Lessons from SFU

This past week we submitted Drawings to the city for Building Permits and are awaiting their return.

We had very insightful conversations with Mahvash Kourosh and Dale Mikkelsen who were key in developing the Simon Fraser University Child Care Centre   These conversations provided some great leads for water system and material sourcing.  Some highlights:

– Water petal is once again looking much more promising after talking to the suppliers of the SFU system.  We look forward to reaching a decision about the water systems in the next few days

– Materials Petal is still being a bit elusive.  We are confident that meeting the red list requirement will be pretty straight forward (probably the optimist in us coming forth).  But the challenge for this project may lie in the FSC lumber requirement.  In Canada FSC lumber is not readily available.  Don’t miss understand, there is a lot of FSC cut blocks in BC but the lumber from those cut blocks is shipped directly to the US.  For us to procure FSC lumber we actually need to purchase the wood in “lifts” (that is a huge pile of lumber) and have it trucked back up to us from the Portland or Seattle.  Not a very good carbon foot print. We are working towards using the same strategy as SFU did with their lumber procurement by purchasing wood directly from mills that were processing “Pine beetle killed lumber that was destined to be clearcut anyway in order to stem the spread of the infestation.”

Met with our clients again today and we had some very lively discussion around the various petals of the Living Building Challenge.  They are both very excited to be part of the process.

Lastly, The Vancouver Foundation has graciously offered to extend the deadline for their assisted living grant funding to the end of January.  This will give us time to receive our Building Permits and get our material packages ordered.

Look forward to an exciting week.

 

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