[ Lost in the Landscape ]

our front porch project

We began this project to redo our front porch sur­round last year. It’s not totally fin­ished, but it’s at a point I thought I’d share it with you.

The house orig­i­nally came with an enclo­sure around the lit­tle front porch/patio area that made it feel like you were behind bars, doing time for a crime you didn’t com­mit. We took a saw to the orig­i­nal porch cover and pro­vided some breath­ing space in it, but it always felt like an uncom­fort­able retro­fit. As the ter­mites dealt a ter­mi­nal blow to the first enclo­sure, I devel­oped this com­pletely reworked design, sort of a decon­structed patio cover, with open­ings through the front screen­ing panel, as well as an open, incom­plete canopy overhead.

This shows the shel­ter from the front of the house. The big win­dow cut into the screen lets you see out into the neigh­bor­hood, while not mak­ing you feel caged.

Another front view, approach­ing from the side of the house…

And a last shot from the roof, show­ing the par­tial cov­er­ing over­head. Many of days are over­cast, and we really would pre­fer sun over shade most days. This reduced cover shel­ters the big main win­dow and front door, but lets more light in than an edge-to-edge cover.

The new wood needs to sea­son just a lit­tle bit before the final fin­ish­ing, and the old wood will need to be scrubbed to clean it a bit. But once the fin­ish is on, it should really look great. I’m pleased!

Main mate­ri­als: pressure-treated lum­ber for the sup­port struc­ture (painted black, to fade into the back­ground); ipe hard­wood lum­ber for the slats; exposed stain­less steel screws for fas­ten­ing the slats. The ipe hard­wood is poten­tially the least green com­po­nent of this project. Although my local lum­ber sup­plier is assur­ing its users that their ipe “is har­vested from pro­fes­sion­ally man­aged sus­tain­able forests,” some of my research is now say­ing that the claim just may be a crock of green­wash­ing. Ugh.

Choos­ing sus­tain­able mate­ri­als for an out­door project is chal­leng­ing. There are inter­est­ing dis­cus­sions you can wade into, includ­ing an intro­duc­tory Sus­tain­able Deck­ing Solu­tions post that’s worth a look. If you must use ipe, a sup­plier like Altru­Woods can sup­ply FSC cer­ti­fied lum­ber for a project, and might have been the bet­ter choice for get­ting mate­ri­als for this project.

What­ever you do, reduc­ing the amount of mate­ri­als you use is a begin­ning. The post above rec­om­mends that “[o]ne green build­ing idea with a lot of merit is treat­ing wood as a lux­ury. Trees help the planet the most when they’re alive and glob­ally, the acreage per for­est is dwin­dling rapidly. Using wood as a com­mon struc­tural and out­door fin­ish mate­r­ial is not a long-term sus­tain­able prac­tice.” Good advice.

How do you all approach try­ing to be greener in your out­door projects? I sup­pose one excel­lent alter­na­tive to a patio cover would have been to plant a tree. It’s a con­cept our grand­par­ents would have signed on to…

April 01 2009 | Categories: landscape design • my garden | Tags: green building practices • hardscape • patio covers • sustainability | 6 Comments »

a cool idea for garden shade

Maybe a year ago I was read­ing about a park­ing lot in town, at the local Kyocera cor­po­rate head­quar­ters, where they’d installed what they were call­ing “Solar Trees.” (They actu­ally trade­marked the name, but really aren’t all trees solar?) The Kyocera species of trees were steel poles that sup­ported big canopies made up of solar pan­els. They pro­vided shade to the cars below, and at the same time they gen­er­ated power. By the corporation’s esti­mate, one 30 by 40 foot solar tree would reduce as much green­house gases as a small grove of real trees.

Instal­la­tions like this are start­ing to appear in var­i­ous places, includ­ing a cou­ple of park­ing struc­tures at UCSD where they’re installing rooftop arrays over this summer.

I’ve thought about doing more with active solar devices, but where to put the pan­els was always an issue since the house has some pretty wacked roof angles, most of which don’t face south. Some sort of solar struc­ture in the gar­den might be an inter­est­ing solu­tion, maybe some­thing com­bin­ing a patio cover func­tion with power generation.

The Kyocera trees seem to be slanted more to cor­po­rate envi­ron­ments, and besides I find them more than a lit­tle mono­lithic and over­whelm­ing. Would you want these in your gar­den? But some­thing along these lines could be prac­ti­cal, good for the envi­ron­ment and attrac­tive. Sounds like a job for an artist or designer instead of an engineer…

That these trees sprouted here in town left me won­der­ing if there was any sort of link between them and Jim Bell, a local self-proclaimed “envi­ron­men­tal designer” who, among other things, has run for mayor (unsuc­cess­fully) twice, and once for City Coun­cil (also unsuc­cess­fully). I met him at a book sign­ing circa 2003, and he was hot on the idea of cov­er­ing all the roofs and park­ing lots with solar pan­els. His web site has an inter­est­ing statistic:

In the San Diego/Tijuana region, where I live, 20 per­cent cov­er­age of our build­ings and park­ing lots with solar pho­to­voltaic (PV) cells, cou­pled with effi­ciency improve­ments, would gen­er­ate enough elec­tric­ity to replace all forms of energy (elec­tric­ity, nat­ural gas, gaso­line, and diesel) cur­rently used in the region.

That idea was prob­a­bly not his orig­i­nally, either. But it speaks to a move­ment that’s in the air. Maybe the move­ment could begin right at home, in our back yards…

July 05 2008 | Categories: landscape design • rambles | Tags: patio covers • shade • solar energy • solar panels | No Comments »