Emily Mottram, Architect & Author and her book Pretty Good House

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[00:00:05] Emily Mottram: around the house. Trash is like a whole nother environmental thing that we don't talk about, right? It's like you put it out for the curb and it's like it's gone. So we don't, It's forgotten, right?

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[00:00:16] Emily Mottram: We don't talk about the 102 tons of trash we make in our lifetimes or whatever.

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[00:00:38] Emily Mottram: Right? And it's really apparent when it's all in one place, but when you're just like, put it out to the curb, like gone somewhere else, it's, you know, said it and forget it. When it comes to remodeling and renovating is a lot to know is, is around

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[00:01:00] Eric Goranson: Thanks for joining us. We have a great guest back in the studio today. Emily Matra, MA Architecture. Welcome back to Around

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[00:01:15] Eric Goranson: Ah, this is always fun. You know, you and I can get into the weeds on this stuff, which is super fun to me.

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[00:01:36] Emily Mottram: It is a little bit crazy. Uh, you know, some days you wake up and you think, What did I do?

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[00:01:50] Emily Mottram: got that today. Yeah, no, same here. It's like, how soon do I have to be presentable for a meeting? I'm gonna be on camera for Oh, I like, [00:02:00] And you'd love the day that you don't have any of those, but I don't think they exist anymore.

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[00:02:23] Eric Goranson: you know, what's, what's interesting though is, and I, and I ran into this with design and I'm sure you run into the same thing with the architecture.

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[00:02:44] Emily Mottram: Yeah. And I think the, the thing that we sort of forget is we got all these other things going on and it's like, oh, there looks like there's a block in your schedule, but you need that time to spend two to four hours, like deep dive into your project stuff too.

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[00:03:15] Emily Mottram: Mm-hmm. , like I might be able to get one little thing done or red line a detail for, you know, our production team or something like that, but there's no way I'm doing hard super creative things in a short window of time. And that's, that's been my battle this fall is making sure that I leave enough creative time in my schedule.

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[00:03:42] Eric Goranson: Caught up on the emails, but uh, the design time didn't happen. Right. So here's the, it's, it's, it's, it's interesting, you know, cuz there's so much going on right now, it's so hard to even stay on top of stuff.

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[00:04:08] Eric Goranson: I'm trying to stay on top of it, but it's

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[00:04:27] Emily Mottram: And then it's just like, boom, it's gone. And you got distracted by something in this. Like, you see it pop up again and you're like, Oh no, wait, I gotta read that. So. Exactly.

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[00:04:54] Eric Goranson: So you're gonna have to change the whole unit out versus just change out the, the [00:05:00] heating or the cooling part of it. So, uh, we're gonna see that, and I saw that they're measuring H V A C differently than just your c ratings now too. So I think it's gonna be a little complex early part of the year as everybody figure out, figures out what's going on out there.

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[00:05:34] Emily Mottram: We need to be tracking, we need to know what's out there and what isn't working so that we know how to move forward. You know, for a couple of years it was this struggle with, you know, low load homes and traditional. HVAC systems, right? Yeah. And then, you know, in cooling climates not running long enough to have any kind of dehumidification, needing more dehumidification in heating climates, you know, [00:06:00] short cycling and having all, you know, wasting all this energy.

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[00:06:20] Emily Mottram: And so I feel like these new changes are going to hopefully spare people to kind of get into it, start doing that, and we're gonna start seeing hopefully some more data on. Pushing forward in that avenue. Mm-hmm. . And so I just wanna encourage people to still do it, even though it's gonna be really frustrating and like we apologize way in advance.

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[00:07:01] Emily Mottram: Yeah. It's like we need to change our energy dependency, we need to take advantage of this. We need those people who are willing to do it, even when it's frustrating to kind of move that needle. So yeah, just some encouragement out there for people. It's gonna be complicated. I'm sorry. It almost

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[00:07:27] Eric Goranson: And the rule came out before really the things were a hundred percent dialed in where they got over their skis a little bit. And I'm looking at this going, I don't know if technology we're gonna be over skis like we were at the toilets, but I think just in the understanding of how we're gonna navigate this, we're gonna be over our skis

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[00:07:45] Emily Mottram: And I hope that it's gonna teach us a little bit more about resilient systems too, right? Because that's part of, you know, that's, that's part of this thing is like, you've got this system and you wanna upgrade part of it to make it more efficient, but you gotta take the whole thing out now because [00:08:00] this part doesn't work with this part and it doesn't have the same this or that.

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[00:08:18] Emily Mottram: And how do you know, what are we doing with this as like, Hopefully we're gonna see some of that in our mechanical stuff as well. Yeah, it's, it's

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[00:08:35] Eric Goranson: Right. And it's, we don't have him out here. It's rare to have oil furnaces out here on the west coast, but there it's common and he's like, Hey, I think I might just put in, you know, natural gas for electric heat. And I'm like, well you might wait till first of the year cuz there's gonna be one rebates and you just got it serviced and it's working well.

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[00:09:06] Emily Mottram: Right. And I, So this leads into a totally, uh, totally off the off track.

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[00:09:28] Emily Mottram: You know, we need to move away from fossil fuels, but that doesn't need that. We need to all of a sudden just take everything that we have and junk it. Right. Right. So I'm reading this book, it's 10 years old already. Um, but it just came across my knowledge. Right. So here's things out 10 years, um, called GAR Biology, which is actually talking about what happens to our trash.

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[00:10:09] Emily Mottram: Oh, that is so cool. Right. And it was like this fascinating thing where sometimes recycling doesn't make any sense because we carted it 10 times across the country before it ended up in whatever its final resting place was, which will never offset the actual recycling of these things. So I do wanna encourage people back to bring it, bring it back home.

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[00:10:49] Emily Mottram: Mm-hmm. , it's like you put it out for the curb and it's like, it's gone. We don't, it's forgotten.

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[00:10:54] Emily Mottram: mind. We don't talk about the 102 tons of trash we make in our lifetimes or [00:11:00] whatever. Like, I mean, it's just you, you . The example they use in the book is like, you look at the hoarder house and that's like the stuff that they just didn't send to the landfill, and that's all of us.

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[00:11:29] Eric Goranson: Family mind blown right there. Mind blown. Hold on. Mind blown. Wait a minute. The only thing is between a hoarder house and how you and I live in theory is that we just moved it out to the curb and they just kept it in the house.

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[00:11:47] Emily Mottram: Not everybody collects a lot of things. So, you know, there's a, there's a little bit of, uh, escape in that, but essentially it. Is the same, right? It's like you, you didn't get rid of that trash and so you just have a [00:12:00] visual sight of what all of that is. So if you could just see all of the mountains of stuff that you like put out and sent somewhere else, you know, it's like outta sight outta mind for sure.

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[00:12:43] Emily Mottram: Like I think it was, can't remember if it was batteries or cell phones or there there's some like one E technology that people were talking about. There are six plants that recycle them and they're all in China. Yeah. So anytime you wanna recycle it, it's gotta get all the way back to China. So it just uses a ton of [00:13:00] our carbon energy, transport, all that stuff to get it to the place that it needs to go.

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[00:13:24] Eric Goranson: and covers, chargers and all of the rest of the stuff, you know?

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[00:13:52] Emily Mottram: How many years of running your oil boiler does that have to happen? And. 10 years are really important for what we're doing. Yeah. So we [00:14:00] just have to weigh that balance. It's like, and people ask me all the time, Well, what, what's the right choice here? Well, it in in renovations, it really depends. Yeah. It really depends.

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[00:14:16] Eric Goranson: it's interesting and just to kind of jump on what you're saying there, this makes sense because I have taught, done some interviews in the past with people that are in the recycling business.

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[00:14:43] Eric Goranson: It's actually better for us to haul it over to the landfill and bury it than it is to ship. All the way across the world and get it there because literally you're spending more in fuel and doing more in damage from the fuel of that ship that's running fuel oil going across there than you are [00:15:00] by recycling it.

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[00:15:02] Emily Mottram: right? It is a tough argument. And at the same time, we're not held responsible. This goes back to the like, you know, curbside and forget it. I was like, we're not being held responsible. US manufacturers, the people who are using for our disposable society,

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[00:15:20] Eric Goranson: So let's take, let's say, let's say we've got that nineteen ten two story cool house. You know, it's fairly un molested. Somebody hasn't came in and done four flips on it, you know, it's got plaster and all of a sudden people are like, we're gonna make this all energy efficient. And now all of a sudden they've got four dumpsters full of plaster, vermiculite, horse, hair, whatever else I jammed in those walls back in the day, depending on who built it, where they built it, LA and plaster, all the trim.

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[00:15:52] Emily Mottram: Yeah. And it's so frustrating to me. So part of, um, the design aspect of the Pretty Good House book is to build things that [00:16:00] people wanna keep and build them for resilient systems and to build them for future remodeling, cuz we know people are going to remodel it. So what happens to it when it comes off the house, right?

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[00:16:25] Emily Mottram: And so in think about where, where does it go when it gets to the end of life and how can you deconstruct it, right? Yeah. Like how can you take these houses apart easily? Like, can you take the cellular out of the wall and spread it on the ground in your grass and have that just be perfectly fine? You know, like off cuts on wood siding here.

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[00:17:04] Emily Mottram: What, like, they wrote all kinds of funny things on it, you know, to encourage the neighbors to take it to, you know, put it in their PU sales or hey, you know, like you're camping in Maine for the weekend. Here's some kindling or whatever. And so it's just, You know, you, I mean, you know, they could have just thrown it on the ground too, and in a couple of years it would've decomposed into something.

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[00:17:42] Emily Mottram: Exactly. I get it. But you can spread it out and fertilize the yard. Yeah. You know, depending on what it is.

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[00:18:07] Eric Goranson: Everything else was reused. They repurposed. There's, they, all this stuff got reused or donated and was used someplace else, and so I, I love it when, you know, of course that costs more money, right? I mean, it always costs more money because the cheap answer is to back up the next dumpster.

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[00:18:34] Emily Mottram: Exactly. But if you were charged for all the other things, then no. In the long run, it really didn't cost more

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[00:18:50] Eric Goranson: But let's talk about your book, The Pretty Good House book. This is fascinating to me, uh, what you guys did, because I honestly haven't seen a book like this out [00:19:00] there before where you guys just jumped in and did a very intelligent deep dive that I think is really smart for, for people to jump into if they're just getting ready to design a house, remodel a house, you know, all of those things are, this is an important book.

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[00:19:39] Emily Mottram: Um, but it's also meant for people, like when I was in architecture school and just getting out and starting as a young architect, I didn't know what I didn't know. Right. You know? And like, I love some of the great resources that we have available to us, especially those of us who love to get in the weeds and get down and, you know, all of that.

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[00:20:12] Eric Goranson: Oh my gosh.

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[00:20:18] Emily Mottram: That's just how it works. That's just how it works. And so anyway, you get onto some of these great resource sites and you run into us, right? Mm-hmm. and we have six ideas. And now if you don't know enough about what we're talking about, you're totally confused and you quit.

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[00:21:02] Emily Mottram: It's a series of guidelines. It's like, Hey, did you think about this? Did you think about this? And like, No, you don't have to sacrifice the performance of your building. In order to save money, here's what you need to do during the design process to evaluate the economics of that. Yeah. Especially right now where, you know, it can be hard to get some products or it can have long lead times.

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[00:21:47] Emily Mottram: Like passive house might be the economic level that you go to. Mm-hmm. , right? Yeah. And pretty Good House is in tandem with that. But you know what, economically, maybe you can only afford to [00:22:00] build. To code. And it doesn't mean that you shouldn't think about potentially changing some materials for indoor air quality, or everybody needs to have mechanical ventilation.

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[00:22:29] Emily Mottram: Right? Sure. And lots of us do blower door tests, but then the code office doesn't have any way to record that. You did a blower door test, right? Yep. So there's no way to prove that you actually did it. Right. And so as professionals, we get ahold of that. Some towns will keep it and they'll put it in the building file, but we have all been in a building department where the building file is like one page and you're like, Where's the actual information on this project?

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[00:23:12] Emily Mottram: Yeah. Right. I mean they're, they're like the same thing. Trying, You're doing a job trying to, Yeah. Trying to, you know, explain to people that the code is done by people who have practiced in a lot of areas and made intelligent upgrades for people to do so. You know, code is not the enemy. Like let's start forgetting that it's an enemy, but pretty good houses, a spectrum of everything in between.

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[00:23:54] Emily Mottram: That's like three, That's like 350 hotel rooms. Mm-hmm. [00:24:00] or some something stupid like that's 350 years to offset the cost of just having built that. Right. Not cleaning it, heating it, keeping it free of things that we accumulate in our houses because our spaces are bigger. Right. Just starting to talk about what do you really want out of your space.

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[00:24:19] Eric Goranson: it's, I've run into this with, with homeowners, with children. They're designing this whole space for their nine year old and I'm going, You realize by the time this is done, they're 10 and by the time they're 12 or 13 that's going on the dumpster, they don't want anything to do with it.

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[00:24:43] Emily Mottram: you're building for that one day of a year. Right, Exactly. If you're building for that one day a year, you gotta get a giant Christmas tree in the door. Mm-hmm. , like build for the other 364 days of the year that you're doing it like that grand staircase, because you have a guest that comes over like once a year that you wanna impress, like you still have to heat that and [00:25:00] light it and do all kinds, like it's a circulation space that you use so infrequently, right?

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[00:25:27] Emily Mottram: Or I've got a, I always love the grand staircase with that weird space at the top of the stairs, right? Like, yeah, it doesn't, not gonna be big enough to be a room, but it's not really small enough to be a hallway. And you're like, what happens in this space? Yeah, like .

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[00:25:51] Eric Goranson: Right. You really can't use it. Um, and then my favorite too is the big grand, a circular staircase that comes up and sweeps, but now you've got radius walls [00:26:00] downstairs in all these different rooms because that wall now ends up. Creeping around on the backside of that. So it's the same kind of thing. But I wanted to touch on this with building code and it's fascinating how well California does stuff, for instance, down there.

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[00:26:21] Emily Mottram: So have you seen, uh, so talking about people who are a super awesome deep dive and I'm gonna promo his book too. Um, if you haven't gotten a copy of Allison Bale's new book, uh, does the House need to breathe or not?

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[00:26:57] Emily Mottram: And then they had to take half the siding off because they had to [00:27:00] go back to do proper flashing. And then there was a follow up photo in that post as well, where they fir, they put the windows in too early and they forgot to put their WRB on mm-hmm. . And so in the picture, the WRB is just like wrapped over the window, which clearly they must have come back and cut it and done some flashing tape and some other things.

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[00:27:38] Emily Mottram: says that's fine. But if you actually look at the, uh, moisture resistance of the R five in our climate zone, and you read, I think it's chapter three, which talks about condensation resistance. It's not Okay. . Yep. You know, and it's like driving by and going, Oh, oh, that's gonna be a pro. Like that's gonna be a problem.

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[00:27:59] Eric Goranson: [00:28:00] yeah. Great example. So my buddy who's, he's been on the show before here, Jason McDaniel, he's Global Tile Posse. He's a, a big tile guy out there. And he went down to help out another homeowner that got taken by a tile contractor. And so, you know, they tore the whole space out. He spent a week down there rebuilding this thing for him.

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[00:28:41] Eric Goranson: And he is like, I get that you have building code for this, but if you have four inches of water in the bathroom, why does it matter? , , You know, and so some of the stuff you just shake your head and go, What is that accomplish?

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[00:29:06] Emily Mottram: So we, we wouldn't do that, but we'll, we'll try to somehow mangle together some version of what we have done to kind of answer the same Yeah, so like, not all the .

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[00:29:26] Eric Goranson: And so you've got some inspector out there going, Well we gotta test it. Gotta have three inches of water in it, Got three inch of water in it. And it's like, Oh, come on guys. You know, that's the stuff that makes people like you and I scratch our heads and go, I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish here.

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[00:29:48] Emily Mottram: Yeah, so we were doing a project and we, for the most part, if we're gonna build new, we usually do super high performance. The building envelope is mine. What you're doing on the inside is yours. We'll put up walls, not put up walls, all kinds of things.

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[00:30:20] Emily Mottram: I was like, I'll walk you through how our walls is double stud wall. Our continuous insulation is just in the middle. It's not on the outside. And obviously it's not rigid. Yeah. But you know, it's continuous. There's a thermal break. There's, you know, no thermal bridging in the wall system, et cetera. It's

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[00:30:34] Emily Mottram: propose.

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[00:31:03] Emily Mottram: And she's like, Okay, that's fine. Just put that on your drawings. And I'm like, OK, , But don't tell anybody else to do that. Yeah. Cause that's, Let, let's not do that. Yeah.

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[00:31:20] Eric Goranson: But maybe that'll .

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[00:31:43] Emily Mottram: Um, and so I was working on a project and they were, you know, trying to tell me what, what the expansion rules were. Oh, you know, that's not what that says. And she's like, What do you mean? And I went through and I was explaining to her and she's like, Oh. So she gets on the phone cuz they had just learned about it.

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[00:32:12] Eric Goranson: No.

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[00:32:16] Eric Goranson: Firefighting 1 0 1. Oh no .

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[00:32:37] Emily Mottram: And so if you wanna know more about code, I also encourage people to get on TikTok and follow Glen Matheson. He is the only person I have ever met who makes code. Interesting. Nice. And he has Code University and he explains a lot of things to people. And so he's been at a bunch of these Building Science symposiums, um, just talking about, you know, the origin of code and what's in it.

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[00:33:08] Eric Goranson: Exactly. Well, it's fascinating with code because, you know, there's some states that do it, so, And then there's others. I, I talk to somebody that's, you know, in our audience that's out there and I'm like, Oh, that's right.

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[00:33:35] Emily Mottram: super scary to those of us who have been, you know, sort of in the high performance world is, um, We, uh, we argue with our clients about having oversized range vent hoods because we know the importance of the capture area and all of this stuff.

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[00:34:06] Emily Mottram: And then, you know, water vapor from what you're cooking. But also too, now here's this gas range. Oh, by the way, you've got carbon monoxide, which is tasteless, colorless and odorless, and you don't know you're poisoning yourself for the, you know, like super scary. And so, you know, I'm, I'm really big. In fact, if you have a gas range, you have to have makeup air too.

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[00:34:35] Eric Goranson: Yeah. I've gotta, I've gotta, I've gotta a 48 inch gas range, so it's, you know, it. Six burners and the griddle, right? I've got a 1200 CFM hood and I use all of that, what I have on the griddle, a steak or something on it.

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[00:34:52] Emily Mottram: right? So it's so important for people and like we, I didn't even touch on bathroom vent fans, which is like, what's the largest [00:35:00] point source moisture in your house, The bathroom? How many people have mold growing on the ceiling? And by the way, till you see the mold, you already have fully saturated and a bigger problem than you, you know, than you thought.

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[00:35:38] Emily Mottram: One of the things that we did as part of those projects was tried to do education with the homeowners to say, Hey look, I get it, you know, you, you maybe don't always wanna report if something's broken or you know, the fans sometimes are allow mm-hmm , but like, this is why you need to use it and this is how it impacts your health.

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[00:36:11] Emily Mottram: Yeah. We. Have done some, um, where we use our erv in the bathroom to recapture some of that moisture cuz trying to get houses to 40% in in Maine, negative 15 degrees pretty hard.

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[00:36:43] Eric Goranson: I haven't had, I have a steam shower in a fairly small bathroom and because I put the fan in, in the correct space and have a right, fairly large fan in there, that mirror has never ever been foggy. And I can open up the three foot wide door in [00:37:00] the steam shower and leave it open. And unless the steam unit's on, it's getting sucked up.

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[00:37:35] Eric Goranson: It can start doing it for you. And that's pretty cool.

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[00:37:52] Emily Mottram: Floor came on, um, came on. Right? I am totally into this idea. Um, you know, but. Somebody said at one of the [00:38:00] conferences that I was at recently, like, Raise your hand if you'd be willing to give, you know, your homeowners an indoor quality monitor like afterwards. And I'm like raising my hand, like Yes, yes, yes.

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[00:38:25] Emily Mottram: Right? The accuracy on some of the home monitors is kinda like it. It's, we're not in a testing lab, right? We just want you to know when something is off, right? Mm-hmm. , if you have a spike in something, that might be some kind of indication of something else, right? So, We actually have been doing a renovation project at our house, and we had to put down some mid Antech flooring to replace some sections of, um, 1970s particle board that's mostly just saw dust.

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[00:39:11] Emily Mottram: But anyway, put some avantech in. See a spike on our energy monitor, cuz guess what? Avantech has glue in it. It's got other mm-hmm. , you know, it's got other stuff in it. And so we see a spike in it and we're like, Oh, I wonder what that was. Well we finally put down some wood flooring. Guess what went away?

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[00:39:45] Emily Mottram: you know, neither my husband and I have, you know, severe chemical sensitivities that we knew of. Right. So we were just kind of doing some things that are great products that you put down and that you use. And I went. Huh. Okay. Mm-hmm. , right? Like, maybe you have to think [00:40:00] about this. Now, neither of us had an issue with it, but the energy model, you know, the monitor, the indoor air quality monitor was saying, Hey, something is going on here.

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[00:40:29] Emily Mottram: Kane seemed to get the moisture to leave our bathroom even when we're running the, like, even when we're running the bathroom fan, when we're doing a load of laundry. And I was like, I'm glad you asked. You have a bunch of lint in your bathroom. And she said, Yes, you know we do. And I was like, Your dryer vent isn't connected.

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[00:41:02] Emily Mottram: You know, the heated byproducts of laundry detergent not so great to breathe in. And that kind of excess moisture, like you think about how wet your clothes are when they went in the dryer. All that moisture is just in your space everywhere. I was hated. Do you, do you still have this in Portland, Oregon or is this just like a weird main thing where they would just drop the dryer vent into the like bucket.

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[00:41:41] Eric Goranson: And the worst thing is if it's a gas dryer. Right. Cuz that's also putting out all that carbon monoxide back into that space when you do that.

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[00:41:59] Emily Mottram: [00:42:00] Unfortunately in the building world, sometimes those investigations aren't really clear. We had one client that just had a major reaction to her house right after it was built, and we think that something was off gassing. Like even if you ask for low VOC paints, once they tint them dark, they don't always use low BOC in the tint, even though you ask for low voc paint.

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[00:42:38] Eric Goranson: to. Maybe it was the, the primer, maybe it was the drywall, right? I mean,

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[00:42:43] Emily Mottram: Maybe it was this little piece of foam we used in one location. Mm-hmm. You know, maybe it was the, you know, and we tried to do, um, the best that we could with like, the cabinetry that we got and the flooring that we got. And they brought furniture that they had owned in their other [00:43:00] houses too. Right. But like, here's this high performance house and we're not really sure what the trigger is.

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[00:43:06] Eric Goranson: one of my biggest speeches I've given to builders that are building high performance houses, is that before your homeowner moves into that house, you should do a full air test in that place. So you know what's in. Because that way when your homeowner moves in and they just got that, maybe it's an IKEA couch or no, no shade thrown on ikea, but you know, whatever's in that foam or whatever's in brand X's foam, it could

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[00:43:36] Emily Mottram: Yeah. You can have nice high-end furniture companies that have stain guard on it right there. Yeah. That's like if you are asking your product to do something that doesn't seem natural for that product to do, then there is something in it that is helping it to do that, which in some cases might be a perfectly natural material.

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[00:44:01] Emily Mottram: be. But in a lot of other cases we just have a ton of, you know, made products that are chemical compositions of some things, you know? Yeah. So my whole, the whole BPA plastic, and then they were like BPA free, but they replaced it with bpf, which is the cousin of bpa, which is actually just as bad for you.

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[00:44:23] Eric Goranson: Yeah. Well, okay, so here's a funny story that's at, that's at my house. So this is a personal story. I put in this really great air system and, uh, carrier infinity. I have no problems with that at all. It's working really well. Variable speed, you know, super efficient. Uh, zoned in my 1970s house, so it works great.

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[00:45:12] Eric Goranson: So in the summertime when she made bread, she had to take it outside and put it on the outdoor kitchen because it wouldn't rise in the house. And so now I'm going, Hmm, I don't know if I'm gonna keep that technology now. You know what I mean? And that this is where I start getting concerned. And if it's doing that to,

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[00:45:33] Emily Mottram: We're the people who trial it. All right? Everybody says, I wanna go to the architect's house. No, you don't. No. It's an experiment. It's an experiment in all kinds of things that we're trying to test in and who knows what we're doing, right? Yep. And so just, just like that, but it does make you think, right?

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[00:46:05] Emily Mottram: But like you said, it kills the yeast in the air. Well, if you're, if you're a beer fan and you're making lambic, that's how they make lambic Exactly. By the natural yeast that's in the air. And so, you know what? It probably isn't terrible for us. Yeah. Now there are some things that are bad for us, but we don't wanna kill all the germs and biodiversity.

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[00:46:43] Emily Mottram: Oh my gosh. And the things that we use to treat water can sometimes be worse for us than whatever it was that was in the water. In the like, obviously not rayon, but you were talking about that like Ro o d i Water is not stuff you should drink. [00:47:00] Yes, Right. You gotta add something back into it. You know, there's all this, So,

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[00:47:08] Eric Goranson: They jump online or go down to their home improvement store and put something in. No one's ever tested the water. Nobody has any idea what's in.

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[00:47:28] Emily Mottram: And I was like, well, let's just put a filter on it. Cause you don't think to filter town water. Well guess what? First day we had it completely filled the filter with copper. I mean so much copper filing in it completely called the filter first day. So I called up the water department and I was just like, Hey, I put on this five micron filter on the water system and like it is shockful.

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[00:48:11] Emily Mottram: It's probably in your water line. I was like, this thing is a whole house filter, like it's on directly after your pump. So the only part of it that's coming in my house might be from like, it's 30 feet, right? Yeah. . I mean, even 30 feet, if you count the, Do I own that part that's outside of my house that goes to the water main?

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[00:48:33] Eric Goranson: meter, feet, whatever the

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[00:48:39] Eric Goranson: right. That's it In your area, your water meter is in your house, so it doesn't freeze. Mine's 150 feet out towards the road.

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[00:48:48] Eric Goranson: So yeah. Different climate mimic though, right? ,

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[00:49:11] Emily Mottram: Mm-hmm. , if you're on the side of the hill, you're gonna have a different climate on your, like a different microclimate on your specific site than you're gonna have in other areas. I think people totally disregard this idea, climate zones. And part of the reason why I think that is because people come to us and they'll say, We found this plan online, we love it.

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[00:49:47] Emily Mottram: And so, yeah. Um, I think that that's disregarded. So that's been the very first chapter of the book, I think, which is start with your climate zone. You know, if you can't afford to have a fully custom house, pick [00:50:00] a plan or a modular company or somebody who's designed something specifically for your climate zone.

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[00:50:29] Emily Mottram: Right. But not that you can use that a style inspiration, but I can't give you this. And if somebody tells you they can give you this, you're going to freeze. Mm-hmm. , it's potentially not going to hold the snow load. And you're gonna have a lot of figure it out in the field to accommodate for things that aren't planned for in, you know, in this.

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[00:50:51] Eric Goranson: Yeah. It's absolutely the same. And it's funny, so I like wine and I go out and talk to friends at their wineries and I'm out there enjoying it like beer too. [00:51:00] But I'm out at the wineries and they're like, Oh yeah, well, the climate zone over here for this grapes make it taste different on the same piece of property than up here.

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[00:51:20] Emily Mottram: And you talk about grapes in the climate zone, you probably also have different soils too, right? So it's so incredibly important for you to have a building site before you have a design, so that you really can make these things work together.

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[00:52:00] Emily Mottram: Right. Those things are critical. They're important. You gotta think about it. And unfortunately, a lot of times if you don't think about that, they're gonna build it high up out of the ground and they're gonna bring in Phil to fill up to it. And that just kind of goes against everything that seems natural about working with the

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[00:52:17] Eric Goranson: Yeah, we had to, on a project I did, oh, 15 years ago, uh, up in Seattle on Lake Washington, beautiful house, uh, had the property design, the house geotech went out there and went, Hey, you need 75 concrete pilings underneath the structure to hold it up because the soil is not gonna be good cuz this is all just, you know,

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[00:52:42] Emily Mottram: And they were out there

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[00:53:09] Emily Mottram: Oh, does he work in all those places you've seen in the news right now where essentially the whole hillside is just like, Bye-bye house. Yeah, like, yeah, that's,

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[00:53:31] Eric Goranson: So he's doing all that. But,

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[00:53:49] Emily Mottram: Where you got a lot of geotechnical stuff, right? You got a lot of concrete and steel. Well, guess what? Concrete and steel real high up there on their carbon impact. And so, um, pretty good [00:54:00] houses maybe for. The rest of us. Right? Well, I live in these 1970s, 1400 square foot houses. Well, that's me. Yeah,

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[00:54:08] Eric Goranson: that's me. That's

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[00:54:10] Eric Goranson: it's funny, you know, when I look at this too, is, uh, kind of a twist on what we were talking about here. There's some companies now that are starting to do these modular homes that are coming out. Interesting. I just talked to somebody, uh, down in Texas that are doing high end, you know, really about as green as you can build it that I've seen.

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[00:54:51] Eric Goranson: So it's kind of interesting to see how some of these guys are doing some new stuff.

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[00:55:10] Emily Mottram: If we're gonna do it, we should do it well, right? Build better things. Um, but I think the modular industry actually has a huge potential to have an impact on housing on a much larger scale. One, because they build the same house over and over again, right? Mm-hmm. , they're not recreating the shop drawings, they're not doing all of that.

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[00:55:49] Emily Mottram: It can really push forward some of these better building standards and we need them to just do it as a matter of principle, right? Yeah. Like let's stop building the [00:56:00] stuff that isn't really good enough for the populations that we're serving, because you have the ability to do it at a cost effective price point.

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[00:56:11] Eric Goranson: Yeah. The waste is what's amazing cuz now instead of taking a 16 foot two by four and having to cut it to 14 feet, they can order 14 foot material. They can order if they need to have, if they're thrown away half a sheet, they can order a 10 foot sheet of OSB that you're not gonna order unit for that, but you, you can now do that.

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[00:56:38] Emily Mottram: Well, and if you look at how they have a set up, some of these really well organized ones too, all those off cuts go into the pile to become blocking in the same thing. Mm-hmm. , it's like, this is less than three feet. Wanna need one that's less than three feet.

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[00:57:17] Emily Mottram: Like, here it is, it's here. You know? And so, It's efficiency in a whole new way, you know, and a lot of these places when I talk to, um, product manufacturers or distributors too, are talking about, Well, how's your factory run? How are you powering your factory? Mm-hmm. , I mean, I love it when I see a solar array on top of it.

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[00:57:59] Emily Mottram: I [00:58:00] mean, Oh, it's, I think it's been. Six years and maybe even eight years since I was out and saw Lake Mead and I thought, gosh, that's low. And now you're seeing all these stories where like that was high compared to that. I mean, they're finding bodies from the eighties. That's like the, that's when it starts to freak you out, right?

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[00:58:22] Eric Goranson: beach. Well, and the other thing I think that's really important as well with with these modular units now is that quality control. You can have somebody there that's watching the entire process, I'm sorry, a job site does not have somebody sitting there watching every nail go on, every screw, go on everything go together.

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[00:59:03] Emily Mottram: Well, and you think about it too, right? One of the biggest challenges for some of these job sites things is lay down space, right? You don't have anywhere dry to put something to acclimate it, right? So everything that you put into this structure is basically wet. Yeah. Right? Gets rained on. Could be soaked,

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[00:59:19] Eric Goranson: Yeah. It turns black In my, in my climate here, when they're building these four story mixed use stick frame projects, by the time they're sheathing the roof floor, one OSB is

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[00:59:41] Emily Mottram: Do we understand all the building products that we're putting on our building to the extent that we know that it's allowing it to dry or allowing it not to get wet? Well, what happens if it was wet when you put it in there, but you have a system that's meant for it not to get wet. Yep. Right. So in the factory, generally they have a big space, right?

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[01:00:27] Eric Goranson: Right? Yeah. It's just not happening that way. So that's the cool part. And they have jigs and all that other stuff, and, and when things get tipped up, they're not, they're tipped up correctly. They've got a crane that's doing it. It's not two guys trying to do it that are getting hurt and bending the wall up, and it's all outta square.

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[01:01:00] Eric Goranson: Assemble 'em together and off they go. And this isn't like your double wide, single wide, triple wide stuff. This is when it's done, it looks like a custom home. They level five finish on the inside. Stucco, exteriors, metal roofs. I mean, they're built to last, which I

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[01:01:18] Emily Mottram: It's funny that. Everything inside your house is probably built in a factory except your physical house. A lot of that is still stick built. Yep. Um, and there are some challenges to that and it's not always more cost effective. Right. Especially if you're trying to ask a manufacturing facility to build a custom structure.

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[01:01:55] Emily Mottram: And you know, they say we move every five to seven years, so why are we moving to [01:02:00] a structure that we then blow apart and do all these different things for it? Like let's stop building the same thing over and over again. Like maybe when you move from that 2,500 square foot house because all your kids went to college and they're at home anymore, you move to the 800 square foot house.

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[01:02:26] Eric Goranson: where has the time gone? You and I could do this for like another four hours and just keep rolling.

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[01:02:42] Emily Mottram: So the best place to find that is to go to the Toton Bookstore and put in pre, uh, pretty good house. And since I'm gonna call this an event, a podcast, if you use P g H event in the, uh, Toton thing, you'll hear 25% off of the book right [01:03:00] now.

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[01:03:17] Emily Mottram: This is an awesome book. It's a great coffee table book. It's a great book for, for your staff who are just coming on board, new people in your office. It's also a great book for your clients. It helps them to understand. In terms that some of us who are super nerdy like to talk too technical and they don't really care about that.

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[01:03:52] Emily Mottram: They'll go to the store to buy look. Um, so use the code. You, you can get that for a good deal. So since I'm calling this an event, [01:04:00] it's a, I'm throwing it out there. Um, and

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[01:04:06] Emily Mottram: I do have a podcast. So, uh, this year in 20. Two. Yeah, whatever year. This is 2022.

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[01:04:31] Emily Mottram: So I just wanna be out there supporting women in the trades, really any minority getting into it, because guess what? The construction industry needs so many more people than they have, They need. Everybody to join. So like, get into it. It's something that you can be passionate about. Uh, you know, just forget about whatever stereotypes you think you might have heard.

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[01:05:09] Emily Mottram: So like, get involved. It's cool. So, uh, that's what my podcast is about. Usually ,

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[01:05:19] Emily Mottram: you know, it happens. Everyone. I mean, I talked about garbage today, which I think is related, but like we've talked to music

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[01:05:27] Eric Goranson: It's what we do here. Yeah. And then of course you're an architect, you do cool stuff with homes.

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[01:05:50] Emily Mottram: We do a lot of either high performance, uh, new construction. We have a semi custom plan set so you don't have to start from scratch. So we've got a bunch of those. Uh, I need to [01:06:00] update my website to get everything consistent and on there, but just reach out, we'll tell you all about them. Um, and, uh, we also, um, we only really for the most part do renovations in Maine because you need somebody to be local If you have a renovation project, There we go.

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[01:06:18] Eric Goranson: all of our friends in Maine that listen to us on the radio in Milano at a Ws y y am 1240, Emily's right around the corner.

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[01:06:30] Eric Goranson: Oregon for me. That's right on the corner.

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[01:06:38] Emily Mottram: Exactly. I get it. I get it. . But yeah, that's awesome. I love it. We love what they're doing, the conservation all up in that area, so very cool stuff. Very cool.

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[01:06:56] Emily Mottram: I know like we meant to talk about some things and [01:07:00] then we just hijacked it and talked about whatever we felt like talking about what we do. It's what we do. Always a pleasure.

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