Image Credit: Daniel Morrison
Image Credit: Daniel Morrison Green building needs a Victorian Renaissance I went to a builders conference once and kept hearing people say 'green building is too expensive.' I'm glad beautiful building wasn't too expensive during the Victorian era. In fact, it was too expensive before steam-powered saws and shapers were built. Before, all this stuff would have been done by hand. When (steam) power tools were invented, a small crew of carpenters could double their output with ten times the aesthetic quality.
Image Credit: Daniel Morrison This is the Victorian that Pete and I visited. As we climbed up the roof, Pete looked at the lower gutter and said "Oh, on tight lots you have to share a gutter." But as it turns out, the gutter Pete was looking at is the neighbor's gutter. This is the gutter for the Fox residence -- an integrated gutter. The water goes down the scupper and into a rain garden. As it turns out, the neighbor's gutter had rotted out years ago and rotted Mr. & Mrs. Fox's walls and foundation along with it.
Image Credit: Daniel Morrison Plenty of room for PV While the rest of the country is complaining about the price of PV, California is installing them everywhere. Every panel that goes up is coal that isn't dug up and burned. The downside? What could have been a great roof top deck is now a power plant.
Image Credit: Daniel Morrison I have a soft spot in my heart for Victorian houses because I met my wife restoring one.
Image Credit: Daniel Morrison Not much to say about these except that I liked the patterns
Image Credit: Daniel Morrion Basic boxes decorated differently If at all. The house on the left is a slight spanish flair, the house on the right, a little more modern. What do they have in common? A wall. Remodelers in San Francisco have a much different reality than remodelers in New England
Image Credit: Daniel Morrison More tightly-knit houses
Image Credit: Daniel Morrison
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We drove to Lillian Wilson’s (Alex and Jerelyn’s daughter) apartment to borrow a bike to power our booth at West Coast Green. Pete and Lillian then had to go to the airport to pick up Lillian’s parents, Alex and Jerelyn Wilson, the founders of our company, BuildingGreen. I decided to walk back to the Convention center so that I could shoot photos of the city. It was about a five mile walk and I only stumbled into the wrong neighborhood once. Tip: San Francisco has a lot of hills, and those hills don’t really show up on a Google Map on a Blackberry. If you set out on a five mile walk, keep that in mind.
Here are some of the photos I shot on the way to set up the booth. I didn’t shoot any photos of the “wrong neighborhood” or any of the cash exchanges I witnessed as I wandered through said neighborhood.
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