The Green Garage

New video on building a roof

A little bit about the process of building a super insulated roof...

More on the roof work

As you can see, the new roof is beginning to take shape. This week they have been putting up 3 layers of polyisoinsulation.

On top of this, they are putting up rafters that will be covered with oriented strand board, but first will be filled with the cellulose insulation that we saved from our deconstruction.

In addition, we've been advertising materials on Craigslist that we don't need with pretty good success. Here are some of the lights heading out.

New roof

At this past Friday lunch meeting, Joe Gallagher took us through the process by which we will be building our new roof. We had made the decision to keep our existing roof, for historic and reuse reasons, but knew we needed to build something over it for insulation and protection. What we came up with is a super-insulated cool roof with so many layers of insulation that our models show it to have an R value of over 100. (If you don't know what an R value is, it's the measure of thermal resistance in a building. The higher the number, the better the building insulation's effectiveness.) Most residential homes have roofs with an R value of 30, but as fuel costs are increasing, the number is shifting to 40+.

I could detail for you all of the layers, but I think if I can just summarize, you might read beyond the next sentence. Basically, what we're looking at is layers of polyisoinsulation sandwiched between layers of laminated veneer lumber, covered with a white Duralast membrane. Is that good enough for you? Someone in the group said it's like an Oreo cookie, but the Double Stuff variety, and I'll add, covered in white chocolate. If you can picture that, you'll know what this roof is going to look like. As soon as I get any sort of visual on this, I'll post it. In the meantime, think Oreo.

This might sound expensive, but relatively speaking it's not. We are using ALL recycled materials, except for the Duralast membrane and some brackets, and this is saving us a substantial amount of money.

Our roofer (QHR Roofing) says he has never done a 100+ R roof. They start next week, and it should take about 3 weeks.

Once we get most of the roofing materials out of the building, we are going to sand blast our interior ceiling and some walls. Actually, we're not SAND blasting, but have decided to do SODA blasting with common baking soda. We learned that sand is a carcinogen, and that it is not safe for workers to ingest whatever is floating in the air. A bit of research turned up the idea of soda blasting - that's what they used to clean up the Statue of Liberty.

Finally, we've reached the end of deconstruction and our place is chock full of materials we'll be reusing and materials we'll have to send out for use elsewhere. Tom O'Connor has done a masterful job of managing all of this stuff. If you want to learn more about what we'll be doing with all this stuff, take a look at the following video.

Progress

It's October and we're making steady progress. As you can see, the old windows in front have come down, and will be reused for interior offices. Because nothing is leaving the building, as stuff is removed from the walls and ceiling, it is piling up inside to the point where it is sometimes hard to make your way along the floor.

One part of this project that I'm sure is not typical is our near-obsessive dedication to salvaging wood, and that requires removing every nail that is in every piece. Here is the pile of wood requiring nail removal as of last week:

 

We have had a dedicated group of volunteers - and some paid employees - who are removing nails hour after hour, day after day. We are going to have to take them out for one serious dinner when this whole thing is over. Jamilah is one of our volunteers...

There will be a special place in heaven for these people, trust me.

Also this week, we are removing bricks from the parapet (a wall that stands higher than a roof, in case you're wondering) in the front of our building. This section of the building will be renovated anyway, restoring it to the original 1920's look, and we need the bricks to restore the front facade. 

Other than this, I can report that we are without heat (no gas for obvious reasons), and since the Michigan temps are settling into the 40's this week, it's a bit chilly. But the guys inside the old section of the building doing all of the deconstruction work aren't complaining, so I won't either!

The sky is falling!

Actually, it's just our suspended ceiling. But it is indeed coming down, slowly but surely. I have mentioned Eduardo Martinez before, who is doing an outstanding job deconstructing this place. This week he is working in conjunction with another gentleman, Heladio Gomez, to take down the suspended ceiling. They are extremely careful, but every once in a while I hear a loudish crash coming from the next room (I and my computer are safely ensconced in the new part of the building), and I know another panel has decided not to make a graceful exit. But look at the results so far:

As of today, about half of the tiles have been removed, and those that are salvageable have been stacked for further use. For the material that's not salvageable, we're considering 2 options: putting it back into the land to augment the soil (around non-edible vegitation), or possibly putting it through a chipper and using it to fill in some stud spaces. It could be a great insulator.

On another matter: in my last post, I mentioned that we would be receiving a large quantity of gently used oriented strand board from a man in Manchester, MI. As you may remembr, this board was used for flooring at U of M for convocation ceremonies at the Big House. After 3 uses, it gets disposed of. In this case, our contact in Manchester made the purchase and sold it to us. It arrived this week. Here's what it looks like:

You might ask what we're doing with all this board. We're using it as part of the substructure of the new roof. To refresh you, we're keeping the old historic roof, putting in a ton of insulation, and building a new roof on top of it. The roof comes from Duro-Last, and will be white (better for reflecting the sun's rays off of the building). So underneath the Duro-Last roof, and sandwiched in the insulation, will be this oriented strand board, framed by some of the 2x4 pieces of wood we've been storing from deconstruction.

One more thing, completely unrelated to the above post, but worth mentioning. We're working this semester with 2 students from Wayne State University's School of Library and Information Science to help us develop our urban sustainable library. We meet for the first time tonight, and we'll be talking over what exactly we're doing with our information system here. We have to hammer out what our physical library will look like, how we'll manage questions and consultations, what our online presence will be, how we want to design our site to be user-friendly and possibly even interesting. Each student will be in charge of one small aspect of the library design as part of their classwork, and we're hoping that their work will be helpful to us too.

Sometimes people get on sites or read blogs and have ideas for how they would like to see information presented, and I'd like to offer you this opportunity. If you have read this far into this blog, I think you've made enough of an investment to perhaps offer some suggestions to us. So if you have any ideas for how you'd like to see information displayed at the Green Garage, or how you'd like to learn about sustainable ideas, please make a comment and we'll try to incorporate your suggestion. Right now is a great time to offer up ideas, before I engrave our work into rock, never to be altered. Well, you know I'm kidding, but I do encourage you to make this work relevant to you. And thanks!

Using technology for materials sourcing

You all know we're reusing a lot of the material we're taking down right now. It's all being stacked into the new part of the building, ready to be used later. But we are going to have to bring in some other materials into the building too, preferably used, and some I'm sure will be new. I know we all curse technology from time to time, but in cases like this, it can be a wonderful thing.

Case in point: We were looking for LVL (laminated veneer lumber), above, for the framing of our new roof, and through Craigslist found a source right here in Michigan (in Casco, to be exact). Not only is it local, but it is used, and so will cost us only 30% of the price of brand new lumber.

We also needed pretty large quantities of polyiso insulation for the roof and wall systems, and a Google search turned up once-used polyiso in Chicago and Maryland for under 50% of the price we would have had to pay for new.

And here's an interesting one: Have you ever wondered what happens to all of that board that covers U of M's football field during graduation ceremonies? Does it keep you up at night?  Here's the payoff for reading this blog (and a great trivia piece for party settings): It goes to Manchester, MI. Another Craigslist search found the 300 sheets of 3/4 " oriented strand board (which is just wood chips and glue) that we needed in Manchester. The owner said that it is a combination of gently used and new, and the gently used stuff is from, you all know by now, U of M graduation events. Apparently it is used for about 3 events, then sold. So if you enter the Green Garage and somehow feel like singing 'Hail to the Victors,' you'll know why. Oh, and the cost will once again be less than 50% of new.

Finally, let me include pictures of a couple of things that have surfaced in the deconstruction. The first is an advertisement that dates back to the 1920's and the second is a radiator cover from an Ames Automobile (Ames was here in 1920). Really cool.

 

Still no dumpster

We're on day 5 of deconstruction and still no dumpster. Believe me, we're taking things apart.  We have hired a gentleman named Eduardo, and he is doing the lion's share of the work.

Eduardo takes everything apart and stacks it. Right now he's working on removing the wood.

Tom O'Connor, who is managing our materials processing, spent some time today removing nails from the wood.

Then he took it over to the annex building, where we have set up a materials storage and staging center.

Since we can't safely do our work (computer-type) in the historic building, we have reconfigured the furniture and have developed a nice temporary working space.

It's all working pretty well. We're spending a good amount of time figuring out how to get rid of materials we don't need (like flexible duct - Craigslist is a great help), and finding used materials for things we still need. It's an interesting journey. And still no dumpster! Yes!

Removing insulation

Now that we have our permit to work on the building, one of the first things we're doing is removal of the existing paper insulation from ceiling panels in the upper level of the building. Those ceiling panels will eventually come down, but first we need to get rid of the insulation that is covering them. We are working with an insulation company called Kenco, and so they are here today doing the removal.

Normally this is a pretty easy job. They suck the insulation out in tubes and take it to a landfill. Since we don't want any waste, we have devised another way to do it. We knew that we could reuse the insulation, so we worked up a way to get this stuff out of the ceiling and into a safe spot until we're ready to use it. So here's the process: The truck connects a tube to the space upstairs.

The insulation is sucked into the tube and sent back downstairs....

...into a plastic-sealed room where it will be stored until we're ready to use it.

The insulation will be added to the cellulose insulation that Kenco will be putting in the walls of the building. We want this to be a no-waste project...so far, so good!

Some positive news about Detroit

Yesterday we received 2 pieces of great news - we received our permit to begin construction at the Green Garage, and the permit for the Green Alley. Hooray!

We're pleased for ourselves (now we can begin construction), but we're also happy to send out a positive report about working in the city of Detroit. We sent our plans for the Green Garage into the city just 1 1/2 weeks ago, and here we sit today with permit in hand. That's remarkable! We have done construction projects in other cities, and have been told that they wouldn't even LOOK at our application for 2 weeks, let alone comb through it for approval. So this represents lightning speed - good for you Detroit!

What's even more amazing to me is the fact that this is not your usual project. We had to pass plumbing, electrical, mechanical, structural codes on a project that incorporates collecting up to 2,000 gallons of rainwater on site, utilizing a solar/hot water/geothermal heating and cooling system, installing an insulated roof over a roof, and developing a rooftop garden. We're working with a historic building, so we needed all of this to mesh with our need to keep the historic integrity of the building intact. These items needed extra scrutiny, as they represent relatively new concepts. In fact, most of the approval happened within a week, and we had to wait the extra half week for some details to be worked out. For example, we needed approval from the health department for the water harvesting.

Now, keep in mind that we went in prepared. We sent in over 25 pages of detailed building plans and operating procedures. And to get to those 25 pages, we spent 9 months in design and modeling, and then 3 months preparing the plans. We also worked with people throughout the design phase who know city code, like Laurie Catey, a mechanical engineer, or Ted Berlinghof, an architect. Without their input we would not have had such a positive result.

So the green incubator has emerged from a long incubation. We also have a positive story to tell about working with the city. We all win.

Letting the light back in

On Friday we took a brick out of the building, and we were all cheering. OK, you may say, what's the big deal? Let me explain a little about the history of the building to help you understand what led to our reaction.

The Green Garage building was constructed in 1920, a boom time for Detroit with the burgeoning auto industry. For a year it was the home of the DeFord Motor Truck Company, and then became a sales center for the Ames-built Sales Corporation, which made bodies for Model T cars. This is why it's on the National Register of Historic Places. Here's what it looked like in 1920. Notice the windows.

By the early 1960's, the building had gone through many owners, and eventually housed a company called Kanners and Patrize, which sold sundry goods to departments stores like Hudsons. Here's how it looked. Notice the windows beginning to shrink.

In 1967, around the time of the Detroit riots, all of the windows were bricked up, and remain so until today. Here is a current photo of the exterior.

When we bought the place, we understood the relationship between the windows and events in Detroit's history, and also what removing the bricks from the windows would symbolize. So this past Friday, as we met to discuss the passing of the design phase and approach of the build phase, we wanted to pause and celebrate the removal of the first brick from the facade. So while Joe Gallagher got up on the ladder outside and began hammering away, the rest of us stayed inside with the lights off, waiting for the first light to shine into the building. Here is a picture of Joe outside, followed by a short video showing what it looked like inside the building. Warning: it gives new meaning to the term film noir. You won't see much, but I think you'll get the story.