Log home gives glimpse of green living
With a booming voice and enthusiasm to burn, Mike Vowels resembles a high school football coach more than the conservationist he actually is.
Make no mistake, though, Mike is not what most people consider a traditional conservationist. He says he’s “the farthest thing from” a tree-hugger; the resource he’s most interested in conserving is financial. “So much of the things I’ve done out here have been economics-driven,” he says.
So, when he started building his log home in Duvall in 1984, it was with site-harvested wood, second-use timbers, and, where he could, scrap or used materials that he got cheap or even free. He made the most of what he had on his five acres, and traded his neighbors for theirs, too, like the cedar logs lining the pathways around the home.
Sometimes, of course, he had to buy new materials, but then he focused on quality, even if the products were not as eco-friendly, and even if they were more expensive.
“If it lasts a long time, it’s greener,” he said. “It’s not sending as much to the landfill.”
As for his own scrap, he recycled it into wildlife habitat, erosion control features, forest art, and last Friday, a birdbath made from a broken shovel, which was attached to a tree so it looked like the shovel went through the trunk.
Nowadays, his focus is on keeping energy consumption and costs down. “A lot of the stuff that’s driving people to ‘go green’ is writing those checks every month,” he explained.
So in recent months, Mike added a solar water heater, which has already visibly lowered his gas bill, and a whimsical “solar clothes dryer” (a clothesline hung at a wheelchair accessible height) that visitors to the home chuckled about on Saturday.
Mike and his wife Karen opened their home to nearly 250 people last weekend, as part of their own “Living Green” event, and as part of the Master Builders’ Association tour of homes. Several green vendors and Puget Sound Energy were also available for information. During the day, people toured the log home, admiring not only the greywater recycling bog garden outside of the home, and the living roof on the shed, but also the unique “green” features inside, like the wooden floors, with rope detail.
Almost all of the wood used in the house came from the property, including the cedar shakes on the roof, some which Mike cut himself out of scrap wood, and the plank flooring, installed when the wood was still green. As the green boards dried, they shrank leaving gaps to be filled with various widths of rope.
Flooring is a major component making the Vowels’ home “green.” In the utility room, there’s sheet flooring made from linseed oil and paper pulp (“not vinyl” says Mike), and outside, the deck is made of a commercial product using recycled wood and recycled plastic (it’s not as green if they make new plastic for the sealant, Mike points out. He even used recycled materials – shredded truck tires – as a sort of paving material for a carport outside.
Outside is where Mike and his co-worker Jake Hatfield (Mike, Karen, and Jake comprise the newly formed Stewardship Remodeling company) really got into the recycling, though. Nearly every log or stump on the property was harvested from the surrounding five acres and re-established to provide habitat for plants, bugs and other wildlife. Hundreds of feet of logging cable have been put to work for structural support and for bundling small scrap logs into a large berm along the road, providing a sight and sound buffer for the house, and a home for the occasional mountain beaver.
Mike is working toward green-built status from the Master Builder’s Association, but he’s long been a member of King County’s Timberlands program, encouraging property-owners to practice sustainable forestry. That was an easy decision, not economic at all.
He explained that he was watching a Discovery Channel show on the Brazilian rainforest, referring to it as the lungs of the world. On a more local level, he said, “you could say that my woods are the lungs of my neighborhood.”
So he feels a personal sense of responsibility to maintain his woods and sustain all the creatures in it. Expecting government organizations or large corporations to solve the problems of erosion and pollution just isn’t going to cut it, he says, and people shouldn’t want it to.
“I’ve grown to be a little bit passionate about me having the opportunity to do something on my one little piece …” he says. “It’s like I’m taking care of something that really isn’t mine. If everybody did a little something, then things would be different, better.”