Our first Backyard Cottage featured on NW Eco-Building Guild Green Home Tour

This weekend Seattle’s NW Eco-Building Guild is sponsoring a green home tour around Seattle to showcase residential projects utilizing green building methods and materials.  Studio DEC is  excited to have our first Backyard Cottage project featured as site # 6.  The McTrax Cottage ( a combo of the owners last names) is a small two-story office/studio fit into the back yard of an older, single story Ballard home.  Owners Sean and Lisa really pushed the envelope on super-insulating this cottage well beyond the code minimum. Double stud walls with blown-in dense pack cellulose and both spray foam and cellulose in the ceiling make this a very easy space to keep warm.  Sean scoured building salvage stores (the ReStore and Second Use among others)  for most all of the interior fixtures.  A cement fiber board (much of it salvaged) rainscreen system and metal roof set up for rain water harvesting are some other environmentally friendly features on this project  that was built by  Ncompass Construction LLC.

You can see this home, along with dozens of others, Saturday April 16th and Sunday the 17th as part of this self-guided FREE tour.  Stefan and Drew of Ncompass will be on hand to answer questions about this cottage, as will Sean the owner, and I’ll be there Saturday afternoon.  I encourage you to get out and see some of the innovative projects on this great tour.