A Top-to-Bottom Green House

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.