In this week’s episode, Anthony and Abbey Maschmedt of Dwell Development in Seattle join me to discuss sustainable construction and high performance renovations. Dwell Development is an award-winning sustainable residential builder, and they strive to create the most energy efficient homes in the world. They believe that sustainable efficient design can create a better tomorrow.
Katharine MacPhail (KM)
Anthony Maschmedt (AN)
Abbey Maschmedt (AB)
KM: Hello and welcome to Talking Home Renovations with the House Maven. I’m your host, Katharine MacPhail. I’m an architect. I practice in Eastern Massachusetts, and my specialty is renovations and additions to existing homes. I started this podcast as a resource for homeowners who are thinking of undergoing the home renovation process and would like to learn as much as they can before they start. So today I’m talking about sustainable construction, high performance construction, with Anthony and Abbey Maschmedt, who are the principals of dwell development in Seattle. Dwell development is an award-winning sustainable residential builder, and they say that they strive to create the most energy efficient homes in the world, and they believe that sustainable efficient design can create a better tomorrow. So we had a conversation about how high performance and sustainability could apply to renovations, as well as new construction. Let’s just jump right into the conversation.
KM: First of all, there’s the question of how do you do a sustainable renovation if you’re adding onto a house and you have an existing house and you’re not necessarily gutting the existing house, then how do we kind of marry these systems together? So that’s one thing that I’m interested in. I’m trying to figure out how to approach people on this because I have previously said, are you interested in any sustainability at all? And they say, yeah, no, not really. Okay, I should have put that differently somehow.
AB: I think it needs to be rebranded is kind of what you’re saying, because I think the idea is that it’s too ambitious or too expensive. And thus people immediately, their knee jerk is to say no, that’s not possible when really you can do pretty small things that will have a greater impact on sustainability and your home for years to come. And the bottom line, your electricity bills—And I don’t know what they’re like in Massachusetts. I’m presuming they’re high—So anything that you can do if you’re looking down the road of years to come will be better for the environment and for your pocketbook.
KM: Right, it’ll save people money, yeah. I feel like people are tired of hearing about saving the earth. And I don’t know if they can care about saving the earth, but I feel like if we reframed it into saving human life on the earth—because the earth will be here after we can’t live here anymore—I mean, that sounds kind of extreme, but I feel like maybe if we had different terminology for that people wouldn’t block it out, which I feel like people are just kind of blocking it out now.
AN: Well, I think everybody, if you ask, if you sit down and talk- because we only know one way to build homes and that’s, we build the most high performance, sustainable energy efficient homes in the world, and we get recognized for it. And when we can actually take that message, when you sit down and talk to a buyer, for example, and that’s for one of our new homes or one of these homes that we renovated, and you have an open dialogue with them, everybody cares about sustainability, everybody wants to do their part, and housing and renovations are the largest contributor to CO2 off gassing and the ozone layer of any industry in the world. So little bits and pieces, everybody can do their small part and make better choices about how they put a home together from a renovation standpoint or a new construction, or just making small choices, like Abbey said. I’m part of the Built Green committee here in the city of Seattle and I get asked this question all the time and there’s five rules, simple things that people can do in their homes that aren’t fully renovated, but you can make a huge impact on your energy bills and sustainability just by doing little things that we could touch on as well. So everybody cares about it, people just don’t understand the little things they can do that make a big difference.
KM: Well, that’s great, I’m glad that they do care. In Seattle they might care. I don’t know, maybe it’s just the people I run into over here.
AB: Well I mean it’s different, your homes are all older. I mean, it’s humbling to talk to somebody from the Massachusetts area because I know, being that I was born in New England, I know that the homes are much older. We don’t have as much old construction and historic construction as you do. A home here that’s 1905 is very old. And of course my grandparents were in Jamestown, Rhode Island and the homes built around 1900 weren’t that old in Jamestown.
KM: Right, right, that’s true. And so it’s all kind of relative.
AB: Yeah, it’s relative.
KM: I went to graduate school in Los Angeles and it was a totally different mindset about what’s historic out there versus here. Here like 99% of my work is just work to regular old houses built in the 1920s, 1940s. There is a lot of old housing stock here, it’s just what people live in. I would love to hear about those five elements that you just brought up that are easily achieved for… what are you calling it?
AN: Oh, yeah for sustainability. Well, the first thing that people can do is change out windows, old windows in a house, you know, replacing windows is a huge source of heat loss and energy loss in homes, especially in older homes. So bringing any efficient double- we only use triple pane windows, but even going into a double pane window makes a huge difference in the homes. So that’s the first thing. The second thing is that a lot of homes built in that area don’t have insulation or a lot of the insulation has fallen down inside the wall cavity. So when you have leaky windows with leaky walls, you know, your furnace kicks on, your boiler kicks on, it’s trying to keep up and it’s just leaking out of the house. So the most efficient thing you can do is really attack those two things in an existing home. There’s ways you can put a little hole in the exterior blowing insulation in the wall cavity pretty easily in any home. So windows and insulation are two things to deal with the thermal envelope of the home, which is crucial. Then on the inside, changing all your light bulbs to LED light bulbs in the house. That’s simple. LED light bulbs, you can get all kinds of historical looking ones that look like they’re, you know-
AB: That’s involved, We only use LED. I bought many fixtures that were old fixtures that had been restored, and then I replaced all the bulbs with LED. So that’s a very simple, very cost-effective way.
AN: Yeah, incandescent light bulbs should be illegal. I mean, they’re illegal in a lot of countries around the world.
AB: They’re phasing them out.
KM: I thought they were, I thought they were illegal. And then I heard that they weren’t. And then I heard that there are definitely not going to be, and now-
AB: There was a lot of pushback on making them illegal. A few years ago they were talking about just getting rid of them altogether and then people started ordering bulbs. You would hear about crazy people buying up all the incandescent bulbs to save them, and now I think that there’s been enough pushback that they’re not illegal. But it’s a pretty simple cost effective measure. If windows are too much, too expensive, insulation, oh that’s too way too much, I can’t do that. And then you roll in the plumbing fixtures. We only use the Niagara toilets that are 0.8 gallon flush. They’re not a dual flush, it’s a single flush. Those toilets are I think, 400 bucks out the door. The trim and the toilet seat and the whole nine yards they’re like 350.
KM: Huh, I never heard of Niagara. Is that the name of the company, Niagara?
AB: yeah, the name of the company.
AN: the average toilet, just so you know, all existing toilets out there—especially on the East coast—a lot of them are 3.5 gallons of flush. New toilets that come out now, you have to be below two gallons of flush and you have the two buttons, which one for which, which button you push and people get kind of confused and all that. So this is just one button 0.8 gallons of flush, and it saves the average home, if you have three toilets in your house, say five to six thousand gallons of water a year just by switching out these toilets. And then what Abbey said is the WaterSense certified fixtures, all the fixtures now, California standards are 30% water reduction, 20% water reduction just by picking new fixtures that aren’t flushing all that water down the drain.
AB: One could do that over time. If you’re a homeowner and you’re like, oh boy, I can’t take on changing out all my plumbing, you can go room by room and sort of say, okay, every six months, I’m going to change out a fixture. you can be planning on that, that’s your goal. And that’s what we did with our renovations. At this point in time, you can get some beautiful fixtures that really can look historical. They can look like they go with the home. They don’t have to be modern looking fixtures.
KM: Yeah, that’s true. Can I say something about the dual flush toilets? I do not find those confusing. So I’m just going to clear this up for anybody listening. So there’s two buttons and there’s one that’s bigger and one that’s smaller. So I think if you don’t need that much water just press the smaller one, and if you need more water, press the larger one.
AN: Yeah, in theory, that’s it. But a lot of people don’t know that and they’ll push them both and they get confused so regardless, unfortunately the user experience on those is confusing. That’s why we like this one button.
KM: No, I get it. It was just a PSA for dual flush toilets. Also, if you live in the house, you should be able to learn after a while how to flush the toilet. And sure, you might have guests over who get confused, but maybe a little tour ahead of time. Anyway, I have dual flush toilets and I love that. I go to my parents’ house, they used to have an old farmhouse from the 1830s and they had these, I swear they are seven gallon flush toilets. It was like, how much water could you possibly waste? You don’t need that much water.
AB: Well, the Niagara toilets are a patented vacuum technology. They’re amazing. Since we’ve been using them, in the Seattle area, they’ve grown their business because they’re such a great toilet above and beyond the fact that it’s a 0.8 gallon flush. It’s also a really good toilet and we have limited with our homeowners, we have not had a lot of warranty calls with regard to their toilets.
AN: Never, never one.
KM: Well, cool.
AN: Those four things are the things that kind of get you to a place. You’ve got lighting, you’ve got conserving water, and just last on the water before I move to the fifth thing is that, people don’t understand that when you flush the water or water goes down the drain, obviously you’re paying for all that water coming in, but that’s also your paying- that’s your sewer bill going out. And people don’t get it. They just don’t care and they let the water run and everything. And that’s why people’s sewer bills are so high because they calculate sewer based off of water in water out. So, you know, it’s a double win when you conserve water, you’re not paying for it in, you’re not paying for it going out. And that’s a huge, huge money saver for a lot of people. And the last thing I would say is, you know, related to the first two items- insulation and windows. Once you get your home, that’s less drafty, less leaky, as best you can because insulation is what’s going to help air seal those cavities up a little bit, now you can look at reducing the size of your mechanical loads in the house. So maybe that’s a good time to get that big ol’ boiler out of there, or the big electric furnace out of there, and you can go to heat pumps, ductless heat pumps, and ducted heat pumps. Really energy efficient and they have the option of adding cooling to the home as well. So, you know, the East coast, you have those hot humid summers and you can go to cool mode on these things and you can put up that five heads on, on one heat pump that go outside and they’re easy to install, they’re great for renovations-
AB: And they’re fairly affordable.
AN: Yeah. And they’re used worldwide. So going to a heat pump, a heating system, that also does cooling. And then heat pumped water heaters as well. You know, super high, efficient heat pump water heater is about 300% more efficient than a standard electric water heater, and so when that water heater goes out, you can get a really nice upgraded water heater that’s more efficient and saving you a ton of money on not wasting all that electricity. So those mechanical loads go way down when you make the thermal envelope of the home more consistent.
KM: Yeah. And just in case people don’t know what a heat pump is, those are the through the wall units that you might see.
AN: That mount on the wall, yeah. So those are ductless heat pumps and they’re individual units that have a refrigeration line that goes to a heat pump that’s outside. Those can be mounted anywhere and they’re great for renovations and retrofits because they’re simple to run and they’re easy to get to and repair. And we hear people say, Oh, I don’t like the way they look. Well, you can put them somewhere that it’s not as visible and people can do cool little grills around them and build them into things. But really they’re more and more acceptable right now because they make the house so comfortable and balanced.
KM: That’s very true. And most of the old houses around here, unless they’ve been renovated, do not have air conditioning. I’m holding out because I feel like if everybody got air conditioning, it would increase the problem that we need more air conditioning, But it’s getting pretty hot, so I’m thinking about a heat pump.
AN: Yeah, and these heat pumps, these ductless mini splits are really, really efficient. I mean, they’re super efficient. So it solves that question. You’re going to be, everyone gets air conditioning. This isn’t air conditioning. This is just a unit that can do heating and cooling. You get two for one. And the energy consumption is a fraction of what a typical air conditioner is.
KM: Yeah. So tell me about these renovations that you did. One of them was a really cool Sears kit house I saw which, I love those. You don’t hear about them a lot over here, but on the West coast, when I was in school over there, we heard maybe these are still more around, I don’t know where they were more popular.
AB: Oh there’s tons of them. We found in our research that there were hundreds of Sears and Roebuck catalog homes. There were a few other catalogs, but that was the biggest seller of it. Because during the Western expansion, they blew up in Seattle and they were all over the place. Generally American Foursquare seem to be the design of choice in a lot of our neighborhoods. And I, probably from having been born in Boston and then come migrating west, I am a big, big lover of old homes. I feel like Victorians- and there’s not, there’s only a smattering of them in Seattle. So we decided we had a little bit of a lull in our schedule with our new construction-
AN: A big lull in our construction schedule.
AB: We love challenges and we decided we were going to take on a renovation, and that exploded into two more. So we did three all within a year. And they were all within about a mile and a half of each other, so it was easy geographically to get around to all of them and it was- They were all different. Two were Foursquares, and one was a Victorian. And the Victorian was 1896, which is really, really old for Seattle. There aren’t a lot of homes pre 1900 in Seattle. So that was exciting. It had a turret, it had all of the elements of a Victorian that make them so special, the bric-a-brac, and they were all in different levels of disrepair. And we applied the same thing. We decided to use the basis of our business, the foundations of our business are the sustainability piece. And we knew that in practice we could do it in old homes as well, and on a budget because we’re spec builders, so we don’t have a client, we’re not working for somebody else. We have to put it on the market and actually we’re a for-profit company. So it was not only a learning period, it was also like, hey, can we make this work as a business model? And they were all challenging, they were all really exciting, and I spent lots of time in them just sort of re-imagining what they used to be used for, what the spaces used to be used for because of how somebody may have lived in 1896, how they built their home, what they needed and how we live now. So we’re trying to update the homes in terms of their systems, but also update them in terms of use, because you’re all of a sudden in a home and you use it differently than you did before.
AN: Yeah. And then, but not to lose the character. So when you walk and you walk up to the grand steps and you see the turrets and the bric-a-brac and the moldings, all that stuff is beautiful and we want to preserve all that. What’s happening behind those walls and make sure that there’s insulation, you’ve got to update the wiring, update the plumbing systems and heating systems in those homes- all those things that you don’t necessarily see, but that makes a home really, really comfortable. Those add, to me, to the efficiency and the beauty of the home. So visually Abby is fantastic about making that home look historic, but still have those new creature comforts, the nice cabinets, the newer windows that operate, we’d like to keep some of the windows and replace the ones that are in more disrepair. So we kind of picked and chose where we do certain things and really put this thing back together. Like Abby said, we need to market it for today’s home buyer. They want to have a nice master suite. One of the houses that you referred to had had a hallway bath that was shared by three bedrooms. It’s very common in a Foursquare Sears Roebuck house. So, how can we make this bathroom bigger? How can we make it feel like a master bathroom, but also knowing that it’s going to be shared by the two other bedrooms? So we made a big double shower in it, and we did a big double vanity in it, and we use the space as best we could to give that current home buyer that feeling that I have this big, nice bathroom, but I don’t have that master suite bathroom anymore, but I’m going to share this with my kids. So there’s little things that we had to choose. How can we do this without breaking the bank as well?
AB: In every home we saved all the flooring, because we thought the flooring was important to maintaining the house and continuing the legacy of the house and not completely stripping it away and throwing in brand new flooring. So we really tried to, as much as we could, save what was there, what was relevant to the house and what the original architect had- you know, you want to pay homage to that architect and see how they had their vision of the house. It was amazing to me the iterations of the houses because they were old and many of them had had multiple iterations. They’d been used as a boarding house at one point, because during the war people were living in it-
AN: A speakeasy.
AB: A speakeasy, yeah. We were told by one of the homeowners that, oh yeah, there was a speakeasy when alcohol was prohibited in the central area of Seattle.
KM: That’s why I think I love houses, because of the lives that have been lived through the houses. And I know you had mentioned in the article that I read about the renovation you talk about imagining how people lived in these houses and what they were, what they, the actual people, what they were doing in there. I dunno, to me it has an energy to a house or has sort of a spirit or energy, I think.
AB: Well the grandest of the three homes that we did, the last one, had a room where you would have somebody come, like perhaps a sales person would come calling and you wouldn’t want them in the rest of your house. It was a formal entry area where you’d sit- or perhaps somebody taking somebody on a date, you’d have them sit and wait in a waiting area. And I always just kept closing my eyes and walking around and thinking, wow, this was somebody actually designed a home now we never have that much space that you think about an area where somebody would wait, a waiting area.
KM: I love that! I love that idea because there may be people coming to your house that you don’t want in the heart of your house. But especially now with the whole pandemic, you think about visitors in a different way, maybe. So you can have a little area where visitors are allowed- I mean, I guess that was more like the formal living room back in the day, right. We don’t use it the same way anymore, but I mean, do we really want everybody in our houses in the same way?
AN: No, no. It’s interesting because now, new construction- everybody wants the grand room, the big open concept. They want everything to kind of feel the kitchen is right, connected, it’s all one big room and that the dining room and the living room, all one big space, and all these houses have those formal- that’s what’s neat about these older houses, they all have their little formal elements: Here is the living room and it’s its own room with a door, a pocket door or whatever. Here’s a social area of the kitchen, where you would sit by the fireplace, in a separate area. Here’s the formal dining room, you have these places that can be shut off from each other, but then they also flow, and that’s what a lot of new construction, you know, unfortunately you get now. you get big open concept, which is what people want.
AB: We had to find the balance between the two. We had to take out some walls because we acknowledged the fact that the current home buyer does want spaces that are multi-use. So we had to re-envision those spaces as multi-use. And in the first one we did, the Sears Roebuck, It had some constraints, spaces that we knew, well, people don’t live like that anymore. They don’t have necessarily this need for all of these formal spaces. They want to be able to use them for different things. And certainly with the pandemic we were forward-thinking then. We thought we needed, because we were thinking, yeah, there’s a lot of these extra spaces. And now we’re finding, there’s sort of a pushback with our construction where people do want more carved out niches within the house. So they can sneak off and do a zoom call in private.
KM: Right, right. You don’t know what’s next, that’s the truth right? What’s the next thing that people are going to want in their homes. Which one was the house that had the ladies’ home journal or something all underneath?
AB: Yeah, the last one we did, the blue spruce house, it was the grand American Foursquare, definitely built for somebody prominent in Seattle. We did some digging and I had linked the house to somebody who set up the first electrical grid in Seattle, so it had an amazing heating system. When we bought the home, we couldn’t figure out this hole in the basement. We came down to the basement and there was this giant hole and-
AN: It was like a concrete pit that had about a two foot ledge around it. So as I was this like a baptism pool, or it was it like… We’re trying to figure out what the hell… There were 10 foot ceilings in there. And we were trying to figure it out, we finally realized
AB: The neighbor, the neighbor, we pulled out this old piece of metal that we didn’t really, we were sort of like, oh, is this some sort of a stove? Or what is this? We pulled it out, we put it outside, and the neighbor came over and he’d lived there for about 40 years and he came over and he said, well, you know, that’s a part of the old coal pit. You know, those stairs that you guys unearthed in the back, it was a ramp where they’d unload the coal, dump it down into the pit. So it was a coal pit. So mystery solved. And then we got to pass that information along because initially our real estate agent was like, you’re going to have to do something about that weird hole in the basement. That’s really weird. So we were like, is it a wine room? And then we had the story and that was enough. We were able to tell the buyer, hey, this was the coal pit. It’s original, it goes with the house.
KM: Yeah, that’s cool. It’s convenient to have old neighbors who knew about the house, you know.
AN: The idea of us doing three in one year, and we got through them and they’re all successful and we’re all very proud of it. You know, and then being recognized by the Seattle times, like, wow, those homes are really significant, we want to do a whole feature story on these homes. I mean, we were like, wow, that was interesting. And there’s a market for that. And it led us to this place where as we kind of navigate new construction sustainability, that we do want to commit to preserving and saving these old homes that normally would be knocked down and, you know, multi-units be put up where it’s like there’s bits and pieces where, you know, we’re going to do one a year or one every couple of years and have a model for it, cause we get called all the time. Hey, will you help us renovate our house and give us some ideas and thoughts, and that’s a whole different business model and we’ve considered having a separate division focused on that. And we’re not ready to do that right now because it would be such a shift from what we currently do. But one model will be to try to get these old homes to be net zero. And if we could kind of figure out a way to renovate and restore these old homes, like we have done it, but then add the component of making them really, really super efficient, make the energy consumption really low. And then you can add solar panels to them to get them to net zero. I think a lot of people would love to have a super high performance 120 year old Victorian. Huge market, huge market for that. So we’re putting our toe in the water over there and see if that’s going to be a viable option for us.
KM: So in order to get a net zero house on an existing Victorian, you would pretty much need to gut that, would you say?
AN: Yes. You’d have to get it down to the studs, expose all the exterior walls, you’d have to air seal it. And air sealing is the most important thing that we do because we attack the air sealing in two ways: One from the exterior of the home, before we side it and put a fluid applied membrane on the home. So it basically makes- it’s a permeable product, but it makes the home waterproof and airtight from the outside. But for a renovation, there’s a product called AeroBarrier, which is a newer product that came onto the market about a year and a half to two years ago, and it’s won all these awards and it was based off of the concept of duct ceiling. And it was called Aeroseal. And these guys came up with these ideas. All these leaky ducts in people’s houses are just shooting air into these dead spaces, and it’s really inefficient. So they pressurize the ducts and they would airborne these little beads of caulk and they’d fly around the air and they just would build up on all the areas where, every little hole, nook and cranny so it’d seal all these ducts and it will make your existing duct work instead of tearing everything out and redoing it, it really was an efficient product. And one of the people who worked on this said if you can do it for ducts, why couldn’t you do it for a house? And then they created a new company called AeroBarrier, which reached out to us about two years ago and asked if they could come out from Ohio, I believe they’re based out of, where their manufacturing is done and they read something about us. And I said yeah, come on out, and we did a couple of our homes that were in construction. And the idea is right before you add the insulation, everything’s roughed in, you’re about ready to cover everything up, you come and you put up these little tripods that are connected to this fluid caulk on the inside. And the house is totally pressurized and there’s little beads of caulk go flying around the area and they just land everywhere that air is being out of the house.
KM: That’s amazing!
AN: And they build up until that leak has gone. And you sit outside on the computer and you’re watching the air exchanges come down. And how we measure efficiency in the house is called air exchanges, ACH. And so you gotta pressurize a house to what we call 50 Pascal and it, and it shows you how many times an hour the house will leak, and code in the city of Seattle is five air exchanges per hour, okay. And what that means is five air exchanges is really efficient compared to, from an older home standpoint, but it’s about the size of a front door being left open year round 24/7 throughout the house, all the nooks and crannies that a front door. That air exchange of two is about the size of maybe about an eight by eight inch square. So it’s dramatically different. Our homes we get to one, 1.2, down to even below that, you know, getting to zero is the key, because then you’re really really really efficient with the heat loss. So AeroBarrier is a fantastic product for renovation that you can hit from the inside. So when you’re talking about getting an existing home to net zero, you gut everything out, you get all your roughing down, your new plumbing and your electrical, your new HVAC, everything’s in, before installation. And then you do the AeroBarrier on the inside of the house, and that seals that house up really, really well. So that’s a fabulous product for air.
KM: Wow, so you keep the siding on through that?
AN: Yeah, all from the inside.
KM: That’s amazing.
AB: It’s a game changer. I mean, they’re introducing it out here and it’s going to be- there are all these code changes for us in the city of Seattle and it’s going to be required for new construction.
AN: Well, the national energy code changes every two years. So once that updates it’s going to be required, people aren’t going to be able to get permits for new construction without making these energy credits happen. And this is going to be the one product like Abbey said, it’s the game changer. They won national Einstein award product of the year in the housing industry. So it’s going to be the only way for new construction to get to net zero. Like California requires all new construction to be net zero, Washington, we’re probably at about two years behind that. And pretty soon everybody, all new construction, commercial and residential is going to be required to be net zero. And this will be the way to get there because you need to make that house tight as possible.
AB: And all of these elements can be applied to an existing home. They may not have the same sum total, you know, net result, but it will make a difference.
KM: How did you get into sustainable building? Anthony, you were a contractor?
AN: Yeah, I was in business with my family in a design build firm that I left in 2005. And because I wanted to go into a sustainable pathway and I wanted to shift into more of a modern aesthetic because there wasn’t much modern, new construction going on in the city of Seattle back then. So I left to create my own pathway and I started to do all the development. And thank God I did because you know, the fact that we went sustainable and went modern was the thing that grew my company by 300% during the downturn when everybody else was going out of business and the real estate market crashed, we were sitting there with homes that we were pre-selling in foundation because the buyers that were out there wanted more. And the fact that we can deliver them a product that was really, really interesting architecturally because it really starts having an interesting architectural element for people to get out of their car. They go, that’s a cool house, I want to go check that out. But then look at all these things that the homes does with the efficient windows and insulation, the heating cooling system, and then the design all has to come together. And so when we went down that path, we decided to get way out in front of the marketplace. So when the real estate market does come back—and it did—we would be way out in front pushing the envelope on net zero, passive house and building these really super high performance homes, because we said if we could show everybody how to do it, then the market will follow. And we want everybody to build homes like this.
AB: And it doesn’t have to be cost prohibitive. I think that’s the thing is that most people think it’s too expensive and they just don’t want to do it. I think that’s why a lot of people don’t do it, is ultimately the cost.
KM: Right, because if it’s the same cost, why not do it?
AB: Right. And for us it costs us more, but that’s part of the challenge is coming up with ways that we can do it for the same price, because there are ways to do it. You just have to continue to innovate.
AN: Yeah. I mean, cause when we put a house in the market, the market tells us what it’s worth. We can’t say this home is so much better. It has X, Y, and Z behind the walls and there’s all this- And people have to A) be willing and understand it and it and B) be willing to pay for it. So one example that I like to share is that we built a sustainable micro-community here in the Columbia City neighborhood of Seattle. It was 54 units that we built over a five-year period. And one home we built, one of the first ones we built was three bedrooms, two bath, 1500 square feet. It was zero days on the market. And back then we sold that house for $400,000, which was a great home. It was a great start. It was an age in place style home, where you didn’t need to have stair access. It had everything on one main living floor, which is really, really nice. Another builder in the same community—there’s only two of us in there—built a three bedroom, two bath home, 1500 square foot. It was a beautiful home by a very reputable builder. It was on the market for 175 days and sold for a hundred thousand dollars less. We were like, wait a minute. You know the design’s working, you know the sustainability people want it and they’re willing to pay for it. We didn’t tell the market our home was worth that much, someone was willing to pay for it before the home was even done. So it really validated what we were doing. And as the company grew, Abby came on board. You’ve been almost 10 years now? She took over all the design and really helped push our product to a different level from an aesthetic standpoint. We hit a little lull in our schedule, like I mentioned earlier, where we had a bunch of permits get caught up in the city of Seattle, so we decided we want to keep our guys employed. Let’s do a renovation and-
AB: And that grew to two, then it was three pretty quickly.
AN: Yeah. And each one was a little bit different from a renovation standpoint. The first one was let’s try to do this and try to figure it out. And we navigated the nuances: Do we keep the lath and plaster on that wall, you know, because our wiring doesn’t necessarily need to get there or do we gut it all down to the studs? And so we kind of had to do bits and pieces to figure out how to navigate the renovation.
AB: There was definitely a learning curve. So by the third, we were really good.
KM: Right. Well, that’s part of why I feel like this podcast is necessary, because a lot of people aren’t going to be doing more than let’s say two renovations in their lives, so if they could learn from other people ahead of time they’ll have an easier time of it. So if you had one, the most important piece of advice for somebody who has this, let’s say an old Victorian and they’re trying to add onto it and make it more efficient or more sustainable. What would you have?
AB: One piece, wow.
KM: Okay, or you could have five or however many pieces.
AB: Well, I think ultimately the thing we learned by the third and final is that keeping plaster and lath wasn’t necessarily- I love plaster and lath, yet having with no insulation when we would open the walls and then try to patch the plaster and lath- I would tell a homeowner, you probably need to scrap—if it’s an extensive renovation—you need to scrap the plaster and lath, open the walls, get access to your knob and tube wiring (which we upgraded) and give yourself a little bit more of a blank canvas. Rather than trying to go at it, you know, poking holes and then it ends up more expensive. I think we thought we were going to save money by doing it in bits and pieces here and there. And opening it, make a hole here, patch a hole here. And really, we discovered it’s probably better just to scrap your plaster and lath, open your walls, have access to everything, reinsulate and then put it all back together.
AN: Yeah. And don’t try to save that novik too, but if you’re going to be replacing your electrical panel, you know, or if you have an old fuse box, whatever, don’t try to save the knob and tube because it’s virtually impossible to do that cost effectively and safely, because of the way it’s non-grounded and so forth. So just get into all your systems, and be able to put them in and put it back together efficiently can save so much time and so much money. And people are like, Oh, I don’t want to take- people think of punching a hole in the wall is, oh my God. Now I gotta fix that. What’s more expensive than fixing the patch would be taking out the whole wall and putting up a new sheet of drywall.
KM: And it might not even look good in the end.
AB: Yeah. It ends up cobbled together. And that was the hard part, is then marrying the two and making it look seamless was difficult.
KM: Yeah. Well, that’s a lot of information for people, so. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your experience and advice.
AB: Well, hopefully we can help anybody. We love, we really, I mean, when we were in the throes, we were like, wow, this is too much. But just like, you know, birthing a child, when you get done you’re like, wow, that so easy, that was amazing!
KM: Let’s have another one.
AB: Yeah, let’s do another one!
AN: And we’re an open book. If you can pass this on to your listeners, if anybody has a question or wants to reach out to us, I mean, I’m the chair of the Built Green executive committee and doing things sustainably is real important to us, It’s a core value. So if we can help a renovator anywhere in the country make good choices, and that are cost effective, we’re happy to share that with anybody.
KM: I’ve found that even if the homeowner wants to do certain things, it depends on who they get for a contractor. Because they might get talked out of it, depending on who it is, because it’s not the same old way everybody does it. They just seem overwhelmed. Maybe they don’t understand it. So yeah, I may be sending people to you with questions. Contractors-
AN: Contractors don’t have the best reputation either and they have a self-interest of, you know, let’s do this and it’s really expensive cause the contractor then makes more money, right? They’re not always thinking about what’s in the best interest of their client. Now, I don’t want to put everybody in that same bucket. There’s really, really good reputable contractors out there, but there’s a lot of guys who take advantage of people and that’s just known. So really getting the right general contractor, or the right subcontractors that you can manage yourself, is really, really, really important.
AB: Well, and part of what we did last with doing those renovations is adapt. And I think often there are contractors that are set in their ways and they have one way of doing things and we’ve been pivoting a lot in our business and embracing new innovations and new technologies and realizing that those can be applied to old homes as well as new homes. It’s not one or the other. They coexist together.
KM: How can people get in touch with you, do you have social media?
AN: Well we can be found all over social media. We’re on LinkedIn, we’re on Facebook, we’re on Instagram.
AB: Our website is dwelldevelopment.com, so they can look us up and access all of our social media links from there.
AN: Yep. And then you can also email us directly through our website, and if you want to share with your listeners our direct email addresses, you have those. So feel free to, you know, again, I’m all about raising the bar and I want people to make good sustainable decisions. So anything we can do to chip away at what we talked about at the beginning of the conversation about climate change and how this earth is being impacted by what we do. I mean, if everybody can make those good choices, it all adds up. It really does.
AB: We’re willing to share. None of it is proprietary. We’re happy to. We’re not good poker players.
KM: Yeah I’m not either. Well, thank you. Thank you so much for sharing your work and for doing your work and for being here with me.
AB: All right. Thanks for having us.
AN: Thank you for the platform to be able to share what we know, because it’s really important work and we really enjoy it.
KM: Thanks again to Anthony and Abbey for joining me, I’ll put all our contact information in the show notes. And thanks to you for listening to the episode. And I’ve got an exciting announcement. I’ve been asked to join Design Network, which is a group of podcasts. You can check out the other design shows in the group at designnetwork.net. Please join my mailing list. I’m trying to put them out with every episode. The link is in the show notes and I’ve still got that guide book for green renovations that I used to mention. I’m making some changes, so it’s not downloadable on my website anymore, but it should be ready soon. If you’re interested in a copy, send me an email at the house Maven at talking home renovations.com and it has a lot of other kind of low-hanging fruit as I like to call it. Things you can do that will help with the energy efficiency and sustainability of your renovation. So it pertains to what we were talking about today. Also email me any suggestions for episodes or questions you might have, and I’ll try to get back to you with answers. You can also find me on Facebook and Instagram as talking home renovations and on Tik Tok as the house Maven. And this podcast has been a production of my architecture firm, Demios architects, where we believe architects are for everyone. Well, I’ll be back with another episode next week. So keep your eye out for that. And until then take care.