The day has finally come to pour the driveway. For two years, we have endured loads of fill and gravel, mud, vehicles getting stuck, mud, gravel getting tracked onto our beautiful fir floors on dog’s (and other mammals’) paws, and did I mention mud?

Level access area "BEFORE"

We debated (oh, okay, I debated with myself) the issue of building green by using permeable concrete which allows rain to percolate into the ground below, to avoid flooding the neighbours’ yards and causing erosion. Permeable concrete incorporates a different gravel and concrete mix which is very dry, and involves much more tooling to finish properly. Denis, the concrete guru, says it would cost about 50% more. He has designed the driveway to drain into the storm sewer and along the bank side of the driveway.

When I started this blog, I described my process of decision-making as balancing cost with green-ness. Almost all our decisions were controlled by these parameters (plus our sense of aesthetics, of course, which has lead to a considerably higher cost than a plainer house would have.)

The driveway is already a huge expense, involving some 30 meters of fly-ash concrete. (Fly-ash is a waste product from industry, used in the concrete mix, so that’s the green angle here.) FYI, we’re talking $15,000 in this area of the world.

The driveway is also a huge expanse. Again, our philosophy of green-ness lead to a little debate about its size. (Are we paving paradise, putting up a parking lot?) As with our perhaps excessive use of stone, our desire to make this an easy-to-care-for xeriscaped yard has dictated this mix of concrete and strategically-placed planting areas. We know the spring will bring a huge effort on our part to tame this large yard, then make it “wild” (sustainable) again!

Denis and his huge crew arrived about 1:30. The rainy, windy weather of late means they have to do all their pours when suitable weather arrives. Dark comes at 4:30.

Pouring a greenhouse pad

They worked feverishly into the evening hours, then Denis and Harry came back after dinner to finish smoothing the driveway, using worklights and flashlights to see what they were doing. There’s no rest or coming back tomorrow when you’re pouring concrete. The job has to be finished in one go. I think they did a beautiful job.

Level access "AFTER"

In my insomnia-induced delirium the night before the pour, I conceived of this idea for finishing the stair treads:

The forms are stripped four days later. Here are photos:

An example of how the stones blend with the concrete

So, that’s the driveway.

After a week of waiting for trades to show up when they promised earlier in the week, they all showed up on Friday.

The upshot of the day’s labour is that we have LIGHTS,

These are temporary light fixtures while we do all the finishing activities that might break the permanent fixtures

we have HOT WATER, and we have a massive cabinet in the bedroom/bathroom.

The cabinet/furniture maker is Vincent Lang, who has a workshop near Sechelt. He has built the unit (and the kitchen cabinets) out of formaldehyde-free 3/4″ plywood. I was able to choose the alder veneer before it was laid up, and Vincent custom-mixed the stain, finishing the cover coat with a tough, green finish, as well as designed the doors to match a photograph of a cabinet I showed him from a magazine. Local trade, quality construction (included mortise and tenon drawers, soft-closing hardware, etc.) No particle board in our house if I can help it! I confess that a flood in our apartment convinced us that particle board cabinetry, such as the IKEA cabinets, falls apart when it gets wet. Not sustainable.

The bedroom side of the cabinet

A view of the bathroom side of the cabinet. Hardware is yet to be installed.

Plus, I filled in my spare time cleaning and cutting flooring to its useful length. Very satisfying progress.

On demand hot water heater

Let me tell you about the hot water heater. It’s a Navien CR180 on demand gas fixture, which claims 98% energy efficiency, “the highest in the industry.” And “best gallons per minute performance when comparing input BTU.” It has to be vented on an outside wall. We considered a re-circulating booster, which would deliver the hot water instantaneously, keeping all the pipes filled with hot water.  We decided against it because of course, it requires more fuel to keep it instantly ready. So now the question is: do we just let the initial (cold) water out of the faucet go down the drain? When we get the $ together to install a solar hot water booster, the water going into the tank will be hot on sunny days, but it still won’t deliver hot water until the pipes have been emptied of their room temperature water.

Our house will be finished with cedar, because it is harvested and milled on the coast, plus it suits the traditional aesthetic of our home (see post: 2) Design Considerations.) Cedar has the extraordinary ability to naturally repel insects and is very slow to rot. It is conceivable that the cedar will last over 100 years, as long as we (and future owners) take care of it.

If left to weather naturally, cedar will all turn silvery-grey, and it will eventually rot as water finds its way into the wood. To  increase its life expectancy, it needs to have some preservative to repel water. Naturally, I want to use a product that is kind to the environment.

First stop: Greenworks Building Supply in Vancouver. The product: Broda’s PRO TEK TOR (“tough, natural, wood protection”). The brochure notes that it “contains oxide and trans-oxide pigments…suspended in linseed oil, tung oil and water. The water opens the spaces between the cells of the wood, drawing in the oils and protective pigments. Easy to use. Cleans up with water. Looks good longer.” “Get ready to enjoy years of beautiful durable wood colour.” Sounds like a no-brainer, right?

The catch is, according to the salesman, your stain only lasts up to 2 years before it needs to be reapplied. We don’t want to have to re-stain every 2 years. What’s sustainable about that (especially for our bodies!)? Add to that the cost of the product (about $60/gallon), and I decided to start asking around at other paint stores.

Benjamin Moore (“we will be launching our enviro-stain in April.”) Then Sherwin-Williams (“we’re working on it.”) And finally Home Depot (“our eco-stain is the water-soluble Varathane.”)

What I finally decided on was Behr’s wood stain, which is water-cleanup, but has the UV protection and Mildew-resistant finish  like the Broda product, and costs about 2/3rds the price. The clincher: it’s guaranteed to last 8 years on vertical surfaces. As we applied the stain to our faschia boards yesterday, we didn’t notice any obvious smell (although I know that some very bad gases don’t smell.)

So, once again, a reality check about how “green” we can be.

As I’ve already mentioned, we have been paying big time for building on a hillside. My brother asked if we got the lot cheap because it was on a hillside. Almost all lots with great views are on hillsides, unless you can snag a flat waterfront lot. So the answer is no.

The other price we pay, apparently, for that great view is “fill”. I confess that I don’t understand how we can dig a big hole in the ground, put the piles of dirt outside the hole, fill up the hole with 47 cubic meters of concrete and then wood, and still have to bring in 100 truckloads of various kinds of dirt to put back into the hole and around the house to make it livable. Is the house going to slide down the hill if we don’t add all that dirt?

We are changing the landscape so that we have flat areas around the house to drive on. How ironic. Those flat areas necessitate a steep hill on the rest of the lot. We’re just transferring the steepness to another part of the lot. Will the yard, then, be usable? At a later date, we will have to carve some switchbacks into the bottom of the lot so that it might be.

And, what about the pollution generated by those excavators and trucks we’re using to bring in this fill? Green dilemma #4. Ouch.