Unique Spaces: A Yankee Goes Green

• October 14, 2009

by Fritz Hubig

Back in 2000, when Tim Makepeace was gutting and renovating a six-bedroom, 3.5-bath American Foursquare property in 16th Street Heights, he didn’t consider himself at the forefront of the green revolution.

“I am a Yankee and I am thrifty, so I reuse things,” Makepeace told UrbanTurf. “I believe that when you have a longer-term view of the world, you invest in your home and it pays you back.”

However, the home, which is located about two blocks from the former Colorado Kitchen space, would indeed be considered green by today’s standards. The floor is made from recycled roller skating rink wood, and there is a radiant in-floor heating system. (His children say he is obsessed with keeping his thermostat extremely low, to which Tim responds, “You can make the whole floor a radiator!”) There is also a waste water heat recovery system that extracts heat from the hot water that goes down the drain from the kitchen and showers and returns it back to the home’s hot water system, reducing the overall energy used to heat the property’s water.

Photo courtesy of Jeremy Rusnock of Virtual Laboratories.
For a 3-D virtual tour of this home, click here.

The property originally measured out at about 2,600 square feet, and Makepeace added another 1,000 square feet during the year-and-a-half renovation. The large addition on the back of the house (see photo above) is a passive solar design made almost entirely of steel and its south-facing orientation and special low-emittance (Low-E) windows provide a huge boon to energy efficiency. “If it is 30 degrees outside and sunny, it will be 70 degrees in this room, without the heat on,” Makepeace said.

While serving mainly as the primary residence for Makepeace, his wife and their two daughters, the home has also become the unofficial art gallery for Makepeace’s sculpture work. (If you found yourself at home watching TV this past weekend, you may have caught Tim in his other job as co-host for the Discovery Channel’s Weapon Masters series.)

Perhaps the only downside of this home is that it is not currently on the market. “We are likely here for the long haul,” Makepeace noted. 

If you have questions about any details of this home, or if you have your own Unique Space that you will be putting on the market soon, please contact Fritz at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

3 Comments

1. benji said at 9:54 am on Wednesday October 14, 2009:

   Great piece and great place. Glad to see this column again!

1. Josha said at 10:33 pm on Sunday October 18, 2009:

   What a cool looking place!

1. Sean said at 12:03 am on Tuesday October 20, 2009:

   Love it!  Aesthetic and efficient in one.