In December of 2006 I wrote a blog entry about my mailbox design. This entry was later posted on From the ground Up in March of 2007. either way it was quite early for me to have a mailbox design for a house that was only in conceptual form.  Now as we near the start of December, 2008 I am pleased to say that the concept is now a reality, but not without out a little help and a few modifications.

Although there are some decent design for mailbox out on the market these days most of them a really fairly pricey, and to be quite honest, most of the coolest looking modern ones are design for urban settings where the mail carrier goes door-to-door rather than in a suburban area where the carriers drive by boxes lined up along the street. For me this meant that I would need to spend a little time and energy to design and build my own mailbox in order to get exactly what I wanted. The trouble sometimes with being a designer is that you often times can envision it but you aren’t necessarily versed in the ways of making it, this was the case with my mailbox design. I had designed a tall rectangular shaped form to be divided into three sections. The first section would be a concrete finished base. The second section a light transmitting layer of some kind that would hold the house numbers. The third layer, and the one that posed the problem for me was the actual functioning mailbox, which I designed to be constructed out of steel. The problem, I don’t weld. As a matter of fact I didn’t even know where to get the steel I was looking for, let alone how to fabricate it— lucky for me I know people that do.

This past summer we spent a long weekend with friends at a cabin enjoy some of central Wisconsin’s beauty. Over a breakfast one morning I was telling my good friend Steve Severance about my mailbox and he said it would be something he could easily build for me. I sketched the design and the dimensions down on a scrap piece of paper for him to take home. Because Steve lives in Southern Wisconsin I knew that the next time I would see him probably wouldn’t be until one of our other annual get togethers later in the year. In August I saw some photos of the box in fabrication and learned that it was constructed out of scrap steel that came in a shipment from overseas. Then in mid-November Stacy and I made the trip to Southern Wisconsin for one of our annual get togethers, and to pick-up our prized mailbox. Not that this should be a surprise (knowing the kind of person Steve is) but I have to say I was super pleased with the way it looked and all the extra details that he had put into it —Thanks Steve, you’re an awesome friend.

If you’ve ever thought about constructing your own mailbox, there is one thing you need to remember, once you put the mailbox up it’s no longer yours, its the property of the U.S. Postal service. This means that before you go and throw any old box up, you need to make sure that it meets the standards of the U.S. Post office. As a rule the mailboxes that you purchase at your local hardware store or home improvement center have been constructed to these standards. In my case I needed to arrange for an inspection of the box via the postmaster at my local branch. I was a little nervous about this, but as it turns out there was nothing to worry about. The maibox needed to meet some general standards for size and access along with making sure that it was safe for operation, all of which my mailbox more than complied with. in addition to the mailbox construction we talked quickly about the location of the box (being on the curve of a cul-de-sac the placement was little tricky) so that was accessible and yet woldn’t have issues with the snowplow clipping it, and then we were good to go.

Over a the long holiday weekend I decided it was perfect time to put the mailbox up. We have had a rather nice run of warm weather for this time of year and the ground still hadn’t taken a deep freeze so I was able to get my posts set in place for the base. I decided that instead of pouring a concrete base I would use concrete backerboard and attach it to a base that I prebuilt, this was one of a several modification from my original idea that would be needed. For he second section I used left over pieces polycarbonate instead of plexi or glass. When I went to get the house numbers that matched the one on the building I found out there were discontinued and they were out of ones, of which I needed two. I had to run by Menards to pick up some pieces of wood and while I was there I found some great looking pin mounted modern styled house numbers, that worked perfectly. I was also able to find a solar panel and floor light at Menards that happend to be on sale. I mounted the floor light on the inside of the frame so the polycarb would be illuminated from the inside and the house numbers would be easily seen from the outside.

By noon on Saturday the mailbox was completed and the mail carrier had deposited the first parcel in our new mailbox. By Saturday evening I was able to see the final piece of the mailbox come to life as the solar floor light lit up the front of the mailbox. I have to say I was feeling pretty proud that my design had stayed s true to it’s orginal form almost 2 years from its orginal design.

The original design done in December of 2006. I wasn’t even sure of the house numbers at the time, but got fairly close with my guess.

The finished mailbox in place.

I think the box nicely mimics both the structure of the home but also the use of materials.

This little solar panel gathers light that eventually illuminates the inside of the mailbox, making the house numbers visual at night.

The LED solar flood light puts out a fair mount of light for a good 4 to 5 hours from what I could tell. Long enough to make sure the pizza man can find our house at night.

This past year our house was an award winner for energy conservation and design from SIPA (the national organization for the Structurally Insulated Panel Industry). As a result of this honor an author of several home books by the name of Sheri Koones contacted us in consideration for our house to be featured in her newest book about pre-fab homes. Our house isn’t traditionally what most people invision when they say pre-fabricated homes, but because the walls of our house were constructed of SIPs in a factory our house is consider a pre-fab.

Late last week I received my second call from Sheri Koones letting me know that our house had indeed been selected to be featured in her latest book. I will be provideing her a couple of different images of the house for publication. One of the images that was requested was that of the house being constructed of the SIPs panels while the second is a finshed exterior shot. Since the current leafless surroundings of the house are less attractive than some of the shots taken this past summer when we had full foliage, I’ve decided to include one of those images instead.

So what does this type of recognition mean. My hope is that 20 or 30 years from now some of the awards and recognition mean that our house is valued at more than if we would have built something a little more traditional, and a lot less energy efficient. I would imagine the energy efficiency part will prove to be true, but as far as the recognition paying dividends, we’ll just have to wait and see.

The boxes go into place.

The walnut top goes on.

The boxes get a coat of paint and the top gets a layer of poly.

The shelves are installed.

The doors go on and the cabinet is complete.

And now…

…the door to our bedroom…

..finally closes!
In our bedroom there is a small closet space that was designed to feature a nice built-in cabinet. This was something we had originally decided would not be a part of our initial design, build project, so in the interim period we would place our old dresser in the space. Unfortunately the dresser proved to be about 1/2″ to deep to fit into the space and allow the bedroom door (which is on a track) to slide shut. So for the past 10 months or so we have not been able to really use the space, and maybe more importantly, we have not been able to seal ourselves off for even a few minutes from the madness of two small children. This alone was enough to prompt me to finally take some action and build these cabinets.

I knew we had a few pieces of walnut plywood that we had saved from the design of our upstairs fire place, so with that in mind, along a quick dicussion on how me might best use the space, I came up with a design. We would divide the space up into three even cabinets. The two outside boxed would be open shelves while the inside box would be slightly recessed to account for doors that would be flush with the surface of the other cabinets. Although I am pretty comfortable working on most projects, the idea of building my own cabinets was a bit daunting. After some close study as to the method applied by our cabinetmaker (Eastvold Custom) I set to work building the frames.

I decided to use MDF to construct the boxes which turned out to be fairly easy to do. I then laid out a template and drilled holes in the boxes along the sides that would be used to hold pins for shelves. We slid the three boxes into place and they fit fairly well. I cut the walnut plywood down and we used it to create a nice countertop for the cabinets. Stacy painted the cabinets white and put a coat of poly on the plywood which really made the entire thing look good.

The one thing that remained to be done was to figure out the doors for the center cabinet. We had a couple extra pieces of walnut plywood around, and had decided that it was a nice connection to the rest of the piece to use those to create the doors. The challenge was that the pieces we had either were not big enough to cover the entire space, or the grains didn’t align so that we could do two doors from one sheet. Stacy came up with the idea that we do two doors. One with a horizontal grain on the top and one with a vertical grain on the bottom that was slightly larger. This solution for the doors turned out to be a nice one.

To finish off the pieces I decided to drill holes in each of the doors to serve as handles. The circles were dual purpose as they tied to the sub-theme of our homes design, while at the same time created an out-of-the-way handle that didn’t interfere with the sliding door like traditional hardware may have done.

After a couple of coats of poly on the doors I was feeling really good about the way the entire cabinet was looking. I was also  pretty proud that we were able to do the entire thing for under a $100’s worth of new material and some leftover pieces of wood.

 
Determining Site location for the panels.

This device helps to measure solar viability during peak hours.

The Kill-A-Watt device helps measure phantom consumption in your home.

With the rising costs of energy putting the pinch on many people’s disposable income, the idea of adding a supplementary energy source (that isn’t tied to the world economy) is very intriguing. This is something that we had originally thought about when our project began but based on some initial research appeared to be financially restricting so we decided against it at the time. Looking back at it, this one of he decisions I wished I would have researched more closely before writing it off. Then this past summer while doing a story on the Eco-Experience at the State fair I met Rebecca Lundberg Owner and President from Powerfully Green. They were featuring a few of the products and services they offer on the Eco-house design and I struck up a short conversation with them about what they offer.

What struck me as most intriguing about Powerfully Green was their consultative approach to solar energy installation. Instead of giving me the typical answers about rising energy costs or guilting me with some environmental responsibility statement they offered solutions to home energy consumption as key. Telling me that one of the services that they do is a site inspection and home energy audit to both assess the viability of solar as an option, but additionally to help the home owners to find ways to reduce their home energy needs. This was something I had not heard of before from the various solar installers I had talked to in the past, so I made arrangements to have an audit done for our house.

Solar site survey
Rebecca and Dan from powerfully green showed up in the later afternoon about a week ago to do the energy audit of our house. This was obviously somewhat different than the one we had done for our EnergyStar rating as it was based on our current needs and consumptions and our potential to off-set those with a solar supplement.

We started by making a trip to the roof of our house where Rebecca and Dan where they did an audit of our site. They started by measuring out the surface area of the roof and all the potential objects (vents etc.) that would be obstacles to work around. Then using a couple of different tools they determined the ideal direction for placement (straight south), and measured the solar potential of the roof during the prime between 9am and 3pm. From there we determined where the system would need to come down off the roof and into the electrical connection to provide service. In our case because we face directly south and have almost no obstructions making or house the ideal setting for both a solar water heating system as well as a photovoltaic solar energy system. After doing the solar site assessment we made our move inside to review a few of our latest energy bills and talk about proper system sizing.

Selling us knowledge
What you would normally except at this time was to get a hard sell on the size and type of system that you need, but instead what we got was quite the opposite. Instead of telling us we needed a system that would completely take us off of commercial energy dependence Rebecca and Dan advised us on ways that we could actually reduce our overall need. Using a little devise called a “Kill-a-Watt Meter” we made a trek through our house identifying devices that were carrying phantom loads. These are devices such as most cable or satellite box receivers that appear to be off to you and I, but are actually continually pulling energy into them at al times. The most surprising was our coffee maker which was taking a good 20 watts and hour when off and unbelievable 900+ watts and hour when it was on— and apparently this is quite common as Rebecca new right where to go to show us the main culprits. From there they shared with us a couple of simple tricks to manage your energy waste through the use of simple things like connecting your devices to power strips and turning the entire strip off when not needed. The Average Minnesotan uses about 815 kwh a month. By just implementing a few of these simple techniques you could easily cut that amount in half and potentially even more if you were really diligent about it. This type of awareness helped them reduce their home energy needs from about 600kwh a month to roughly 200kwh meaning a significant reduction in the size of their system and cost of their month bill to the energy company.

Sizing the system
At our house we use slightly less than the monthly average of 815 kWh a month at about 750 kWh a month. this meant that on an average day we used about 25 kWh. Every kWh per day is equal to 5 200 watt solar panels. However Rebecca recommended against installing a system that met 100% of your need. In part because it was easy to reduce your consumption but additionally because as energy becomes more of an issue more and more of your home appliances will become better at energy conservation. This means that in a few years your system would quickly become over sized for your homes needs, and you would have over invested in the technology. Instead she encouraged us to first try and reduce our use through simple conservation methods and then determine what would be a cost effective system to help supplement our energy needs.

Offering up solutions to both supplement my energy needs with a solar energy systems but more importantly to advise us on ways we could actually reduce our demand, lowering the size and cost of the system we would require by decreasing our over-all energy needs. This type genuine interest in helping me to reduce my energy consumption in an effort to decrease my costs and decrease my carbon footprint was proof to me that Powerfully Green were in this for all the right reasons and that I could trust their advisement. I don’t have plans to put in a system right now but maybe in a few years we’ll make an invest in one, for now we are working at trimming our energy needs on a daily basis.

If you’re interested in a site survey like the one we had you can contact powerfully green via their website and for a small fee they will come out and conduct an entire home audit along with generating a report of their findings for you to reference to.

Dustin Halverson our Landscaper and I work on digging the first of three rather large holes. Each hole was 24″ deep by 36″ in diameter.

The second hole proved to be the toughest as we discovered one of the areas where the concrete trucks that poured the foundation had rinsed out, leaving a rather large slab of concrete for us to remove.

A good shot of shot of all three trees in a row just before we put the last tree in the ground. You can see the one surviving Oak and the Columnar tree in the distance.

I love the both the color of the bark and the shape a motion of the leaves on the Quaking Aspen. I can’t wait to seem the in full foliage next spring.

two years ago when we purchased the lot that we would eventually build our house on it was heavily covered will mature Oaks and a ton of invasive Buckthorn. We had fully expected that pulling the Buckthorn out would make the lot feel more open and give us the ideal setting amongst the beautiful oaks to place our house. Our Architect Michael Huber and taken care to have the survey company note all trees on the lot of over 10″ in diameter so we  could work around and with them to optimize our design. We had positioned the house to face the south with large windows designed to harness the winter sun while the leaves on the big oak trees shielded the windows form the heat in the summer. Our passive solar design seemed to be the perfect “easy green” feature until the following spring. When we arrived on site to clear the scrub brush and Buckthorn we found an settling change had occurred. Of the six large oaks at the front of the lot we had designed around four of them had become consumed by Oak Wilt and would need to be removed. Before we had a chance to extract the four dead trees one of the remaining two trees that was intended to provide the majority of the shade for the large windows had become infected and died within a few days. We were left with only one oak tree to provide shade form the summer sun and it was the smallest, most oddly shaped and least protective of the original group. It was clear that if we wanted to maintain the integrity of our original passive solar design we would need to bring in some new trees.

This summer during the major push to complete our landscaping we brought in a tall Swedish Columnar Aspen. This tree is really more of decorative feature as it will keep its tight column like shape and provide very little sun protection to the majority of the windows. However, this week we purchased 3 large 2″ diameter Quaking Aspens’ to provide coverage this coming summer. The three trees are about 15 to 20′ in height now but will quickly grow upwards of 35′  and provide us with the shade we need during the hottest days of summer.

The tree planting was something we new we were going to do but the timing was something we were unsure of. As it turned out our relatively late date of getting the trees in the ground had it’s advantages. We found several nursery’s in the area that had good prices on trees of this size because it was the end of the planting season. The late planting means that the trees will require a fair amount of water before the go dormant for the winter but fortunately we seem to be getting a fair amount of that over the last few days. As it turns out it also looks like we will be able to capitalize on a local city incentive that reimburses homeowners 50% and up to $200 for planting new trees on or before October 15th.

The exterior of the house fits well with the natural surroundings of the lot.
photo courtesy of Jeff Gallo.

The interior of the house has an open floor plan, giving it a greater sense of size.
photo courtesy of Jeff Gallo.

This rendering of the site shows the integration of the landscaping and structure.
Although there seems to be a growing rise of green friendly modern homes going up across the country, few can claim to be as remarkable as the the Twin Cities own 5ive house. The project is the brainchild of Jeff and Salena Gallo, who after taking a tour of one modern modular home, set themselves out on a course to building what would become Minnesota’s first LEED certified platinum home.

The Gallo’s were not your typical couple entering into the process of building their first new home. They began with the decision to build something modern and environmentally friendly well before it had become all the rage. In 2005 the LEED for home program was just in its infancy stage, but the Gallo’s signed on to be pioneers in the program. They made a conscious effort to look for an architectural partner who shared their same set of values and vision, while being mindful of their budget when designing their new home. After a long thorough process, they settled on Minneapolis Based architectural firm Shelter Architecture. The project and the partnership would prove to be a fruitful one for both parties.

Green from start to finish.
Jeff and Selena had purchased a lot on Minneapolis’ west side that was occupied by a home in disrepair. The lot was cleared of the old structure, but Jeff and Salena made sure that everything that could be saved or recycled, was (about 60% of the old structure was recycled). They then began to break ground on what would come to be known as the 5ive house. The Project would include a variety of alternative materials and building practices both inside and out, all geared toward a green friendly building. Like many green projects, the 5ive house had a focus on making sure the building envelope was as energy efficient as possible. This included pre-cast Thermomass® walls with an R-31 rating, and Energy Star windows and doors. Additionally, they made the exterior elements of he house work for them as well. This included a landscaping plan that was for prairie restoration, a 93% permeable site and rainwater harvesting and irrigation systems.

On the inside of the house the green theme continued. Highly efficiency faucets and toilets, that use a fraction of the water of most household fixtures. A 97% efficient hot water heater was put in, and Jeff and Salena were conscious to select Energy Star Appliances and lighting fixtures. Even cosmetic elements such as countertops, paint, window treatments and even plumbing were selected for their No or low-VOC (Volatile organic compound) ratings, helping to ensure that the homes indoor air quality lived up to the houses environmentally healthy image.

As Minnesota’s first LEED certified residential project and a winner of the Minnesota RAVE award 2008, the 5ive house has also become an incredible resource for other people, including home owners and architects, looking to do the same on their projects. Just another way that this house has had an impact on our future environment.

By the numbers
R-31 insulated walls
R-60 roof
75% drought tolerant landscaping
93% permeable landscape Over 40% construction waste recycled
Over 60% of of land clearing waste recycled
16 SEER (Seasonal Energy Efficiency Ratio) cooling
9 AFUE (Annual Fuel Utilization Efficiency) heating