Sylvan Ecohouse right fit for Vancouver native, family

The Sylvan Ecohouse was supposed to be a modern, angular house using the latest and greatest energy efficiencies, its slanted roof pointed skyward.

“Tomorrow has arrived,” announced a sign outside the home in Vancouver’s Truman neighborhood during construction in 2013 that touted solar panels and a graywater-reuse system in addition to the unusual concrete exterior.

But tomorrow didn’t come.

After the project was abandoned partway through construction, the white foam house surrounded by trees sat vacant. Occasionally, optimistic buyers looked at the house, only to back out after they realized the effort and money it would take to complete the structured concrete insulated panel, or SCIP, house, a rare type of construction in the Pacific Northwest.

The original owner, Michael Tausch, had a “spiritual connection” with a redwood tree on the 0.44-acre property, said Sue Pauley, a broker with Windermere Real Estate. The planned SCIP home was Tausch’s dream, she said.

When that project failed, he called Pauley to sell the house and possibly recoup money he had put into it.

“He finally realized his dream wasn’t going to come true, so he wanted to let it go,” Pauley said, adding that Tausch moved to California.

Touched by his story, Pauley agreed to help him.

“I looked at it and thought, ‘My God, what have I gotten myself into?’ ” she said.

The foam house was covered in mesh rebar, surrounded by a chain-link fence. All of the windows and doors were kept in storage.

“It was probably the most interesting listing I ever had,” she said.

It was first priced at $150,000 until the top of Tausch’s beloved redwood smashed through the garage during a winter windstorm. The home was on the market for eight months.

Enter Stefan and Angela Walz. The couple were moving back to Vancouver from Tucson, Ariz., with their two teen children, and they wanted to buy a house that they could make their own.

“We had a custom-built home in Tucson, and we loved the finished product,” Angela said. “We were looking at cookie-cutter houses here, and we were seeing not as much of the custom finishes that we wanted.”

When the National Guard offered Angela Walz an active-duty position in her hometown and a chance to be near her family again, the Walzes seized the opportunity. They began searching for homes in the $340,000 to $360,000 range, typically finding older homes that weren’t their style and needed work. A custom-built house seemed beyond their budget. Seeing the partially done foam house, the couple began to envision a Southwestern-style house, similar to the adobes they’d grown accustomed to after 16 years in Arizona.

“To the general public, yeah, it’s going to be a hard house to sell,” said Dineve Ramirez, the couple’s real estate agent. “They saw the vision in it.”

The Walzes bought the property for $100,000, securing the original blueprints and plans for the house. They basically picked up where the old builders had left off.

“I’m glad somebody’s going to do it, because it was an amazing concept,” Pauley said. “I was also really happy for Michael. He just needed something out of it.”

Unusual structure

Structured concrete insulated panel homes are built using foam panels covered in concrete. They’re durable and take advantage of concrete’s thermal mass, which keeps the house cool in the summer and helps it retain heat in the winter, said Jim Muir, chief building official with Clark County Community Development.

“While we’ve done them, they aren’t that common,” he said, adding that he has seen basements built this way.

Insulated concrete form houses are more common, said Dave Fentress, director of marketing at CalPortland, a Vancouver-based concrete company. These homes sandwich foam and concrete in the opposite way as SCIP: Concrete is poured inside foam forms that make up the walls of the house. He estimates there are 500 of these kind of houses in Clark County, including some near Lacamas Lake.

In 2014, the Census estimated there were 172,762 housing units in the county.

Muir said builders aren’t jumping on unconventional building methods. More often, people use innovative systems that make conventionally built homes more energy efficient, such as incorporating solar panels, reusing graywater or perhaps reinsulating a home using insulation made of recycled denim.

Unconventional homes — that by their very nature aren’t built often — tend to be more expensive to build, he said. The Walzes’ house, as interesting as the angles are, would be cheaper to construct if it was a simpler, boxier shape, Muir said. If someone was to design a whole SCIP subdivision, savings could be found that way, he said. Of course, building multiple homes would require a construction crew that’s familiar with the process, and there aren’t a lot of people in the industry locally who are.

Still, Muir’s office gets inquiries about straw bale homes, rammed earth homes and homes made using recycled tires. Just because they don’t follow the “cookbook way” to build a house, doesn’t mean they can’t be built to meet code, he said.

‘Building with Legos’

In the Walzes’ case, it helped that two of the main contractors from the original project live in the neighborhood. Paul Sibley, who has been studying SCIP construction for about 10 years, is a few blocks away. The Walzes’ home is the first of its kind that he helped to build in the Northwest.

“I was very excited to learn that Stefan and his wife had bought the place, and were anxious to complete it,” Sibley said.

He said SCIP construction scores high on the Home Energy Rating System. While “the holy grail” is a score of zero, otherwise known as a net-zero home, a SCIP home would get a score of 50, still better than a new, standard-built home, he said. Every stud in the wall of a traditional home is a chance for heat to escape.

Concrete doesn’t rot or attract ants, it’s not as flammable as wood, and it has a strong earthquake value, Sibley said. Those features could cut maintenance costs and, in addition to adding to energy efficiency, help offset the higher up-front cost.

Sibley is trying to talk Stefan into entering the Better Home Building Challenge, a national competition that encourages innovative building practices.

“It’s kind of like building with Legos, really heavy Legos,” said Britt Killian, a structural engineer with Vancouver-based MD Structural who was also involved in the initial construction and lives a half-mile away.

In the Pacific Northwest, timber-built homes are king, Killian said, and this uncommon building method comes with a learning curve. The curve was eased by the fact that most of the needed contractors live nearby and simply went past the house while Stefan Walz was working on it.

David Parsley, who lives up St. Johns Road, was walking through the neighborhood with his wife and saw the unusual-looking house under construction. He asked Stefan Walz who was doing the drywall for the house, and Stefan told Parsley he could do it.

“It’s not every day a commercial drywaller is walking by the house you’re trying to complete,” Parsley said. “I called it the crazy house at first. Now, it’s the cave in the Couv.”

“I’ve learned that there’s a tool for everything,” Stefan Walz said, or, he added, a person who knows how to do what you want to do.

Work in progress

It’s been about a year since the Walzes bought the house. Construction is no easy or quick process. In the meantime, they’re living in cramped quarters at a duplex a couple of miles away. Children Haley, 15, and Foxx, 14, share a bedroom, which is difficult, they said.

The Walzes say they hope to get temporary occupancy by Easter and aim to be totally done by summer. The Walzes didn’t follow the original plans to install solar panels on the house or collect rainwater in a cistern. However, the house will have features such as a tankless water heater powered by gas and radiant floor heating. It’ll have an industrial-modern look; the internally framed walls are being covered in sheetrock and will be painted like standard walls, while the rest will remain gray concrete. In total, the Walzes estimate the house will cost $300,000.

Eventually, they want to get chickens and have a garden. Stefan Walz, who has been working full time on the house, wants to get back into graphic design work.

“I learned that no matter what house you live in, whether it’s a concrete house or a duplex, you still have family and friends,” Foxx said, ducking as his sister threw a paintbrush at him.

“He’s right, though,” Stefan said, smiling at his family. They all huddled into Haley’s bedroom, where she was working on a mural.