Reclaimed Wood Floors Add Beauty to Ultra-Green Home

When discussing green building, cities such as San Francisco or Portland come to mind, but the town of Norris, Tenn., a bedroom community 20 miles north of Knoxville, was a green building leader long before there was a green building movement. Back in the 1930s, the Tennessee Valley Authority built the modern, idealistic garden city to house dam builders and their families. Seventy-five years later, students and faculty from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville sought to bring Norris back to the cutting edge of housing design by incorporating what we now know about carbon footprints, volatile organic compounds and waste reduction into a New Norris House. The culmination of their efforts incorporates everything from rainwater harvesting to wood floors reclaimed from old barns and earned the unusual project a LEED-Platinum certification.

Back to the Future

When the Tennessee Valley Authority was created in 1933, the region it served was in a sad state: The average income was $639 a year, farmland was nutritionally depleted and eroding, the best timber had been cut, and while large American cities were 90 percent electrified, only 10 percent of rural communities in the region had any electricity.

The TVA, the nation's first public utility, was created as part of the New Deal to remedy many of these issues. Dam-building projects put the unemployed to work, created electricity and mitigated flooding. The first of these projects was Norris Dam, named after the TVA's greatest supporter, Senator George W. Norris of Nebraska. TVA chairman Arthur Morgan envisioned the city of Norris to house dam workers and serve as a model community.

The original Norris Houses, constructed from local wood and stone, were some of the first all-electric homes, each featuring indoor plumbing, a dial telephone and a refrigerator. The twelve house designs experimented with new building techniques and materials like prefabrication and plywood interiors. The town was designed with winding roads, walking paths and communal, centrally located garages to foster a sense of community. Limits were placed to prevent the city from encroaching on surrounding woodlands.

Today many communities across the country are adopting the same policies, discouraging sprawling development and constructing walking paths to offer alternatives to driving. Back in Norris, University of Tennessee-Knoxville is experimenting with the New Norris House using the latest in green technology to again make Norris a model to follow.

By using random-width planks, Salvageantique was able to reduce waste in the milling process. "We liked the aesthetic a lot as well," adds Samuel Mortimer.

Groundbreaking Class Project

The "New Norris House" was designed and built by the University of Tennessee-Knoxville College of Architecture and Design to celebrate the TVA's 75th anniversary. The project was funded by two EPA People, Prosperity and the Planet (P3) grants, which provided a total of $85,000 for planning and construction. The scale of the college project was as unique as the house itself.

"This is the biggest project to date and has broken new ground for everyone involved," said Samuel Mortimer, a lecturer and researcher in the College of Architecture and Design who worked on the house. "Projects in the past have been of significantly smaller scales, such as a Tennessee state park overlook and an unbuilt Tennessee state park visitors center extension."

Mortimer estimates 55 students from the colleges of Architecture and Design, Engineering, and Agriculture Science and Natural Resources participated in the project.  Because the various phases of design, construction and evaluation spanned several semesters, only a core group of students, including Mortimer, who became a faculty member during the process, were able to be involved from beginning to end, but at the project's peak during construction, up to 25 students, researchers and faculty were involved at once.

One of the projects bloggers noted, "The floors give the home a warm feeling and really make the white walls of the home stand out."

Students in various courses laid the house's foundation and built the deck and enclosure for the outdoor cistern. They also applied the white cedar siding, installed the windows and helped with interior finishing. Students even designed the folding plywood lounge chairs in the house.

After the house was completed in August 2011, grad students involved with the project lived in the house, evaluating the practicality of the design and putting the eco-friendly systems to the test.

Small-Scale Sustainability

The original Norris Houses experimented with new materials and building techniques like plywood interiors, modular construction and, most importantly at the time, indoor plumbing. The New Norris House followed the same innovative path.

Clayton Homes of Maryville, Tenn., built the house in its facility in Bean Station, Tenn. According to LEED, building off-site like this saves wasted lumber, because builders often ship more lumber to the construction site than they need, and any leftovers are then unnecessarily integrated into the structure or are thrown away.The house is comprised of two 12-by-30-foot modules, which made the finished house 4 feet wider than the original Norris Houses. The house was designed with an open-concept interior to make the small, one-story interior feel larger.

While the original Norris houses integrated novel indoor plumbing, the New Norris House is also on the cutting edge of water use. The roof harvests rainwater for use and storage inside the home. The design team had to work with state and local officials to get this system approved, as it was outside the existing regulations. Though the water is cleaned using both charcoal and UV filtration, regulators would not allow its use in the interior faucets. At this point, harvested rainwater can only be used in toilets and washing machines, but the university hopes by monitoring the water quality in the New Norris House, it can provide sufficient data to change the regulations for future projects. The faucets that do use centralized water are low-flow, using more than 30 percent less water than conventional counterparts.

Through innovation and mindful design, the New Norris House earned a LEED Platinum certification from the U.S. Green Building Council with 26 points to spare, making it the first University of Tennessee project and only the sixth project in the state of Tennessee to earn the Platinum rating.

Three-Point Floors

Contributing to the Platinum rating was the use of local and reclaimed wood throughout the house. The siding is locally sourced and milled white cedar, the structural wood was harvested and manufactured in North Carolina, the countertop was made from reclaimed truck beds, and the primary flooring is solid white oak reclaimed from century-old Kentucky barns and milled to order by Salvageantique LLC.

One of the members of the project knew University of Tennessee-Knoxville alum James Brady, the son of Salvageantique's owner Scott Brady, and asked if the company would provide the reclaimed flooring for the project.

"We told them we'd like to help them, and we decided to donate the material and help get it down," Scott Brady said. "It turned out to be a pretty fun project for everybody."

Scott Brady's brother Paul Brady installed, sanded and finished the random-width floor. The random widths both reduced milling waste and enhanced the overall design. In the loft, locally processed structural tongue-and-groove pine flooring was installed by Clayton Homes.

The members of the project chose solid, nail-down floors to reduce indoor air pollution by eliminating the potential for any VOCs in adhesives. Both the reclaimed white oak and pine floors were finished with a hardwax oil finish chosen based on its low VOC content and positive recommendations.

To prevent waste incurred by "durability failures" as well as infestations of mold, LEED awards one point to projects that keep humidity under control, and so the wood floors on this project benefited from the inclusion of a multi-split HVAC system with a dehumidification function, keeping the RH as constant as possible. By using locally sourced reclaimed wood flooring finished with a low-emission coating, the house earned three LEED credits toward its total of 106.

The floors in the loft are structural two-by-six, tongue-and-groove pine boards, installed and finished by Clayton Homes

Award-Winning Abode

In addition to the P3 grant and the LEED Platinum certification, the New Norris House has been getting positive attention since 2010, when it received the UT Exhibition of Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement top award. Since then the project was named one of the American Institute of Architects' Top 10 Green Projects and given the Design-Build Award by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, a merit award for single-family housing from the Residential Architect Design Awards and more.

The university plans to auction the house this fall as the evaluation process comes to an end. All of the proceeds will go to the College of Architecture and Design's Design, Build, Evaluate Initiative to fund future projects. Because this is also new ground to break, a date has yet to be released.

Thanks to the success of this project, interest in future Design, Build, Evaluate projects is ever increasing, Mortimer said. The biggest question is how to fit such a overarching project, which involves several colleges, semesters and outside partnerships, into the curriculum.

Eighty years after the founding of Norris, the tiny utopia-turned-sleepy-suburb is back on the map of innovative cities. The historic town is again the home of something new and uniquely Norris.

The floors in this ultra-green home were reclaimed from 150-year-old Kentucky barns and finished with a low-VOC hardwax oil. (Photos by Ken McCown)

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