Bloom Where You Are Planted
(Be Green Where You Grow!)

Nearly every website or publication about “Green Building” begins with an introduction to proper “Site Selection.” Most will then proceed to talk about things like solar orientation, greenfield sites, brownfield sites, wetlands, topography, etc.

It’s all valuable information, but the fact is most buyers will choose a home in an existing neighborhood development that meets the needs of their family. In most cases, the desire to be “green” becomes secondary to other lifestyle factors, including jobs, children, schools, elderly parents, financial situation, etc.

Forget our carbon footprint!
We had to find a location to
plant our four sets of real feet.

Like most families looking for a new home, we were committed to an area of about five square miles just to keep our children in the same school district. Forget our carbon footprint! We had to find a location to plant our four sets of real feet.

Only one neighborhood met all our criteria: Pleasant Oaks, a lovely, new semi-rural development in northwest Guilford County.

Somewhere between the decision to build in Pleasant Oaks and actually putting money down on a lot in Spring 2007, the idea of “building green” began to take shape. Gradually, the idea of incorporating a few green elements into our new home blossomed into Greenspiration—a high performance home that would still fit seamlessly into an existing neighborhood.

Our mission was to build a home that looked perfectly mainstream, yet performed much better and was substantially more environmentally friendly.

Matching the Lot with the Plan
We had the neighborhood. We had the builder. It was now a matter of selecting the lot and a houseplan.

As a writer for the HVAC industry, I knew site selection and building orientation would impact the performance of the home. In simple layman’s term, if you live in the south (as we do) building a house with a wall of windows facing due west so that the afternoon turns your house into an oven and blinds you with glare between 3PM and 7PM is neither energy efficient or desirable. That’s where proper orientation comes in.

I’ll sum up what must have been about 50 hours of research on the subject: We needed to pick a house and a lot that would maximize southern sun exposure while minimizing east and west sun exposure.

Admittedly, this is an oversimplification. But when you factor in the fact that we had to choose from existing, pre-surveyed lots (like most people) and we needed a large flat backyard for our two “rising soccer stars”, this almost immediately narrowed down our lot choices to just a couple.

We chose the lot shown here because it met our 3 primary criteria:
(1) It was in the neighborhood we desired
(2) It provided room for a large, flat backyard
(3) It gave us unobstructed southern sun exposure

Now all we had to do was pick a plan that would work well with the lot we chose. Enter our first BIG challenge.

According to neighborhood guidelines, the front of our house would have to face west on the lot that we chose. This meant that the SIDE, not the front or the back, would be our south facing wall. This presented a problem since we needed space on the south side of the house to place most of our windows for proper solar orientation.

Why is this so? Because south sun is GOOD for warming the house in the winter and also providing year round daylighting, while east and west is BAD for causing unwanted heat gain in spring, summer and fall. The advantages of solar orientation vary depending on your geographic location. Northern states have more to gain, since they have longer winters and a greater heating load to overcome.

Finding a houseplan to match our lot would not have been a problem if architects designed houses with the long axis running front-to-back as opposed to side-to-side. However, most homes are designed to look their biggest from the street. If a lot happens to face south or north, you’ve got it made. If your house faces west (like ours would have to) you will probably either need to have a home custom designed for passive solar heating/solar tempering, or be willing to look through 483,971 plans to find one that meets all your desires and still provides space for windows on the side.

Not wishing to spend the extra money to have a home custom designed, I started logging hours (and hours) on the internet, searching for a plan that was at least as deep as it was wide.

I can’t stress to you how difficult this was, especially given our other criteria. Houses simply aren’t designed this way. And, if they are, their unique lines tend to make them look rather conspicuous—the exact the opposite of our Greenspiration mission. Even my searches for “passive solar” houseplans yielded disappointing results. The houses were usually smaller than what we desired and few, if any, retained any semblance of a traditional appearance. So, I pressed on, hoping to find an existing plan that would offer some opportunity for solar tempering.

[original plan image & rendering]

At last I found what I thought I was looking for in “Ambrose Boulevard Plan NDG-983B “by the Nelson Design Group. This attractive, French Country design, was almost as deep as it was wide, providing extra room for those south facing windows. More important, it met all our other criteria:

• A 2-car attached garage, adjacent to just one “non-living” area of the house (so we wouldn’t be spending extra money to heat or cool the house as a result of heat loss or heat gain through this unconditioned area).
• 1st floor master bedroom with large closet
• Large kitchen, open to the family room
• Downstairs home office area
• 2 additional upstairs bedrooms
• A bonus room for the kids and/or overnight guests
• 2 ½ bathrooms
  
• Approximately 3000 sq. ft. of living space

Modifying Plan for Greater Overall Efficiency
Even though Ambrose Boulevard NDG-983B seemed close to perfect, we made a few changes to improve the overall efficiency and make it better meet our needs. These changes included:

• Flipping the plan so that the side with the greatest opportunities for windows would face south on our lot.
• Flooring in the vaulted ceiling above the family room, making this our bonus room rather than the area above the garage. This is a more efficient approach to a bonus room since it takes less energy to heat or cool a space above an already conditioned space than a non-conditioned space like a garage. Also, rooms with vaulted ceilings are notoriously difficult heat and cool. We could live without the “lofty” aesthetics of a vaulted ceiling, especially if it helped keep our utility costs down.
• Modifying window placement and sizing to optimize opportunities for day-lighting and solar tempering. We added more windows on the south side by including some in the kitchen and dining room. We also eliminated or minimized some of the windows on the east and west. Technically, we still had more windows one the east side than was ideal, but the shade provided by the grilling porch would help offset some of that heat gain.
• Adding a trellis along the side of the house to provide some shading of south side windows to help prevent overheating during shoulder seasons when the sun sits lower on the horizon, increasing heat gain.
• Altering the upstairs bathroom to provide a full Jack-n-Jill arrangement for our kids, who fight when they brush their teeth if they have to stand side by side. This invariably leads to missed school buses, which is a bad start to everyone’s day. This change was aimed at conserving Mom & Dad’s energy.
  

Thanks to the skill and patience of the Nelson Design Group, this is what we came up with: