Apologies for the long break since my first post. It's been a crazy few months between the addition construction and our vacation.
Since our family consists of my wife and I and four active little ones, we found that maneuvering around our developer-designed kitchen/eat-in area was getting more and more difficult, especially with the amount of time we spend in these spaces. We have been contemplating putting an addition off the back of the kitchen to expand the space for a few years and decided to take the plunge this summer. I understand there is a strong case to be made about working within square footage boundaries to minimize environmental impacts and I won't dwell too much on that at this time as it is not the avenue we decided to take. However what I will focus on is our approach - through design and creative use, re-use and recycling of materials to minimize both cost and environmental impact associated with our project.
Fortunately for us, the previous owners of our house had installed a 14'x16' turn-town patio slab off the kitchen, so we used that as our baseline for new construction footprint. The only downfall was tearing up the beautiful (wet-bed set!!!) flagstone I had installed a few years ago. Luckily I was able to save all the pieces of stone and only broke one, which I'll simply cut into two and re-use. We will re-install the flagstone on a sand bed adjacent to the new room next year. The concrete I ripped up from the wet bed will be broken up on site and used for a bed under a new shed I will build with reclaimed lumber and sheathing next year as well. The remainder of demolition waste will be recycled. I was able to salvage all the wall/roof sheathing and rigid insulation for under floor and on exterior walls from a commercial project I was working on, which had two great benefits - it kept that material from a landfill, extending its useful life, and it saved us some money!
After many design iterations and visits to cabinet shops, we came up with a layout which re-used all our existing cabinets and minimized the need for new ones. We only bought one new island cabinet assembly, consisting of 3 cabinets - totaling 7'0" long. In lieu of pantry and other custom cabinets, we decided to build our own built-ins. We have one which serves as a book case within the wall, and two flanking our new triple double hung windows. A 9' wide window bench spans between the two built-in cabinet units. This saved us a great deal of money and served as a fun learning process for me - a big thank you to my dad for getting the built-in project mostly underway!
In addition to re-using our cabinets, we re-installed our kitchen window (east facing) and sliding door (west facing). The only new unit we purchased is the triple on the south facing wall. On the exterior we built a pent roof which will shade the hot summer sun on the south wall while allowing low winter sun to enter and heat the space passively. Having natural daylight on three sides of our space has greatly improved the quality of light in the existing spaces.
We installed bamboo flooring to match the existing, which turned out to be a bit of a chore but looks great and uses a rapidly renewable material in lieu of slow growth lumber. For lighting we installed recessed ceiling fixtures that will accept LED PAR 20 lamps - which will use about 10% of the energy of incandescent bulbs and last approximately 40,000 hours.
So that's the brief summary of how we approached the idea of adding to our house. I will try and post before/after images on a future post! Also, look for a bit of info about Italy (from our vacation) and some of my observations about cultural/environmental differences between our country and theirs. Hopefully I can get on a more regular schedule of posting soon. Thanks for reading!
Brian
