[00:00:00] Eric Goranson: It's
[00:00:05] Emily Mottram: around the house. Trash is like a whole nother environmental thing that we don't talk about, right? It's like you put it out for the curb and it's like it's gone. So we don't, It's forgotten, right?
[00:00:14] Eric Goranson: It's like, Oh, outside outta mind.
[00:00:16] Emily Mottram: We don't talk about the 102 tons of trash we make in our lifetimes or whatever.
[00:00:21] Emily Mottram: Like the example they use in the book is like, you look at the hoarder house and that's like the stuff that they just didn't send to the landfill, and that's all of us. They just kept it in one place. And so you think about that and then that's kind of almost like an an impact. Of like, Oh my gosh, if, if I, like, I make that much trash.
[00:00:38] Emily Mottram: Right? And it's really apparent when it's all in one place, but when you're just like, put it out to the curb, like gone somewhere else, it's, you know, said it and forget it. When it comes to remodeling and renovating is a lot to know is, is around
[00:00:54] Eric Goranson: the house. Welcome to Around the House Show. This is where we talk everything about [00:01:00] your home every single week.
[00:01:00] Eric Goranson: Thanks for joining us. We have a great guest back in the studio today. Emily Matra, MA Architecture. Welcome back to Around
[00:01:09] Emily Mottram: the House. Hey, thanks for having me. It's always a good, fun afternoon to hang out with you.
[00:01:15] Eric Goranson: Ah, this is always fun. You know, you and I can get into the weeds on this stuff, which is super fun to me.
[00:01:21] Eric Goranson: You've got so much going on as well from a book to architecture to speaking, you're, you're like, Everywhere. I, I don't wanna see your schedule cuz it's gotta be like this crazy flow chart cuz you're, you're everywhere at the same time.
[00:01:36] Emily Mottram: It is a little bit crazy. Uh, you know, some days you wake up and you think, What did I do?
[00:01:43] Eric Goranson: I get the same thing where I'm like, I'm getting up in the morning and I, when I open looking at my Outlook calendar. Oh yeah, that's right. I
[00:01:50] Emily Mottram: got that today. Yeah, no, same here. It's like, how soon do I have to be presentable for a meeting? I'm gonna be on camera for Oh, I like, [00:02:00] And you'd love the day that you don't have any of those, but I don't think they exist anymore.
[00:02:03] Emily Mottram: So it's like you're a mythical unicorn . Yeah. I gotta, I gotta be presentable by this term, so I gotta be done doing email or whatever else I'm responding to or doing and, you know, make sure that I'm, uh, at least, you know, you say camera ready, but I mean, it's kind of, you know, zoom is a stretch, but, uh, Yeah, ,
[00:02:23] Eric Goranson: you know, what's, what's interesting though is, and I, and I ran into this with design and I'm sure you run into the same thing with the architecture.
[00:02:29] Eric Goranson: When I get focused in a project, time travels fast. Like when I'm like totally zoomed into, okay, I have to get us from point A to point B, and then you look up and go, Oh, I thought it was two and it's four.
[00:02:44] Emily Mottram: Yeah. And I think the, the thing that we sort of forget is we got all these other things going on and it's like, oh, there looks like there's a block in your schedule, but you need that time to spend two to four hours, like deep dive into your project stuff too.
[00:02:57] Emily Mottram: And so for me it's um, it's a [00:03:00] balance between making sure I have that time and I didn't miss a meeting I was supposed to be at, but also making sure I don't put so many things in my schedule that if I only have an hour in between something that's oftentimes not enough time for really creative process to happen.
[00:03:15] Emily Mottram: Mm-hmm. , like I might be able to get one little thing done or red line a detail for, you know, our production team or something like that, but there's no way I'm doing hard super creative things in a short window of time. And that's, that's been my battle this fall is making sure that I leave enough creative time in my schedule.
[00:03:33] Emily Mottram: Cause it looks like there's this four, you know, three, four hour block of time. Like, oh, this is great, and all of a sudden you blink and that time is gone.
[00:03:42] Eric Goranson: Caught up on the emails, but uh, the design time didn't happen. Right. So here's the, it's, it's, it's, it's interesting, you know, cuz there's so much going on right now, it's so hard to even stay on top of stuff.
[00:03:51] Eric Goranson: I don't know if you even had a chance to, to catch, and you know, we don't talk politics in here, but that new energy standards that are [00:04:00] coming out here in like January for heating and cooling stuff because of that whole inflation reduction act thing. Have you been seeing and fallen on some of that stuff?
[00:04:08] Eric Goranson: I'm trying to stay on top of it, but it's
[00:04:10] Emily Mottram: tough. I can't stay on top of it. There's just so much going on. And so it's like all you see, you flip by, you save it, you're like, I'm gonna read that. I'm gonna get into it. I'm gonna, I'm gonna take a, you know, an amount of time to understand what that meant and how that impacts everything.
[00:04:27] Emily Mottram: And then it's just like, boom, it's gone. And you got distracted by something in this. Like, you see it pop up again and you're like, Oh no, wait, I gotta read that. So. Exactly.
[00:04:35] Eric Goranson: Well, one of the things that I noticed, and this is just kind of doing the, the, the 30,000 foot level. Cause we're not gonna get into the weeds on this, but it looks like if you're a homeowner out there and you're wanting to get some of these rebates and you say, Okay, I'm gonna replace my air conditioning in my home, that you're gonna have to put in a more efficient and matched system.
[00:04:54] Eric Goranson: So you're gonna have to change the whole unit out versus just change out the, the [00:05:00] heating or the cooling part of it. So, uh, we're gonna see that, and I saw that they're measuring H V A C differently than just your c ratings now too. So I think it's gonna be a little complex early part of the year as everybody figure out, figures out what's going on out there.
[00:05:16] Emily Mottram: And I feel like it's gonna be a little complex and it's gonna be a little frustrating both for the professionals and for the homeowners as we navigate that. But I also feel like the one thing in the, the arena that we don't talk enough about is mechanicals, right? Like, we need to do some of this stuff.
[00:05:34] Emily Mottram: We need to be tracking, we need to know what's out there and what isn't working so that we know how to move forward. You know, for a couple of years it was this struggle with, you know, low load homes and traditional. HVAC systems, right? Yeah. And then, you know, in cooling climates not running long enough to have any kind of dehumidification, needing more dehumidification in heating climates, you know, [00:06:00] short cycling and having all, you know, wasting all this energy.
[00:06:03] Emily Mottram: And then, you know, now we talked briefly like, wait, we wrote a book, right? Talking about it. And in some of it, it's like we default to mini splits, right? Mm-hmm. , that's kind of like a default thing. Sure. But is that the right answer? Maybe not, but is what we have right now. You know, it's like, Oh, why are we defaulting?
[00:06:20] Emily Mottram: And so I feel like these new changes are going to hopefully spare people to kind of get into it, start doing that, and we're gonna start seeing hopefully some more data on. Pushing forward in that avenue. Mm-hmm. . And so I just wanna encourage people to still do it, even though it's gonna be really frustrating and like we apologize way in advance.
[00:06:42] Emily Mottram: Right. Because it's gonna be complicated and probably everybody's gonna be upset for a while till we figure it out. But like, even though it's complicated, it's just something that's really important that we need. That we've been talking about a lot more recently in, you know, the energy [00:07:00] improvement market across the board.
[00:07:01] Emily Mottram: Yeah. It's like we need to change our energy dependency, we need to take advantage of this. We need those people who are willing to do it, even when it's frustrating to kind of move that needle. So yeah, just some encouragement out there for people. It's gonna be complicated. I'm sorry. It almost
[00:07:18] Eric Goranson: is. Yeah. It feels almost like the nineties when I first started designing, when they changed from the like three and a half gallon flush toilets to the 1.6 gallon flush toilets.
[00:07:27] Eric Goranson: And the rule came out before really the things were a hundred percent dialed in where they got over their skis a little bit. And I'm looking at this going, I don't know if technology we're gonna be over skis like we were at the toilets, but I think just in the understanding of how we're gonna navigate this, we're gonna be over our skis
[00:07:44] Emily Mottram: a little bit.
[00:07:45] Emily Mottram: And I hope that it's gonna teach us a little bit more about resilient systems too, right? Because that's part of, you know, that's, that's part of this thing is like, you've got this system and you wanna upgrade part of it to make it more efficient, but you gotta take the whole thing out now because [00:08:00] this part doesn't work with this part and it doesn't have the same this or that.
[00:08:03] Emily Mottram: And it's like, we're in so many ways not building resilience systems. Mm-hmm. . And so hopefully that's gonna teach us a little bit about this too. Like, we're starting to think about that in our buildings. Like once you take it apart, what happens? How does it, you know, and how does it handle these climate changes?
[00:08:18] Emily Mottram: And how do you know, what are we doing with this as like, Hopefully we're gonna see some of that in our mechanical stuff as well. Yeah, it's, it's
[00:08:25] Eric Goranson: interesting, like my brother is a great example. He lives, uh, up in oh, Western Pennsylvania and he's got a newer air conditioning system, but he's got an oil furnace cuz it's an old house.
[00:08:35] Eric Goranson: Right. And it's, we don't have him out here. It's rare to have oil furnaces out here on the west coast, but there it's common and he's like, Hey, I think I might just put in, you know, natural gas for electric heat. And I'm like, well you might wait till first of the year cuz there's gonna be one rebates and you just got it serviced and it's working well.
[00:08:52] Eric Goranson: So it'll probably be better. But we don't really know how this is all gonna, you know, it's probably gonna be February, March [00:09:00] before you really get an idea of even what those things are gonna dialed in and be, cuz it's gonna be a little complic.
[00:09:06] Emily Mottram: Right. And I, So this leads into a totally, uh, totally off the off track.
[00:09:10] Emily Mottram: Yeah. But I'm gonna talk about it. Cool. Uh, which is, you know, that's one of the things that comes up about renovation. There's not a ton of renovation stuff in the original pretty Good House book. Uh, apparently we're gonna maybe have a follow up with renovations, just, you know, little plug might happen. No promises, but.
[00:09:28] Emily Mottram: You know, we need to move away from fossil fuels, but that doesn't need that. We need to all of a sudden just take everything that we have and junk it. Right. Right. So I'm reading this book, it's 10 years old already. Um, but it just came across my knowledge. Right. So here's things out 10 years, um, called GAR Biology, which is actually talking about what happens to our trash.
[00:09:48] Emily Mottram: Mm-hmm. , like where does our trash go? What happens to it? You know, all this stuff. And, and even it talks about recycling too. And they did this project, and I don't know if they're still doing it and I, I need to look it up to see if they're [00:10:00] still doing it, but they did this project where they embedded trackers in the trash and recycling to see where it went and like how long it took it to get to certain places.
[00:10:09] Emily Mottram: Oh, that is so cool. Right. And it was like this fascinating thing where sometimes recycling doesn't make any sense because we carted it 10 times across the country before it ended up in whatever its final resting place was, which will never offset the actual recycling of these things. So I do wanna encourage people back to bring it, bring it back home.
[00:10:28] Emily Mottram: Is the, the right answer isn't always to take out your existing, whatever you have that's working right now. Mm-hmm. and just junk it. Right? Because it already has a carbon impact. It's already there. You know, you gotta recycle it or, or throw it in the trash. Right? The trash is like a whole nother environmental thing that we don't talk about, right?
[00:10:49] Emily Mottram: Mm-hmm. , it's like you put it out for the curb and it's like, it's gone. We don't, it's forgotten.
[00:10:53] Eric Goranson: Right? It's like, oh, outta sight, outta
[00:10:54] Emily Mottram: mind. We don't talk about the 102 tons of trash we make in our lifetimes or [00:11:00] whatever. Like, I mean, it's just you, you . The example they use in the book is like, you look at the hoarder house and that's like the stuff that they just didn't send to the landfill, and that's all of us.
[00:11:09] Emily Mottram: They just kept it in one place. And so you think about that and then that's kind of almost like an, an impact of like, oh my gosh, if, if I, like, I make that much trash. Right. And it's really apparent when it's all in one place, but when you're just like, put it out to the curb, like gone somewhere else, it's, you know, said it and forget it.
[00:11:29] Eric Goranson: Family mind blown right there. Mind blown. Hold on. Mind blown. Wait a minute. The only thing is between a hoarder house and how you and I live in theory is that we just moved it out to the curb and they just kept it in the house.
[00:11:41] Emily Mottram: Right. Wow. The only, the only difference between that is, and, and in some cases people collect things.
[00:11:47] Emily Mottram: Not everybody collects a lot of things. So, you know, there's a, there's a little bit of, uh, escape in that, but essentially it. Is the same, right? It's like you, you didn't get rid of that trash and so you just have a [00:12:00] visual sight of what all of that is. So if you could just see all of the mountains of stuff that you like put out and sent somewhere else, you know, it's like outta sight outta mind for sure.
[00:12:12] Emily Mottram: and it's like, oh yeah, but so in renovations our answer isn't always like deep energy retrofit sounds so great, but if you're taking off a whole bunch of stuff that you're then sending to the landfill, can't do anything with, maybe still had a life, we don't have local recycling. So even if you could take it off and somebody could use it, if you don't have somewhere local to recycle it, it ends up in the landfill or it uses a ton of energy to get to wherever that facility is.
[00:12:43] Emily Mottram: Like I think it was, can't remember if it was batteries or cell phones or there there's some like one E technology that people were talking about. There are six plants that recycle them and they're all in China. Yeah. So anytime you wanna recycle it, it's gotta get all the way back to China. So it just uses a ton of [00:13:00] our carbon energy, transport, all that stuff to get it to the place that it needs to go.
[00:13:06] Emily Mottram: Cuz we don't have a lot of local ability to recycle. Electronics and e-waste and you know who doesn't have a pile of, Okay, so say you didn't recycle it cuz you were afraid of what was on your cell phone. And getting those pictures back, like who doesn't have a pile of cell phones, like, and chargers
[00:13:24] Eric Goranson: and covers, chargers and all of the rest of the stuff, you know?
[00:13:28] Emily Mottram: Exactly. So anyway, that was my totally like, completely off the wall thing here. But when you talking about renovations, keeping that oil boiler until it literally can't be fixed. Repaired or anymore because if you've gotta make a heat pump and you've gotta charge a system and you've gotta do all of that, you have expended some of your carbon budget before it ever gets to your house.
[00:13:52] Emily Mottram: How many years of running your oil boiler does that have to happen? And. 10 years are really important for what we're doing. Yeah. So we [00:14:00] just have to weigh that balance. It's like, and people ask me all the time, Well, what, what's the right choice here? Well, it in in renovations, it really depends. Yeah. It really depends.
[00:14:08] Emily Mottram: There's a lot of factors and unfortunately that's the part that it's super challenging for homeowners to evaluate what is the right decision. Well,
[00:14:16] Eric Goranson: it's interesting and just to kind of jump on what you're saying there, this makes sense because I have taught, done some interviews in the past with people that are in the recycling business.
[00:14:25] Eric Goranson: You know, the people that are, that are grabbing it curbside and taking, taking rid of it, and they're like, Yeah, there's times that we send semi-trucks worth of plastics because it's, it costs us more to recycle it and it doesn't make sense to send it over to China or whatever other country that's doing it.
[00:14:43] Eric Goranson: It's actually better for us to haul it over to the landfill and bury it than it is to ship. All the way across the world and get it there because literally you're spending more in fuel and doing more in damage from the fuel of that ship that's running fuel oil going across there than you are [00:15:00] by recycling it.
[00:15:01] Eric Goranson: And it's a tough argument,
[00:15:02] Emily Mottram: right? It is a tough argument. And at the same time, we're not held responsible. This goes back to the like, you know, curbside and forget it. I was like, we're not being held responsible. US manufacturers, the people who are using for our disposable society,
[00:15:17] Eric Goranson: right? Yeah. Yeah. And, and it goes into remodeling as well.
[00:15:20] Eric Goranson: So let's take, let's say, let's say we've got that nineteen ten two story cool house. You know, it's fairly un molested. Somebody hasn't came in and done four flips on it, you know, it's got plaster and all of a sudden people are like, we're gonna make this all energy efficient. And now all of a sudden they've got four dumpsters full of plaster, vermiculite, horse, hair, whatever else I jammed in those walls back in the day, depending on who built it, where they built it, LA and plaster, all the trim.
[00:15:49] Eric Goranson: Really? Does that make a lot of sense?
[00:15:52] Emily Mottram: Yeah. And it's so frustrating to me. So part of, um, the design aspect of the Pretty Good House book is to build things that [00:16:00] people wanna keep and build them for resilient systems and to build them for future remodeling, cuz we know people are going to remodel it. So what happens to it when it comes off the house, right?
[00:16:09] Emily Mottram: Like everybody's like, Oh, I'm a vinyl siding and no maintenance. There's no such thing as, no maintenance doesn't exist and, you know, vinyl siding is going to have an end of life and then it's gonna go to the landfill and it's gonna live there or they're gonna incinerate it, which is terrible too, you know.
[00:16:25] Emily Mottram: And so in think about where, where does it go when it gets to the end of life and how can you deconstruct it, right? Yeah. Like how can you take these houses apart easily? Like, can you take the cellular out of the wall and spread it on the ground in your grass and have that just be perfectly fine? You know, like off cuts on wood siding here.
[00:16:42] Emily Mottram: Mm-hmm. , Um, I a projects, I don't think they've had a dumpster. And, uh, cuz almost everything it feels like is wood, uh, on this project site. And they have this dumpster, or not dumpster, it's a wood pile, but that it in bins and they have all kinds of funny things painted on it. It's like, please take [00:17:00] party wood and like campfire wood and like wood stove.
[00:17:04] Emily Mottram: What, like, they wrote all kinds of funny things on it, you know, to encourage the neighbors to take it to, you know, put it in their PU sales or hey, you know, like you're camping in Maine for the weekend. Here's some kindling or whatever. And so it's just, You know, you, I mean, you know, they could have just thrown it on the ground too, and in a couple of years it would've decomposed into something.
[00:17:22] Emily Mottram: Sure. I'm like, that makes you feel good about what you're building. Yeah. Versus like, you show up and you have four dumpsters that that does not make you feel good. Yeah. And yeah, I agree that sometimes you might have a material that you have had friendly critters who have come and lived in your structure and that, I mean, you can't, can't put that back other stuff.
[00:17:42] Emily Mottram: Exactly. I get it. But you can spread it out and fertilize the yard. Yeah. You know, depending on what it is.
[00:17:49] Eric Goranson: Well, it's interesting, you know, I had a conversation with Keen Utility and they did their new headquarters here a few years back. And I mean it's multiple stories. I think it's four stories, like a city block in Portland [00:18:00] downtown, and they hauled off like one dumpster or two dumpsters out of the whole building.
[00:18:07] Eric Goranson: Everything else was reused. They repurposed. There's, they, all this stuff got reused or donated and was used someplace else, and so I, I love it when, you know, of course that costs more money, right? I mean, it always costs more money because the cheap answer is to back up the next dumpster.
[00:18:28] Emily Mottram: Well wait. It costs more money if you only think about upfront costs of doing it.
[00:18:34] Emily Mottram: Exactly. But if you were charged for all the other things, then no. In the long run, it really didn't cost more
[00:18:40] Eric Goranson: money. Yeah, exactly. But you know how it is with construction. Someone's looking at the budget, What am I writing the check for today is what they, they're worried about. And that's, that's one of the problems we're into.
[00:18:50] Eric Goranson: But let's talk about your book, The Pretty Good House book. This is fascinating to me, uh, what you guys did, because I honestly haven't seen a book like this out [00:19:00] there before where you guys just jumped in and did a very intelligent deep dive that I think is really smart for, for people to jump into if they're just getting ready to design a house, remodel a house, you know, all of those things are, this is an important book.
[00:19:19] Emily Mottram: So the book was really meant to, um, One, be homeowner, approachable, right? Mm-hmm. , because these are the people who wanna understand what they're getting or who may think that they are getting this anyway. And so it's a conversation for them to talk with their, uh, design and build team while they're building or designing a house.
[00:19:39] Emily Mottram: Um, but it's also meant for people, like when I was in architecture school and just getting out and starting as a young architect, I didn't know what I didn't know. Right. You know? And like, I love some of the great resources that we have available to us, especially those of us who love to get in the weeds and get down and, you know, all of that.
[00:19:57] Emily Mottram: But that is too deep of a dive [00:20:00] for a lot of people. And you know, if you've ever met some really nerdy building science people, we're going to debate six different ways to do it. And then we're still gonna do it the way we would've done it originally. But we gotta talk about all six weeks , right? So,
[00:20:12] Eric Goranson: Oh my gosh.
[00:20:13] Eric Goranson: Just so, right. That's, there's the elephant, the room right there, right? That's the elephant in the room. That is.
[00:20:18] Emily Mottram: That's just how it works. That's just how it works. And so anyway, you get onto some of these great resource sites and you run into us, right? Mm-hmm. and we have six ideas. And now if you don't know enough about what we're talking about, you're totally confused and you quit.
[00:20:34] Emily Mottram: Yeah. And you don't do any of it. And so the point of the book is to be really approachable for both, um, homeowners who are thinking about building or renovating a house. It's also supposed to be a great first place to start for newer professionals or professionals who are, who maybe they've been building for a while, but as codes are getting more strict and we're getting a lot more products on the, on the market, and they [00:21:00] just wanna understand how these things relate to each other.
[00:21:02] Emily Mottram: It's a series of guidelines. It's like, Hey, did you think about this? Did you think about this? And like, No, you don't have to sacrifice the performance of your building. In order to save money, here's what you need to do during the design process to evaluate the economics of that. Yeah. Especially right now where, you know, it can be hard to get some products or it can have long lead times.
[00:21:26] Emily Mottram: Like when you gotta order your windows three months before you're gonna break ground, that's kind of scary for people. Mm-hmm. . Right? And so it's just a really good, um, broad overview and it's, it's not a system, it's not mm-hmm. passive house or lead or energy star. And you can have a pretty good, any one of those building certification houses, right?
[00:21:47] Emily Mottram: Like passive house might be the economic level that you go to. Mm-hmm. , right? Yeah. And pretty Good House is in tandem with that. But you know what, economically, maybe you can only afford to [00:22:00] build. To code. And it doesn't mean that you shouldn't think about potentially changing some materials for indoor air quality, or everybody needs to have mechanical ventilation.
[00:22:10] Emily Mottram: Let's stop kind of ignoring that part of the code. Right. There are some places in the country that are better about enforcing it. Yep. But then there are other places in the country, um, which interestingly enough, I, I heard this story when I was in Kansas City, um, where, uh, there are lots of places that say blower door testing is required.
[00:22:29] Emily Mottram: Right? Sure. And lots of us do blower door tests, but then the code office doesn't have any way to record that. You did a blower door test, right? Yep. So there's no way to prove that you actually did it. Right. And so as professionals, we get ahold of that. Some towns will keep it and they'll put it in the building file, but we have all been in a building department where the building file is like one page and you're like, Where's the actual information on this project?
[00:22:52] Emily Mottram: Yeah. And so, you know, there's not always a lot of, uh, of [00:23:00] ways to kind of keep track of that. Mm-hmm. . And so it really is encouraging you that maybe, maybe code in some places code is almost as good as passive house. Like Sure. Code in California and passive house that works in California almost neck and neck.
[00:23:12] Emily Mottram: Yeah. Right. I mean they're, they're like the same thing. Trying, You're doing a job trying to, Yeah. Trying to, you know, explain to people that the code is done by people who have practiced in a lot of areas and made intelligent upgrades for people to do so. You know, code is not the enemy. Like let's start forgetting that it's an enemy, but pretty good houses, a spectrum of everything in between.
[00:23:35] Emily Mottram: And it talks about economics because there aren't things that you have to do. There are just things that. Better practice that we want you to think about doing. Right? Right. Do you really need to build that guest suite for another 60 to $80,000 that somebody stays in once a year? Hotel's pretty cheap.
[00:23:54] Emily Mottram: That's like three, That's like 350 hotel rooms. Mm-hmm. [00:24:00] or some something stupid like that's 350 years to offset the cost of just having built that. Right. Not cleaning it, heating it, keeping it free of things that we accumulate in our houses because our spaces are bigger. Right. Just starting to talk about what do you really want out of your space.
[00:24:17] Emily Mottram: It's, and hopefully kind of leaving,
[00:24:19] Eric Goranson: it's, I've run into this with, with homeowners, with children. They're designing this whole space for their nine year old and I'm going, You realize by the time this is done, they're 10 and by the time they're 12 or 13 that's going on the dumpster, they don't want anything to do with it.
[00:24:38] Eric Goranson: Right. You're building for a year. Or two. Or
[00:24:43] Emily Mottram: you're building for that one day of a year. Right, Exactly. If you're building for that one day a year, you gotta get a giant Christmas tree in the door. Mm-hmm. , like build for the other 364 days of the year that you're doing it like that grand staircase, because you have a guest that comes over like once a year that you wanna impress, like you still have to heat that and [00:25:00] light it and do all kinds, like it's a circulation space that you use so infrequently, right?
[00:25:06] Emily Mottram: Mm-hmm. and. Yeah, sure. Grand staircases are, are are beautiful, but like they can also be beautiful, functional part of another room. They don't have to be like this. And those spaces always add other weird spaces. Right, Right. You're trying to explain, trying to explain to people that it's like, yeah, I have this, but now I have to get from here to over here and now I've got this hallway.
[00:25:27] Emily Mottram: Or I've got a, I always love the grand staircase with that weird space at the top of the stairs, right? Like, yeah, it doesn't, not gonna be big enough to be a room, but it's not really small enough to be a hallway. And you're like, what happens in this space? Yeah, like .
[00:25:42] Eric Goranson: So yeah, you can't use this in a home office because the kids that are up there in the other three bedrooms are running around, so you can't have a Zoom meeting in that space.
[00:25:51] Eric Goranson: Right. You really can't use it. Um, and then my favorite too is the big grand, a circular staircase that comes up and sweeps, but now you've got radius walls [00:26:00] downstairs in all these different rooms because that wall now ends up. Creeping around on the backside of that. So it's the same kind of thing. But I wanted to touch on this with building code and it's fascinating how well California does stuff, for instance, down there.
[00:26:14] Eric Goranson: But then I'll drive by projects in California and go, You know, you put that house wrap on completely wrong, and they're citing right over the top of it.
[00:26:21] Emily Mottram: So have you seen, uh, so talking about people who are a super awesome deep dive and I'm gonna promo his book too. Um, if you haven't gotten a copy of Allison Bale's new book, uh, does the House need to breathe or not?
[00:26:36] Emily Mottram: Um, uh, Fabulous. But he just posted, he writes for Energy Vanguard, he's been doing. Amazing post for years, and he just posted a new one. Right. And I think he actually got a picture from another awesome professional, uh, Christoff Irwin with positive energy in Texas, um, of, uh, a picture where they started to put the siding on before they put the windows on.
[00:26:57] Emily Mottram: And then they had to take half the siding off because they had to [00:27:00] go back to do proper flashing. And then there was a follow up photo in that post as well, where they fir, they put the windows in too early and they forgot to put their WRB on mm-hmm. . And so in the picture, the WRB is just like wrapped over the window, which clearly they must have come back and cut it and done some flashing tape and some other things.
[00:27:18] Emily Mottram: But it's like sequencing being so important and then doing it wrong, Right? You drive around all these job sites and you're like, Ooh, well, you know, I was driving by a job site down. And they put R five rigid insulation on the outside. Technically our building code, if you only read the chapter on, you know, insulation mm-hmm.
[00:27:38] Emily Mottram: says that's fine. But if you actually look at the, uh, moisture resistance of the R five in our climate zone, and you read, I think it's chapter three, which talks about condensation resistance. It's not Okay. . Yep. You know, and it's like driving by and going, Oh, oh, that's gonna be a pro. Like that's gonna be a problem.
[00:27:59] Emily Mottram: And so,
[00:27:59] Eric Goranson: [00:28:00] yeah. Great example. So my buddy who's, he's been on the show before here, Jason McDaniel, he's Global Tile Posse. He's a, a big tile guy out there. And he went down to help out another homeowner that got taken by a tile contractor. And so, you know, they tore the whole space out. He spent a week down there rebuilding this thing for him.
[00:28:18] Eric Goranson: But I think it was Memphis. No, it was, yeah, I think it was Nashville building code. He did a, a curb of shower for him. It was beautiful so they could get access to it. He called for the inspection on the shower pan, which he needed, and they said, You didn't do the dam in front. He's like, It's curbless. He had to build a four inch waterproof dam across the front of this, fill it up with water.
[00:28:41] Eric Goranson: And he is like, I get that you have building code for this, but if you have four inches of water in the bathroom, why does it matter? , , You know, and so some of the stuff you just shake your head and go, What is that accomplish?
[00:28:57] Emily Mottram: Well, I know there are some weird things in [00:29:00] it where it's like, this, this doesn't make sense for how you would test it cuz this isn't how we built it.
[00:29:06] Emily Mottram: So we, we wouldn't do that, but we'll, we'll try to somehow mangle together some version of what we have done to kind of answer the same Yeah, so like, not all the .
[00:29:16] Eric Goranson: Yeah, it's just sometimes it just, I get the intention of it. Oh, we, we don't want that to leak. I get it. And I'm sure they looked at it and went, Okay, all shower pans have curbs and we're just gonna go to that.
[00:29:26] Eric Goranson: And so you've got some inspector out there going, Well we gotta test it. Gotta have three inches of water in it, Got three inch of water in it. And it's like, Oh, come on guys. You know, that's the stuff that makes people like you and I scratch our heads and go, I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish here.
[00:29:42] Eric Goranson: Some, some smarter people need to sit down and go, Is this the way we need to?
[00:29:48] Emily Mottram: Yeah, so we were doing a project and we, for the most part, if we're gonna build new, we usually do super high performance. The building envelope is mine. What you're doing on the inside is yours. We'll put up walls, not put up walls, all kinds of things.
[00:29:59] Emily Mottram: Um, [00:30:00] and so submitted it to the code officer and they're like, Your wall system doesn't meet code. I was like, Say what? So, like, it doesn't have continuous exterior rigid insulation. And I was like, That's actually not what that says. Right. You know, . And I was like, ok. I was like, but, but I'll put on my drawing so it understands.
[00:30:20] Emily Mottram: I was like, I'll walk you through how our walls is double stud wall. Our continuous insulation is just in the middle. It's not on the outside. And obviously it's not rigid. Yeah. But you know, it's continuous. There's a thermal break. There's, you know, no thermal bridging in the wall system, et cetera. It's
[00:30:32] Eric Goranson: actually much better than what they're trying to
[00:30:34] Emily Mottram: propose.
[00:30:35] Emily Mottram: Exactly. And so then, um, I went through and said, also there's a chart directly below this that has the UA equivalent. And so here's my UA for my wall system as well. So even if you read this is, this is what this says, which is not what this says. This is the other chart that says, you know, and like, you know, the, the you value for the total wall system through my [00:31:00] energy models significantly less than what's in the chart.
[00:31:03] Emily Mottram: And she's like, Okay, that's fine. Just put that on your drawings. And I'm like, OK, , But don't tell anybody else to do that. Yeah. Cause that's, Let, let's not do that. Yeah.
[00:31:12] Eric Goranson: Well maybe that was the same person that was over there putting the foam on the outside of the other one that was like, you gotta do this, you know, wasn't in the same town.
[00:31:20] Eric Goranson: But maybe that'll .
[00:31:22] Emily Mottram: I, I think that, I think that there's a real, very real possibility that lots of people said that because that was how they interpreted it. Mm-hmm. , um, you know, in a similar problem. Um, so we also do a lot of shoreland zoning, cuz Maine has a ton of water. Yeah. So anything within 250 feet of any major water body, we've got a lot of lakes, we've got a lot of streams, we've got the ocean.
[00:31:43] Emily Mottram: Um, and so I was working on a project and they were, you know, trying to tell me what, what the expansion rules were. Oh, you know, that's not what that says. And she's like, What do you mean? And I went through and I was explaining to her and she's like, Oh. So she gets on the phone cuz they had just learned about it.
[00:31:57] Emily Mottram: They had just changed the shoreland zoning break. Yeah, I [00:32:00] get it. You know, and they get on the phone to the person who instructed them and they were like, Is this what this says? And they were like, Yep, that's what that says. And she's like, Hey, it was great meeting you. I have a couple of people to call .
[00:32:12] Eric Goranson: No.
[00:32:14] Emily Mottram: Ok, that's probably a good idea.
[00:32:16] Eric Goranson: Firefighting 1 0 1. Oh no .
[00:32:19] Emily Mottram: Oh no. But I mean, at least they were willing to follow up with, you know, whomever they had and just said, Hey, you know, this is, I, I misinterpreted with this. Said, you know, it really says this and. It can be hard. There's a lot of jargon in it and I think people give up on that and it's meant to be easy.
[00:32:37] Emily Mottram: And so if you wanna know more about code, I also encourage people to get on TikTok and follow Glen Matheson. He is the only person I have ever met who makes code. Interesting. Nice. And he has Code University and he explains a lot of things to people. And so he's been at a bunch of these Building Science symposiums, um, just talking about, you know, the origin of code and what's in it.
[00:32:59] Emily Mottram: And I [00:33:00] don't know anybody that knows code the way that he does . So, um, it was actually exciting cuz normally you're just like, Oh, that's, I don't wanna learn about that .
[00:33:08] Eric Goranson: Exactly. Well, it's fascinating with code because, you know, there's some states that do it, so, And then there's others. I, I talk to somebody that's, you know, in our audience that's out there and I'm like, Oh, that's right.
[00:33:21] Eric Goranson: You don't have ventilation required in your house as long as there's a window in the room, so you don't have to put a kitchen van hood if you've got a window. You don't have to put a bath fan if you have a window. And I'm like, this is such a bad idea. Which is
[00:33:35] Emily Mottram: super scary to those of us who have been, you know, sort of in the high performance world is, um, We, uh, we argue with our clients about having oversized range vent hoods because we know the importance of the capture area and all of this stuff.
[00:33:50] Emily Mottram: And then you have people who are putting gas ranges in with no hood at all. So not only are they not picking up on any of the VOCs from our cookware or burning, like, Oh, I don't know about anybody [00:34:00] else, but I like to burn things when I cook. Yeah. Um, you know, whatever you've burnt, uh, you know, that all has VOCs in it.
[00:34:06] Emily Mottram: And then, you know, water vapor from what you're cooking. But also too, now here's this gas range. Oh, by the way, you've got carbon monoxide, which is tasteless, colorless and odorless, and you don't know you're poisoning yourself for the, you know, like super scary. And so, you know, I'm, I'm really big. In fact, if you have a gas range, you have to have makeup air too.
[00:34:26] Emily Mottram: Yeah. Because the range had, you know, is, needs to be so large to make sure that you're not poisoning yourself well. That I gotta an example.
[00:34:35] Eric Goranson: Yeah. I've gotta, I've gotta, I've gotta a 48 inch gas range, so it's, you know, it. Six burners and the griddle, right? I've got a 1200 CFM hood and I use all of that, what I have on the griddle, a steak or something on it.
[00:34:50] Eric Goranson: Otherwise the house gets smoky,
[00:34:52] Emily Mottram: right? So it's so important for people and like we, I didn't even touch on bathroom vent fans, which is like, what's the largest [00:35:00] point source moisture in your house, The bathroom? How many people have mold growing on the ceiling? And by the way, till you see the mold, you already have fully saturated and a bigger problem than you, you know, than you thought.
[00:35:12] Emily Mottram: And like, We don't, I, when I worked for, uh, a little while doing energy engineering projects for low income housing as well and you know the number of those that you go into, cuz somebody doesn't wanna report that the fan is broken or that they didn't use it or whatever, they're have mold in them. It's just like, because you get to get into a lot of different units, you can see it on a larger scale and it's like, hey, this is so incredibly important.
[00:35:38] Emily Mottram: One of the things that we did as part of those projects was tried to do education with the homeowners to say, Hey look, I get it, you know, you, you maybe don't always wanna report if something's broken or you know, the fans sometimes are allow mm-hmm , but like, this is why you need to use it and this is how it impacts your health.
[00:35:55] Emily Mottram: And just try to, try to, you know, help people to [00:36:00] understand why that's in there. It's not just in there like, cuz it's steamy in there and you need to use the mirror after you take a shower. Yeah. Like has a big impact. Need to use the bathroom fans or I'll be here in the northeast at least for a little while.
[00:36:11] Emily Mottram: Yeah. We. Have done some, um, where we use our erv in the bathroom to recapture some of that moisture cuz trying to get houses to 40% in in Maine, negative 15 degrees pretty hard.
[00:36:24] Eric Goranson: Yeah. Yeah. Dew points are kind of in our weed spot. . Yeah. Well it's interesting, you know, and it's, it's so crazy. Like 15 years ago when I was designing kitchens 20 years ago, I was using like Anita's bathroom, the roburn medicine cabinet with the heated mirror.
[00:36:43] Eric Goranson: I haven't had, I have a steam shower in a fairly small bathroom and because I put the fan in, in the correct space and have a right, fairly large fan in there, that mirror has never ever been foggy. And I can open up the three foot wide door in [00:37:00] the steam shower and leave it open. And unless the steam unit's on, it's getting sucked up.
[00:37:06] Eric Goranson: So, you know, and, and those are things that are so simple to do. And now what I'm so excited with, and you and I saw some of this last year when we were in, uh, Orlando at the big show down there is companies like Bro Newton for instance. They're coming in and now they're getting it so that ERV can now talk to the Bath fan and there's sensors in the house and we're really starting to get it where the homeowner and the user doesn't have to think about it.
[00:37:35] Eric Goranson: It can start doing it for you. And that's pretty cool.
[00:37:39] Emily Mottram: Yeah, well, so we were on the tech stage together at the International Builder Show, and we talked about all kinds of fun, cool techy gadgets. So this year at the International Builder Show, I bet I, I vote, we have a little competition to see who can find the coolest gadget on the show.
[00:37:52] Emily Mottram: Floor came on, um, came on. Right? I am totally into this idea. Um, you know, but. Somebody said at one of the [00:38:00] conferences that I was at recently, like, Raise your hand if you'd be willing to give, you know, your homeowners an indoor quality monitor like afterwards. And I'm like raising my hand, like Yes, yes, yes.
[00:38:10] Emily Mottram: And it was funny cuz we had this whole discussion, you had the carbon monoxide alarm, which in a space like that would just go off consistently, right? Yep. So we had it disconnected. But generally speaking, if you do enough education with your homeowners, it's not as important about what the numbers are.
[00:38:25] Emily Mottram: Right? The accuracy on some of the home monitors is kinda like it. It's, we're not in a testing lab, right? We just want you to know when something is off, right? Mm-hmm. , if you have a spike in something, that might be some kind of indication of something else, right? So, We actually have been doing a renovation project at our house, and we had to put down some mid Antech flooring to replace some sections of, um, 1970s particle board that's mostly just saw dust.
[00:38:55] Emily Mottram: Yeah. You know, I mean, it's like dried oatmeal, right? Yeah. . It does look like dried oatmeal, you [00:39:00] know, and you hate to pull it up, but at the same time, like it's, it's not doing what it's supposed to do anymore. And this is in renovation when you should take advantage. When products are at the end of life to do better things.
[00:39:11] Emily Mottram: But anyway, put some avantech in. See a spike on our energy monitor, cuz guess what? Avantech has glue in it. It's got other mm-hmm. , you know, it's got other stuff in it. And so we see a spike in it and we're like, Oh, I wonder what that was. Well we finally put down some wood flooring. Guess what went away?
[00:39:27] Emily Mottram: That spike? It's like, hmm. Oh yeah. Right. It's been, you know, we didn't have the windows open when we were doing it cuz we weren't thinking anything. Well, like we weren't really thinking anything about it. And you know, for my chemically sensitive clients, we, we go like the whole route, you know, we wouldn't have been that, but mm-hmm.
[00:39:45] Emily Mottram: you know, neither my husband and I have, you know, severe chemical sensitivities that we knew of. Right. So we were just kind of doing some things that are great products that you put down and that you use. And I went. Huh. Okay. Mm-hmm. , right? Like, maybe you have to think [00:40:00] about this. Now, neither of us had an issue with it, but the energy model, you know, the monitor, the indoor air quality monitor was saying, Hey, something is going on here.
[00:40:09] Emily Mottram: And it was just a trigger to take a look at something. Yep. You know? And that's what we want. And one of my clients, I did a walkthrough with them. We were going through their systems, Do you know how to use this? Do you know how to use your ventilation, your heating, whatever? And I left. And because we have been talking about it, they called me afterwards and they said, Hey, you know, I, I.
[00:40:29] Emily Mottram: Kane seemed to get the moisture to leave our bathroom even when we're running the, like, even when we're running the bathroom fan, when we're doing a load of laundry. And I was like, I'm glad you asked. You have a bunch of lint in your bathroom. And she said, Yes, you know we do. And I was like, Your dryer vent isn't connected.
[00:40:46] Emily Mottram: So the reason that you have to continuously run the fan and his wet in here is because dumping moisture, probably when it got pushed in or whatever. Mm-hmm. , it got disconnected. Yep. And I was like, I'm so glad we had this conversation and you called me because that [00:41:00] could have been a much bigger problem.
[00:41:02] Emily Mottram: You know, the heated byproducts of laundry detergent not so great to breathe in. And that kind of excess moisture, like you think about how wet your clothes are when they went in the dryer. All that moisture is just in your space everywhere. I was hated. Do you, do you still have this in Portland, Oregon or is this just like a weird main thing where they would just drop the dryer vent into the like bucket.
[00:41:23] Emily Mottram: Right. And so it would collect the link. I see people that in the bucket, cause they were trying to recapture the heat. Yeah. And I'm like, you might have recaptured a little bit of heat, but you created a significantly bigger problem with like water Yeah. Than what you had. So like, don't do that . And then worse.
[00:41:41] Eric Goranson: And the worst thing is if it's a gas dryer. Right. Cuz that's also putting out all that carbon monoxide back into that space when you do that.
[00:41:48] Emily Mottram: Right. Right. So that's even worse. It's like, it's like, you know, I want them, I want them to have an indoor air quality monitor and I want them to call me when there's a spike on it.
[00:41:59] Emily Mottram: [00:42:00] Unfortunately in the building world, sometimes those investigations aren't really clear. We had one client that just had a major reaction to her house right after it was built, and we think that something was off gassing. Like even if you ask for low VOC paints, once they tint them dark, they don't always use low BOC in the tint, even though you ask for low voc paint.
[00:42:22] Emily Mottram: So you have to know what you're asking for. And so we think what happened was that. Either the thinner or the tint in the paint might have. Um, we painted the basement ceiling. That was where she had the most, you know, uh, reaction
[00:42:38] Eric Goranson: to. Maybe it was the, the primer, maybe it was the drywall, right? I mean,
[00:42:41] Emily Mottram: maybe it was the primer, maybe it was the drywall.
[00:42:43] Emily Mottram: Maybe it was this little piece of foam we used in one location. Mm-hmm. You know, maybe it was the, you know, and we tried to do, um, the best that we could with like, the cabinetry that we got and the flooring that we got. And they brought furniture that they had owned in their other [00:43:00] houses too. Right. But like, here's this high performance house and we're not really sure what the trigger is.
[00:43:06] Emily Mottram: See, that's
[00:43:06] Eric Goranson: one of my biggest speeches I've given to builders that are building high performance houses, is that before your homeowner moves into that house, you should do a full air test in that place. So you know what's in. Because that way when your homeowner moves in and they just got that, maybe it's an IKEA couch or no, no shade thrown on ikea, but you know, whatever's in that foam or whatever's in brand X's foam, it could
[00:43:35] Emily Mottram: be you haven't even ikea, right?
[00:43:36] Emily Mottram: Yeah. You can have nice high-end furniture companies that have stain guard on it right there. Yeah. That's like if you are asking your product to do something that doesn't seem natural for that product to do, then there is something in it that is helping it to do that, which in some cases might be a perfectly natural material.
[00:43:57] Eric Goranson: It could be something like that. It could be simple, [00:44:00] right? But it might not
[00:44:01] Emily Mottram: be. But in a lot of other cases we just have a ton of, you know, made products that are chemical compositions of some things, you know? Yeah. So my whole, the whole BPA plastic, and then they were like BPA free, but they replaced it with bpf, which is the cousin of bpa, which is actually just as bad for you.
[00:44:22] Emily Mottram: So, .
[00:44:23] Eric Goranson: Yeah. Well, okay, so here's a funny story that's at, that's at my house. So this is a personal story. I put in this really great air system and, uh, carrier infinity. I have no problems with that at all. It's working really well. Variable speed, you know, super efficient. Uh, zoned in my 1970s house, so it works great.
[00:44:41] Eric Goranson: I put on as an add-on to it, an air scrubber, and this air scrubber is working too good, and Aris is the one that makes it, it's really nice. Problem is, is Julie, my wife can't sit there and bake bread because if she goes to make [00:45:00] something rise, It kills the yeast in her dough when it's sitting there on the counter because of the peroxide things that are in the air in killing it.
[00:45:12] Eric Goranson: So in the summertime when she made bread, she had to take it outside and put it on the outdoor kitchen because it wouldn't rise in the house. And so now I'm going, Hmm, I don't know if I'm gonna keep that technology now. You know what I mean? And that this is where I start getting concerned. And if it's doing that to,
[00:45:30] Emily Mottram: well people, People like us, right?
[00:45:33] Emily Mottram: We're the people who trial it. All right? Everybody says, I wanna go to the architect's house. No, you don't. No. It's an experiment. It's an experiment in all kinds of things that we're trying to test in and who knows what we're doing, right? Yep. And so just, just like that, but it does make you think, right?
[00:45:45] Emily Mottram: And I think people sometimes worry about things that aren't actually an issue. Like there are molds, bores everywhere, and a lot of it is not toxic, and it's not harmful and whatever. Mm-hmm. , it's the bad stuff that you want. And like you hear mold, you [00:46:00] think bad, black, terrible. Mold. That stuff is bad. You need to do something about that.
[00:46:05] Emily Mottram: But like you said, it kills the yeast in the air. Well, if you're, if you're a beer fan and you're making lambic, that's how they make lambic Exactly. By the natural yeast that's in the air. And so, you know what? It probably isn't terrible for us. Yeah. Now there are some things that are bad for us, but we don't wanna kill all the germs and biodiversity.
[00:46:23] Emily Mottram: Like we, we need those things too. It's a, it's a, Have you ever heard me go on my diatribe about grass and pollinator plants, right? Yeah. Like we need bugs, which includes the tiny, microscopic things that your air scarber might be killing. It's the same one. Another thing that I think that we need to spend a lot more time talking about is water quality.
[00:46:43] Emily Mottram: Oh my gosh. And the things that we use to treat water can sometimes be worse for us than whatever it was that was in the water. In the like, obviously not rayon, but you were talking about that like Ro o d i Water is not stuff you should drink. [00:47:00] Yes, Right. You gotta add something back into it. You know, there's all this, So,
[00:47:04] Eric Goranson: and most homeowners, most homeowners go, Oh, I need a water system.
[00:47:08] Eric Goranson: They jump online or go down to their home improvement store and put something in. No one's ever tested the water. Nobody has any idea what's in.
[00:47:16] Emily Mottram: Well, even so we live on city and town water, right? Yeah. So this, this is tested, right? Mm-hmm. , this is highly tested. Yeah. And um, we were having trouble with some of our fixtures, right.
[00:47:28] Emily Mottram: And I was like, well, let's just put a filter on it. Cause you don't think to filter town water. Well guess what? First day we had it completely filled the filter with copper. I mean so much copper filing in it completely called the filter first day. So I called up the water department and I was just like, Hey, I put on this five micron filter on the water system and like it is shockful.
[00:47:52] Emily Mottram: I was like, It's green, it's not slimy. I know it's not biological matter. Mm-hmm. , I think it's copper, blah, blah, blah. And she's like, I've never had [00:48:00] anybody have a five micron filter on it. Like they sell them at Lowe's. Yeah. This is a rocket science here. Yeah. Clearly somebody does. And I was like, and you know, she was like, Well, it's not us.
[00:48:11] Emily Mottram: It's probably in your water line. I was like, this thing is a whole house filter, like it's on directly after your pump. So the only part of it that's coming in my house might be from like, it's 30 feet, right? Yeah. . I mean, even 30 feet, if you count the, Do I own that part that's outside of my house that goes to the water main?
[00:48:30] Emily Mottram: Like if I don't own that part? Yeah. I'm talking like from the
[00:48:33] Eric Goranson: meter, feet, whatever the
[00:48:33] Emily Mottram: meter is. Yep. Three feet from the water meter to where this thing is. That's
[00:48:39] Eric Goranson: right. That's it In your area, your water meter is in your house, so it doesn't freeze. Mine's 150 feet out towards the road.
[00:48:45] Emily Mottram: Oh yeah. See? And 18 inches down.
[00:48:48] Eric Goranson: So yeah. Different climate mimic though, right? ,
[00:48:52] Emily Mottram: Right. This is, we talk about climate zone. So we do talk about this in the book. Yeah. Not, not that we, it's, uh, off topic with the book, but, um, climate [00:49:00] is so important, um, when we're talking about it. Both, you know, there are. Eight climate zones in the United States, and then there are micro climates in your site within your climate zone, right?
[00:49:11] Emily Mottram: Mm-hmm. , if you're on the side of the hill, you're gonna have a different climate on your, like a different microclimate on your specific site than you're gonna have in other areas. I think people totally disregard this idea, climate zones. And part of the reason why I think that is because people come to us and they'll say, We found this plan online, we love it.
[00:49:28] Emily Mottram: And I'm like, Great, my house is perfect in Florida, but by the way, here are the eight reasons why it won't work in Maine. Yeah. Or why I can give you something that looks like that, that's style. We can copy that style, but here's the structural that you're gonna need with your one and a half, 12 slope to hold up 90 pounds of snow loaf, you know?
[00:49:47] Emily Mottram: And so, yeah. Um, I think that that's disregarded. So that's been the very first chapter of the book, I think, which is start with your climate zone. You know, if you can't afford to have a fully custom house, pick [00:50:00] a plan or a modular company or somebody who's designed something specifically for your climate zone.
[00:50:06] Emily Mottram: Mm-hmm. . And we've done, there's so many different, there's so much architecture out there today that there's a style that fits the style that you like, that has been designed for your climate zone. Mm-hmm. . But like, if you bring me a plan from 2008 that was designed for, you know, your climate zone in Portland, I'm gonna say, I can custom design you something that looks cool in that style, but I You can it on that road.
[00:50:29] Emily Mottram: Right. But not that you can use that a style inspiration, but I can't give you this. And if somebody tells you they can give you this, you're going to freeze. Mm-hmm. , it's potentially not going to hold the snow load. And you're gonna have a lot of figure it out in the field to accommodate for things that aren't planned for in, you know, in this.
[00:50:49] Emily Mottram: Yeah. And that's gonna cost you money.
[00:50:51] Eric Goranson: Yeah. It's absolutely the same. And it's funny, so I like wine and I go out and talk to friends at their wineries and I'm out there enjoying it like beer too. [00:51:00] But I'm out at the wineries and they're like, Oh yeah, well, the climate zone over here for this grapes make it taste different on the same piece of property than up here.
[00:51:10] Eric Goranson: And think about it, I'll, okay. If that's enough to make the grapes taste different, what's it doing at your house as. And that's, that's within a quarter of a mile.
[00:51:20] Emily Mottram: And you talk about grapes in the climate zone, you probably also have different soils too, right? So it's so incredibly important for you to have a building site before you have a design, so that you really can make these things work together.
[00:51:33] Emily Mottram: Even if you're using a predesigned plan set, you need to evaluate that for the site. You may need to do geotechnical. Um, I met a phenomenal architect in the Chattanooga area, and they had this piece of property and then the drainage ditch next to their house, The town decided was a stream. So then they had to have a 30 foot setback, and then they get into digging and they had to do, I think it was something like a, Six, basically like a six foot deep French drain under their house because of the drainage in this [00:52:00] area.
[00:52:00] Emily Mottram: Right. Those things are critical. They're important. You gotta think about it. And unfortunately, a lot of times if you don't think about that, they're gonna build it high up out of the ground and they're gonna bring in Phil to fill up to it. And that just kind of goes against everything that seems natural about working with the
[00:52:16] Eric Goranson: landscape.
[00:52:17] Eric Goranson: Yeah, we had to, on a project I did, oh, 15 years ago, uh, up in Seattle on Lake Washington, beautiful house, uh, had the property design, the house geotech went out there and went, Hey, you need 75 concrete pilings underneath the structure to hold it up because the soil is not gonna be good cuz this is all just, you know,
[00:52:37] Emily Mottram: so you basically need like one solid, solid concrete piece here.
[00:52:42] Emily Mottram: And they were out there
[00:52:43] Eric Goranson: for months doing the geotech work just so they could start on the foundation stuff. Yeah, and I, of course, you know, David Applebaum comes on here and talks all the time of the, uh, my good friend architect down in LA where he does stuff in, you know, Beverly Hills and, and [00:53:00] uh, be air on the hillside where they've literally gotta strip all the dirt off the hill and put something in there that's gonna be more stable just to be able to put something up on it.
[00:53:09] Emily Mottram: Oh, does he work in all those places you've seen in the news right now where essentially the whole hillside is just like, Bye-bye house. Yeah, like, yeah, that's,
[00:53:17] Eric Goranson: yeah. So he does all those. He's the architect of the stars down there and uh, he is so amazing with the celebrities. He's the celebrity guy, you know, so he's doing the, the 40,000 square foot house kind of stuff as well.
[00:53:31] Eric Goranson: So he's doing all that. But,
[00:53:33] Emily Mottram: uh, that's another thing. The Pretty Good House book is not, we do not understand the 40,000 square foot house. We're not sure what you do with all of that space. I guess if you have an unlimited budget, should you still spend a, that big of a carbon budget on it? Um, especially in areas like California, right?
[00:53:49] Emily Mottram: Where you got a lot of geotechnical stuff, right? You got a lot of concrete and steel. Well, guess what? Concrete and steel real high up there on their carbon impact. And so, um, pretty good [00:54:00] houses maybe for. The rest of us. Right? Well, I live in these 1970s, 1400 square foot houses. Well, that's me. Yeah,
[00:54:07] Eric Goranson: exactly.
[00:54:08] Eric Goranson: that's me. That's
[00:54:10] Emily Mottram: me too. And
[00:54:10] Eric Goranson: it's funny, you know, when I look at this too, is, uh, kind of a twist on what we were talking about here. There's some companies now that are starting to do these modular homes that are coming out. Interesting. I just talked to somebody, uh, down in Texas that are doing high end, you know, really about as green as you can build it that I've seen.
[00:54:32] Eric Goranson: And they're affordable too. I mean, you can get the house placed on your lot for, you know, $300,000 and, you know, level five finish on the inside. They've gotta, you know, and, and the advantage that they have there is that they could actually build it indoors. You don't have all this lumber that's getting moldy in the winter time or anything like that.
[00:54:51] Eric Goranson: So it's kind of interesting to see how some of these guys are doing some new stuff.
[00:54:55] Emily Mottram: And I think this is an incredible, important piece that you're putting here. We did a whole section, [00:55:00] you know, a little piece in the book on, you know, this. So that I think the future of really sustainable building, obviously designing one single family house at a time is not gonna have as big of a climate impact.
[00:55:10] Emily Mottram: If we're gonna do it, we should do it well, right? Build better things. Um, but I think the modular industry actually has a huge potential to have an impact on housing on a much larger scale. One, because they build the same house over and over again, right? Mm-hmm. , they're not recreating the shop drawings, they're not doing all of that.
[00:55:27] Emily Mottram: But two, when you work inside all the time, you're not getting paid, um, to run your own business and run your own trucks and do all that stuff. Mm-hmm. . So the more things that they. In the factory, the better they can do. They also have better buying power, right? Mm-hmm. , if you're building hundreds of houses a year, you're gonna get a better price for buying certain types of materials.
[00:55:49] Emily Mottram: It can really push forward some of these better building standards and we need them to just do it as a matter of principle, right? Yeah. Like let's stop building the [00:56:00] stuff that isn't really good enough for the populations that we're serving, because you have the ability to do it at a cost effective price point.
[00:56:09] Emily Mottram: What I love too is building stuff.
[00:56:11] Eric Goranson: Yeah. The waste is what's amazing cuz now instead of taking a 16 foot two by four and having to cut it to 14 feet, they can order 14 foot material. They can order if they need to have, if they're thrown away half a sheet, they can order a 10 foot sheet of OSB that you're not gonna order unit for that, but you, you can now do that.
[00:56:31] Eric Goranson: So the waste is amazing coming out of those places compared to a normal job site.
[00:56:38] Emily Mottram: Well, and if you look at how they have a set up, some of these really well organized ones too, all those off cuts go into the pile to become blocking in the same thing. Mm-hmm. , it's like, this is less than three feet. Wanna need one that's less than three feet.
[00:56:52] Emily Mottram: I go to the three, two and a half foot bucket. I got a piece of block stack. Right. Exactly. And so there's so little waste in really [00:57:00] well run factories, you know, and they set up these systems. Right. You know, some of these great ones have, you know, they have the same bin at every station, right? Yep. So that you're not running all over trying to find, you know, the box of screws or GRKs or whatever it is you need at that moment.
[00:57:17] Emily Mottram: Like, here it is, it's here. You know? And so, It's efficiency in a whole new way, you know, and a lot of these places when I talk to, um, product manufacturers or distributors too, are talking about, Well, how's your factory run? How are you powering your factory? Mm-hmm. , I mean, I love it when I see a solar array on top of it.
[00:57:37] Emily Mottram: Sure. It may not make enough power to run the entire factory, but hey, if you're offsetting a significant portion of that, that feels good. You know? And, you know, are you, there are some product manufacturers who recycle the water that they use in the process. Mm-hmm. and, you know, use it again. Right. Well, we're seeing a, like out on your coast, we're seeing huge water shortages.
[00:57:59] Emily Mottram: I [00:58:00] mean, Oh, it's, I think it's been. Six years and maybe even eight years since I was out and saw Lake Mead and I thought, gosh, that's low. And now you're seeing all these stories where like that was high compared to that. I mean, they're finding bodies from the eighties. That's like the, that's when it starts to freak you out, right?
[00:58:14] Emily Mottram: It's that low that things that they thought someone thought was submerged in hundreds of feet of water is now like on the
[00:58:22] Eric Goranson: beach. Well, and the other thing I think that's really important as well with with these modular units now is that quality control. You can have somebody there that's watching the entire process, I'm sorry, a job site does not have somebody sitting there watching every nail go on, every screw, go on everything go together.
[00:58:39] Eric Goranson: Those processes of watching and there, cuz one Friday afternoon there's a framer hanging around till seven o'clock at night cuz he's gotta get caught up cuz they're a half day behind or they, somebody comes in on Saturday and is knocking something out to keep on schedule. Things get covered up, things happen, and you really eliminate a lot of that when it's [00:59:00] a factory built peace.
[00:59:03] Emily Mottram: Well, and you think about it too, right? One of the biggest challenges for some of these job sites things is lay down space, right? You don't have anywhere dry to put something to acclimate it, right? So everything that you put into this structure is basically wet. Yeah. Right? Gets rained on. Could be soaked,
[00:59:19] Eric Goranson: right?
[00:59:19] Eric Goranson: Yeah. It turns black In my, in my climate here, when they're building these four story mixed use stick frame projects, by the time they're sheathing the roof floor, one OSB is
[00:59:30] Emily Mottram: black. It's black and like you just hope that it was able to dry out and that it, you know, it's good before it got enclosed, but like they're working on timelines, Stuff's getting enclosed, things are getting enclosed wet.
[00:59:41] Emily Mottram: Do we understand all the building products that we're putting on our building to the extent that we know that it's allowing it to dry or allowing it not to get wet? Well, what happens if it was wet when you put it in there, but you have a system that's meant for it not to get wet. Yep. Right. So in the factory, generally they have a big space, right?
[00:59:59] Emily Mottram: Like the two [01:00:00] by four s you're using on this project probably didn't show up yesterday. Yeah. You know, like there's a whole stack of 'em. Maybe they did, I don't know. Sometimes right now it's hard to get things, whatever, but like they can be in there, they can acclimate, they can have these systems set in place so that it is straight and it's dry and it's, you know, In, you know, to a 32nd of an inch, like, oh, in the fields, cutting things to a 32nd of an inch.
[01:00:27] Eric Goranson: Right? Yeah. It's just not happening that way. So that's the cool part. And they have jigs and all that other stuff, and, and when things get tipped up, they're not, they're tipped up correctly. They've got a crane that's doing it. It's not two guys trying to do it that are getting hurt and bending the wall up, and it's all outta square.
[01:00:41] Eric Goranson: I mean, it's completely different. The impact there of, Okay, you're putting in, they're doing, uh, you know, it's Texas, so they're doing slab on grade. They get that poured. They come in with the crane and lift like the, the kitchen sec section, the living space in the bedroom. Those are all separate sections.[01:01:00]
[01:01:00] Eric Goranson: Assemble 'em together and off they go. And this isn't like your double wide, single wide, triple wide stuff. This is when it's done, it looks like a custom home. They level five finish on the inside. Stucco, exteriors, metal roofs. I mean, they're built to last, which I
[01:01:16] Emily Mottram: like. I'd like to see us doing more of that.
[01:01:18] Emily Mottram: It's funny that. Everything inside your house is probably built in a factory except your physical house. A lot of that is still stick built. Yep. Um, and there are some challenges to that and it's not always more cost effective. Right. Especially if you're trying to ask a manufacturing facility to build a custom structure.
[01:01:37] Emily Mottram: Sure. They haven't built it before. They gotta build all the shop drawings, they gotta run it through that doesn't make anything. They gotta make sure, you know, like those things don't make sense, but where not everybody needs. A custom house. They need a house that works for them and their family at the time.
[01:01:55] Emily Mottram: And you know, they say we move every five to seven years, so why are we moving to [01:02:00] a structure that we then blow apart and do all these different things for it? Like let's stop building the same thing over and over again. Like maybe when you move from that 2,500 square foot house because all your kids went to college and they're at home anymore, you move to the 800 square foot house.
[01:02:15] Emily Mottram: Mm-hmm. , Which doesn't exist cuz nobody builds them. Yep. So let's build those, You know, like it's so smart. Not everybody wants three bedrooms, two and a half baths and 2,500 square feet. Exactly. Like we just don't all want that. Emily,
[01:02:26] Eric Goranson: where has the time gone? You and I could do this for like another four hours and just keep rolling.
[01:02:31] Eric Goranson: But I know we have, I thought that was five minutes. I know it . So how do people track you down and get this book? Let's get to the book first. How's the best place for people to find that?
[01:02:42] Emily Mottram: So the best place to find that is to go to the Toton Bookstore and put in pre, uh, pretty good house. And since I'm gonna call this an event, a podcast, if you use P g H event in the, uh, Toton thing, you'll hear 25% off of the book right [01:03:00] now.
[01:03:00] Emily Mottram: So buy it from the to store. Um, I highly encourage you, if you're listening and you're a professional in the field, get a couple hand amount to everyone in your office's Christmas gifts, right? I like wine too, Eric . But not everybody likes to give wine to their clients anymore or to their staff. And so, hey, you know what?
[01:03:17] Emily Mottram: This is an awesome book. It's a great coffee table book. It's a great book for, for your staff who are just coming on board, new people in your office. It's also a great book for your clients. It helps them to understand. In terms that some of us who are super nerdy like to talk too technical and they don't really care about that.
[01:03:34] Emily Mottram: There are some deep dives in the book, but there are also just some general simple things in every chapter to get people to understand why they should care about these things. There we go. So that's the best place to get the book. Um, you can go to Pretty Good house, uh, dot com or.org and also get to the link.
[01:03:52] Emily Mottram: They'll go to the store to buy look. Um, so use the code. You, you can get that for a good deal. So since I'm calling this an event, [01:04:00] it's a, I'm throwing it out there. Um, and
[01:04:02] Eric Goranson: speaking of podcast, you have a podcast too, by the way.
[01:04:06] Emily Mottram: I do have a podcast. So, uh, this year in 20. Two. Yeah, whatever year. This is 2022.
[01:04:13] Emily Mottram: I did it once a month. Um, I used to do it once a week so you can catch up on old episodes. Essentially. I do the podcast because I like to talk to other super cool people in the industry. Um, so it's really just me and having a good time. If anybody listens to it, that's awesome, but it's in support of, uh, architecture, boating, science, and female entrepreneurship.
[01:04:31] Emily Mottram: So I just wanna be out there supporting women in the trades, really any minority getting into it, because guess what? The construction industry needs so many more people than they have, They need. Everybody to join. So like, get into it. It's something that you can be passionate about. Uh, you know, just forget about whatever stereotypes you think you might have heard.
[01:04:52] Emily Mottram: There are so many different avenues for people who are great at project management, wanna work with their hands. You know, there's rough carpenters, finish [01:05:00] carpenters, electricians, plumbings. You wanna get into putting solar panels on. We need like five times the electricians that we have licensed in the United States just to do solar movement.
[01:05:09] Emily Mottram: So like, get involved. It's cool. So, uh, that's what my podcast is about. Usually ,
[01:05:16] Eric Goranson: it's like around the house usually, you know, we, we get off track sometimes,
[01:05:19] Emily Mottram: you know, it happens. Everyone. I mean, I talked about garbage today, which I think is related, but like we've talked to music
[01:05:24] Eric Goranson: at Hydroplane Racing, so I mean, we, we get off track sometimes.
[01:05:27] Eric Goranson: It's what we do here. Yeah. And then of course you're an architect, you do cool stuff with homes.
[01:05:35] Emily Mottram: I am, uh, sometimes I do cool things with homes. Uh, yes, I'm a licensed architect in Maine, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire currently. Nice, uh, in Utah. Um, but I'm a licensed architect. I have a couple of people in my office.
[01:05:50] Emily Mottram: We do a lot of either high performance, uh, new construction. We have a semi custom plan set so you don't have to start from scratch. So we've got a bunch of those. Uh, I need to [01:06:00] update my website to get everything consistent and on there, but just reach out, we'll tell you all about them. Um, and, uh, we also, um, we only really for the most part do renovations in Maine because you need somebody to be local If you have a renovation project, There we go.
[01:06:15] Emily Mottram: They need to have eyes on that thing a lot. So
[01:06:18] Eric Goranson: all of our friends in Maine that listen to us on the radio in Milano at a Ws y y am 1240, Emily's right around the corner.
[01:06:27] Emily Mottram: I'm not too close to Millinocket, but you're not in
[01:06:30] Eric Goranson: Oregon for me. That's right on the corner.
[01:06:33] Emily Mottram: I'm not in Oregon. But you know what, Maine's a really big state and some other places are closer than some places.
[01:06:38] Emily Mottram: Exactly. I get it. I get it. . But yeah, that's awesome. I love it. We love what they're doing, the conservation all up in that area, so very cool stuff. Very cool.
[01:06:48] Eric Goranson: Emily, thanks for coming on today. Uh, this has always been fun and we're gonna do this again cuz we just kind of scratched the surface again today, like we always do.
[01:06:56] Emily Mottram: I know like we meant to talk about some things and [01:07:00] then we just hijacked it and talked about whatever we felt like talking about what we do. It's what we do. Always a pleasure.
[01:07:06] Eric Goranson: All right, thanks. I'm Eric G and you've been listening to Around The House