Back in the saddle

Front Facade of Our Passive House

Life has a way of redirecting your attention, and ours was redirected plenty. For those of you who have been following along, you know this project has had more than its share of detours. After the architect situation we detailed in our last post, there were additional personal challenges that put everything on hold yet again. We are happy to report that by the end of 2025, those challenges resolved themselves, and we made a deliberate decision: full speed ahead.

So here is where things stand.

The plans have been submitted to and approved by Passive House Institute US (PHIUS). That is a significant milestone. Getting PHIUS approval on your plans means that the design has passed a rigorous review for energy performance and building science. It is not a rubber stamp. We are proud to have it.

With that approval in hand, we moved to engaging the two key partners who will be building the physical structure of the house.The first is the company handling the wall and roof panels.

One of the things that makes a Passive House genuinely different from a standard stick-built home is how the building envelope is constructed. The walls, roof panels, and the envelope as a whole have to be built to a far more precise standard than conventional construction.

To achieve that level of precision and quality, we are having the panels built off-site by a specialist, then transported to the property and assembled on location. The company doing this work focuses soley on this kind of Passive House panel construction, and finding the right partner here was not a quick process.  

The second partner is handling the foundation and walkout basement. This choice is due to the fact that the lot has a significant slope going back from the street, so the our lot made this decision on the bottom level of the structure for us. For this we are working with a company that specializes in concrete wall construction. A walkout basement done right is a significant undertaking, and having a specialist in concrete wall systems is the correct call for a build of this nature.

Now here is the piece that adds a little time before we can break ground. Both of these companies, by the nature of how they build, require engineering review of the architectural plans before they can proceed. That is not a bureaucratic formality. That is how you make sure everything fits together correctly when the panels arrive on site and when the concrete goes in the ground.

Another aspect of the house which requires engineering is the floor trusses. Those have to be engineered to fit exactly with the concrete walls and the pre-fabricated panels, so it is a carefully choreographed dance of engineering to get all the parts and pieces to come together, and have them all fit like a glove.

There is one more layer to this: we are adding timber framing to both the interior and exterior of the house. Timber framing is one of the most beautiful structural elements you can incorporate into a home, and it is also one that demands its own engineering. The timber frame company has its own engineering team and process, and that work also needs to be completed and coordinated before construction begins.

All of these engineering threads running in parallel do take some time to pull together. But there is no shortcut worth taking here. Solid, coordinated engineering at this stage is what prevents expensive problems later.

Our current projection for breaking ground is May 2026. We will be keeping you posted along the way. This third attempt to build is the charm and we are delighted that this one is actually happening.