Neos House

Neos House

The Neos house is a 4 bedroom family house. 2614 square feet. Completed in spring 2021.

Designed as a multi-generational home with one full bathroom & one full bedroom on the 1st floor, if the piano-room & the rec-room were enclosed with walls we’d have a 7-bedroom home. Enough for a substantial family to live together.

Pointing south, the view looks towards the huge garden.

The garden spills into the dining area through sliding doors. The folks who commissioned this home are gardeners, with kids, who will be drawn towards the natural world as a way to thrive.

The weather briefly nips at you as you walk from the front door to the garage under the covered walkway, creating a connection with the day’s weather and the world outside the energy-shell.

The SIPs installation was subcontracted because this is a Bellevue job & the TC crew have northern families & want to be home at night if possible. Issac taught a Peruvian framing crew how to sling the SIPs and the job ran fast & smoothly using advanced SIPs details required by the Bellevue jurisdiction.

Despite one design mistake (the mechanicals are in the unheated garage), this house is an exercise in textbook design for cost & energy performance.

The client did a stellar job of following design advice & the crew lovingly built the house, sealing the envelope to 0.6 air changes per hour, Passivehaus standard. The result is an economical house that has won a Department of Energy Grand Prize, attained 5-star Build Green certification and is certified Net Zero.

The envelope & mechanical systems are all drawn from the 2020 TC system: 6.5” walls, 10.25” SIP roof, 4” R20 foam under the slab, R24 ICF’s, Chilltrix CX34 heatpump with (1) fancoil upstairs, Zehnder 350 HRV with comfopost heat/ cool delivery. Vinyltek triple pane windows & Thermatru front door.

All the stormwater from the roof is infiltrated back into the onsite soils via a huge infiltration trench. Additionally, the excavation soils all remained onsite to reduce soils trucking. The clients took responsibility for seeding the exposed construction soils, choosing to plant a complex cover crop in place of the usual grass. The cover crop can be tilled back into the soils to impart nitrogen & other nutrients when a new planting regime is decided upon.

The house in a garden is a traditional family way of life and TC is proud to have built a modern, dense & flexible version of this ideal, updated to make all its own power to address the demands of the climate-change world.

House in a Hollow

House in a Hollow

The house-in-a-hollow isn’t really in a hollow, it’s on a knoll, above protected wetlands, northeast of Bellingham. The hollow is formed by the trees, which were preserved to shield the house from overheating, and to conserve the flora of the native wetlands.

Measuring 1950 square feet, this Department-of-Energy certified Net Zero clerestory design has a central kitchen and a 1st floor aging-in-place floorplan. Designed for an Alaskan couple whose love of the outdoors demanded a house that fully engaged with the landscape, plenty of daylight is admitted & access to outdoor living is easy.

Most of the house is downstairs, leaving (2) bedrooms, a full bathroom and a rec-room upstairs for family visits, grandchildren to play Lego, perhaps an office if needed, old friends to take up residence…

Advances in TC’s mechanical systems determined that the radiant tubes embedded in the 4” concrete slab will serve as a back-up heating system to handle abrupt cold snaps, with the day-to-day heat & cool being delivered via the Zehnder Comfopost, a heating/ cooling coil that sits in the ventilation delivery ducts. The Comfopost coil is driven by the Chilltrix CX34 heatpump, along with a further fancoil heat/ cool unit located in the 2nd floor rec-room.

The energy-shell is formed using the system: 6.5” SIPs walls, 10.25” SIPs roof,’ with 4” slab-on-grade concrete-mass insulated from below with 4” of R20 foam. The openings are plugged with Vinytek triple pane Boreal windows & Thermatrue fiberglass doors.

TC Legend built this net-zero house through the winter of 2020/ 2021. The SIPs roof panels swung in on a crane through the blowing snow, Ted now reporting feeling has returned to his fingers, 6 months later! The owners planted over 630 native trees and shrubs in the chilling March rain, and the crew scooped up the mud and maintained the new 700’ driveway to this remote & beautiful lot: A gem in the Pacific Northwest.

Demarest

Demarest

Demarest

In collaboration with Bolt Construction NW, TC Legend Homes helped design, permit, and frame this 1,950 square foot home on Orcas Island.

Clerestory windows reflect light deep into the interior and create wonderful sculptured light-gradients along those white, reflective walls. Designed to flow people and views out to the west and onto the western deck. The main living spaces balance high ceilings in the kitchen and dining areas and a lower, cozy ceiling in the living room/ tv area.

The 2nd floor main-master bedroom also engages with a westerly view, leaving you feeling like you’re in a tower. The second-master bedroom connects privately through the Jack-and-Jill bathrooms & shared closet.

A choice of main entrances allows this house to fit onto most lots.

 

Specs

  • 1950 square feet
  • 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom
  • 1st floor aging-in-place
  • Radiant in-floor heating with 1 fancoil
  • High kitchen/ dining room
  • Kitchen island/ bar
  • Clerestory daylighting
  • West facing
  • 2-bedroom 2nd fl master suite.
Morales Utility Shed

Morales Utility Shed

This small backyard building in urban Bellingham was designed for multiple uses: yoga studio, brewery, workshop, and cycle storage. While not built to be a living space, it does have a bathroom. The entire project was built for just $120,000, with the client doing much of the finish work. With its south-facing roof, this building is ready to become net-zero-energy with the installation of solar panels.

Specifications

  • 360 square feet
  • 6.5” SIPs walls
  • 8.25” SIPs roof
  • 4” R-20 foam under 4” concrete slab-on-grade for thermal mass
  • R-24 insulated concrete forms perimeter stem-walls below grade
  • Terracotta colored floor from red dye within poured concrete slab. Scrubbed, polished, sealed.
Saint Claire Powerhouse

Saint Claire Powerhouse

This 1,900 square-foot 3 bedroom clerestory home, with an additional 672-square-foot attached garage located outside the SIPs shell, was built in 2016 in western Washington.

Because the master bedroom and bathroom were required to be located on the first floor, the clerestory design allowed us to locate two additional bedrooms and a bath on a minimal second floor, while leaving the glorious and spacious SIPs vaulted ceiling within the main living & kitchen spaces.

The play of light from the second-floor clerestory windows penetrates deeply into the main living spaces, eliminating glare at the large south windows and providing unusually even and dynamic day-lighting within the kitchen and living room. The occupants feel connected to the sweep of the sun, clouds, and weather patterns outside.

This is a near-perfect lot for a solar-panel net-zero home, identified by the clear solar exposure to the south, with no trees or buildings between the building and the sun.

 

SPECS/FEATURES

  • Department of Energy Net-Zero certified
  • Chilltrix CX34 air-to-water heat pump
  • 100% on-site storm water infiltration via 30-foot dispersion trench
  • 10.8 kW of solar panel installed
  • 6.5” R-29 SIPs walls
  • 10.25” R-49 SIPs roof
  • 4” R-20 foam under 4” concrete slab-on-grade for thermal mass
  • 5.5” foam (total) R-23.8 insulated concrete form (ICF) perimeter stem walls
  • Vinyltek Boreal series triple-pane windows (U values from 0.14 to 0.16)
  • 1:1.6 aspect ratio floor plan, with the long side facing south
  • Minimal east and west glazing