Their story began with a desire to have minimal impact on their site, address the natural slope and be as sustainable as possible. To address site impact, we kept the garage up the hill to minimize the driveway length and backed the house into the hill to help maintain the original site topography. At the house, we started with the first rule in being green: make the footprint smaller and more efficient. At only 1750 sf, this home has an open kitchen-dining-living space with adjacent tv loft, three bedrooms, two bathrooms, laundry and pantry. Many of the spaces are relatively small, but are uniquely defined by altering ceiling heights, wall heights, a floor change or a window to visually connect rooms together, but retaining an identity for each space.
Among the many energy conservation strategies within the house, we used light tubes into spaces along the earth-bermed wall, added clerestory windows along the interior hallway, oriented the house for passive solar gain optimized by concrete floors for thermal mass heat storage and extended the roof overhangs, used solar collectors to heat water, and incorporated radiant heating in the floor. For water conservation strategies, we plumbed for greywater landscape irrigation, collected roof rainwater and restricted the pluming in the house to one wall along the back of the house. Additionally, we incorporated a unique heating system called Annualized Geo Solar, developed by Don Stephens. For this (in brief), we capture the heat from under the metal roof and use small external fans to pull the heat underneath the house to heat the soil to then be released back into the house during the winter months. To sum up, we are very proud to say this home received the Built Green® Washington “Eastern Washington Custom Home” award for 2009.