Jeff Wilson has always wanted to build a green dream home. "It was going to be this super-high efficient, solar-powered, off-the-grid house — those were my goals," says Wilson, 42, of days when he would study plans for building an earth-sheltered concrete home.
Instead, he took quite a different path when his family moved into a 70-year-old Cape Cod home in the rural college town of Athens, Ohio. "We found a dream house in the rough," he says, describing its proximity to the elementary school, farmers' market and local shops. "Then, we decided to rebuild it."
Specifically, Jeff embarked on a journey to give his home the ultimate energy efficient treatment: a Deep Energy Retrofit (DER) that involved everything from beefing up insulation to installing solar panels. He converted a leaky, uncomfortable home that needed some TLC into a functional, healthy environment for his family — one that eventually will not cost him a dime to heat and cool.
"Getting a handle on old homes and retrofitting them is something that someone needed to tackle, and I felt it was a place where I could lend my voice," Jeff says of the yearlong project.