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Building One House at a Time – Master carpenter focuses on the details.
By Sally Keeney – Correspondent
The Chapel Hill News – May 23, 2010
Margaret LaRoe, a retired educator and school administrator, has found a peaceful life in the rolling meadows and woods of Rougemont, just across the Orange County line in Person County. Her neighbor has 12 home sites. Each homeowner has three acres, and there are about 120-150 acres of open land. “We are buffered from the world,” LaRoe said.
She moved to the area to be near her
children and grandchildren; a daughter in
Durham and a son who lives next door to her
new passive-solar home built in 2007-2008 by
Steven Brouillard.
Brouillard is a master carpenter and home
designer who has been building homes in
Orange, Chatham, Durham, and surrounding
counties since 1980. Unlike most builders,
he designs and builds one house at a time
using master carpenters who have been with
him for years and subcontractors who have
often worked with him equally long.
And his clients, like Margaret LaRoe, seem
happy to trade quickly built for the
perfection and passion that Brouillard
brings to the work site every day. “I loved
working with him,” LaRoe said. He is a
craftsman and designer, and kept me involved
every step of the way in the designing and
the building of the house. I so appreciated
his keeping me in the loop. I also love
that he is a perfectionist.
“When my kitchen cabinets were installed,
the man from the cabinet company that
installed them said, ‘I don’t know if I’ve
ever put cabinets in a perfectly plumbed
kitchen before.’ I just laughed and said
that would be Steven.
“He captured my vision, which was blurry,
and he brought his knowledge to the table
and got me the light, airy Craftsman-style
house that I was hoping to have,” LaRoe
said.
Winter Warmth
Brouillard has been building low-impact,
energy-efficient homes using sustainable and
local materials before the concepts of “not
so big house,” “green building,’ and
“zero-energy” became commonplace.
And Brouillard keeps in touch with many of
the people for whom he has built homes. “Steven
still comes out here annually on the winter
solstice to see where the sun is,” LaRoe
said.
From many years of building passive-solar
homes, Brouillard knows that the sun, when
it’s out, will be shining on LaRoe’s thermal
mass floors that retain heat and give it
back long after the sun goes down.
To take advantage of winter sun, LaRoe’s
house was sited with large windows on the
southern and eastern exposures and built
with thru-body ceramic tiles on concrete
backer boards providing thermal mass in the
east-facing kitchen and with four inches of
concrete etched with an acid stain for
beauty and thermal mass in the great room.
The great room has atrium windows and fans
that are reversible and work as a supplement
to the remote control atrium windows helping
to pull hot air out of the house or cooler
air in as needed. They also can circulate
hot air that collects in the atrium in the
winter or provide a gentle cool breeze on
those really hot days of summer.
“The atrium is wonderful,” LaRoe said.
“That was his idea as a way to bring light
in from outside and not damage my Oriental
rug from direct sunlight. The atrium gives
the house a feeling of being bigger than it
is. I don’t know quite how I’ll manage to
change the long-life light bulbs in the fans
when needed, but my son lives next door. He
can help when I need to change the bulbs.”
Using Earth’s Energy
But the passive-solar
design with the deep over-hanging eaves and
good insulation is only part of the
energy-savings built into LaRoe’s
2,200-square-foot house. The rest is the
geothermal heat pump which actually diverts
some of the heated water into the domestic
hot water tank when it doesn’t use it for
heating.
“Using the earth’s
temperature really is one of the most
efficient systems and reduces your carbon
footprint,” LaRoe said. “It was even
surprising to Steven that geo-thermal wasn’t
that much more expensive than a conventional
heating and cooling system.”
LaRoe said that a representative of Piedmont
Electric Cooperative told her that her house
for its size was very efficient and showed
her other houses of the same size that had
higher electric bills.
But LaRoe is cognizant that energy-efficient also has to do with lifestyle. “I don’t have a lot of kids to do laundry for or open and shut the doors,” she said.
Windows Everywhere
Asked what she would change if she was building a new energy-efficient house today, LaRoe quickly responded that she would put up more gutters. Not putting up the gutters was her decision. She says didn’t do it when the house was being built so she could save money. She also says that she comprised on passive –solar in several ways. One was with the front porch indented. “I wanted porch more than I wanted passive-solar, but I may have changed that if building now.”
One thing that LaRoe says impresses everyone about her house is the number of windows: 57 in all, including those in the doors. “Having “too many windows” is an environmental sacrifice that she made knowingly. “I went overboard on windows,” she says in a confessional tone. “No skylights, but windows everywhere and every window like a big picture frame. It is so beautiful outside, and the pictures in the window change with the seasons.” As she sits in her 18-by-24-foot south-facing kitchen, she counts 12 windows, and there are as many in her bedroom.
Too many windows or not, LaRoe says that she feels good about the environmental impact of her house. She and her son are talking about installing shared solar panels and placing them in his open field. And she’s planning for the next visit from her grandson who loves fishing in the ponds and streams.
"For more
information on the design and building of
the LaRoe Residence, including a slideshow,
click here."
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