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Eco-Renovation The dust has been vacuumed away, furniture and appliances relocated and it's time for re-evaluation and re-visioning the completion of the Eco-Home™ kitchen remodel. Everyone says that remodeling always takes longer and costs more than you expect and this remodel is no exception. As soon as the wall was removed between the kitchen and the service porch, it was clear that a new ceiling would have to be installed. That added $700 to the estimate in the blink of an eye. But there was no way around it. These two rooms with different ceiling treatments and even different heights were now one room and the ceiling had to be consistant. Speaking of the service porch, it turned out that none of the work in that area, except for replacing the back door, had been included in the original estimate. That was a very important lesson. My vision of what had to be done had been so clear in my mind that I had made assumptions about what was covered by the contract without being sure every element was actually written into it. As a result, the cost for the basic strucural changes for the kitchen grew. From now on I will have someone else who is aware of what needs to be done on a job look over a contract before I sign it. The same problem arose with the electrical service. When the contract said installation of new electrical service and circuits I thought that included the new outlets and switches. It turned out that installation of outlets and switches was extra: a minimum of $40 per unit extra. This more than doubled the final cost of the bare minimum electrical for the new kitchen. Plumbing expenses also ballooned. In addition to relocating the washing machine and the stove, the vent for the on-demand gas hot water heater had to be separated from the vent for the furnace in order to meet code requirements. When that was done, there was no way to repair the hole in the old vent securely, so the original concrete/asbestos vent pipe for the furnace had to be removed and replaced. And now I had another collection of hazardous waste to dispose of. Changes I was very nervous about making the change because the original design had been done by Carol Lamkins, a professional kitchen designer. And now, in retrospect I see that I should have called Carol and talked it over with her instead of allowing myself to get caught up in the rush of the process. Now that it's done, I think it was a mistake, but it's too late to change it now. Kitchen Range and Range Hood Carol had warned me that with the range in this position the range hood would have to project down into the opening between the two rooms. The minimum distance between range top and hood, for it to effectively vent cooking fumes, is 30 inches. We looked into back vented stoves, but it seemed that they were not very effective and they were quite a bit more expensive than regular stoves. A range hood is not required by law, but since one of the reasons I had embarked on this renovation now was because Brandt, my environmentally ill tenant, couldn't tolerate combustion fumes from the old stove, a hood was essential in this particular situation. And clearly, it had to be positioned in such a way as to work effectively. Nevertheless, the issue was not fully confronted and resolved by me until the stove and the range hood were actually in the kitchen. Only then did I realize that I absolutely did not want the hood to block any part of the opening between the kitchen and dining room and that therefore the range had to be located elsewhere. Since I also didn't want the range to be the featured view as one walked through the doorway to the kitchen, it was installed against the west wall. There I could place the hood as low as I wanted. The minimum distance between the range top and the hood that still allowed me full view of the back burners when standing at the stove was 20 inches. But then I was looking down on the top of the hood and the hole in the wall where the metal-clad wires for the fan and lights emerged. In retrospect, I think I could have figured out some way to hide those, but at the time I just decided to move the hood up 6 inches. So far, I have to say I'm not overly impressed with its performance and I wonder if I had left it at 20 inches whether it would have worked better. It seems that I must turn on the vent as soon as I turn on the burners and keep the vent running up to one half hour after I cease cooking in order to prevent cooking fumes from permeating the house. It has two speeds. The low speed seems to be OK for mild cooking odors from rice or steamed greens, but anything else requires the high vent setting which is fairly noisy, and, I assume, more energy consuming. Mary Cordaro, our healthy house consultant, had strongly recommended that the motor for the range hood fan be located above the ceiling to reduce noise. However, the minimum estimate for such an installation was $600, which made it out of reach financially. As it was, installation for the hood with its vent pipe was $260, close to the cost of the range itself. Calling a Halt Unfortunately, they hadn't. Something in the drywall or the "mud" was very toxic to him. That meant I had to cover up that surface as soon as possible. Paint This time I called Mary Cordaro and got some other paint and finish recommendations from her. Her preference, always, is plant based material such as Livos or BioShield, which are available from The Environmental Home Center in Seattle, Washington. For a clear finish her recommendation was Pace Chem's Crystal Aire which I have seen listed in many references on healthy home building and furnishing. She suggested that I order samples of several paints and apply them to 10 x 10 inch squares of inert material and let Brandt keep them close to him, sleep with them near him for a few days, to evaluate which ones his sensitized body found least damaging. The only inert material I could think of to use for this test was glass, since Brandt is reactive to metals. But buying or cutting a half dozen or so squares of glass while we were preparing for the "Homes for the Future" Tour seemed daunting. Brandt and I discussed it and he felt that pieces of clean cardboard, free of any printing, would be an acceptable test base. After speaking with the Environmental Home Center, I ordered samples of Crystal Aire, and Best paint, which he thought were the next best choices to the plant-based products which were too expensive for our budget. I applied these samples to two cardboard squares - both sides and the edges. I also made samples of AFM Safecoat semi-gloss, Glidden Spred 2000, and EnviroKote, Frazee's lowest-emission line. (You won't find the EnviroKote on the shelves at The Home Depot, but you can special order it through them.) I noticed the label on the EnviroKote says "no formaldehyde added" which I'm guessing means that there is some formaldehyde present in the product. I presented the samples to Brandt several days later for his evaluation. I was surprised by the results. The AFM Safecoat semi-gloss interior paint was rated highest by Brandt, i.e., most well-tolerated by him. Frazee and Glidden were about equal in second place and Best and Crystal-Aire, least well tolerated. I was surprised by the high rating of AFM, since the primer which he had reacted badly to had come from AFM. But when I used the Safecoat semi-gloss I could tell there was a difference. The semi-gloss had virtually no odor, even when just applied, whereas the primer had had a noticeable odor that lasted for several days, although it was certainly not a strong odor to my senses. I dedicated the first possible weekend to applying two coats of the AFM semi-gloss to all the walls that had been painted with primer. I did it myself to save a couple of hundred dollars and somewhat reduce the added expense of the AFM paint plus all the other samples which added up to significantly more expense than a couple of gallons of Standard Brands! The next "Tolerance Test" will come in a few days! Recycling Center Recycling demolition materials What now? —Julia Russell |