Fine Homebuilding's Project House
http://www.finehomebuilding.com/projecthouse
A few years ago, a former FHB editor, Chris Ermides, came to me and asked why we were letting the house behind our building slowly rot away. "Because we are lame, Chris" was my answer.
He and I decided to become a little less lame and figure out a way to remodel the house. We drew up a 2-page document outlining what types of remodeling projects we could do, what kinds of magazine articles we could publish, and how long we could milk the house before we had to tear into the spot where we had started. Greening the Ubiquitous Ranch was the title of our document.
We were terrible at writing proposals, and the idea went nowhere.
GBA picks up where FHB left off
A couple of years later, when I left FHB to build Green Building Advisor, I decided to try to sell the idea again. it would be a really cool way for us to get great video without traveling all over the country (start-up websites do not have very big budgets). It would also serve as a great "best practices" laboratory for GBA to investigate new construction methods.
As part of that proposal, Rob Wotzak and I made a short video and sent it to the management team. Our idea was to do a deep energy retrofit on the house and see if we could get it to zero energy. We would invite our team of advisors to help us and to star in the videos.
First, we invited Joe Lstiburek and Betsy Pettit, of Building Science Corporation, to come down for a look. Joe loved the house because it was simple and ugly -- simple means easy to make energy efficient and ugly means no historic commission would be upset with us for working on it.
Betsy sent a team of architects to measure the house so that they could make working drawings (we were hoping to become a test house for BSC).
The management team liked the idea, but we all had so many balls in the air that no one moved on the old ranch house project. Partly because it was such a big undertaking.
FHB picks up where GBA left off
A couple years later, the GBA team and I rejoined Fine Homebuilding. Here, Brian Pontolilo had an ingenious idea: Ask our bosses for a dumpster and permission to shoot photos for an article and a video or two. That's it: a dumpster and permission to shoot an article. That was a simple enough plan for even busy executives to sign on to, and within a week, we had a dumpster.
After another week or two, most of the clutter had been cleared out of the house and garage. We were ready to roll.
We decided to convert the two-car garage into living space, which was basically part of the plan that Betsy and BSC had laid out. Rather than make it into just any old living space, we decided to build a deluxe shop. This way, we could outfit it nicely and bring authors in to do articles and videos and they would have most of the tools they would need. Fine Woodworking has an amazing woodshop, and they bring in authors all of the time to build "timeless pieces of furniture."
We're building a 'timeless piece of shop'
In the coming months, you'll see articles in the magazine that were developed and photographed at our Project House. "New Window in an Old Opening" is the first article and is at the printer right now. Look for it in your mailbox or newsstand in a couple of weeks. There will also be a companion video.
We've also published one video series shot in our shop, Installing a Subpanel. Look for more videos on rough electrical as well.
After that, look for feature-length videos and articles on airtight drywall, re-roofing a small shop, and site-built cabinetry. Also most of the new Tool Hound videos will be shot up there, as will be our newest short video series, the Project House Weekly Wrap.
The Project House microsite is where to look for updates on all things Project House: http://www.finehomebuilding.com/projecthouse
You can ask questions and get answers through the Project House forum: http://forums.finehomebuilding.com/breaktime/project-house-qa
Stay on top of things with the official Project House blog:
And peek at our progress in the Project House photo gallery: http://www.finehomebuilding.com/contest/galleryproject-house
Stay tuned!
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