Minnesota Students' Cooperative

Normally 7 residents share the L-House. This is few enough that to keep out of each others way with less strict rules than houses with more than ten people often require. We have two bathrooms, a kitchen, a pantry, a living room, a porch, and gardens that evolve year to year..

In the kitchen we each get a cupboard or two to ourselves, and share a refrigerator with one to two other resident(s). We all share the gas oven, stove top, and microwave oven. Efforts to add efficient storage space and DIY home improvement are on going, yet the compact architecture requires some thought when choosing furniture or professional capable of improving the house affordably. Our efforts to improve discussed at the end reflect ongoing commitment to respect ecology we value and leave better resources for future students than we inherit as coop members. We remain MSCs most efficient home per person, and joined Saint Anthony Parks most energy efficient households in 2015.1

Living Room:

Quite simple, wood floors, bay window faces South yet is shaded by trees. Couches are now there with the table, yet the center photo gives a sense of the bay window space. Floor lamps light the room at night, since there is no ceiling fixture. S windows provide abundant daylight for plants, as we grow grapes to help shade them in Summer now that we lost a beautiful Oak Tree that had shaded our whole house.

Porch:

Occasionally serves as a garden tool shed, yet people chat in the shade of the porch. Smoking is not allowed anywhere inside our buildings, but some does waft in from time to time when friends visit. Fortunately there is back garden level entrance to the kitchen.

Kitchen:

A small kitchen if 3 people cook at once so meals shared by 7 in our kitchen involve 4 people standing. We keep finding ways to increase how efficiently we use space. Pot racks were a big improvement as pans dry as stored. One may store 2 pans on the rack, but extras go back in the pantry room because kitchen space is limited. When we have 8 residents, due to a double occupancy (which requires unanimous approval by all house residents), we may need to get a 4rth fridge because we've been enjoying the extra kitchen space. We often open the back door assure sufficient fresh air while baking, but our hopes for a better kitchen rely on assisting Main House plan a better upgrade to MSC's biggest kitchen next door. We use our pantry room intensely.

Long ago Little House had no kitchen, so residents ate in the main house. Our trash closet doesn't yet accommodate recycle well so we empty a small blue bin into totes on the porch. A hung bucket collects food scraps for garden compost. We are the one MSC house to properly use a compost bucket to reduce trash related fruit flies for more than a decade. It involves no vegetable waste in the regular trash bin, cleaning sinks and the pale, not leaving stored vegetables to rot, and taking out the compost every 3 days in humid weather. When we fail at these, fruit flies can arrive & persist. Moisture is problem because mold likes to grow in cool basements. It takes a long time and much bleach to clear mold if allowed to bloom, so we must not do that. We must not leave puddles of water in our kitchen and moisture control is central to most L-Kitchen remodel concepts.

Bathrooms:

Downstairs: Tile floors and walls simplify cleaning when one makes a mess. When one is dirty from gardening or a game of soccer, one goes directly from our back door and into this bathroom to shower off in the tub. Properly insulating these basement walls will require gutting the bathroom for days, so we put that off.

Upstairs: This is the most used bathroom because it is convenient for rooms upstairs. It has significant shelf space for everyone's extra hygiene items. Picture predates larger DIY shower replacement. We still work at getting a 2nd shower to durably not cause issues so we can take that for granted. A discarded high end show model window can install to serve as a vinyl 3 pane double hung window to end moisture condensation issues.

Pantry:

Doubles as a storage room. Never tidy, but it is finished with tile floor. It was used for laundry until 2014. It is one place where we can repair stuff.

Bedrooms:

Every room in the Little House has a closet. Your room is your secure private space.

Rent is slightly higher without a 6mo lease, and $25 lower for those actively serving on our board of directors. Residents may rent one standard car spot for $10/mo. Wider vehicles, trailers, and anything that cannot properly park in the compact parking spots due to extended length or deficiently tight turning radius may cost extra.

MSC Homes

Litla Hús residents are glad to no longer live with 2015 roof construction in progress or past annual roof leaks. We can now openly admit how very bad the situation had been that convinced MSC to invest in a better roof. The project achieved everything that we promised, yet the promises were a minimum theoretical expectation if key things were done wrong. We got the strategic transformation needed to let DIY insulation corrections proceed under a solid and dependably dry structure, but getting within reach of MSC affording key professional assistance to wrap certain thing up right tests our resolve. Mostly our efforts show a sustained commitment to be good ecological stewards, but the following will get into some technical weeds that make dull reading regardless of how important they can be for achieving ideal results on tight budgets.

Our efforts lead us to deeply appreciate the value of huge trees.

Roof improvements can't fully compensate for losing the great white oak tree to Burr Oak Blight because it shaded, and evaporatively cooled all the air around our home in Summer. Despite clear Winter gains, bragging about improved roof performance in Summer feels sad in light of a net loss in vegetative cooling that would require 60 years to restore. We had rarely felt a desire for AC, yet since the loss of the tree we have had a year when 5 or 7 rooms used AC in August.

When a tree is again large enough to fall on our roof the 2x12 rafters and steel roof with continuous membrane below are ready to receive severe impacts as long as hurricane scale winds don't lift the whole roof off (not a code expectation here). Until then sufficient modifications to let us grow vegetative shade on the house without causing moisture damage take a lot of thought, DIY time, and ultimately some strategic specialist help to convince insurers and city that solutions are good. This involves getting verification of how much weight can suspend from the rafters under eaves to support a bat house to serve as an awning above South Windows, trellises to hold binding plants far enough from the house to shade without humidity or fire risk, and even bird houses because we enjoy birds that are not trying to nest in the actual roof.

How Bad the L-House HVAC situation had been:

Honestly, old forced air heat couldn't reach 65°F in rooms L12, L22, or L23 of this old house on very cold days without bothersome desiccation issues. Inspectors had us install GFCI in most bedrooms because Arc-fault systems are very expensive to retrofit, but moisture in the Wall of room L22 kept tripping the GFCI outlets to off. Professionals had mistakenly oversize the furnace which merely increased desiccation, extended periods of chilled rooms between heat cycles, and increased heat loss. Professionals are liable for under sizing furnaces, but not for over-sizing them or providing balanced air return. How systemic professional biases harm air quality and health in American homes could fill a book. Residents convinced MSC to fund house and heating system modifications in 2014 while replacing the roof. Our argument was simple, we pay the same rent per square foot as anyone else in MSC while we are a household that consumes less, costs less, and offers less shared space per person than any other house in MSC. Conservation is good by choice --we are proud to help fund needed improvements elsewhere-- but on cold windy winter nights we were unable to provide warmth many modern people prefer in 3 of our 7 rooms. That was not by choice. Winter construction likely increased 2014 energy use, and plentiful hot water enables longer showers so it is too soon to learn many important lessons from L-House renovation. Indications are insufficient to celebrate financial success other than we heat rooms at least as well as before with somewhat less dryness and use 30% less gas overall. Still L-Hús is now among the most energy efficient homes in our Neighborhood according to Xcel Energy reports that don't consider that 7 of us share this home. The concern is if electric use increased from AC use, and the direct vent water heater fan. Also recent residents have tended to leave windows open in winter because they can, whereas before we sealed some windows behind 3 layers of plastic film because we had to to get warm (film on outside and inside of each sash, film just inside the storm window, and film over each set of windows).

Our Improvement Plan Evolved:

Taking advantage of past neglect of L-House and much free resident labor, the 2011 L-House Project Proposal sought to make L-House the most comfortable in MSC by replacing the roof, removing an obsolete chimney, installing a dual zone 97% efficient micro-boiler to provide both hot water and radiant heat, replacing key windows --in rooms L12,13,22,23--, and running modern ventilation ducts to someday carry the right amount of HRV cooled or warmed air to each room after we upgrade all L-House windows and tighten air leeks sufficient for that to be both necessary and affordable. House audits in 2009 showed 7 air exchanges per hour via passive air leakage in a 25mph wind. Active ventilation is only required if this falls below 4 ACH. A guy at Badger Heating & Cooling expects removing any chimney our size to reduce total air leakage by 5%. Could tighter windows and doubled slant ceiling insulation result in 6 ACH before an energy audit? Could an energy audit compare a Larson insider window panel to window refurbishment of an identical window to inform investments in other houses?

In 2014 L-House Roof and Heat Projects were approved on a shoestring budget. Directors of the BOD were discussing proposals that implied demolition of L-House for new construction by MSC or a purchaser within years, so Sustainability Committee optimized for only a 10 year life expectancy. A 67% AFUE direct vent tank water heater let the roof Project proceed to tighten the house without the additional $700 to do things the smart way that excited professionals wanting to show off what they could achieve with a combi-boiler and radiant heat. Volunteers removed the chimney down to the 1st floor mantle piece, and refurbished 4 double hung windows. Six leaky windows in the smallest bedrooms are replaced with 3 very tight windows of comparable glass area, but far less leaky frame area for about what it would cost for professionals to refurbish all 6 windows.

After rejecting HVAC professionals who seemed clueless regarding how our old house works, we found Metro Heat recognized that short cycles of heat from our grossly over capacity furnace and inadequate air return for that volume of airflow explain both the long cold periods in certain bedrooms and the severe desiccation that resulted in nose bleeds if not for many pans of water in bedrooms and aggressive watering of houseplants. He sized a dual stage condensing forced air furnace for the actual heat being delivered to our house, so it will deliver the heat more evenly over time resulting in less time for certain bedrooms to cool between heat events.

Instead of conventional roofing company proposals to provide R15 slant ceiling insulation where R14 felt inadequate we chose a creative metal roof option that accommodates R-37 by widening the rafters and uses a metal roof to:

• reflect 20% more summer heat

• rapidly distribute heat above ventilation chutes to prevent ice dams

• last > 50 years maintenance free (even the paint finish is warrantied longer than an asphalt shingle has lasted in our climate).

• structurally the 2x12 rafters are absurdly strong if a tree hits the house to dent the roof.

• water from the roof is cleaner for gardens with no PAH rich asphalt debris.

• environmentally it is made with little waste to ship from WI and is recyclable if not somewhat reusable at end of life.

Work is incomplete enough to know the smaller furnace is adequate for an unimproved house accept when all slant ceiling roof & insulation were removed during construction, and that L22 was significantly cooler with the new roof in 2016 than the past summers. L23 is a new resident with no basis for comparison. Both L12 & L22 have sufficient ventilation and light with fewer new windows. We still need to augment air returns and get a decent thermostat. The new thermostats are needlessly horrible because we drop to 50°F every time a battery dies. The old thermostat was far superior. Metro heating truly ripped us off by replacing that, and the 2 stage function of the furnace wont run without a new wi-fi dependent thermostat for which they charge hundreds. Still we use 30% less gas due to better house roof design and overall more efficient furnace. We may use more water showering with a new water heater that is is no more efficient. However, the ECM blowers of the direct vent water heater and condensing furnace use less electricity than the old furnace blower alone.

2017 Update. While nose bleeds no longer are a thing here, the loss of the biggest Oak tree that had shaded L-Hús was removed due to Bur Oak Blight. Our nifty roof is no substitute for the cooling effect of a 70 year old transpiring Oak Tree even at 2/3 canopy. It came down at half canopy. Less ecologically conscientious attitudes conflate with roof changes, yet tree loss is partly responsible for 4 window AC units used 3 months of 2018.

Improper use of open faced fiberglass in L22 dormer eaves was corrected with hand packed cellulose insulation, but wall insulation gaps remain from settling caused by moisture that entered the old roof. IR imaging & insulation patching wait for an unoccupied room. We still desire a contractor to affordably install shutters to endure Northwest winds and block Western Summer Sun. Still other MSC houses waste more money than L-Hús, so we are no longer a strictly Sustainability priority in the bigger 5 house coop picture.