The Project

Our goal is to transform the current large single family lot (7633 sqft/709 sm) into housing for 2.5 families that uses less energy than a typical single family home being built today. We will do this by maintaining and upgrading as much of the existing 100+ year old house as possible (the blue one in the picture), while vastly improving its performance and resiliency; finishing the basement for an extended family suite, and adding a new ultra low-energy 3-bedroom home that we will sell or rent to another family.

The guiding principle of our project is to introduce a modest increase in density in a highly walkable, family-friendly neighbhourhood, with housing that uses a fraction of the energy of new housing built to today’s code. This housing will also be water efficient, healthy, and foster a connection with the outdoors and our neighbhourhood.

Here are the two early schemes we considered: one an attached duplex + suite; the other, a subdivided lot with existing + new house on separate small lots.

The foundational fact about the property that I return to when I temporarily panic about what we’ve gotten ourselves into: the existing house is a good-sized old house on a big lot in an amazing location. If the grand scheme fails, we can still put some money into making the existing house better and host local soccer team practices in the spare yard space.

When I first started looking for a property, I assessed potential sites for both walkability and potential for passive solar gain, i.e. large unobstructed southern exposure at either the front or the back of the lot.

I found several properties that worked well for passive solar gain, but were in less desirable locations, and we just couldn’t make the leap to sacrifice walkability or the feel of the location simply for good southern exposure.

I was also thinking a lot about existing houses and liked the idea of demonstrating what could be done with an existing house, regardless of the location or orientation, because that’s what most of us are dealing with. Most of the houses in our city have already been built or won’t be replaced for many years, so what can we do with these houses?

Finally, I had played with the idea of doing a pure investment project first – one that wouldn’t be our home but that might finance our home down the road, but 1) I was confused and discouraged by the investment scenario for this approach and 2) I just didn’t feel motivated to move on any of these properties. Creating a project that would include a long-term home for my family had clearly emerged as our first priority.

To make matters more challenging, I was helplessly pulled toward the area I grew up in, where developable land is scarce and houses are expensive.

So when we found this property on the Oak Bay border; in a school district we liked; right next to the Avenue where we could walk to all amenities; on a family-oriented residential street; and on a large lot with development potential – the fact that the side yard faced south was among the lowest of our concerns. I knew that we could still design and build an extremely energy efficient project. This blog documents what happens next.