As most of you know, this blog was originally created to document the 100k House Project in all it’s intricate details. Over the course of that project we covered design, product research, mechanical systems, zoning process and much, much more. We tried to live up to our goal of transparency as much as possible and hoped that our openness was helpful and perhaps, at times, even inspiring.

Since the end of that project this blog has grown into something less defined, but we hope, nearly as interesting. We kept up coverage of the subsequent projects which sprung from the 100k idea and added posts on our philosophy, marketing approach, objects of admiration and a whole mess of other miscellany. Over the years this has led to incredible conversation, valuable relationships, flattering PR and great opportunities for continuing our own education in this field of what we will loosely call green building.

Through this process of blogging, our actual company, Postgreen Homes, found itself slightly obscured. While not a terrible concern, we did think that the Postgreen Homes brand offered a better long-term definition of what we hoped to accomplish than the 100k House. So, when we launched our home customization tool at PostgreenHomes.com, we began to talk about bringing it more to the forefront. To that end, we moved some coverage to a new Postgreen Homes Blog (which some of you have visited). At first these were largely construction related posts specific to individual projects, but in recent days we have chosen to move everything over. That’s right . . . everything.

We have decided that the 100k Blog has run it’s course. It is simply too much to concentrate on two different outlets for our ideas while trying to juggle our actual job of developing real life buildings, and we think that, of the two, Postgreen Homes offers a more appropriate venue for our updates and musings. We understand that in terms of SEO and market exposure this seems, perhaps, a little foolish, but we hope that over time we can make the Postgreen Homes blog into what the 100k has been and even improve upon it.

So, this will be the last new post on 100khouse.com. The archives will remain intact and fully searchable but we intend to simplify the site and leave it as a monument of sorts. This is not, however, the end of the 100k Team or our writing on green building, urban planning, design and all the rest. It is also not the end of the 100k idea of modern, healthy, energy efficient homes at an affordable price. We ask that those of you who have been such an important part of the conversations on the 100k Blog stick with us as we change venues. In fact, we might go so far as to beg . . .

Please read our ongoing writing.

Please sign up for the new RSS Feed or Email Feed.

Please visit ISA, our esteemed 100k partner, for design services.

And please tell people about the change. We know this is a big move and we will need all the help we can get to keep momentum through it.

Before we go, we want to thank all of our readers, especially those of you who have taken the time to share our work and join the conversation on our posts. We have learned a great deal from the process of writing and maintaining this blog, and we have learned a great deal from all of you.  We hope to continue creating useful content and generating powerful conversation as we move this operation to a new home.

This is 100k signing off. We will see you over at Postgreen Homes soon.

You may or may not have noticed that we haven’t posted in a while. We had some serious WordPress database issues that were well beyond my ability to fix. Fortunately the great support team at Hosting.com was there to bail us out.

I would also like to thank all of those fellow Twitter users who offered help and advice during this mini-crisis. I am always impressed with the number of people willing and able to give quality, free advice. Hopefully we are carrying our side of that karmic load in the building arena.

Anyway, we have a bit of a backlog of posts so expect some good reading material in the coming days. Thanks for your patience and I promise . . . someday we will have someone on staff who actually knows how to fix technical issues.

This is just a brief update of the action over at the Skinny Project. If you want more detailed info, you’ll have to follow our new Postgreen Homes Blog. Over there we are giving step by step construction updates complete with pictures, video and occasional witty asides.

The foundations are now completely finished at the Skinny Project. This means we have hauled away a good amount of dirt and put in three nice, dry, tightly insulated basements. The slabs were just poured last week over 6 inches of rigid foam insulation and a plastic sheet that acts as an air barrier. We will finish up that insulation and air sealing after we get through framing.

Framing is starting today and we will be out documenting the project carefully. We are really looking forward to seeing the double-studded walls come together and we’re excited to get a first look at the gaskets we specified for air sealing details. Hopefully we will have a significant amount done by Thursday’s BIA Tour.

We won’t be doing this type of post much longer here as it overlaps the other blog, and we don’t want to waste the time of those checking both. So, if you are into the construction process of our projects, get on over to the Postgreen Homes Blog. Questions are welcome in the comments, and we thank you for your patience as we figure out the new division of labor between our two blogs.

I’m imagine most of you are familiar with our Postgreen Homes customization tool by now. For those few that aren’t, it is an online tool that allows folks to customize one of our homes much as one might customize a computer or car online. You can choose things like flooring, counters, fixtures and much more. In the end, you have a customized home and a price you can expect to pay for it in a given project.

The site has been pretty successful so far and seems to be well liked by those that use it. We have already sold two homes using the tool and expect most of our future home buyers to use the process as well. However, we are not ones to let well enough alone. We are always hoping to make things better, more useful, more interesting. We certainly don’t always succeed in this pursuit, but we try.

To this end we have decided to move some of our blogging over to the Postgreen Homes website. From now on we will be using the Postgreen Homes Blog for all construction updates and project posts. Changes in model designs, the addition of new products to the customization tool and Postgreen Homes press releases will also find their home at the PGH Blog. In the end, the Postgreen Homes site will be a comprehensive information source for all of our residential projects . . . we hope.

This does not mean a reduction in the excellent (humor us) content here at the 100k House blog. We will continue to cover our building science research, design philosophy, product overviews and inspirations. Over time we hope to transition this blog into an even broader outlet of coverage at the cross section of green, modern and affordable. We hope to start featuring more products and innovations that we like, and we want to start putting the spotlight on other projects that impress us. Future non-residential Postgreen projects will also find daylight here first. So, be sure to stay tuned.

There will likely be some overlap between this blog and the Postgreen Homes site, particularly in the beginning, but we will not be duplicating content. We encourage all of our readers to check out the new blog and follow along if you want to keep up with us. We know there is a lot to read out there, and we are very glad that you choose to check in with us on occasion. We wouldn’t add one more thing to your plate if we didn’t think it made sense.

So, head on over to the new Postgreen Homes blog and tell us what you think. If you like it, subscribe via RSS or email and keep up to date on all of our PGH work. As always, the comments are open for your pontificating pleasure.

This post is a little cry for help. No, not like the time I got caught pocketing Necco Wafers at the 7-Eleven. This is more of a straightforward cry for help. It is a request for the assistance from our ever insightful readers. Only this time, we are looking for questions instead of answers.

We have recently added an FAQ page to the Postgreen Homes website, but it is hard to be sure we are covering all the common queries. It is also difficult to be sure if the answers to the questions we have captured are sufficient. So, we are turning to you.

If you have time, we are asking that you take a moment to visit our new FAQ page and read it over. Then, using the comments, tell us what questions we missed and what answers seemed lacking. Feel free to be as critical (or complimentary) as you like.

Thanks in advance for your help, and now . . . to the comments.

The Postgreen Homes site updates continue as we move into 2010 and closer to groundbreaking on the Skinny Project. The biggest of these is probably the change we have made to our flooring options. As many of you know we were using sheet products on our floor. We would cut sheets of OSB, bamboo plywood or birch down to 2 x 8 sheets, finish them with a diamond-hard, low-VOC clear coat and lay them like hardwood. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your opinion), we have had to move away from this custom flooring and into more standard, green options.

The reasons behind this change are mainly warranty related. While we love the sheet product application, any problems that arise from it are on us. This is not that big of a deal when we have four homes, but could become a burden when we build another twenty. By moving to flooring manufactured by someone else we are able to take advantage of the manufacturer’s guarantees and warranties. In the long run, we think this will be better for us and our buyers.

The other major change in flooring is caused by the addition of the basement which eliminates our concrete floor. This prompted us to combine the first and second floor options into a single choice throughout the house. Again, this is something we will miss, but it seems the storage potential and mechanical simplifications offered by the basement offset the coolness of the concrete floor.

Right now our new flooring options are :

Base Option 1: Vertical Bamboo – This type of flooring is getting pretty common and has it’s pluses and negatives (doesn’t everything?). On the plus side, it is affordable and pretty attractive. It comes in light and dark and will give our floors a nice clean finish. On the negative side, it is somewhat softer than we would like. These floors will have a tendency toward some denting (much like any wood floor).

Base Option 2: Recycled Rubber - Made from recycled tires (80%) and colored rubber chips (20%), this flooring is fairly non-traditional in a residential setting, but we think it could look amazing. It comes in roll form so there are very few seams. It is an incredibly durable and ergonomically comfortable floor. We can’t wait to see someone try it in one of our homes.

Upgrade 1: Strand Woven Bamboo – Strand woven bamboo flooring is some seriously durable stuff. It is twice as hard as oak and is a solid (non-laminated) product. It comes in light and dark and a couple of mixes of the two. It looks beautiful on the floor and will last a long, long time. We think this is a great upgrade if you are prone to high heels or own a long-nailed dog.

Upgrade 2: Cork – This might be my favorite upgrade. Cork is stylish, warm and comfortable to stand on. We have a wide variety of styles and will be adding to those over the coming weeks. Cork is also going to be starring as our new bathroom floor option which means that this upgrade could lead to consistent flooring through the entire home.

Upgrade 3 (coming soon): Stained Bamboo – We will soon have several available options for stained strand woven bamboo. These come in richer colors than our standard strand but are just as durable.

Upgrade 4 (coming soon): Specialty Sustainables: Right now this category includes three flooring types on which we are waiting for better images and pricing. Palmwood, Mulberry and a Burled Bamboo are the options we hope to offer in this category.

Why not head over to postgreenhomes.com and customize a home in the Skinny Project to see these upgrades in action. You will be able to see all the options and how the upgrade costs will effect your overall price. Then come on back here and let me know what you think in the comments.

The day before yesterday we discovered that our company site, postgreen.com, had developed some serious health problems. Pages were displaying incorrectly, plugins were malfunctioning and the code looked like a cat had walked across the keyboard at the beginning of each file. Our immediate attempts to fix this issue by upgrading WordPress (our favorite web publishing platform) and Thesis (our favorite WordPress theme) only led to further problems. This might have something to do with the fact that we hadn’t upgraded either in years, but we are more inclined to place the blame elsewhere. So, instead of taking any personal responsibility, we are going to call this a case of middle child syndrome.

This is the problem with having three fairly successful sites, only one of which was designed by professionals (oh how we love you postgreehomes.com). We tend to pay the most attention to the 100k blog (our firstborn) and to making sure we are holding up our end of the content bargain at the Postgreen Homes site (our baby). As a result, our company site tends to feel like the overlooked middle child, and as such, started to create problems to get the attention it craved. Well congratulations middle child. The attention is yours.

Realizing that a misbehaving company site was a bad reflection on the company as a whole we devoted yesterday to dealing with the problem. This involved wiping the entire existing site off our server and starting over from scratch. We salvaged some of the content and recycled a few of our images, but by and large, we rebuilt from the ground up. The result is the site you’ll see if you head over there today. It isn’t completely finished, but overall we are happy with how it looks. Soon, we’ll be able to go back to ignoring it in favor of its more popular siblings.

Now, I realize this post won’t really matter to a lot of you. You are here for the sustainable living, green building and modern design stuff, but I know there are a few out there who are interested in the way we market what we do. I wrote this post for you. A big part of our marketing efforts has to do with our online work, and that work is made considerably easier thanks to the two tools I mentioned earlier, WordPress and the Thesis Theme. We never would have been able to build an entire site in a day without those two components. If you are a small business with an “empty pockets” marketing budget, we couldn’t recommend these web tools more highly. This is not to say that we don’t think professional design is worth paying for . . . it is. All of our sites will likely be reworked by pros at some point. But, we realize the budget constraints of a start-up company, and thankfully these tools exist to help us get the most out of the tiny bit of funds going toward online marketing. At the very least, we hope tools like this will help get rid of the excuse for bad websites among small companies.

So, sorry to those of you who find this a little off-topic, but we hope you will at least look at the site and tell us what you think. We would also be happy to answer any questions you might have about the site’s design. Shout out your thoughts, critiques and questions in the comments.

Disclaimer: I discovered after writing this post that the company behind the Thesis Theme has an affiliate program, and I signed us up. If any of you click on one of the links and decide to buy the theme, we will get a little cut. I would have written this post exactly the same way without that incentive, but we thought you ought to know that you might be providing us with a little beer money.

We are in the midst of some overhauls to the Postgreen Homes website which will continue over the next couple weeks. These changes are motivated by budget concerns, warranty issues, new product finds, basic improvements and other lessons of the past months. This is just the first entry in what will be an ongoing series of changes including some expansion of the scope of the customization process.

The first major change was a juggling of our kitchen appliance packages. Partly these changes were budget related as we moved money away from appliances and into air sealing and insulation. We think the dollars will have a greater impact for the end user if they are spent on energy efficiency. Using that thinking we developed three new appliance packages, one base and two upgrades.

We also took the induction cooktop out of the base option, but allowed it to be added back in as an upgrade. This was both a budget move and a usability one. Since only certain pots and pans work on the induction cooktop, we felt that it was unfair to force buyers to invest in pans at the same time they invested in a house. We still believe induction is the best cooking method for our homes, but we felt it was to soon to force the issue.

Package 1: IKEA

IKEA has fortunately given us some great design options for our base appliances. For this package we are offering their built in oven (in three color options), their dishwasher with interchangeable face plate and their electric cooktop. We stuck with the Frigidaire refridgerator because of its energy efficiency and practicality. We also offer an upgrade to a full induction cooktop in the package. For this we use the LG cooktop that is in our third package.

Package 2: Frigidaire

The Frigidaire Package features many of the appliances that were in our original homes with updates to recent versions and the addition of the hybrid induction/electric cooktop. This is the perfect cooktop for those who want to change to induction but have a couple favorite pans that might not function properly on a magnetic burner. We also allow the upgrade to LG’s full induction cooktop for this package.

Package 3: LG

Our new high-end, pretty appliances come from LG. Those who come to the Passive House Tour this Thursday will get to see how nice these things are in person. The package features a bottom-freezer, double-door fridge, a sleek dishwasher, an oven with a touch display and a very nice full induction cooktop. This upgrade is an investment, but its a good one.

We think these three packages give a nice range of options to our customers. Over the next few days I will be adding more detailed descriptions to the website, but you can see them in place now at www.postgreenhomes.com. Just customize a house and pick the appliance package you like best. Then, let us know what you think in the comments.

Many of you have already taken the opportunity to play around with our new Postgreen Homes website. We hope it has been a rewarding and entertaining experience that you are anxious to share with all of your family, friends and passing acquaintances. OK, that might be a bit much but hopefully you at least mildly enjoyed your visit.

For those that haven’t swung by the new customization tool yet, it is an easy, fun (we hope) way to customize one of our homes. It is particularly useful if you want to customize a home in one of our upcoming building projects. This handy video shows you how you can choose a home in our new Skinny Project and customize it to your tastes. It also features me talking quickly and stumbling occasionally which some of you might find entertaining.

At the very least, give it a watch to reward me for the many retakes caused by the constant crashing of my video capture program. Admire how I manage to do the same long take for the 20th time without dissolving into tears and cursing. Oh . . . and ignore the quality issues if you can. Hopefully I’ll figure those out in the near future.

Hope you enjoyed the video. Give it the old Siskel and Ebert in the comments.

Many of you have likely heard the news already, but I feel an occasion this momentous (to us) deserves an official launch post. Postgreen Homes’ new website has finally been released into the world and with it comes the ability to customize our homes. After months of development, content writing, graphic creation, testing, and whining about all the work, www.postgreenhomes.com is finally ready for the Internet. More importantly, we are ready to build the homes that you design in our new online tool.

The customization process is fairly straight forward. Everything from flooring to landscaping to house numbers is open for upgrading and adjusting. Each option has associated pricing to lead to a final total cost for the home you design.

There are two basic ways to use the site. You can either customize a home in one of our existing projects, or you can start from scratch, customizing a model without the restraints of objective reality.

Project customization is for those interested in actual homes and realistic costs. It allows you to pick one of our ongoing or upcoming developments, select a specific lot within that project and customize a home that fits the lot and the project constraints. The end result is a home we can actually build in the near future with an accurate price including your customization choices. Take the final result to your Realtor, sign an agreement of sale, and we will build your house.

Model customization is for those who simply want to play around with the customization tool. This allows you to choose any model and any facade without concern for the lot size or style limitations of a project. The pricing in this section is based on an average lot in one of our E. Kensington projects, but it is purely speculative and shouldn’t be seen as an accurate representation of any actual property. Any home designed in this way could vary in price drastically based on where it is built.

Customization Options

We offer plenty of options in our customization process and those options will keep growing and changing as we find better products and new applications. There are some things, however, we don’t let you customize.

Building Envelope: We don’t let you change the walls, roof, insulation, windows or doors because we have spent a lot of time determining the best options for each. These are the elements that make our homes incredibly energy efficient, and like them or not, they are there to stay.

Toilet: If another high quality, stylish, low cost dual flush toilet becomes available we might eventually offer an option in this category, but for now you are stuck with the Kohler Dual Flush we like best. Of course, when I say “stuck with”, I mean “privileged to have.”

Shower Head: Low flow fixtures are important, but so is getting wet when you shower. We have noticed that many low flow shower heads forget this. Our research has led us to the one that doesn’t. Great performance and excellent water savings is what you will be getting no matter what.

Mechanicals: Like the building envelope we have worked hard to design the most efficient and healthy mechanical system we can. This is an area in which we simply won’t compromise.

The rest is pretty much fair game. There are nine different customization categories including Model, Facade, General Interior, Kitchen, Bathroom, Landscaping Packages, Landscaping Details, Alternative Energy and Miscellaneous. Each of these categories has a growing variety of sub-categories and options. For more detail you will have to check it out yourselves.

The goal of the site is to give a considerable amount of control to the home buyer without attaching the high cost that control often seems to bring with it. Since we design and build relatively simple, pared down homes, it was important to us to allow people to inject some of their own taste and personality.

So, what do you think? Does the site work? Is there a place for this kind of site in today’s real estate market? What options are we missing? How can we improve? What did we do right?

Hit those comments hard.