Nelson House - Clean, Green B & B

It's great to tell you that this week we have installed an amazing Energy Star qualified, high efficiency gas furnace AND an air filtration system that removes 99.98% of all allergens from the House' air - even the flu virus!

Our bed and breakfast's long journey towards energy conservation and a more healthy living environment is finished - at least for 2009. Blog posts from March, April and September reported on the history of this century-old home's construction and our earlier insulation and eco-renovation efforts.

The culmination of this year-long project is a new central heating system that holds the highest energy efficiency rating of 96.7 per cent. I am told that the old gas furnace was lucky if it converted 60% of the fuel burned into usable heat for the house. Where did the rest go? Into the atmosphere. Oh, global warming. Oh, major fuel bills. No more! We have now lowered our thermostat settings as much as 5 degrees F. and the interior of the House - all of it- is warm, dry and toasty like never before! The variable-speed DC fan motor even uses less electricity while it accomplishes this minor miracle.

Better yet, the air flowing through the B & B, whether heated in winter or simply circulated for mild summer cooling, is now cleaned to 8 times the hospital standard achieved by conventional HEPA filters and 100 times the purity of air blown through the old one-inch thick furnace filters. All of the common triggers for asthma and allergies have been removed. Dust, pollen, spores, even bacteria and viruses of .1 microns or more are now gone.

This is a system that every home should have for the sake of family health. It is a system that my family has fallen in love with after only a few damp, frosty Vancouver nights. I know our bed and breakfast guests will love it too!

If you are mulling over home energy or interior air quality improvements, please feel free to contact me for the manufacturer and contractor's details.

Shangri-La

The pictures above show the new look of the Shangri-La's cozy wetbar. The last few weeks have involved both an energy retro-fit and a stylish makeover for portions of our top-floor suite. Attic spaces have been opened, insulated and resealed airtight. Not only do guests have the makings for coffee, tea and cocktails(note the built-in refigerator under the counter) but the chimney brick has been exposed for the first time to add more of that heritage warmth that B & Bs are all about. Sexy lighting adds just the right touch for an evening's romantic nightcap.

New flooring and natural wooden baseboard trim has also warmed the ambience of Shangri-La's comfortable bath. Yes, that is a corner jacuzzi tub for two. By day, it is tropically sunny under a skylight.

By night, the tropical artwork on the oval wall mirror is backlit. I sketched the artwork and the mirror was custom built for us in Hong Kong. You just gotta see the cool green and golden glow from the perspective of the tub.

Hope you like! We are not your grandma's bed and breakfast - nor your local Best Western. Please checkout the guest-house website for more pictures of the suite - very nice for a romantic getaway.

Vancouver Convention Centre 2 Opens

People come to conventions to be educated and inspired. At Expo'86 in Vancouver, the World Fair's Canadian Pavilion was designed for future use as Vancouver's iconic "Canada Place". The effect is of a huge sailing ship jutting out into the waters of Burrard Inlet. It is imaginative as it's design includes a convention centre, a hotel, a cruiseship terminal and even an IMAX theatre. At the time, the translucent, white glass-fibre fabric hung from five masts was technically advanced and served to create huge unobstructed interior spaces, flooded by natural light.

This week, Vancouver's NEW Convention Centre expansion opened to the public and for it's first conventioneers. I took in the show. Situated just west of Canada Place, along the new Coal Harbour Seawall, this building also juts out over the harbour. Seaplanes land and take off from the waters at it's side. Wraparound public walkways have added fresh new views of Vancouver's picture post card beauty. The world will soon receive plenty of televised views as the Convention Centre will be used as the Media Centre for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.

The new Convention Centre's effect is of an angular, sharp-edged mountain with natural green, grassy slopes. The building is "green" in many more ways than one. The six acre(2.4 hectare) grass and wildflower roof is the largest living green roof in Canada. It is already home to thirty thousand bees and attracting nesting birds. Deep below, forty per cent of the foundation is resting on concrete piles driven into the seabed. Design features have been included to form a marine habitat for sea urchins, starfish, sea lettuce and Vancouver's friendly harbour seals.

The aesthetics are dominated by enormous glass walls that frame views of the harbour and the North Shore mountains. Inside, the awesome spaces are warmed by the generous use of BC. fir beams overhead and stacked BC hemlock walls(assembled by a robot, named Victoria). The unique seawater heating and cooling system makes highly efficient use of energy.

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Vancouver welcomes the Dalai Lama!

Photo of the Dalai Lama courtesy of the Vancouver Sun.

I have to mention "energy" conservation of a different kind. No doubt about it, the Dalai Lama loves Vancouver. It has just been announced that His Holiness will visit us for the third time in five years, this Sept. 26 -29, 2009. Last time he was here, in 2006, he spoke at our downtown hockey arena selling out 30,000 tickets in a matter of hours. This September, the event is dubbed the Vancouver Peace summit.

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The Dalai Lama's Peace Summit will search for ideas for change. You can join in discussions of education and peace activism with His Holiness, five other Nobel Peace Prize laureates(!), Vancouver's Eckhart Tolle and other remarkable human beings such as Mary Wilson, former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, who was compelled to resign her post after she criticized violations by the Bush Administration.

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The Sept. 26th edition of the Vancouver Sun will be given over to the Dalai Lama as its guest editor. The theme will be "educating the heart". Panel discussions and workshops will be open to the public.

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This all reminds me of when I moved to Vancouver after living five years in Texas. I had grown familiar with a southern, Christian vocabulary that permeated everyday conversation. Texans commonly used churchy words like "share" and "witness." In Vancouver, those words disappeared to be replaced by "energy" and "being open". I quickly met locals who were convinced that Vancouver sat at the crossroads of some global, metaphysical meridians. This powerful and benign flow of energy enabled a great potential for both personal spiritual realization and worldwide advancement. Perhaps, there is something to it.

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On his last visit here, the Dalai Lama opened the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education. This 2009 visit is part of a commitment he made then for a continuing series of "Vancouver Dialogues". You have to ask yourself - Why Vancouver?

Going green - one dusty step at a time.

Our Shangri-La construction project is progressing. A new attic hatch has been cut into the central ceiling. For the first time, I was able to peek into the top pyramid-space of the attic under the peak of the roof. It was clean and dry. No signs of critters. No bats in the belfrey so to speak! Being inside a pyramid, I am sure I benefited from some sort of positive energy vibrations. Well - why not?

Two other wall hatches were also cut into the the corner attic spaces between the dormers. A scrap of 1941 newspaper seems to confirm that the rock wool insulation was installed at that time. No patched holes in the walls, so the roof must have been redone in '41 as well. All this cutting is through lath and plaster walls. It's not easy as the vibrations of the saw can quickly crack and crumble surrounding walls.

I always say that old houses are organic - through the years, things seem to have grown together. Or put another way - dare to fix one thing and you F up another!

Shangri-La - rooftop renovations.

A photo collage of the Shangri-La Suite

This week, we started to renovate our top-floor Shangri-La Suite. This is not the first time. Shangri-La occupies the entire third-floor of the house. The centre of the suite is under the peak of the roof. Originally(c. 1907), this was likely to have been the children's bed &/or playroom. The central area is now used as a sitting area gathered around a TV and gas fireplace. From it, three flat-roofed dormers jut east, west and north out of the sloping roofline. Charming, multipaned casement windows front each dormer.

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There is no south dormer - probably because of the neighbouring house. In the early 1990's, we added an ensuite bath with jacuzzi tub and skylight on the southside. When building the bath, of course we insulated the bath's walls and constructed a hatch inside the closet for future access to the southside attic crawlspace.

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To complete the picture - under the east dormer, overlooking the front door and garden is a desk, armchair & single bed. Under the west dormer is the main sleeping nook with queen-sized bed and glass doors leading to a balcony. Under the north dormer is the focus of our current project.

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When we bought the house in 1989, this small space, just beside and behind the fireplace, was a tenant's kitchenette and somehow managed to contain a gas stove, a full-sized clunker of a fridge, sink and simple custom-built cabinetry. For B & B purposes, our first renovations reduced this to a "galley kitchen" with only a bar fridge, microwave, coffeemaker, kettle and a general freshening up with paint and vinyl. Now, our goals are to turn this area into a sexier "wetbar", obtain access to the remaining attic spaces to prepare for blown-in insulation, make necessary electrical improvements and, once again(fun!), update the decorating scheme.

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Heritage Restoration and B & B Renovation

When I purchased 977 Broughton St., it had already been five decades since the old house had been used as a single-family home. The history of Vancouver's West End is that many of the prominent upper and comfortably middle-class families began to move out of the downtown neighbourhood between the two great wars. Gradually, large homes, such as this one, were converted to revenue properties. In our case, I figure this conversion to rentals may have occurred in the early forties.

Fifty years of rentals meant that many hundreds of individuals have lived in the house. Fortunately, the series of owner/landlords never subdivided the original rooms nor seriously damaged the character of the home. Bedrooms were simply converted to monthly rental spaces, locally called "housekeeping suites". Most rooms had a fridge, a gas stove or hotplate and a sink. A number of these suites shared a bathroom down the hall.

When I came along, thinking bed and breakfast, my first choice was whether or not to restore the house to it's early 1900s, Edwardian layout or gut and renovate to entirely modern standards. In the end, I opted for restoration of the public areas and renovation of the guest areas. I had the great advantage of purchasing a house that really needed no major reconfiguration or structural repairs. Because the bedrooms already had plumbing in them from the old rental days, I set out to quickly add ensuite baths for the use of B & B guests. Of course, the old kitchenettes were quickly removed. The entire house, inside and out, was scrubbed and painted. Where possible, original hardwood floors, banister rails and some built-in chests of drawers were sanded and refinished. Carpeting was added. The roof was re-shingled, stopping leaks and adding some small insulation improvement. The existing gas furnace was at least cheaper than oil, so I left it alone.

But the focus was on baths. A pair of shared hallway baths were gutted and rebuilt. One remained a shared bath for more budget-minded B & B guests. The other became an ensuite. In fact, over the course of some years, a total of four new ensuite baths were created for guest use. Two more were rebuilt and enhanced for my own and staff's use. In building six baths, I took the opportunities presented to insulate inside and outside walls for each project. However, I made the mistake of neglecting to insulate the remaining exterior walls. I worried more about delaying and disrupting B & B operations than long-term energy conservation. I rushed to redecorate with interior panelling, wallpapers and paints. That was way fun! I wanted to get and keep the bed and breakfast up and running for both the guests' enjoyment and to recoup some of my investment. In the process, I put off the big, messy task of drilling holes in the walls and blowing in insulation.

If I have learned one thing in the physical creation of Nelson House B & B, I would tell all aspiring innkeepers that "going green" is no longer an option, as it seemed to me back in 1989-90. Energy conservation is now a fundamental necessity to build your business bottomline. I know. You should see my gas bills!

Going "Green" in a century-old Bed & Breakfast.

I hear the lament that it's not easy being "green". In Vancouver, where Greenpeace was founded, we tend to be unabashed tree-huggers. Wilderness exists virtually in our backyards or certainly within sight of them. So - if we want the bears and cougars to continue to roam our local mountains, then we had better start carrying our own cloth grocery bags - yes? Somehow, it doesn't seem enough.

Then, there is energy conservation. Sure, everyone would like to burn less gas when the price is up. But when the price at the gas-pump eases off, I find myself thinking that I can just drive my SUV another year or so, until the carmaker can hybridize it.

Then, there is my problem of owning a hundred year-old home with hardly any insulation in it. Vancouver has always had one of the mildest climates in Canada and back in the Edwardian era, circa 1907 or so, it was apparent that the builders of this three-story frame house were more interested in building something less frivolous than the romantic fancies built under Queen Victoria. This four-square, symmetrical house has curb appeal due to its dimension, scale and balance. It was built for our grey, misty winters to maximize the light. Over-sized, double-hung windows, dormer casements, cut, leaded and stained glass decorative panes are designed to let the light in, NOT to keep the heat in or the cold out. The Douglas Fir beams, frames and floors remain strong, straight and true to this day but those wooden walls did not have an ounce of R-factor insulation.

Up in the large, top-floor attic room, probably intended as the children's playroom, there is only one lone furnace vent. I guess the kids were intended to dress in woolens and bundle together at night. Fortunately, a gas fireplace adds enormous heat to the room whenever needed. It appears that the house may have been converted to natural gas heating at the same time as "rock wool" was laid in the attic crawlspaces. The original bags for this form of insulation were left behind in the attic and they are conveniently dated 1941. Non-toxic and better than nothing.

I bought the house in 1989 with the intention of creating Nelson House B & B. There are are two other gas fireplaces in the the downstairs parlours. I soon realized that the chimney drafts were inadequate to prevent both furnace heat and fireplace heat from funnelling up the chimneys. I replaced all three primitive gas heaters with new gas inserts and properly sealed the fireplaces themselves. I followed that with some basic weatherstripping on doors and windows. It was a beginning at energy conservation but only just the start.