Drafty old Ann Arbor house finds new life as green, energy-efficient home

LEED is a rating system by the U.S. Green Building Council that promotes the design and construction of green homes that use less energy, water and natural resources and create less waste.

The three-bedroom house has come a long way from the day in 2001 when Beranek, then a bachelor, purchased the property from a couple who had raised their family and lived there for 50 years.

Beranek had confined his years-long search for a house to a three-block radius of the neighborhood just north of downtown Ann Arbor.

With shag carpeting and wallpaper at every turn, Beranek knew the house needed work. He slowly improved it, such as removing the old floor and replacing it with American cherry.

Slideshow: Photos courtesy of Architectural Resource, LLC

It was a house of partially completed projects when Beranek and Park married in 2007. The house's only bathroom, for example, had exposed two-by-fours and unfinished drywall. And it was drafty, not a good climate for Park's Steinway grand piano.

They had to decide to methodically remodel the house one project at a time over the years. Or take the plunge, move into Park's apartment during a major remodel and have the work behind them.

The list of what the house needed was long: New windows, a second-floor bathroom, a new efficient furnace, insulation to stop the wind. At one point, Beranek said, they even wondered if the house was worth keeping.

But their sense of history won.

"People still knew it as the Dixon House, from the family that lived here," Beranek said. "It was part of the neighborhood. It made sense to keep the house and preserve what we could."

Over the year that followed, the house was gutted to its skeleton and rebuilt green from the foundation up:

The insulated concrete form foundation keeps the basement warm and dry and cuts down on energy use by 30 percent. A geothermal heating and cooling system was added, along with a tankless hot water system. Paper stone counter tops avoids using plastics. Advanced framing techniques reduced the amount of wood used in rebuilding the walls, leaving more space for insulation. And ultra-low flow bathroom fixtures, outdoor rain barrels and a rain garden cut down on water use.

It went from one of the draftiest houses that builders Meadowlark Builders had seen to a high-efficiency structure, Beranek said. While winter heating bills used to run upwards of $300 a month, the average monthly heating and air conditioning bills runs about $45.

Some of the other improvements:

• The house's rear addition from the1920s was removed and a new addition made more room for the kitchen and new living space. The remodel added 380 square-feet to the 1,200-square-foot house. It's in keeping with the not-so-big trend of keeping houses and additions modest in size, connecting spaces and keeping what space there is flexible. A moveable stainless steel kitchen island, for example, opens up the area for a party.

• A mudroom - the couple calls if their biking staging area - was also added to the back of the house, giving the avid bikers a straight shot down the stairs to the basement for easy bike handling.

• The four tiny upstairs bedrooms became three bedrooms, including a master suite, and two bathrooms. The suite bathroom includes a stainless steel Japanese soaking tub. And instead of having the laundry room a floor away from the dirty clothes, the laundry room is nestled in the roomy walk-in closet in the bedroom suite.

• The staircase upstairs was removed and replaced with a sleekly modern banister. The pine stairs were recovered from wood that had been discarded in another building project on Fourth Avenue. • The front porch was extended around one side of the house where the driveway once stood, making it a wrap-around. The driveway was moved to behind the house. And a garden with native plants was installed.

• Pieces of the old house found new uses: The old pine windowsills became handrails, banisters and shelf tops. The old wooden beams, replaced by steel ones, became the legs of a glass-topped dining table. Pieces of the old cement floor became garden stepping stones.