind that he had never done before. “He was great,” says Juli. “From the first time he visited the site, he’d say, ‘OK, what do you need?’ and he’d make it happen. He never said he couldn’t.”
 

The House

The main floor of the house has two bedrooms, an office, laundry/mud room, bathroom, and a great room with huge structural beams, soft yellow walls and a kitchen area separated by counters and a functional oak beam ceiling. On the other side of the great room is a sitting area, a dining area designed specifically for their heavy and much-beloved Mexican table that came from Casa Bonita years ago, and a play area/schoolroom where Juli home schools the two children.
“Children like to be near their mothers,” she says. “That’s why there are no walls in here.”
And her kids agree. “We like to be around each other,” Isabella says.
All the kitchen appliances are Energy Star rated, the stove is duel fuel – gas top and electric oven. The counters are made from recycled materials, the kitchen sink island of recycled glass with an acrylic base and the counter surrounding the stove of recycled glass and paper in a concrete base. 
The floors are bamboo, except in the kitchen and laundry areas, where they are cork.
And although the Smiths were concerned about the materials they selected, as Juli notes, every decision involved choices.  Commercial bamboo, for example, does not grow in Missouri — so it must be shipped from more tropical areas. However, it is fast growing and does not cause decimation of forests, so they “chose in favor of the forests.” 
In general, the Smiths were prudent in choice of materials, but didn’t go to extremes. “We used recycled materials but not repurposed ‘waste,’” Juli explains. “When possible we did choose to use materials that keep waste out of the landfill — recycled materials — but that is more downstream than reusing waste, thereby costing more energy to produce it in a new form.”
The home’s lower level has a bedroom, full bath with recycled counters, movie room and large basement storage area and workroom that opens out onto a cedar deck with a hot tub.
 

Solar, heating and plumbing

The house is built on the side of a hill and oriented to take advantage of the angle of the sun. Deep overhangs block direct sunlight in the summer months but allow the lower-angled winter rays to enter. A sunroom hangs, cantilevered, off the south side of the house. The fact that trees surround the house only a foot from the walls means that the summer light is blocked but in winter with no leaves, the sunroom remains warm enough to transfer heat to the rest of the house.
“It is important to me that if we have this resource — the sun — we use it,” Juli says. “Passive solar is so easy. It’s healthy and it doesn’t cost any more.”

In the bathrooms, the countertops are recycled glass, and the floors are bamboo, as are the floors in most of the house. The master bath, shown here, boasts a soaking tub and separate shower.

Located just off the house’s great room, the sunroom has Argon-gas filled double-pane windows as does the rest of the house, a heavy door to manage the heat exchange, heat-absorbing tile floors and a fireplace for winter heating.
Originally planned as a screened-in porch, the sunroom came about at the suggestion of the draftsperson who finalized the plans for the house. Later the builder told Juli and Jeff that they would “feel like a bird on a branch in this room.”
“And,” she says, “we do. I live there in the winter at night after the kids have gone to bed. It’s warm and cozy.”
And while she wanted to use local stone for the fireplace that extends through the wall into the main living area, the fact that the sunroom doesn’t have a foundation under it meant that the floor could not support a real stone fireplace. So the dry-stacked fireplace is made of gray cultured stone.
For wintertime heating, the Smiths chose a heat pump over a much more expensive geothermal system, money being the deciding factor. Since then, the price of geothermal systems has dropped significantly thanks to increased popularity. The Smiths say that they were given a bid of $70,000 for a system that today would cost them $20,000.

Wood and trees

Timber is a big part of the home, both inside and out. It looks and feels like a house in the woods, and with good reason. The Smiths insisted that the builder clear trees from only the house’s footprint and what was absolutely necessary to get their equipment onto the site. The idea was to leave a heavily wooded yard for natural protection as well as beauty. Then, instead of burning, they went through the downed trees and rescued what they could to have custom milled. Most of those that were burned ended up in a neighbor’s fireplace.
In addition, they cut 28 standing dead hardwoods on Juli’s parents farm near Columbia, all oaks but three. The hardwoods became the interior beams and the timber frame entrance to the house. Seventy-eight cedar trees were harvested for decking and fencing.
Some of the reclaimed wood from the yard and the Columbia farm also found its way into inside trim, bookcases and the Smiths’ bedstead, which Jeff made from cedar and walnut trees and an old barn door. The massive fireplace mantle came from a peeled and tung-oil-stained log from the farm. Like the rest of the construction job, nothing about dealing with the trees was simple. From the size of the trees requiring a custom miller who would turn the giant logs into beams and planks to the engineering certification needed to use the huge beams as the structural support for the entrance of the house and the slick winter day when the outside frame of thousand-pound logs was raised in front of the house, everything involved extra thought, extra effort and often, extra time.
But now the house is finished, the complications have devolved into “house stories” and the Smiths are eager to encourage others to think about building green.

Going green

Besides being beautiful, comfortable and the culmination of their dream, the Smiths are pleased with the business end of their project. The energy efficient components are saving them money with every change in the weather. They also believe that the house’s 5+ Energy Star – the highest possible -- rating will add to the long-term value, and make a difference should they ever decide to sell. 
“Our community is beginning to express an awareness of this type of building,” Juli notes, “and I find people to be curious and inquisitive about it.”
Moreover, experience with the down economy has verified what they hoped would happen: the green building movement has been the one bright spot in the construction world. As Juli says, “People want healthier homes and they want a healthier environment!”