Green Restorations

Aaron Lubeck

Description

Some 40 percent of North Americans live in homes built prior to 1940, and when it comes time to remodel or restore our older homes, homeowners and contractors can find themselves lost in a morass of wildly divergent information and opinion. With Green Restorations , author Aaron Lubeck brings his expertise as a restoration contractor and preservation consultant to this first-of-its-kind guide, leading the reader through the steps for restoring historic building using sustainable practices and green building techniques.

In a readily accessible room-by-room and system-by-system format, Green Restorations covers rehabilitation and remodelling questions applicable to old homes, focusing on the core techniques and debates often seen in practice. Here you'll find the answers to restoration questions, such as:

• Is sealing my old crawl space a good idea?
• Should I replace or rehabilitate my windows?
• Are there historic aspects of my home I need to preserve and what can I change?
• What are the cultural, environmental and financial implications of my proposed changes?
• Do residential historic tax credits apply to my home and how can I access them?

Written in such a way as to be accessible for homeowners but technical enough for contractors, this book will appeal to anyone trying to green an older home while preserving its historic and cultural significance.

Sujets

• Architects
• Green building
• Home insurance
• Energy efficiency

Informations

• Publié par: New Society Publishers
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781550924527
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 10 Mo

Extrait

Advance Praise for
Green Restorations
Green Restorations is a truly excellent guide for anyone considering preserving and/or
“greening” their existing home. It will be an invaluable resource to anyone involved in
improving the long term viability of our nation’s aging housing stock. Lubeck makes this
potentially confusing subject straightforward and logical — an amazing accomplishment.
— Sarah Susanka, FAIA, architect
and author of The Not So Big House series and The Not So Big Life
Green Restorations should be on the bookshelves of at least four groups: owners of historic
homes; contractors who work on historic homes; preservationists who need to be better
able to explain energy conservation options to owners of historic properties and architects
who are willing to learn from someone who actually hangs doors and installs flooring.
— Donovan Rypkema, Principal, PlaceEconomics
And author of The Economics of Historic Preservation
Green Restorations is an incredibly useful tool for helping owners of older homes get the
energy-efficiency they want without sacrificing the historic character they love. It’s been
said that the most important piece of “green” technology is a caulking gun — but
Lubeck’s refreshingly straightforward book demonstrates that common sense and a
commitment to sensitive stewardship are mighty important, too.
— Dwight Young, National Trust for Historic Preservation
And author of Alternatives to Sprawl, Road Trips Through History,
Saving America’s Treasures, and the bestselling Dear Mr. President,
and the “Back Page” feature in Preservation magazine.Green Restorations comes as an important new resource just now for owners, builders,
designers and preservation advocates. It serves as a much-needed reminder, at a time
when experimental new green buildings are getting disproportionate attention, that the
first goal of sustainability is to care for the sustainable treasures we already have.
— Michael Mehaffy, Chair, USA Chapter International Network for
Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism (INTBAU)
With Green Restorations, Aaron Lubeck has stepped forward to provide a significant and
much needed resource for the advancement of stewardship of the built environment. In a
clear and straightforward manner, he gets right to the heart of the important matters to
dispel the myths, misunderstandings, and misperceptions that often accompany historic
house rehabilitation. I highly recommend Green Restorations to all those involved in the
practice and advocacy of building rehabilitation as a means to achieving sustainability
and, especially, to those unfamiliar with or even dismissive of the idea.
— Robert A. Young, PE, FAPT, LEED-AP,
author of Historic Preservation Technology
Green Restorations is a book you’ll want to read first with a pen in hand.
It’s practical, practical, practical. Author Aaron Lubeck takes less of an encyclopedic
approach to all options, and instead provides the reader with realistic choices based
on his experience and wisdom as a contractor who must balance for his clients the
emotional goals of green preservation as a cultural and environmental imperative.
If you are thinking about restoring a house, or improving the efficiency of the
house for environmental and financial reasons, this book is a must read.
— Todd Ballenger, CLA, NIFEd author of Borrow Smart Retire Rich
Truly a first of its kind, Green Restorations is a straightforward guide for anyone
interested in historic homes with the green design choice in mind. Author Aaron Lubeck
shares his firsthand experience while providing the compelling environmental argument
for preservation. Our homes can be inspired and energy efficient, with renewable
materials and smart energy use achieving a living example of sustainability in action.
— Quayle Hodek, CEO and Founder, Renewable Choice EnergyLubeck is a matchmaker. The preservation and green movements
should be kissing cousins not feuding Hatfields and McCoys. Clearly and
concisely Aaron lays out a solid foundation for their relationship, mutual values,
shared interests and physical attributes, then shows us how the world of
design would benefit from their marriage.
— Gwyn Ronsick, Gwyn Ronsick Designs
Until Aaron Lubeck combined his extensive knowledge of and experience
with historic and sustainable construction to produce Green Restorations,
sustainable historic restoration was scary new territory and mostly
“learn as you do”. With Aaron’s insightful, detail by detail, guidance within
this encouraging/confidence building source book, everyone now becomes
“experienced” and formidable projects become clear, step by step, and
manageable. With Green Restorations help our efforts toward heritage
preservation for a sustainable life style can now touch anyone’s home.
— Eddie Belk, AIA/LEED AP, preservation architect / speaker
Aaron Lubeck has created a book that makes us smarter about how to
preserve America’s historic homes. Green Restorations demonstrates that green
can (and should!) be a natural component of historic preservation. The detailed
information contained in this book is invaluable in helping renovators make
smart decisions that will ensure our historic homes will last for centuries
longer, as the original architects and builders had hoped.
— Bob Kingery, Co-founder, Southern Energy Management
Green Restorations is the comprehensive guidebook for homeowners to
make decisions about conserving energy and reducing their environmental
impact. Aaron Lubeck draws on deeps stores of know how to help individuals
improve aesthetics, save money and address today’s pressing energy and
climate challenges. The cleanest electron is the one never used at all.
— Kris Lotlikar, Co-founder, & Vice President Renewable Choice EnergyNever have two subjects been so compatible in their broad objectives of
preserving what is beautiful in the world and making the most out of our valuable
natural resources, but so hard to integrate in the particular. Green Restorations
provides an excellent starting point for anyone wishing to bridge this woeful
and unnecessary gap, and get started turning our most beloved
architecture into our most sustainable.
— Stephen and Rebekah Hren, Authors of The Carbon Free Home
Aaron Lubeck sees ‘the big picture.’ Preservation of historic structures
is vital for our collective memory and environmentally conscious construction
techniques are vital for our planet. Green Restorations presents in very clear terms
that these oft-conflicting positions are interdependent, and shows how for future
generations we cannot have one without the other. This book for the first time
puts it all together, marrying the theory and practices of both preservation and
sustainability in a methodology that is technical enough to guide architects
and contractors, and is easily accessible for the owner of a vintage home
considering upgrades to whole house restorations. Finally!
— David Maurer, AIA, LEED-AP Maurer Architecture / TightLines Designs, Inc.Cataloging in Publication Data:
A catalog record for this publication is available from the National Library of Canada.
Copyright © 2010 by Aaron Lubeck.
All rights reserved.
Cover design by Diane McIntosh.
Cover images: House: © iStock/Mark Tenniswood; Paintbrush: © iStock/Hugo Chang
Interior images: Photos © Aaron Lubeck or Trinity Design/Build by permission, except where noted
Illustrations © Aaron Lubeck or Trinity Design/Build by permission, except where noted
Printed in Canada.
First printing February 2010.
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-86571-640-7
Inquiries regarding requests to reprint all or part of Green Restorations should be addressed to New Society
Publishers at the address below.
To order directly from the publishers, please call toll-free (North America) 1-800-567-6772, or order online
at www.newsociety.com
Any other inquiries can be directed by mail to:
New Society Publishers
P.O. Box 189, Gabriola Island, BC V0R 1X0, Canada
[phone]
New Society Publishers’ mission is to publish books that contribute in fundamental ways to building an
ecologically sustainable and just society, and to do so with the least possible impact on the environment,
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who taught me that the trick in life is to figure out what you love to do,
then convince somebody to pay you to do itContents
Acknowledgments