Pape Village House

This new build, two storey home in Toronto’s East End was completed in 2013. The residents, a growing family, were in dire need of additional living space, yet the property’s compact size and high water table meant that underpinning a basement or adding an addition on the existing building was impossible. The only way to add square footage to this family’s home was by building a new two storey house with a walkout basement on the same footprint as the previous bungalow.

Built by Pro ICF, the new house boasts six times more insulation than the old house, triple-glazed fiberglass windows, high efficiency heating and ventilation systems, and passive solar strategies. Large, south-facing windows maximize heat gain in winter, and exterior shading devices counter the hot sun in summer.

With an Energuide score of 85 and a Walkscore of 80/100, this urban new build is efficient, pleasant, and promotes a healthy, relaxed lifestyle for the family.

The roof is home to an active photovoltaic (PV) solar array, which has been connected to the provincial MicroFIT electricity buy-back program. The array has been hugely effective: from their program start in late March 2014 until the end of December, they generated 4,759 kWh, which was fed back into the grid in exchange for over $2,500 CAD. Our energy consultant for this project, BlueGreen Consulting Group, calculated a 14 percent annual rate of return after only 7.4 years to break even. The cumulative net profit over the next 20 years (assuming that the available solar radiation stays the same) will be in excess of $35,000 CAD.

For such a small urban space, this home sets an environmentally efficient example to the surrounding community, proving that active solar energy collection is not just for sprawling country landscapes. This home begins a new conversation on renewable energy, and shows that the benefits of solar power can be felt anywhere and everywhere.

The home stands at two storeys, with three bedrooms and a walkout basement. The basements is roughed in for a separate two-bedroom suite to be used as a rental unit in the future.

The home’s flat roof and rectangular shape allowed us to maximize floor area while keeping within municipal height regulations. At 850 sq.ft. per floor, the rooms are large and airy. The floor heights are generous, with 9 ft. ceilings on the main and second floors and an 8 ft. ceiling in the walkout basement

The house’s foundation is raised several feet in order to ensure that the basement does not disrupt the property’s shallow water table. The main floor’s front entrance includes several steps and a small front porch, leading to a hall equipped with a closet for coats, boots, and outdoor equipment. Off the entranceway is a spacious front room, with an office space and a sitting area that overlooks the street.

Beyond the entrance is the south-facing Great Room. Upon walking in, a large, L-shaped kitchen greets you along the room’s north and east walls, and a kitchen island lined with stools partitions the kitchen from the living and dining areas. The stairway to the second floor runs along the room’s western wall, and the floor-to-ceiling southern windows look onto the backyard.

On the second floor, a closet and laundry facilities are found off the landing, along with three bedrooms and a bathroom. The master bedroom has the southern wall, with a large walk-in closet and an ensuite bathroom. With a skylight positioned above the stairs, natural light is brought deep into the core of the house.

The basement is roughed in for a separate two-bedroom suite, with its own entrance, living area and bathroom.

The home is extremely airtight, measuring at only 1 air change per hour (ACH @50Pa). ICF forms make up the building’s structure, as well as the home’s main insulation and all-in-one vapour and air barrier. The slight addition of 3¼ in. of EPS foam on either side of the ICF Frame, and 6 in. of spray-foam and 3 in. of polyisocyanurate in the roof give impressively high insulation values, with R30 in the walls and basement, R20 in the basement slab, and R56 in the roof. White roofing membrane also contributes by reflecting away heat from the sun.

All the windows are triple-glazed and fiberglass framed. The home is designed with passive design standards in mind: large south-facing windows optimize daylight and maximize solar gain in the winter, and deep overhangs shade them in the summer. The skylight above the stairwell, by Velux, is operated electrically by remote control, which allows for natural stack ventilation.

Both the energy recovery ventilator and the condensing boiler are high performance. All of the faucets and fixtures are low-flow, and a shower drain heat recovery system was installed to recover and channel the heat from drain-water to preheat domestic hot water for use throughout the house. The house is also roughed in for a grey-water system, to be installed in the near future.