BusinessReport.com

Chris Patin was faced with a dilemma: Bamboo wallpaper is too stiff to bend into corners.

He found the solution in the backyard of the house he was busy “green” renovating: garden cane. Patin cut a few stalks, ripped them on a table saw at 90-degree angles and used them for corner molding.

Problem solved.

It was such ingenuity that proved indispensable as Patin entered the unfamiliar, challenging world of green renovation, which may be old hat in places like Northern California but is a long way from catching on to any degree in most of the South.

That makes Patin, owner of Christopher M. Patin Construction, and homeowner Amy Strother Gatz green pioneers. Another curveball involved PaperStone, an eco-friendly product made from recycled paper that Strother Gatz chose as a replacement her old countertops.

“‘It’s paper,’ I’m just thinking to myself,” Patin says. “How hard can it be? When I got that stuff in, I put a router in it and the router just jumped right back out. This stuff is harder than granite.”

Patin called the Washington-based company, which told him what he needed to know: Cutting PaperStone required a diamond-tipped jigsaw blade. The customer service, by the way, was excellent, Patin says. The same was true of the other vendors he dealt with—not always the case with mainstream suppliers and manufacturers.

“They really want to help the contractor,” Patin says. “You got immediate service and people who really believed in the product.”

There was a lot that kind of thing: making phone calls, asking questions, feeling his way through it. The whole project, which involved gutting the interior of Strother Gatz’s mid-1950s ranch-style house near Webb Park Golf Course, took three months longer than it was supposed to—largely because of the steep learning curve.

“But at the end of the day, we ended up with a really unique house,” Patin says.

Strother Gatz, CEO/owner of United Health Care Group, built a house in Hammond several years ago that incorporated some eco-friendly materials. This time she wanted to go all out and didn’t mind paying for it.

Many eco-products, since they’re not mainstream, are pricier than conventional materials. PaperStone, for instance, is about the same as high-end granite: between $70 and $90 a square foot, Patin says.

Other products are more in line with conventional materials. Prices will likely come down as eco-products become more widely available. Strother Gatz says the cost of materials wasn’t bad, though she’s vague about the exact price tag—somewhere in the neighborhood of $300,000 for her 4,000-square-foot house.

“In terms of the renovation I did, it was extreme,” she says.

Besides things like recycled lumber, VOC-free paint and bamboo floors throughout, the renovation features common-sense items like Energy Star appliances, tankless flash-heat water heaters, light fixtures that accommodate energy-saving compact fluorescent bulbs and insulated doors and windows.

“Insulated doors and windows make a tremendous difference,” she says. “It can cut your utility bills in half.”

Strother Gatz, who takes environmentalism seriously and loves contemporary architecture, says she hopes others become as smitten by green building as she did.

“I’m hoping that people in Louisiana realize it’s not too soon, that it’s time to be green and sustainable,” she says. “Certainly it’s time for green business.”

LSU architecture professor Michael Desmond thinks green renovation will catch on eventually in places like Baton Rouge as energy costs continue to rise and people are forced to adopt new ways of construction. Buildings constructed through conventional means are big energy wasters, Desmond says.

Unfortunately, green building hasn’t been part of the education of architects—or contractors and developers for that matter, he says. However, LSU’s architecture department in the past few years has begun teaching “sustainable practices” more aggressively and lately is expanding that focus.

“In terms of business, most people think this stuff is expensive,” Desmond says. “I think we can develop ways to make it cost effective right from the start.”

A lot of green practices are just common sense things that can make a big different in your light bill: seal the gaps, insulate to the hilt, switch out your light bulbs. Desmond says architects in the South in fact once built greener houses by virtue of the punishing heat: high ceilings for circulation; wood siding instead of masonry, which holds heat; low eaves to block solar radiation; and lots of windows for cooling. All that changed with the advent of air conditioning in the 1950s, he says.

Now that he’s climbed the learning curve to become Baton Rouge’s green renovation authority, Patin is ready for more of it. Next time he’ll know how to deal with PaperStone, and he won’t have to go through four different sub-contractors to find one who can lay recycled glass shower tiles.

The experience is a feather in his cap, and Patin intends to advertise it.

“I’ve got two kids in Catholic school,” he says. “I need it to catch on.”