The manager of our East Coast design team, Kyle Barber, RA, CPHC, NCARB has recently swapped roles. While Barber is the architect for our client’s high craft home dreams, when he and his wife made the decision to design and build their own house, he got to experience the process he has immersed himself in from the other side.
Barber says, “It's hard to design your own house, because when you're designing other people's houses, it's sort of easy to say, ‘Oh, yeah, this is what you should do,’ or ‘Maybe you should do it differently next time.’ ‘Here's what you should do over here’, or whatever, right? For my house, it's like, ‘I'm only doing this once’. It gives me a whole new perspective, by being the homeowner, on what the homeowner goes through on that side of what we do.”
“I'm the architect of record, I engineered it, most of it. I’m the GC. I'm a certified passive house consultant. And, this time, I’m the homeowner.”
A wearer of many hats, Barber began this massive undertaking with the goal of building a legacy home for his family. Barber is passionate about high-performance building and an advocate for using sustainable materials in the design + build environment. He strove to adhere to his beliefs while conceptualizing his own legacy home.
“I think the catalyst was that I'm at a point in my career where I understand what I think is the right way to build a house for health, comfort, and durability. This was really about providing a legacy home for our family and providing a house that I feel is not only comfortable, good looking, and long-lasting, but also ultimately long term and healthy in terms of the materials we're using and the air quality for my kids as they grow up.”
“My wife and I went back and forth on if we wanted to build a new home or retrofit an existing house. The environmental activist side of me said we should renovate our existing home and not build a new house. There was another part of me that said it was going to take a lot of money to get to get it where we wanted it to be, doing a renovation. It was a big conversation in our house for a long time”
Their family deliberation concluded that to make a long-term home what they needed, the obvious choice was to build it from the ground up exactly to their desires and specifications.
Barber continued, “There was a big part of me that said, okay, I think I can live with the carbon footprint of building a new house because I know that the housing stock is lacking already. So, with my skill set and my knowledge, why wouldn't I add a good building to the housing stock? Right?”
“My wife has been on-board just as much as I have, which is a blessing for me. Because she understands the value of the way we build and the value of good indoor air quality. She has an environmental engineering background, so she's done air quality assessments, commercial properties and things; she gets it.”
There’s added value of peace of mind that the Barber’s will have engaged a known commodity by a team that they trust that will ensure a home is efficient and safe. To do this, Barber and his wife set and confirmed a couple of nnnegotiable objectives for the project.
“All the window rough openings are not foamed. I'm just packing it full of insulation and taping the joint. I'm also using as little caulk as possible. Part of that is about reducing VOC’s, but part of it is proving something about not overusing caulk and spray foam. So that's one goal. That's why I wanted to go for passive house certification is to substantiate that you can do this.”
“The other goal is to be low carbon and to think about that when we're working through all of the details. We always wanted to do slab on grade, but we wanted to minimize concrete because of its carbon footprint. The foam under the slab is foam. BUT it’s the only foam on the project. I’ve been calling it almost foam free. The important thing is the foam allowed us to get rid of the concrete slab and overall was a lower carbon decision.
Barber expanded on the thought, “There's a concrete slab detail that's been gaining a little bit of traction in the industry, and while it’s not completely new, there are some builders doing it and it's something I've been wanting to try for a while. The idea is that for a slab on grade house, your concrete slab has no real structural value. It's just sitting there, it's acting more just like a barrier, like an air barrier. I realized that with the right detailing, you don't need the concrete slab at all.”
“So, we decided to try it. The foundation is thick layers of foam and then two layers of plywood. And that's the subfloor. You put a vapor barrier above the foam underneath the plywood and the foam acts like it's a plywood slab basically. It just floats there, like your concrete would. It’s almost like a base under a stone patio or stone pavers. We're leveling it, and then we'll set the foam. Then the foam gets stacked and then the vapor barrier goes over top of that, then the plywood goes over the top of that sitting on top. There's a little bit different detailing, but it eliminates all that concrete carbon footprint.”
Fundamentally, the foundation and the core of the house were the most important elements to Kyle and his family. There were other factors both structurally and aesthetically that had to take a back seat to making sure their efficiency and safety goals were achieved through the concrete-free foundation and a high-performance enclosure.
“The enclosure came at a premium. From the very beginning we said that the enclosure is what it is. Everything else is variable. But the enclosure, is a large part of why we're doing this.”
These are just the beginning stages of an intensive process that Barber has ample experience navigating. With an high-performance enclosure erected and the eco-forward foundation to follow, one thing for certain is that the house will be efficient, safe, and constructed for long term living.
Stay tuned ...
