River Sol owners Scott and Lisa May are paying about 60 percent more to construct their Living Building Challenge home than they anticipated.
They’re caught in the turbulent wake of a pandemic that has constrained supply lines for building materials and wildly escalated prices nationwide for products like lumber; enticed more city-dwellers to move to Bend to work remotely, which has squeezed housing stock and caused home prices to soar; and put a premium on contractors’ time, meaning labor is increasingly in demand and expensive. It’s the perfect storm of costly circumstances out of their control, but the Mays are not deterred.
“We have more aspiration than ever,” Lisa said of building the LBC home, noting that while they can’t control COVID’s impacts, they can control their building and environmental impacts, and help pave the way for others pursuing LBC living.
Hoping to break ground on River Sol by June, they’re already looking at ways to leverage their LBC groundwork to build perhaps four additional units on a contiguous parcel they want to buy on River Sol’s east boundary. They rent a home on that parcel today.
They’re looking big picture, past the immediate financial hit. Consider that the Mays’ builder is constructing a similar-sized home in Bend using standard construction, not LBC, and the costs are only about 5 percent to 10 percent cheaper, Scott said.
“We believe it’s worth it to spend the 5 or 10 percent more to be in a home that is built the way it is, that is sustainable — we have essentially zero utility costs compared to a standard home,” he said.
Admittedly, their design costs, which include the time and expense of vetting all building materials to ensure they meet LBC criteria, are higher than for a standard home, but they have created an up-to-date playbook for other LBC projects to follow.
If somebody wanted to build an LBC home in Bend in the next year or two, he or she would save substantial time and money utilizing the work already done for River Sol, Scott said.
“The beauty is that once (a project) is vetted, it’s vetted,” he said of identifying allowable materials and systems. So much time has passed and so many materials have changed since the first LBC home was built in Bend — Desert Rain, completed in 2013 — that the Mays couldn’t piggyback off it as much as hoped.
The Mays, in fact, hope to ride the tailwind of their own work with the four additional LBC homes they’re considering, creating an LBC community of sorts on NW Linster Place. They envision buyers choosing between a stick-built home like theirs, or one made of reused shipping containers, which could prove significantly less expensive. They’ve challenged an architect to design an LBC home using containers.
Details are still fluid, but the Mays could potentially build an LBC spec house from shipping containers. Buyers then could compare such a home to the Mays’ River Sol home and decide which LBC version they prefer. Buyers would then finance an LBC home that takes full advantage of the Mays’ template.
The four homes could possibly have an accessory dwelling unit, as the Mays will have on a second level of their home. The homes also could offer Deschutes River and Cascade views because of the building and land height. Scott believes the combination is attractive: River and mountain views, walking distance to downtown, and LBC living.
Such an LBC development would have the effect the Mays envisioned when they planned River Sol: to lead the way for more such construction with minimal impact on the Earth. For that, 5 to 10 percent more is a small price to pay.