44 | Oregon Home BIKE COMMUTERS: CHECK. Love rock climbing: check. When Lauren and Kate Yeiser met on a front porch in Portland through mutual friends (Lauren was borrowing climbing gear), they discovered they had a lot in common. And one of the most important commonalities for the tech developer and communications professional was their shared interest in doing whatever they can to reduce their environmental impact. “I think it comes from a slight desperation about the state of things,” says Lauren, about their drive to build sustainability into every aspect of their life with Kate. “We mostly look to make the right choices at junctures where we have a choice.” After much thought about how to build an eco-conscious life, the couple called on Green Hammer, a Portland designer and builder of Net-Zero homes, to create a dwelling where they could make their values manifest. Looking at a world where climate change is already altering the homebuilding process, they decided to construct a home that maximized living potential on a smaller footprint and incorporated all of the latest technologies for managing air quality and water usage, while limiting dependence on the electrical grid. The result is a home in the North Richmond neighborhood that just won Green Builder magazine’s Home of the Year in the “Drought Ready” category. The couple’s original plan was to renovate an older home with sustainable updates. This proved an impossibility, since most of the homes on the market needed a complete overhaul more expensive than building from the ground up. So they began looking instead for the right property — where sustainable additions like solar paneling and room for a water tank would be possible. They found it in a dilapidated one-story 1908 home in the North Richmond neighborhood of Portland, in a cluster of historic Craftsmans. That home had a difficult layout, was poorly positioned for daylight, was energy-inefficient and contained toxic chemicals. “The home on the site was in such bad shape, so we were able to feel OK about taking it down,” Lauren says. PHOTO: KEELAN BOOTH Lauren and Kate Yeiser
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