Sometimes great ideas take years–or decades—to actualize. Roger Meager first came up with the idea of building a very low-energy home roughly 30 years ago. Life intervened. His children were born; he switched jobs; and he and his wife, Mary Thomson, changed cities several times, moving at last to Ottawa, Ontario. Finally, he and Thomson, who were empty nesters by now, got fed up with renting and started shopping for a house or apartment that they could settle in for the long haul. Their search turned into a full-on Goldilocks experience. Nothing seemed that desirable or worth the asking price. Ultimately, it was the undesirable house that led to their happy ending: a certified, infill Passive House that is just the right size.

“It was plainly obvious that this house wasn't good,” notes Meager, speaking of the property they eventually purchased. The house was falling apart in multiple ways and clearly would need a drastic overhaul, if only there was anything worth overhauling. And, the street it was on has strip-mall stretches, albeit in a different section. “Nobody wanted to buy it, because the address just put people off,” he explains. Meager didn’t want to knock the house down, because of the waste that would generate, but a building inspector concluded that the property was essentially a vacant lot in the making. “So, in the end, we said, well, we'll build. Let's build this Passive House.”

To minimize the waste associated with demolishing the existing building, he contacted Habitat for Humanity to come and strip the house. However, he bought the property in 2020, and because of Covid, Habitat had stopped providing that service. Instead, he posted notices that the house would be demolished and all the fittings could go. People came and took everything. “They took the windows, the toilets, the baths, the showers, the chimney, the fireplace, and even all of the newer electrical outlets went,” he recalls. Finally, a demolition company was hired who promised to separate the salvageable wood. 

However, the path to getting their fantastic home was not exactly smooth. While EkoBuilt delivered and contracted with a crew to assemble the materials package required for their airtight and weathertight shell, Meager assumed the role of project manager for the rest of the build. He had had some construction experience in his younger days, but still this task he had set for himself was not made easier when another builder that Meager hired to install the board and batten siding told him that several of the Munster Joinery windows, which had been included with the EkoBuilt package, had not been installed correctly. Asked why he didn’t reach out to EkoBuilt to address these issues, he says, “The problem was we had no faith.” When contacted, EkoBuilt was surprised to have not heard from Meager on this item, since they have had active communication with Meager on other items.

Meager ended up investing a lot more money and his own labor into getting the windows installed correctly, the house properly air sealed, and generally finishing the project. He gasketed, he taped, he foamed, and he oversaw the dense-packing of cellulose into the walls’ I-joists, along with thorny questions about where exactly the mechanical and plumbing runs would go. In the process he came to fully understand the sort of detail that is required to hit the Passive House performance targets, especially the airtightness number. “In these sorts of buildings—obviously in any building, in any construction—the devil's in the detail. And, it's the detail that you don't see, which is really important,” he notes.

Meager is enthusiastic about certification as a process that forces all concerned to stick to achieving the set goals. “Without Tad, I would have probably lost faith, but he was evangelical for me,” he explains, “and that was very good.”