Posts written by Marti Burbeck

Patience. Much needed.

Watching the growth of this first orange on our orange tree parallels our Living Building experience.

We’ve spent about two years working on house design. Since this is the third house we’ve built – and we’ve completed remodels on two houses, ranging from minor to huge – we’ve become quite picky about the details. Probably driving the architect a bit batty . . .

But we now have construction documents ready to go. Hooray!

And the right weather for all the high-tech stuff we need to use in order to achieve net-zero energy? Nope, not till spring.

And the real slower-downer here is vetting of materials against the red list. Wow, what a job!

Like our orange, which has been growing larger and orang-er over the past eight months or so, we’ll be working away at this task for some months yet. Thank you, Eric Doyle, for your organization and effort,  leading us on to the end.

Maybe we’ll now see how that orange tastes. Or maybe just another week or two or three . . .

I’ve recently come across two excellent descriptions of the Living Building Challenge: one prepared by Skanska describing the Bertschi School in Seattle, and the other, an article in Houzz online magazine. Click on the photo below to see the entire article, or click through the photos and captions for a quick overview.

Read, learn and enjoy!

Several recent articles have caught my attention – one about groundwater in Michigan and the other on water use in modern Western bathrooms.

There are currently two wells on our Beacon Springs property; both have high levels of arsenic. To use that water, we’ll install a system to lower the amount of arsenic in our water to a safe level. We’ll run the water through a water softener as well, to remove other minerals (adding salt to our drinking water in the process).

If we could avail ourselves of harvested rainwater, we’d of course have a purification system – which, according to our rainwater expert, would provide us purer water than what we’d get out of the ground, even after treatment. And we simply want to flush toilets with this water.

And as for composting toilets, the article recounting the history of modern bathrooms, says so much:

Nobody seriously paused to think about the different functions and their needs; they just took the position that if water comes in and water goes out, it is all pretty much the same and should be in the same room. Nobody thought about how the water from a shower or bathtub (greywater) is different from the water from a toilet (blackwater); it all just went down the same drain which connected to the same sewer pipe that gathered the rainwater from the streets, and carried it away to be dumped in the river or lake.

. . . We take millions of gallons of fresh water and contaminate it with toxic chemicals, human waste, antibiotics and birth control hormones in quantities large enough to change the gender of fish.

We mix up all our bodily functions in a machine designed by engineers on the basis of the plumbing system, not human needs. The result is a toxic output of contaminated water, questionable air quality and incredible waste. We just can’t afford to do it this way any more.

Reduce, reuse, recycle . . . that’s been the mantra for some time now. But it’s hard to go against standard practice, to change ingrained habits. What’s needed is people who will take the time to think through how water and waste are currently handled, and look at viable and proven options that are already available to accomplish what we all say we want.

For ourselves, we’d like to restore our 15 acres of used up, depleted, currently useless former farmland to productive health, and to include ourselves and our home in that ecology. And if our example can benefit the wider community – we’d be delighted.

Two years ago, when we were first working on house design, we thought it would be great to have enough light in the new house to grow our own oranges. Not too long before, we’d each begun eating a fresh orange with breakfast, in place of fruit juice.

So we bought an orange tree, put it in a pot, and placed it by a set of west-facing French doors. In the summertime, the tree lives outside those doors, on the patio. It appears to be thriving, growing new shoots often, and blooming several times a year. Little oranges (or “greens” as we call them) form at each blossom. Those grow for a while, then drop off. Clearly the tree is still too young to really produce fruit.

The “green” in the photo is the longest-lasting and by far the largest we’ve had – about an inch and a half in diameter now. We have yet to see if it hangs around long enough to turn orange. In the meantime, we picture our tree in its light-filled spot in our yet-to-be-built living room.

And in the same way, taking our time with the design process has allowed us to imagine ourselves in the new house, carefully “looking at” and thinking through each window, door, wall area, room . . . All good, and we’ve come up with countless tweaks which will enhance the livability of our new home. And yet, we’ve done enough building to know that once we’re living there, we’ll discover so much more. We look forward to the surprise one day of a real orange and of our new home’s personality and beauty.