Well it is time to tout our sponsors...who have been amazing! The house will be open for community education around green building and see the products that our sponsors supplied in place! PLEASE reserve your opportunity to learn about this special building and home. Sign up at the bottom of this page.
Look for a full feature article on this LEED project in NY HOUSE magazine later in the Spring of 2008. They had asked to have the article in the July 2007 GREEN issue, yet we all felt it would be best served if the house was in a greater finished state...so we wait!
The house was part of the Green Building tour last fall and the article from NY House Magazine has been added for your reading pleasure!
Read the Poughkeepsie Journal Focus article in two documents.
Focus article one
Focus article continuedCable Vision News did an outstanding job on a news segment around the project. We have currently having it made to view on the website...so watch for it soon!
Tacinelli Flooring has a local reality cable show! They shot a segment on site in early December and it will be ready to air in early January. For a fun filled show have a look at www.spinitupproductions.com Episode 3. The segment begins at 12 minutes 55 seconds and goes until 16 minutes 40 seconds. They did a great job! Thank you Charlie!
Here is the article from NY House about the Green Building Tour in the fall of 2007:
HOW GREEN IS MY VALLEY?
Highlights from the Green Buildings Open House tour.
BY JESSICA BARRY, PHOTOS BY JULIE NOVAK
On an unusually warm October afternoon, I set out to visit a number of houses on the Green Buildings tour in the Hudson Valley. The fact that I only got to two of the dozen or more homes suggests how compelling I found each project's story of impulse, intention, and execution—and how short a day can be.
Green, sustainable homes have virtually no unifying visual look. Wildly different designs and technologies can be used to achieve the same objective: energy savings and a healthy indoor environment. The photos shown above prove that. The common thread, however, is the whole-house approach. "Viewing the house as a system is the fulcrum of greening a home," explains designer Jordan Valdina. Valdina designed the home of Deborah Monroe in East Fishkill, the first house on my tour.
As I drove down Monroe's tree-lined and dusty driveway to visit her project, which is slated to receive LEED for Homes certification from the USGBC, autumn leaves of orange, yellow, and brown were falling around the house, and it was there I spotted the home's first visible green feature: the siding. Many conventional homes are built today using vinyl siding, a product whose popularity is based on price and durability, not virtue: Vinyl is highly toxic in its manufacture, use, and disposal. In fact, a catchy environmental mantra has developed around it: "No vinyl and that's final." Monroe's house features a deep, bucolic red siding that's composed of fiber-cement, a material that's highly durable, relatively benign in its manufacture, and completely resistant to fire and insects.
Entering the house, I walked through a vestibule—a green feature itself, as it provides a buffer of air between inside and out—and immediately felt the effect of one of the most elegant green features of the home: the passive cooling and ventilation system. Simple in concept and complex in its realization, the design involves calculating a careful balance of thermal mass to glazing: too much thermal mass and the result will be like a castle, always cold; too little thermal mass and the house will be too warm. Valdina calculated the thermal mass and balanced it against the temperature gradient from the basement, built partially underground, where the earth is a constant 52 degrees F. Open some windows and the cooler air from below convects its way through the house to collect at the top in the cupola. A ceiling fan sits just under the cupola to assist the warmer air out the cupola's windows. In this way a constant circulation of air is created, which keeps the home comfortably cool while controlling humidity.
Other green features in Monroe's house project include Energy Star lighting and appliances, high insulation levels and air-sealing, low-e windows, paints containing no volatile organic compounds, efficient framing to minimize waste, a metal roof, and hook-ups for future installation of geothermal, solar-thermal, and solar-electric systems. More than half of the wood products used in the construction of Monroe's house are FSC certified. As a third-party, independent-certification organization, the Forest Stewardship Council is the only wood product certification program accepted by the U.S. Green Building Council. FSC-certified wood products come from forests that use careful forest management to sustain biodiversity and water quality when harvesting trees.
