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Green Budget Blower

Whiner alert: We're in the middle of a heat wave and I'm packing boxes to move back in to our still-incomplete house. At the moment, Ms. Perky is nowhere to be seen.

You'd think people would be happy to get feedback on their products, right? To that end, after writing my last post as a subpar review of TimberSoy wood stain, I called to get a response from the manufacturer, Eco Safety Products.

I didn't realize until far into the conversation that I was speaking with John Bennett, the president of the company. It was like one of those frustrating conversations you have with a service rep who has minimal information and/or control. First he gave me all the same advice that my dealer got when he called--no wood conditioner or prep needed, no mixing the sealer with the stain. When I described how the stain soaked in impossibly fast into the pine, blotching the floors, Bennett explained that some woods are more porous than others and will soak up stain too fast. And if they're very porous, he told me, you need to lay down a base coat of the stain without any tint first, and that seals the wood.

How would we know this? Does it appear on the side of the can? No. Did anybody tell us when we called ahead looking for advice? No. Does it appear on the more detailed instructions on their website? No. Basically, his response was that each wood has different qualities and there's no way they can direct you sufficiently unless you call tech support--but they're closed weekends, the two days we did the job.

Not that tech support would have helped necessarily. The website does say you can dilute with up to 25 percent water to make it go on more smoothly. "But I wouldn't recommend that on pine floors," he added, "because you shouldn't have any trouble at all with those."

In our case, we diluted by a whopping 67 percent, using a mix of water and sealer, before we could get it to work smoothly. Bennett wouldn't recommend that either, since he insisted you need the stain to lock in separately before you put on sealer.

Neither of us backed down from our positions, and it's clear he's not adding any more info to the website on how to use the stuff. But that's not the point. For me it was really a green economics lesson, though one I've only slowly been learning over the months. People complain about the extra cost of green products, but the real cost, I've found, is the additional labor they often involve. Often, like in this case, it's a new product for the contractor, which means a lot of trial and error (on my budget) to get it right. That labor budget's about to decrease, just in time: our contractor leaves town for the summer, so we move into pretty much total DIY mode.

By the way, after all the extra effort, the floors look great.

© The Green Guide, 2008

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Stained, Sealed and Suckered

My mother taught me that you don't return presents unless it's to exchange a size, you don't send back a restaurant dish you ordered just because you don't like it, and if you can't say something nice, you shouldn't say anything at all.

So this week I flex my green-materials muscle to demand that we get something safer and healthier to finish the wood floors. Our local green building supplier Jeff Rogers at New England Green Building recommends Ecoprocote's TimberSoy stain (bio-based, zero VOCs) and Acri-Soy clear sealer (no hazardous materials). Legare, our builder, has a few questions: Do they also make a wood conditioner that you'd use before putting down the stain? Jeff calls the manufacturer, Eco Safety Products LLC to inquire. No conditioner required, they tell him, because of the way the product is made. Also no to L's question about whether we can mix some stain into the sealer: You need to stain first, then seal separately.

We buy a few little sample cans to try out colors and see how it spreads on some small pieces of flooring. We come up with a color combo of birch and mahogany, Chum leaves town for the weekend, and we leave the job to Legare, the master builder.

Skip ahead to Saturday, when I pop by to see how it's going. Not so good. Like my mom, Legare never has a bad word to say, but he is definitely ticked off. The stain spreads as if the flooring were a paper towel--there's no way he can wipe it off fast enough, and every drip leaves a permanent drip-shaped stain. In half an hour of painstaking work he's only managed to cover about 16 square feet.

The rest of the afternoon is an experiment in dilution, as Legare tries various methods to water down the product and get it to flow more smoothly. Eventually he settles on a one-third Timber Soy, one-third sealer, one-third water mix that seems to work well enough to get a thin coat of birch down. "Okay?" he asks. He looks totally wrung out. It's after 5 o'clock, and I don't have the heart, or the additional funds, to send him back to work to test out the system mixing in a second color. I put the gallon of unused mahogany in my car for my next trip to the hardware store. If my mother were still alive, I'm sure she'd be disappointed.

Read Part Two.

© The Green Guide, 2008

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Dirty Pretty Things

As a kid I thought it would be cool to follow in my dad's footsteps and become an architect. I designed my first house about age 12, using one of his linoleum samples to create a round white house with an interior courtyard. My dad didn't think much of it--"What, are you going to have pie-shaped rooms?" he asked. Things continued downhill after that. At 15 I failed the aptitude test in spatial relations. The next year I had an impossible time trying to lay out yearbook pages, and by 17 I put my design aspirations to rest.

The National Association of Home Builders recently chose this year's Green Building Award Winners. (Click here to see last year's winners.) Maybe some of their creators should have followed my lead. Without embarrassing any single design firm too much--I'm sure they might be very nice people--let's just say a lot of them mix elements of Levittown, New York and Tony Soprano's house in the ways of many a woefully familiar subdivision.

Seems what's driving green building has little to do with aesthetics and design principles and a lot to do with R-values. You take your CAD architectural design software, plug in some foam insulation, Energy Star windows, and bamboo floors, and poof: green design.

As Michigan architect and blogger Philip Proefrock puts it,"Too often, green is being used as the determining factor in a project in place of good design."

If you're into triangles, check out the Slate discussion on the problem with solar home design by one of my heroes, architect / historian / writer Witold Rybczynski: "They tended to resemble wedges of cheese. That's what happens when a single factor--how you heat a building--is given precedence over all the rest."

I can't believe it has to be that way. One of last year's runners-up caught my eye: a place called the Berry Residence by Chandler Design-Build in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. There's a place a person could actually enjoy living in. The funny thing is, when I called the builder, Michael Chandler (his wife Beth Williams is the designer), he told me that yes, one of their projects was a finalist, but not this one. They didn't even enter the Berry Residence, but it seemed to have caught the eye of somebody at NAHB. Chandler thinks the BerryResidence is more interesting than the actual finalist, so he left it as is.

He also directed me to their 2006 runner-up, the Vidra-Moody house. Not only is it a fabulous-looking place, but I love what he writes about their approach. "Many of the ‘demonstration green' homes we are seeing are in the 200-dollar-per-square-foot range and cost $800,000 to well over a million dollars to house a single family. It is hard for me to reconcile the word ‘sustainable' with a home that costs a quarter million dollars per occupant. This house was built at a price that is affordable for a young family with two kids that just needed a roof over their head that suited their lifestyle and fit their values. What this house really represents is an attempt to maximize green for your green."

Beautiful, green and on a budget: my kind of place.

© The Green Guide, 2008

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