Steve Thomas, Host of Renovation Nation on Planet Green

TreeHugger: What do you find are the biggest misperceptions that people bring to the table when they want to approach a green rehab? When they are just starting to get their feet wet?

Thomas: Well, I'd go back to the pyramid, the efficiency pyramid that I just described. The first tier is conversation, the second tier is efficiency, the third tier is renewables.

People want to jump right to the renewables and neglect the low-hanging fruit. They tend to focus on features and features do not make a green building. You can put all the recycled concrete counter tops in the building that you want, but unless it's well built, well insulated, heated and cooled with an efficient plant, then it's just the icing on the cake. And this is of course a view propagated by manufacturers who want to claim their product as green and get you to buy it.

The core of the building—its design, its structure, its engineering, its insulation—that's really what is placed on the site. It relates to its neighbors from a design standpoint. It's utility: the ability to make it smaller rather than large. That is the core of green, and it is hard to define.

Now there are some rating systems, the most well-known of which is the LEED standard, which is a rating system propagated by the US Green Building Counsel. And then there are other regional ones in various states. The LEED system in particular is a good and thorough guideline to going green. So that's a good way to get your feet wet.

Also, of course, you've got to watch Renovation Nation and check out the website. I'd be remiss if I didn't plug my own show.

TreeHugger: You've got some pretty exciting stuff of your own going on. You've got one project that has been on the show and one that is still in the conceptual stages. Would you tell us a little bit more about what you've got going on your own front?

Thomas: Sure. Well my wife and I have been together for 30 years and we have spent a good deal of that time in Salem, Massachusetts buying, renovating, and selling historic houses. I live in one right now that was built in the 1700's and moved to the site in 1836. I bought it in '86 and did a big renovation and have done a number of smaller renovations and big green upgrades: super-efficient boiler, foam insulation and so on. And it's time to move on and do something else. I get itchy. I like to build stuff and renovate stuff. It's just one of those illnesses that some of us have to deal with.

So in Maine, where we have a camp on an island which we bought a number of years ago for really nothing, I built a barn. I call it a green barn because it was built with local timber, harvested 20 miles away from a sustainable forest. This timber guy is a member of The Sustainable Force Initiative; a little bit different than some of the other rating systems. But his family has been on the land for five generations, and they take really good care of it because five generations ago they wanted to be logging five generations hence. And guess what? They are. So they are stewards of the land. That's pretty extraordinary.

At the time of The Revolution, the Robbins family was logging their forest and they're still logging the same land. And guess what? It's got more trees on it now than it did five generations ago.

So we started with that and prefabbed the timber frame and the walls, stick-framed the walls out of rough-sawn and lumber from the same forest. Trucked it all, boxed it all out to the island, and it was set up and we had the barn standing in a week. So that was the best of the old prefab method, the old timber frame methods were, in essence, prefab and the best of the new. We used a lot of steel fastenings—I wasn't a purist at all because we've got 110 naught winds out there. You can see pictures of this on my website, stevethomashome.com, and then we link to some of the video on planetgreen.com.

So that was a cool project. It's done now and we are in the process of moving, living there part time and Santa Fe part time. I have a long love affair with Santa Fe. I was first there over 20 years ago On the very first This Old House project, and I want to build a zero carbon house down there, which is possible to do. A house that is passively heated. You don't need much cooling down there because it cools off at night. It's high dessert.

I want to build out of pretty unique product that is a rammed earth block. We did it on the show actually. You'll see it on one of the upcoming segments of rRenovation Nation. It's a little machine that you bring right onto the site, it looks kind of like a mixer, and you take earth from the site, sand, and a little bit of cement and water, and it makes these modular bricks. Basically mud bricks that are highly compressed and dry stacked.

You just stack them all up. They've got a tongue on the top and a groove on the bottom, so, they lock kind of like Legos. Then you've got to reinforce the structure with concrete in terms of corner posts and bond beams. And then you can stucco the outside and plaster the inside. So in the end it looks like an adobe house.

It's got extremely low embodied energy, and if you design it right then you can take advantage of the plentiful sun down there, and pretty much heat the place using solar. So that's an exciting project. You can make it look like a 200 year old adobe. That'll be a fun project to do.

TreeHugger: I picture very thick walls. Is that right?

Thomas: Yeah, twelve inch thick walls.

TreeHugger: Are we going to see this on the show? It sounds like a blast.

Thomas: I hope so.

TreeHugger: I hope so, too.

Thomas: It will be small. I think 2,000 square feet is the sweet spot. You can have guests over, you can have a little office there, you can have living, dining, kitchen (you don't need a separate living room or dining room; nobody uses it), master bedroom, and storage. 2, 000 square feet, I think, is plenty of space. It's palatial. 1,400 square feet squeezes it a little. But, 2, 000 is great.

So, that's what I'm cooking up. Don't tell my wife. She'll kill me. "What!? You want to build another house? Are you out of your mind?" The answer is, "Yes, you should've known. You married me 30 years ago." [laughs]

TreeHugger: I'm not sure if I can keep your secret for too long, Steve.

Thomas: Eh, she knows its coming.