Life At Villa Boswell

Many people consider eco-friendly design and building to be decidedly un-friendly on the budget.  We have had numerous conversations with various builders who consistently say to us, "Oh, I would love to build green, but I just can’t afford it."  So, when we committed to building our El Granada House using green-friendly materials, we were suprised to learn that this wasn’t necessarily true.  For our house, the cost per square foot of "stick" building was actually more than building using SIPs, or Structural Insulated Panels. 

We are using ThermaSteel SIP panels for our framing and expect to come under budget, even though these panels will be shipped to us from the East Coast.  (Note: we realize that shipping is not green, but because of our lot requirements, we needed the lightest panels possible.)  If memory serves, the panels are equal in cost to lumber, but the real savings comes in labor costs.  The panels are pre-engineered and when delivered to the site, assembly is achieved without the need for skilled carpentry.  We’ll keep you posted on the final numbers.

In the meantime, check out this fabulous video by Michelle Kaufmann from Dwell. 

http://www.dwell.com/daily/video/9298406.html

This video shows the use of Sketchup within Google Earth at the end of the video, which is way cool.  What also excited me was the notion of building using highly efficient processes, and the water reclamation portion of the design as well.  I’d also like to see "softer" designs achieved with the same efficiency, as well as multi-family sites designed as a whole entity.  Imagine!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 28th, 2007 at 3:16 pm and is filed under Architecture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.