We are gearing up for the 12th Annual Sustainable Connections Imagine This! Home and Landscape Tour and I have to tell you, our stop is going to be the place to be! The home and landscape tour is a great way for folks to find inspiration for home and yard projects, to meet general contractors, and to get fired up to start new projects! It’s geared toward both do-it yourselfers and those looking for some help. [pullquote]The ten stops are beautiful, innovative and eco-friendly.[/pullquote]
We will be at the new Birthroot Birth Center, at 1600 Broadway Ave. We finished working on the birth center in early May of this year and think it’s a great example of how old buildings can be renovated and reused. While renovating the building we employed a number of interesting green building and design opportunities, We installed a drain waste heat exchanger to reclaim heat from shower waste water, used insulation and air sealing details from Passive House systems, installed an advance building envelope system and built cabinets with reclaimed materials from the old floor joists. Check out this blog post for a full list of the interesting green building techniques we used.
In addition to the Birthroot Birth Center being an amazing building we are planning to have a bunch of great folks on hand to talk about the building, the process of renovating it, building performance, remodeling, and building reuse. These folks include Jason Bourne of Bourne Engineering, Michelle Banks of Smith and Vallee, Dan Robbin of Robbins Hardwood, Luther Allen of Uncommon Sense Design, Ben Fuller of Spectrum Plumbing and Emily Kubiak from the Community Energy Challenge. We also invited Albert Rooks of Small Planet Workshop to spend the tour with us and share his wealth of knowledge about building performance systems!
Finally, with all of these great folks on hand to chat with you are likely going to need a cup of coffee and some snacks. We’ve taken care of that as well. Spartan Espresso and Highway 542-Go will be on hand to make sure you’re both caffeinated and fed! See you there.