A building consultant practices what he preaches by retrofitting his home for healthy and productive living

When Dan Cote bought this run-down property on Woodstock Avenue in Portland, he wanted to take everything he had learned about high-performance building and building science from his day job as a technician and consultant for Conservation Services Group and pack it into the structure and the lot. He pretty much lived in the middle of his work for the next several years.

Beauty and building science

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Dan’s project is how well he has combined all the technical details with a truly beautiful home, inside and out. From color schemes to flashing details, from plant selection to thermal bypasses, Dan’s home and lot show both right and left brain prowess.

On the outside, Dan dreamed up the eave-overhang green roof. “I spent a lot of time looking at my beautiful secondhand Doug fir doors out back, wondering how I could protect them without an overhang so low that it becomes all that you see,” Dan relates. “In the end, I decided, why fight it; do something attractive on the overhang.” The result is planter boxes full of hardy sedums, minimally attached and flashed in such a way that it does not affect the water management capacity of the roof. “The overhang is a stepped-down add-on to the roof, completely separate. I used a self-healing membrane on the overhang, gooped [sealed] each of the six fasteners securing the planters, and then left the soffit open to dry readily.”

On the inside, Dan’s big thing is durable, low-maintenance floor surfaces. “I really liked the pre-finished bamboo because it is a rugged, low-maintenance material, but I thought the kitchen needed something a bit more interesting as well,” says Dan. With a box full of tile odds and ends, Dan began planning a mosaic right in the center of the kitchen floor. Dan chuckles: “It was like doing a puzzle without the picture on the box.”

Dealing with a “hammock” roof

It is not uncommon for the rafters in old bungalows like Dan’s to be grossly undersized. His rafters were rough-cut 2x4s that sagged nearly two inches in the center. Dan got all but about 3/8 of an inch back in two ways: having each rafter bear directly on the new knee-wall studs (reducing the length of the rafter runs) and sistering both sides of each rafter with plywood gussets.

A tough flashing detail at the bathroom corner window

Dan’s downstairs bathroom has a nifty two-window corner off the back side of the house. The problem is that the back window on the corner is less than a foot from where the back addition roof intersects the main part of the house. This meant that getting the water-resistive barrier and window flashing details and interconnection right was critical for water management. Dan said, “With the housewrap interior to the exterior rigid foam insulation, it was pretty easy to tie the window flashing and WRB together. Then tucking the kick-out flashing behind the step flashing, which were tucked under the WRB, sealed the deal.” Dan mocked all this up ahead of time, including a change in exterior cladding just above this window, to make sure he had it right when the window and housewrap were installed.

“Habitat for Hu-Dan-ity”

So Dan really did all this work in his spare time? Not entirely; Dan is a creative guy and conjured up his “Habitat for Hu-Dan-ity” work crew. You invite your best and most loyal friends over for beer, barbecue, and building. It’s sort of a dude ranch for building science; Dan gets a bunch of free labor and they all get some on-the-job training they can use on their own projects. This explains quite a bit about how low Dan’s cost per square foot is for this gut rehab. Dan scratches his chin and adds, “I suspect that my total project cost might double if we factor in the real labor costs.”

Urban agriculture

Dan’s lot is as high performance as his home: about 1,000 square feet of his 7,500-square-foot lot is raised beds of vegetables and fruits:

• Three varieties of squash, including Dan’s favorite, Boston Marrow
• Four varieties of tomatoes, including Italian Heirloom, Japanese Black Trifele, and Yellow-Red Beauty
• Three varieties of potatoes
• Lettuce
• Spinach
• Garlic onion
• Cabbage
• Bok choi
• Full complement of herbs
• Blueberries
• Strawberries

The raised beds are elevated by at least six inches of local compost and top soil so that Dan essentially is growing above (not in) the untested urban soil below.