People in Green Houses shouldn't

I am building an eco-house. The phrase might evoke images of straw bale walls rising out of a mossy field. When we think about green building it tends to be a new house, pod-shaped possibly and with a living roof that needs mowing. But this is no field in Leitrim. It’s a humble Dublin semi. And over the coming months with the help of an architect, engineer, energy consultant and builder I will be trying to bring it into a fossil-fuel free future.
After a long wet summer of waiting the planning permission is in place to take our 890 square feet end of terrace with ramshackle garage to the side and turn it into just over 1400 square feet of family home. Instead of poring over glossy kitchens I have armfuls of brochures about breathable insulation materials. (Okay there is one glossy kitchen brochure, but only as a design reference.)
The four year-old son has great plans. He wants to push out the boundary walls and turn it all into rolling fields that he will then farm, spending happy days ploughing, keeping a bit of livestock, generally living the good life. Sometimes I wonder if our own plans are just as wildly unrealistic. But here I am.
The whole idea was born when the family decided to move back to Dublin city centre from a commuter town where most of the population spends the majority of their weekday time asleep before getting into their cars to live and work in the next county. In the clamour of radio debates about peak oil and global warming I had toyed with the idea of a wood pellet stove to stop burning oil to heat our lovely Victorian house. Then I looked at the petrol station receipts that ran to around €350 a month and realised that we would really only be tinkering with the situation.
There was the guilt about what I was doing to the planet. The white-crested waves I could see from the house in Wicklow town were munching away much of the peaty soil behind Murrough, a long strip of unspoilt shingle beach where us commuters could enjoy the benefits of country life. Higher sea levels and more ferocious storms have been taking an unprecedented toll in the last ten years. But above that was the quality of life issue, whether I wanted to sacrifice two to three hours of family life a day to the stony grey asphalt of the N11.
And so a year ago a move back into the city around the birth of our second son decided it. In the spring the for-sale sign went up and during some freakishly warm February weeks the house was prepared for sale. Then the family was shoe-horned into a two-up two-down in the city centre and we started to design and plan and cost the next step.
Now it’s about to happen. The commencement notice has been lodged and decisions are being made. I have lived in Jim Lawler’s (our architect) drawings for the past few weeks. My paper self has been cooking sumptuous meals in the future kitchen, while my real self struggles to scramble eggs. From this vantage point it is possible to believe that a house can help make you happy. In one of the drawings Jim has given the two boys an architect-designed spaniel.
The house sits waiting empty and musty, a picture of “before” with its beauty board and a tiled fireplace where someone’s ornaments and family photos once rested. It is the calm before the noise and dirt of an extensive build. The original doors and cast iron fireplaces are covered in layers of paint that we will strip away to reuse these essential parts of the fabric of the house. Those narrow old fireplaces will be purely decorative, a throwback to the days before central heating when the house was built. I have to investigate how to safely block up the brick chimneys so all our lovely green heat does not escape up them.
There are complicated quotes from solar panel suppliers. I am slowly starting to understand the principles of heat recovery systems. I have almost decided on which water harvesting system to go for and how to install it so that the rain clouds will provide water for our toilet cisterns and washing machine.
Over the last few months I have learnt that eco is a byword for expensive and there is a fair amount of greed behind greenness. I expect to learn many more things over the coming months. The hope is that this house will have the “wow” factor, as in “would you look at those heating bills”. But the question now is can I turn a house of the past into a house of the future within a reasonable budget?

What did you do in the time before peak oil Granma?

The story so far. Once there were two adults and two small boys who created the carbon footprint of a small African village. We burned oil, clocked up a 60 mile-a-day commute, lit a drafty old house with incandescent lightbulbs and left them on when we left the room. (Well one of us did that anyway). Now six months into a radical life shift the commute is gone, I've waved goodbye to my car, shoe-horned my family into a small house and started to plan an eco house. Not the typical house that springs to mind when you hear that phrase. (I picture a straw bale mound by a lake in deepest Leitrim where blonde children play with wooden toys under the gaze of their woollen jumpered parents.) No this eco house is a plain old end-of-terrace in Dublin that I want to drag into an oil-free future by applying the best available green building techniques and renewable energies. Why am I doing this? Yes the future of the planet is a factor. But already I am beginning to realise that a greener life has the potential to be a happier life.