My name is Everett Kramer and you're sitting in my house that I'm building for myself and
my family to near Passive House standard in the Hudson Valley of New York we're on my
farm here in Germantown and over that way is my old farmhouse that I renovated and that
was a 1850 farmhouse we had about 40 sheep here on the farm in renovating that house
and trying to update it and live in it like every material in it was not durable it was
impossible to clean through the little like floorboards and stuff and it was cold and
I really started thinking about what would be the ideal house for this environment and
for my family you know and how could we live here in this place and on this land in a really
easy and modern way but that still made sense with where we are and I got really into Passive
House and you know making something that you know responds to climate change and is carbon
neutral or as close to that as possible so I started thinking about like a modern farmhouse
or a Farmhouse Of The Future is what I'm calling it now I have a really amazing team of carpenters
that have been me with me on the project since really day one: Adam Steeneck, Stewart Rappin,
and Ryan Voell and they've been amazing since the very beginning I'm also working with
Cramer Silkworth of Baucraft Engineering and he's the passive house consultant he's been hugely
helpful from the design stage to now and Nick Shaw at 475 has been a really big help with
all the air sealing details and products and guiding me through that but like this house
never goes below 60 degrees and it hasn't gone over 70 so far that to me is like that's
a win that's the point of the house it was below zero last night let's see what we get
okay it feels really nice in here
let's look at our temperature... wow! if you could see this 53 degrees and showing 9 degrees
outside and there's no heat on in the house
a lot of this i think is really because of the air tightness as well as dense pack cellulose
13 inches and we've got 16 inches in the ceiling triple pane windows everywhere and this is
our concrete floor that was recently polished and that's kind of our major heat source at
the moment is the sun hitting this concrete floor
so it was a long process at the beginning of designing this house I just watched a ton
of videos and read a ton of different information I watched all of the 475 videos including
um Ben Freed's pole barn house video that was one of the first ones and since I've never
built a house before and I wanted to build this super-high-performance home how can I
make that easy for myself start to think just what's the simplest shape that I can make
the house what we landed on was just three shed roof volumes that are connected in different
ways and you know the shed roof is basically as simple a building as you can make I started
developing that and then I went up to Yestermorrow and did their two week home design / build
class with my sketchup model everything and really refined it through there and walked
away with I think something pretty close and then got an engineer to put construction docs
together and started working with Cramer to get you know work out the different wall systems
and air barrier and vapor barriers and everything like that that's the INTELLO that'll be our
membrane for the internal stud wall that's a Lunos in-wall heat recovery unit that'll
be the ventilation for the studio they're gonna be two of those a big part of the concept
of this house is that it's a pretty modest sized home um in terms of the internal insulated
condition space but then there's a thousand square feet of outdoor space decks and patio
that connects two buildings or connects the three buildings and then two triple sliders
that connect that space the key idea is like a house that is small and easy to live in
in the winter and easy to live with small family but in the summer opens up and we can
have 50 people here and it feels spacious and comfortable this is our front door these
are Zola ALU75 triple pane glass R-11 glass uh the total R value for most of the windows
is about R-5 but because there's so much glass some of them are a little bit better than
that I'm pretty psyched about these hinges pretty substantial but that's because the
weight of all the stuff it's all super heavy because there's so much significant structure
connected to the outside doing a double stud wall with that outside wall being structural
made a lot of sense it's just been super simple to explain to everyone what we're building
you know it's just another wall inside it's not that big a deal you know we used plywood
as our sheathing so that would be vapor open and we use SOLITEX ADHERO on the outside of
that instead of Zip so that we have you know that vapor openness so we don't need to worry
about condensation on the inside of the sheathing and INTELLO on the inside of that and basically
just got as close to the 475 Smart Enclosure on double stud walls as we could we're fully
strapping the siding for a rain screen so if water gets between the siding and the house
the house can dry out and the siding can dry into this cavity and also to the outside and
because of the stack effect there's probably going to be air coming behind here heating
up as the sun hits it and going out the top so they'll be constantly air venting through
this channel a cool detail in this house that I'm pretty proud of you know the slab sits
a foot higher than the frost wall that insulation under the slab connects directly to the cellulose
in the walls this is our 12 inches of EPS foam that comes up and then there's eight
inches underneath and then the vapor barrier goes through that underneath the mudsill into
the outside and this is all poured on top of that there's an inside house the inside
air barrier that you could draw in section without lifting up your pen and then the outside
barrier that you could draw in section without lifting up your pen and there's no spot where
it's like you know half an inch of insulation or something like that to insulate the gap
between the window and the window buck I used wool for my sheep my wool from my sheep that
ate grass right here you know before the house was here just feels very full circle this
is gonna be our guest bathroom or second bathroom and it's a wet room there's going to be a
shower pan installed in that to that center drain and it took a lot of work to figure
out the levels here there's a pan going in thin set plus tile and eventually it'll all
be the same level as the finished floor I'm sort of embracing this idea of it being a
futuristic house you know we have polished concrete floors that are super easy to clean
from the outset thinking about robot vacuums and you know a house that's just really super
easy to maintain and that you know my son can go crazy in and not you know destroy anything
we're using a lot of a lot of Skatelite which is material for skate parks made by Richlite
it's the same thing so you can we were using that for exterior trim for our countertops
for our stairs and that's just compressed paper with resin it's recycled paper it's
really great product I'd be really excited to inspire other people to build a high performance
home like I run into people all the time through this that tell me that they think a house
needs to breathe and all these other concepts that are really outdated it's not that hard
there's great products out there and great guidance from you guys (475) and yeah it's
totally doable