All Blog Posts Tagged 'Melissa' (9)

Cities grafting green-building certifications like LEED into commercial building codes is nothing new, and a number of places like Dallas, Atlanta, Boston and Scottsdale have had such requirements in place for a decade or more.

Real estate investor Kassi Pelley had bought and sold a number of “fix-and-flip” homes in metro Denver when she fell down the rabbit hole of green building and certifications. She’s gotten a price bump – the “green premium” – on every home she’s upgraded and certified since, and she hasn’t…

Rick and Joann Sandoval live in a green Ferrari – a souped-up, high-performance home loaded with energy-sipping systems and green-home features. But when it came time to refinance their house and capture value from those items, the Sandovals were going nowhere…

When Sarah Coleman and Carl Sack first saw “Big Blue,” they knew they were home. The massive house, so named because all the rooms were painted shades of the color, was built in the 1920s on two and a half lots in the Corey-Merrill neighborhood of inner-city Denver.

Sean Smith was the man in the middle. – a key figure with a foot in both worlds of business and “green.”

A high-end general contractor, he built two LEED-certified homes in the Washington Park neighborhood of Denver in 2009. At an educational session he hosted there, the U.S. Green Building Council approached him to serve on a committee. “If you’re doing big-picture things, I’m all over it,” he told them.

Straw-bale houses have come a long way since Midwestern homesteaders used to stack sod on the Great Plains and call it home. More recently, 20th century straw-bale builders were either crunchy, granola types hand-crafting their own über-green homes, or affluent greenies seeking to create off-grid trophy houses, budgets be damned. In all cases, though, straw-bale has been the preserve of the one-off – designed and built one at a time. Until now.