First Home Certified to National Green Building Standard Featured on ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition

March 24, 2009 - (RealEstateRama) — The Bell family house, which was featured on ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition last night, was the first home in the country certified by the NAHB Research Center to the ICC-700-2008 National Green Building Standard™.

John Wesley Miller, a long-time Tucson-based green builder who built the new dream home for the Bell family, said “it became a religious experience” for the team who worked tirelessly to get the home ready for the televised reveal. Understanding that the Bell family, especially their 14-year-old daughter Lizzie whose immune system is significantly compromised by a rare blood disease, needed a peaceful, safe, and healthy environment to call home, the design and construction team knew they wanted this house to be “green” in every sense of the word. To that end, the EM:HE producers and Miller were determined to have it certified to the National Green Building Standard, a consensus-based ANSI standard that is the most credible definition of green for the home building industry.

The project’s architect, Henry (Hank) Krzysik, is an accredited verifier for the NAHB Research Center’s National Green Building Certification and verified this home. While going through the scrutiny of two verification inspections – once during construction and once when the home was complete – to ensure that every point claimed was visually inspected by the verifier, added another layer to the already challenging non-stop construction schedule, participants said they wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Since February 2008, the NAHB Research Center has been administering National Green Building Certification using the NAHB Model Green Home Building Guidelines as its scoring platform; the option to have a project scored to the National Green Building Standard became available when the Standard was approved by ANSI in January 2009. For more information on National Green Building Certification and the National Green Building Standard, visit the NAHBGreen website.

ABOUT THE NAHB RESEARCH CENTER: Located in Upper Marlboro, Md., the NAHB Research Center promotes innovation in housing technology to improve the quality, durability, affordability, and environmental performance of homes and home building products. Created over 40 years ago as a subsidiary of the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), the NAHB Research Center has established itself as the source for reliable, objective information and research on housing construction and development issues. Through its various testing and certification services, the Research Center seal is internationally-recognized as a mark of product quality and an assurance of product performance.

Tagged as: green building, NAHB

 

 

 

USGBC - U.S. Green Building Council

HUD - U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development

NAR - National Association of REALTOR

RealtyTrac

FHFA - Federal Housing Finance Agency

Freddie Mac

MBA - Mortgage Bankers Association