Life as a house

With only a slight hitch in his stride, Mike Richardson makes his way through the nearly finished Acadian cottage, still vacant and now darkened by the deep indigo twilight of rural Holden, La. The electric lamp gripped steadfast in his leathery workman’s paw paints an amber beam across the black, illuminating a trail for his clay-caked boots to follow.

“This here’s slicker’n owl s—,” Richardson says, stopping to run his hands over the rich vintage face of a bedroom door he plans to encase in one of two frames salvaged from the home he grew up in—the one built from cypress his grandfather milled from family properties in Livingston and Tangipahoa parishes at the turn of the 20th century.

Richardson, 64, knows the source of every board and material he passes. One by one he relays their origins like aural footnotes on the bones of his beloved new home near the Tickfaw River. The joists are reclaimed from a derelict Baton Rouge home. The crossbeam is bought from a barn in Mississippi. The wood slat ceiling is sanded and converted from paneling found in Thibodaux, the log hoisted out of Lake Maurepas 20 years ago. Each has a story, save for those new features whose stories are yet to be told. Richardson points these out, too. His finger waves in the damp darkness at energy efficient windows, doors, insulation, heating and air-conditioning systems, a high-tech vinyl screened porch and radiant barrier roof decking equipped with thin-film solar panels.

Richardson’s new 2,000-square-foot house is on its way to being Green Building Certified by the National Association of Home Builders, and according to energy auditor Wade Byrd, should run him roughly $40 a month in DEMCO energy bills.

It’s a remarkable, even surprising turnaround for Richardson, a forester and superintendent for Cajun Constructors, who last fall watched as his house—then his livelihood—appeared to crumble around him.

Circling his property on foot, bracing against invading winds and gray sheets of rain, Richardson looked to the charcoal skies above a small green glen 30 yards off. He and his wife Nancy had just spent $20,000 renovating their home, and now the hurricane was coming. Sucking in a deep breath, Richardson stared right down the barrel of Gustav.

Soon the surrounding oak trees began pumping moisture out of the ground, shooting sand and water at the roots. Then they started to sway. Some dipped close enough to glance the eaves. Richardson moved Nancy, daughter Joy and grandson Andrew to the front of the house just minutes before a giant red oak crashed through the roof and rearranged the master bedroom. “Guys, it’s time to go to the barn,” he told his family.

The three adults and little Andrew scrambled to safety ahead of the two water oaks that followed suit. The first clipped the front of the house. The last barreled into the back porch.

All told the Richardsons watched 23 tall timbers fall on their property as Gustav squashed their home, knocked it off its two-foot piers and moved it six feet west before slamming it flat to the ground. Richardson didn’t need State Farm to tell him it would be a total loss.

“It was sickening,” he says. “I’d been in that house for 35 years. I built half of it myself, and the material came out of my daddy’s old house. Knowing it was almost paid for, and that I was fixing to retire last year—it’s just a lot of stuff.”

In the days that followed, the Richardsons bunked in a converted 12-by-20 washroom separate from the house. The insurance company paid for a travel trailer for the family to live in, and Richardson went to work saving every still-useful piece of the home that he could, storing some in his barn while leaving others with friends and relatives.

With help from neighbors and the congregation at The Freedom Church in Livingston, Richardson got most of those 23 fallen oaks cut up for FEMA to haul away. Most.

Then the accident happened.

As Richardson was trying to hitch a logging chain wrapped around a tree stump and a pine log to the knuckle boom of the FEMA truck, the log cantilevered, jammed into his leg and dislocated his foot. The compound fracture spiraled; heel forward, toes pointing behind him. “Get this thing off my foot, boy!” he screamed to the FEMA worker.

To reconstruct his leg, doctors implanted two metal plates and 10 screws. One plate was taken out a few months later. The other is in for good. All that hardware gives Richardson a barely perceptible limp, but he feels the pain every day.

“It’s really weird how that happened, because God is in control of everything, and I can look back on it now and see that. But at the time I thought it was the worst thing that ever happened to me,” Richardson says.

On crutches and off work with short-term disability compensation from Cajun Constructors, Richardson—who goes to bed at 9 p.m. and rises at 2:30 a.m. daily—was in desperate need of a new project to occupy his time. Ordered by doctors not to drive, and practically confined to the travel trailer, Richardson learned how to maneuver online. “I was pretty computer-illiterate,” he says. “But I was kind of forced to learn.”

A forester by trade, Richardson had taken a break from that field in the early 1980s to build houses in Baton Rouge. Now he began researching how-to projects for home rebuilding. He had just begun reading up on LA HERO—Louisiana’s Home Energy Rebate Option—when his sister-in-law Cathi Richardson, a human relations specialist at LSU, introduced him to LaHouse. LSU AgCenter operates this working showroom and beacon for the latest in energy-efficient home-building techniques.

“Mike came at least five times, probably more,” says LaHouse coordinator Margaret Pierce. “He’d come sift through all of our vendor info, but being from Holden, he also utilized our Web site a lot. He told me he was looking for greater energy efficiency, and obviously, based on his experience during Gustav, a more durable, wind-resistant home.”

Discovering LaHouse opened Richardson’s eyes to a wider world of building options he never knew existed. “Margaret knew me by name,” he says. “Every time I went back I’d notice something I had missed before.”

Pierce shows LaHouse to homebuilders, architects and contractors of all ages, but she says Richardson is part of the trend of those close to retirement looking for ways to live unburdened by high monthly energy bills.

“The most interest comes from clients who are planning to retire, like Mike Richardson, and those who are already retired,” says James Nelsen, owner of Idea Solar Energy, the Baton Rouge company that sold Richardson his solar roof. “I think everyone wants to do what is right for the environment, but also people want to make good decisions with their financial future.”

Still on crutches this past April, Richardson attended the local Habitat Home and Garden Show at the River Center. “I stumbled into that ‘green’ and ‘solar’ world, literally,” Richardson says. “But out of 100 booths, 20 were about solar, so I thought something must be going on with it.”

Richardson liked Nelson and his colleague Lauren Fain, so he chose to work with Idea Solar Energy. Influenced by neighbor Gerard Ruth, who was a friend of famed architect A. Hays Town, Richardson and Nancy also flipped through The Louisiana Houses of A. Hays Town and chose the Baxter House as inspiration for their new home. Richardson made the initial sketches himself—his father taught him that—and delivered the drawings to builder Gary Perkins.

After obtaining salvaged cypress board, 19th-century bricks and large beams from his friend Robert Addison, construction began in June with Richardson doing much of the work himself. The rest, he says, was performed by his friends and friends of his six children.

Richardson’s shoulder had been hounding him all year, and he had it replaced during the summer. Another surgery. Another recovery. Now at least he can lift his arm to touch some of the finer details of his home overhead, details like the wood from his father’s house refashioned as rustic-chic cabinet faces. “Much of the wood in this house is on its third use,” Richardson says, which is itself a more traditional form of green building.

By the first week of October the house was ready to be toured by roughly 50 homebuilders and contractors from across South Louisiana researching green standard techniques themselves. Richardson showed those tourists each detail of the house just as he shows 225. He points in giddy disbelief to his DEMCO meter moving backwards.

His solar roof is $70,000 worth of technology and construction, but he will get back $62,000 of that in state and federal refunds and tax credits on top of $20,000 back on his other efficiency-enhancing expenditures. But here’s the kicker. Richardson received a loan from an energy bank for 95% of the $70,000 outlay for the solar roof to buy the system up front. The loan is interest-free for a year. “That gives me time to get my refunds and tax credits and then funnel that back to the energy bank,” Richardson says. “It’s a no-brainer.”

The Richardsons said goodbye to their trailer home and moved into the house at the end of October. Mike, Nancy, Joy and Andrew are joined by Mike and Nancy’s youngest son, Judah. They’re getting settled in now, but once they are, Richardson does not expect life to slow down any. There will be more green builders to tour the home, grandkids to sleep over, and housewarming parties to celebrate with the friends and family who helped them through their year-long saga.

In the last 14 months, Richardson has learned almost all there is to know about building an energy-efficient home. But he realizes now he has learned even more about himself.

“I could write a whole book about that,” Richardson says. “Looking back on it now, I can see the progression and all the steps that fell into place. The amazing part of this whole thing is if I hadn’t had a broken foot, I’d been working seven days a week, 12 hours a day, and I never would’ve had time to research everything. I would’ve just built a regular, run-of-the-mill house.”