Green Building Elements

Renovating and ‘re-using’ older homes may be one of the greenest forms of construction. But fixing up an old house tends to be a highly individual endeavor, and the lessons learned while retrofitting a single home are difficult to adapt to larger-scale applications.

In spite of this, Lorraine Gauthier, co-founder of the socially-conscious Toronto design studio Work Worth Doing, has identified a housing type which offers a high degree of consistency across a large number of homes: post-war housing. Post-war homes, built to accommodate returning WWII veterans, are still a part of the landscape throughout Canada and the United States, and many of these aging homes have poor energy performance. By assembling a team of designers and other sustainable building experts to retrofit a single home in the Toronto area (as part of an undertaking known as the Now House™ project), it is hoped that a formula can be created and then applied to literally millions of homes.

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The goal of the first Now House is to create a near zero energy home, one that reduces greenhouse gas emissions by more than half. Key additions to the home include:

• Better insulation
• Increased daylighting
• Energy-efficient windows
• Low-flow fixtures
• CFL lightbulbs
• Energy-Star Appliances
• A gray-water heat-recovery system
• Solar power

The first Now House is located in Topham Park, Toronto, and construction began on Earth Day of 2008. Homeowners in that neighborhood were invited to participate in a collaborative effort to renovate their homes, and currently 200 homes in the community are slated for refurbishment. It is hoped that the model established in Topham Park will proceed to a national rollout. According to the Now House website, it is estimated that there are one million wartime houses in Canada which are similar to one another in structure, and an additional 4.5 million located in the United states.

To view progress on construction of the first Now House, watch: http://nowhouseproject.com/forum/

The Now House Project received major funding by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation and RBC Royal Bank.

Image Credit: The Now House™ Project

For more articles on retrofitting and recycling buildings, see:

Vancouver Adaptive Reuse

Retrofit Radiant Heating

Weekend Review: The World at Home: A Household Guide to Building

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