My Built Environment: Good, Bad, and Really Ugly

Those of us in design and building industries, and particularly those of us that focus on green building, always like to use more environmentally correct products whenever possible. When I started building 10 years ago, are homes always had large front porches, and they still do. At the time, all of our porches were wood framed, and we used Trex decking in lieu of Redwood as the surface material. Trex is considered a green product since it uses a lot of wood scraps in its making, never needs staining, won’t warp, rot, or splinter. I totally agree with all of this, except for the staining part. We have had a Trex porch for nine years now. I do truly like the product, but after nine years, it was starting to look pretty grungy. There have been wine spills, paint spills, and water stains. I have cleaned it several times, but to no avail. So I finally decided to stain it, using a stain that was approved by Trex. In my case, I used a solid color stain by Behr. I also put down two coats. First, I was amazed at how well Trex took the stain, and second, I was amazed at how the stain covered over all of the spots, including the paint spills. I was hoping for them to not be as noticeable, but they are simply gone now. The porch looks brand new, and now matches the paint scheme of our house. Now we shall see how long the stain lasts. BTW, in case you are keeping track, the Behr stain is water based, does not off gas, and cleanup was with water. That is pretty green in itself.

Welcome to my new and improved blog, or at least eventually improved. To all of my readers who were following me at my old blog location, thank you for making the switch. For those of you who are new to my blog, welcome! Just to let you know, while the content here will stay the same, I am continuing to tweak the format look and feal of this blog, so don’t be surprised if the appearance changes a time or two! For those of you who arn’t familer with WordPress, it can be a very powerful tool. You can  also use it for far more than just a blogging tool. As an example, check out one of my other websites, Midori, which has been entirely formatted and encoded in WordPress.

Once again, welcome, and thanks for following me here!

It was first reported yesterday in the Boulder Daily Camera That Mcstain Enterprises has filed for bankruptcy protection. This is on the heals of Village Homes filing for bankruptcy last fall. These are two highly respected Colorado home builders, which both made the top 350 list of giant home builders that I noted in my previous post.

While it is not a surprise, it is truly sad to see Mcstain go under. They were one of the pioneers of green building, particularly on a production scale. The company was operated with a huge dosing of respect and integrity, something that is sorely lacking in many companies these days. The reasons they stated for filing is the poor housing market, and more importantly the gridlocked lending we find ourselves in. In my opinion, the gridlocked lending is making a bad situation worse. Without lending, nothing new is getting built or developed, which is now causing massive layoffs in the architecture and engineering fields. The entire industry has been brought to its knees.

Lets just hope that we can work our way out of this sooner than later, before we are all living under a bridge.

Professional Builder recently issued there 2009 Housing Giants list. Typically they have listed the top 400 builders in the country based on revenue. This list would typically include the large national builders such as DR Horton, Centex, KBhome, Standard Pacific Homes, as well as larger regional builders. With a few exceptions, small volume local builders would not be on the list.

With the residential crash, this years list is the top 350, not the top 400! The smallest builder on the list, only built 50 homes last year. In the not too distant past, a 50 home builder would have been considered a small volume local builder. My how things have changed.

Historic Preservation has existed for several decades now nationally, and for a couple of decades locally. The original intent of historic preservation was to help protect and preserve those pristine homes and structures, and in some cases districts of our past architecture that made our communities unique, and/or that had a direction connection to important historical people. Nationally, the guidelines are that any structure (or landscape for that matter) that is at least 50 years old is eligible for designation, assuming it meets other criteria as well, such as being more or less intact, and not substantially altered. This has served us well.

However, now we have an interesting time coming up, and one that will receive much debate. In the past, prior to the 1950’s, for the most part, homes and buildings were pretty unique. If builders built more than one of a particular floor plan, there usually wern’t more than a dozen or so, and usually far fewer. Now though, the tract homes of the 50’s are technically eligble for historical designation. Locally, this hasn’t been an issue, because our collection of 50’s homes is not huge, and has been consentrated in a few areas, with most of the floor plans fairly unique.

Now though, over the next decade the tract homes of the 1960’s will be coming up for eligibility, then the 70’s and so on. Now we will have homes eligible that not only do we have hundreds of them locally, but there are thousands nationally as builders built pretty much the exact same floor plan in communities across the country. For example, the brick ranch home pictured here, was built in Fort Collins in a neighborhood called South College Heights where there are dozens of similar homes. The same home was built in Greeley, in Panorama in Grand Junction, and hundreds in the Denver area.

Which brings me to the question of now what? Do we really want to designate and preserve entire tracts of identical homes? Not only locally, but nationally. Do we find a few examples in each community to protect? And if so, how do we figure this out? I don’t have the answers as of now, nor have I formed a strong opinion on this yet. However, the Fort Collins Landmark Preservation Commission is starting a project to document the various kinds of home architecture prevalent in Fort Collins, so I volunteered to research and document homes from the 1960’s to current. This will be some interesting research, and will share it with my readers.