Green Building in the Charlotte Metro Area

Green Building in the Charlotte Metro Area

A slow moving movement has begun and in the coming months will become a fast paced necessity. Green building has been getting widely accepted by many builders, not only in Charlotte but throughout the country. There are some production builders right now that are going to be displaying a HERS rating score on every house they build to prove the home's efficiency. The new 2012 residential building code is going to up the stakes on energy values throughout the home, and yet I am still seeing opposition from some people in the custom home builders market. The problem stems from trying to take any old house plan that is off the shelf or designed inefficiently and trying to retrofit the home to be energy efficient in the field. This seems like a very frustrating way to do things. I am sure that this would increase costs, have plenty of room for error and slow production. The key thing with green building is that you have to treat each house as a system. The system not only includes the framing, insulation, mechanical systems and the foundation but needs to extend to the designer, home owner, and site conditions. I have spoken to several builders that say that green building is a waste of time or it causes more problems than it solves. To that I say, get better educated or build a better team because you are doing something wrong. Building a tight home does cause other factors of the home to be considered. When building an air tight home, if the builder never accounts for proper ventilation, then the home will fill with moisture and begin to mold. If the HVAC system is not properly sized, then it will not run long enough to dehumidify and will cause a moisture problem. If a sealed crawl space is used without proper positive drainage a water problem will occur. All of these problems can be avoided with proper communication and planning starting with a good home design team. If the HVAC contractor doesn't know that the house is planned for 2x6 studs @ 24" on centers with R-20 spray foam insulation and a conditioned attic then he will not be able to properly size the unit or the duct work. The reverse of that is if the builder specifies these items to the HVAC contractor and for some reason goes back to conventional framing and R-13 batt insulation, then the unit again will not be properly sized. Then we have technical items that will ruin all of the efforts of building green homes like where and how to provide proper drainage planes, flashings and sealants.
    In order to build a truly efficient home, the design and construction documents must be detailed and devised in a way to increase productivity and decrease the amount of resources used in the construction of the home, as well as being an efficient use of space for the way the home owner will live in the home. Assembling a team of professionals that are educated on building science and that will communicate with each other throughout the entire building process is the only way that green building will be cost effective. A proper home design can be made to reduce construction waste by using advanced framing techniques and using proper sheet good dimensions to reduce material cutting. As our industry looks for ways to make green building more affordable, we need to look at changing the ways we do business. It is very inexpensive to have a meeting with the trades to explain what is expected and to educate them on certain aspects of critical installation. It is very expensive and time consuming to ignore this communication which could cause a builder to change out HVAC, plumbing, or lighting equipment if the wrong items were installed or quoted.
      At KDH Residential Designs we have a passion for delivering to our client the best possible system that they can have. A green home doesn't necessarily need expensive gadgets and gizmos. All it needs is to be designed, detailed and built efficiently and tight. Items such as solar panels, geo-thermal heating/cooling systems, spray foam insulation, and recycled building materials obviously factor into building a sustainable home and will continue to become more affordable, but none of these items are needed to build a green home. Call it what you will, a high performance house, a green home, a sustainable home, or whatever catch phase in popular today, the key is to build a team of educated professionals that understand building science. Start with a good home design that is not only tailored to the way the home will be used but tailored to the lot, the climate, the home owner and the overall energy efficiency goals.
     Green is not always something that a consumer can buy. It's a lifestyle change. If you can't afford a 20% water reducing shower head then simply cut four minutes off of your twenty minute shower. If you do buy the water reducing shower head then snow ball the effect by reducing your shower time anyway. If you have solar panels on your house that save you three hundred dollars a year on your energy bill, don't brag to me when buy an Energy Star refrigerator and put the old non rated refrigerator in your garage that costs you four hundred dollars a year to run in a hot unconditioned space. The high performance home is a system and should be properly planned, executed and maintained. The system should include the residential designer, the builder, all of the trades, the mechanical equipment, plumbing fixtures, electrical components, and most of all the home owner. If the home owner doesn't know how to properly maintain or operate the components of the home or if it the system is overly complicated, the system will break down and not be used to it's maximum capacity. It would be like wondering why your car is broken down only to find out that the dealer should have told you that you should change your oil periodically. A true high efficiency home should come with an owner's manual. If you don't have one then you are probably not living in a high efficiency home.
    Feel free to contact KDH Residential Designs and ask for Kevin Holdridge. He will be able to help you unlock your imagination and help you assemble your team to build your next dream home or to remodel your existing home to make it fit your lifestyle and save on energy in the process.

Design to Domicile

We started with a blank canvas. A vacant lot with some slight topography. Working the current slight right to left fall of the property KDH Residential Designs designed this custom home to maximize the allotted space. Kevin Holdridge designed this home with the garage on the low side of the lot to allow for the ability to work out a split level design on the left side of the property. The design allows for the garage to be located between the first floor and the basement. This home has a home office and recreation room over the garage which is a half of a flight of stairs above the standard first floor elevation. The almost finished front elevation, pictured here, ties this design feature in seamlessly. We were able to get a daylight basement to the rear of the property by using this split level design without a tremendous amount of fall from front to back on this particular lot. The elevated front porch gives the house great presence from the street and from the garage level we are a half of a flight of stairs in from the first floor or the basement. The traffic flow of the floor is wonderfully unique in that from the

home office, the owner is on an intermediate level five feet above the first floor and five feet below the second floor. This home office design allows for quiet and privacy during working hours with the flexibility of being near the family in a moments notice.

KDH Residential Designs is always looking for it's next challenge whether it's a new home design or a remodel to an existing home. Let us help you Unlock Your Imagination. www.kdhresidentialdesigns.com

Ask us about how to design green features into your home without breaking the bank.

Ask a Residential Designer

Question Small but Funtional Laundry Room


We have made a move to DOWNSIZE our life. And one of the hardest to do was my laundry room. We are a busy, stinky, dirty family of Five that has tons of laundry n a daily bases. So when we moved in to our new home and the laundry room was pint size I have to make some alterations!
First Thing we did was to take down the useless above laundry cabinets. Then we painted it all nice and pretty. They we added a shelf where we could put baskets to sort each family members small items. We made sure the shelf could also accommodate hangers. So now all laundry that comes out of the dryer is either hung up and sorted on the hanging part of the shelf or it is sorted in the baskets. Each day (in an ideal world) my family gets "their" folded and hung clean cloths and takes them to their room. Also I got a "over the door" shoe organizer that I sort each persons socks! If you have any organizing ideas I would love to hear them.

Answer Response
It sounds like you have already done a lot of the right things. At KDH Residential Designs we have been helping people downsize from a larger home to a smaller more sustainable home recently. When we can design for this from scratch we can design to take advantage of every inch of space. We also get involved with remodeling projects and quite often see your exact situation. Staying organized in a confined space is key. The use of the short hanging and basket storage that you have could possibly be more efficient if you were able to run a wooden shelf and rod a little higher than your existing shelf and left a center section for full taller hanging and built simple open faced cubbies on either side. The shelf can be near the ceiling because we aren't trying to access anything on top of it. The cubbies would be down lower and more accessible than the baskets you have now. I don't know the layout of your home but I know that quite often a laundry closet is near an attic or second floor stair. Locating this small area under a stair is useful for easy storage with minimal remodeling. With front load washers a counter top can be installed above the machines and provide you a much needed workspace or folding space also. Our company tag line when designing custom homes and remodels is "Unlock Your Imagination" and sometimes that relates to how you make your existing space work for you. Good Luck, I hope some of this helps. Kevin Holdridge - KDH Residential Designs.

If you have any similar questions that you need answered about how to better utilize space please feel free to drop us a line and we will try to help in any way we can.

Evolved Home Collection Launch

The launch of our Evolved Home Plan prototype at the Southern Ideal Home Show was a huge success. We won the People's Choice Award and the live model home was toured and admired by thousands of attendees. Furthering the momentum of the Home Show prototype, in October we are launching the second home design in this collection, Evolved Home Plan 2000. Follow this link to veiw all of the homes in the Evolved Home Collection

The Evolved Home Collection brings to life the passion Cobalt DBS has to provide affordable, sustainable housing that never compromises on style. Our designer, Kevin Holdridge at KDH Residential Home Designs
brings a unique vision to the partnership.

KDH Residential Designs and builder Cobalt DBS have team together to create a series of homes that are sustainable, green certified ready and affordable. If you or any of your clients are looking for land or currently own land and are looking to build an energy efficient green home, please check out these sustainable house plans from 1,000 sf to 2,500 sf. These plans are perfect for small infill lots. The feedback that we have received from the Southern Ideal Home Show proved that we reached a large demographic from empty nesters to first time home buyers. These are high performing homes with a tremendous amount of green features designed into the plans and specifications. Designing the home to use less material and have less waste is important but working with a builder to pull everything together is key. Cobalt DBS has teamed up with our firm to come up with a specification level that addresses water efficiency, indoor air quality, high performance windows, high perforamnce HVAC and insulation systems and the use of low maintenance veneers while staying on a very strict budget.
  
As a mainly custom home design firm, we can also offer any of these green design features to our custom clients that have specific needs. Please feel free to contact KDH Residential Designs at 704.909.2755 or Cobalt DBS at 704.365.3038 if you have any specific needs, comments or questions.

Team Building

In these times of slow to no development in the real estate market I have seen many of my Realtor contacts lose their positions or go into other forms of work. As one to Charlotte's premiere design firms we are all about team building and offering specials to like minded individuals. We have been running specials and referral fees with our builder clients that are members of the local HBA to build our business network. The one area that our company would like to focus on now is the Realtor market. Recently, I spoke to a few agents and asked them how I could help them sell lots in their subdivision. What we came up with was to design "phantom spec homes". They would give me their "trouble" lots that seemed to be less attractive to their prospective clients due to questions about how to use the site properly. I would design homes to fit these lots to show the clients what type of home could be build on the lot. Advertising the property with a vision of what could be built on the particular site helped the prospective clients to visulalize what their home could look like or how the current topography could be used. This has also worked for clients that need to fix up their homes or make small additions to make their property more desirable for re-sale. We will also create a quick sketch for a prospective client that is preparing to buy a current home but would like to make slight alterations after the purchase. When our Realtor associate hears that a certain client would buy the home if it had a screened porch or if the master bedroom was a little bigger, we can quickly go to the home and draw up what this addition could look like. From the design sketch the prospective buyer can figure into their budget the cost of said renovation and make an educated offer based on their findings. This is generally done by our associte taking a picture of the home and giving us a couple key dimensions. We offer this as a team building exercise right now at no cost to our Realtor associates. The effort is to build better business relationships and help boost new and old home sales. If you are interested about being part of the team please visit http://www.kdhdesign.com/ for our contact information and portfolio of work. Thank you and I look forward to meeting and building lasting relationships with some of our forward thinking associates. Also, I would love to hear if anyone has any other ideas about how our design firm could help you boost sales.

Evolved Home Collection

Recently KDH Residential Design was asked to come up with what we are calling "The Evovled Home Collection". The first plan in the series was recently built inside The Plaza during the Fall Ideal Home Show in Charlotte. This was a two bedroom / two bath house that was 920 square feet. It featured many luxury upgrades such as granite countertops and bamboo flooring and because of fore thinking and value engineering we were able to keep the price per square foot below $100. The home was designed to have a very high insulation value based on the way we designed the framing and the windows. We will be launching the rest of the series of homes soon to include plans in many different styles and sizes from 1000sf-2500sf. All of the homes will be designed to receive a green ceritifcation and all will have similar specifications. Over the week-end long show we received a tremendous amount of feedback from potential home buyers on this product line. Keep an eye on our website www.kdhdesign.com and the builders website www.cobaltdbs.com for more details.

Green building - Eat what you need

In past years we would design homes so that the owner could live in the house for up to five years, accumulate some value in the property and sell the home for a profit only to start the cycle again. This cycle has slowed down if not stopped. To me this means we have to change our way of designing a home. Now we are designing a custom home for the long haul. Our clients don't plan on moving again. They want to be comfortable but they don't need 4,000-8,000 square feet anymore. Energy costs are going up fast and the larger inefficient homes aren't going to be desirable anymore. We are seeing a complete market shift forced by lifestyle changes. Will it cycle out? Maybe. But the recent economic downturn has taught us all how to make the dollar stretch a little more.


We also hear this term "Green" everywhere. Whether it's flooring, paints, windows, homes, cleaners, automobiles, newspapers, office buildings, etc. What does it really mean? It probably means something different to everyone. To some of my builder clients it's a scary new place that is untested and different from how they build things now. Scary and new means more expensive to consumers. Granted there is some merit in this because some of the new products on the market are priced a little higher than the lower end items that some builders use in their homes. I equate this to fast food vs. healthy food. Ever wonder why society as a whole is getting fatter and out of shape? It's our economic and lifestyle choices. We need to get home from work and take the kids to soccer practice so we only have time to stop in for a burger and fries. An extra value meal is only five dollars, so why not save time and money. Buying fruits and vegetables is expensive and you may not have time to actually cook a meal before they go bad. We eat quick unhealthy foods because the alternative is time consuming and expensive. This thought process has increased other costs in our lives. Now we need gym memberships or lengthily doctor visits to give us drugs that reduce the effects of our unhealthy lifestyles. It's easy to make bad choices on the fly but now that the dust has settled and the building market is slow, shouldn't we be looking at healthy choices instead of fast food choices. But how we can pay for these expensive healthy items when building a home? Let's try using square footage to our advantage. The initial cost of building a home is dwarfed by the energy costs the home will consume over its life span. Anything we can do to reduce the amount of maintenance and non-renewable consumption in a home is good thing. People will talk to you about pay backs and how some things don’t make sense financially. Most of the time these numbers are skewed because of the unknown cost of future utilities. Non-Renewable resources are named that for a reason. The more we use, the less there is and the less there is, the more it costs.

This gets back to how we design for the long haul. We all want to age gracefully and the design of your home can attribute to that. Using products that require less maintenance, produce less allergens and that are easy to use is a must. As we age our vision gets darker. Things are not as bright and crisp as they once were. We need to bring more natural light into out homes. It becomes harder to get up and down stairs and to bend over as we age. This can be handled by designing most of our daily activities, if not all on one floor. We can also raise things to prevent excessive bending. Properly placed outlets, hose bibbs, and countertops. Air quality is a key in healthy living. Installing materials that reduce the amount of out-gasses in the air and installing and maintaining the proper filters on our air exchangers is high priority. Clutter becomes a problem the older we get, so having plenty of storage is going to help us avoid a cluttered home. Of course, the best thing we can do about clutter is not to have any. Find a way to repurpose or recycle some items that haven’t been touched in years. Keeping a clutter free home as we age also makes it easier for our family members visit and easier to tend to our possessions after we pass. This in turn will reduce the stress on our children and help keep a good relationship while we are still around.

Let's try thinking outside of the box a little. What happened during this economic downturn? Business owners trimmed the fat. We streamlined our companies to be smaller and more cost efficient by consuming less. Less energy, less rent, less payroll, less consumption. We can turn this same model to anything we make, especially houses. Homes can be built with less wood by increasing the stud spacing, stack framing and building with better products. Engineered lumber is a renewable resource and dimensional lumber continues to get weaker and weaker as the number of our old growth trees dwindle. Solar power and wind power both viable renewable resources that are being used today. High performance windows, water efficient fixtures, high insulation ratings, and HVAC system upgrades are important items to building an energy efficient home. The most important item that we always forget about when we are building a green home is the home owner. An uneducated home owner is the worst thing that anyone could ever put in a "Green Home". The home has a state of the art HVAC system, high performance windows, low flow water efficient fixtures and yet we still aren't seeing any savings. How could this be? Well our home owner continues to consume as much energy as possible without thinking of the consequences. The high efficiency HVAC system is running full blast while the high performance windows are open and the kids are all taking thirty minute showers.

Green is a lifestyle change not a gadget we can buy. Putting renewable, sustainable, low consumption items in our homes is only a piece of the puzzle. A great start. Going the extra mile to think about how you are effecting the consumption of non-renewable resources and teaching your children, your neighbor and your friends how to consume less is another piece of the puzzle. Education is the most important part of living green. One person might not make a difference but if we share our experiences with as many people as we can, maybe someday society will realize using less non-renewable resources is a healthy choice. The all you can eat mentality needs to be shifted. Eat what you need and leave some for someone else.