30 - Lorrie Rand - Habit Studio
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James: ​Hello and welcome to Marketing Passive House, the podcast where we hear from architects, designers, builders, suppliers, owners, and other experts in the passive house and high performance building space. We will be talking about what's working and what's needed when it comes to marketing buildings that meet or aspire to the passive house standard.

James: I'm your host, James Turner, and today I'm joined by

James: Lorrie Rand, sustainability specialist at Habit Studio, senior Advisor at the Recover Initiative Board member at Retrofit Canada, and instructor at Passive House Canada. Lorrie, welcome to the show.

Lorrie: It's really nice to be here.

James: So before we get into it, and for people who are just meeting you for the first time, could you share a little bit more about who you are, what you do, and how you started on your passive house journey?

Lorrie: Yeah, of course. So I am based in Nova Scotia. I grew up in the Annapolis Valley, and I've been based in Halifax for we moved back to Halifax in 20, in 2000. So I've been here 26 years.

James: Wow.

Lorrie: and I attended the at the time Technical University of Nova Scotia Architecture School. Which is now absorbed by Dalhousie University, and I studied architecture there.

Lorrie: And before that I did two years of a physics degree. And just because of that kind of intersection I was sort of naturally always a bit of a building science expert. Even, before I was a building science expert, I understood the links there intuitively. And about. Maybe 10 years after graduation found myself a solopreneur designing houses in Halifax and and so was my current business partner Judy Obersi. And so she and I realized that maybe we could help each other out and started collaborating. And after a very long organic growth. We were like, this is a company.

Lorrie: And so we launched Habit Studio as a as a kind of at that point, just a two person company. But then we, we gradually grew over the years and around the time that we were starting Habit Studio somebody had somebody I knew had come to me and said, Hey, could you I'd like you to design a house and I want it to be a passive house. And I said, sure. Even though I had absolutely no idea what that meant. I think I must have, it's a long time ago now. It was probably 2013 ish. And so I, I. heard of it, but I hadn't actually researched it, and I took that opportunity to get myself trained. I was really lucky because passive house Canada offered the training in Halifax

James: Nice.

Lorrie: around the time.

Lorrie: It like. Probably within a couple of months I learned that they were coming to town and there's only been two trainings offered in Halifax, so I was quite lucky to there, there was a synchronicity there for sure.

Lorrie: And yeah, and then I was basically hooked because, you know, the physics never left me.

Lorrie: It's sort of a, you know, it made immediate sense to me to a building with science. You can still have all of the beauty and functionality and all of the other things that make buildings wonderful, but to have an energy model that says, here's exactly what's going on. with all of, the other kind of design tools that we use was felt really empowering for me.

James: I like that.

Lorrie: Yeah. Yeah.

James: That's cool that. It was the, you were drawn into passive house by a client, not the other way around of trying to,

Lorrie: and they were one of these people who was like, I've heard this is the best house you can have, so that's what we want. And it was not

Lorrie: All like an extravagant house. It was a fairly modest house, but they were just we're investing and this is our forever house. yeah, so that was my introduction to passive house. Although that project, we, I designed their house and then there was like about a five year gap before they actually built it. So it wasn't actually the first house I that I designed, that got built.

James: Interesting.

Lorrie: so by the time, and I was like totally afraid that they weren't ever gonna come back, but like a few years later they were like, no, we're ready now.

Lorrie: And so it really did happen, which was wonderful.

James: Great. So that's interesting. Did, and did you design and build a, another passive house before that? Another passive house before that one?

Lorrie: In the interim there was a builder in PEI who learned about me, and I don't, I honestly am not sure how they learned about me. It was a company called Trout River Homes, and were interested in having, doing a partnership or a collaboration and the way that they worked, they had a client. The client had a sort of loose idea of what they wanted, and basically they were leaving it to the builder to like finalize the design with a designer. So I never met with the people who live in that house. Now I just met with the builder and we made it work. But the really great thing about that as the first project that I designed that got built you know, I was quite getting quite comfortable with energy modeling and I had designed lots of houses. That weren't passive by that point,

Lorrie: but having a builder who knew their go-to assemblies, they knew the, where they were gonna get the products. And so a lot of the decisions where you might be questioning where, what am I gonna choose or where am I gonna spec this thing?

Lorrie: Were already in play and I just had

Lorrie: to implement his that company's. Kinda, go to moves. And so that felt, so then I, and then, the design happened in two or three months and then it got built that summer. Like it all happened really quickly.

Lorrie: And a lot of projects that certainly like the first one

Lorrie: that took seven years or something. Yeah. It was deeply satisfying to be a little bit taken under this this builder's wing they had built. Six or seven passive houses before this. So they were very confident in that, you know, that they knew they were going to achieve the air tightness and that the windows that they were using at the time were appropriate for PEI and PEI is, challenging supply chain wise because everything has to cross that bridge or come on a boat.

Lorrie: And there's not a lot of local. Locally fabricated or source materials. And they had all of those kinks worked out and I learned a lot about, what I did want to use once I had, free reign on my other projects afterwards.

James: That's great. Yeah, that was one thing I definitely wanted to talk about today was marketing passive house in our part of the world, Atlantic Canada, where there aren't that many still, relatively speaking passive houses built. It's I've certainly not found myself in many conversations in Fredericton where people know what the heck I'm talking about.

Lorrie: Or if they've heard of it, they think it's a spaceship still. There's not a lot of it would be great. Yes, I would love someday to be able to, every year there's the annual kind of passive house days. It'd be really great to be able to organize a tour

James: An open house.

Lorrie: People having to drive like four hours between sites. Like it's not super viable. But,

Lorrie: There, there are quite a few in the Halifax area. They're not, right on, right downtown or anything that might be doable. If people

Lorrie: were amenable to it, but there's not, there, the majority of our projects are actually rural. A

Lorrie: lot of people with the motivation to do passive house are coming at it at least coming to us from the resiliency perspective. So if they're in a rural location,

Lorrie: they know their power could be. Not a priority,

James: Yeah. Yeah.

Lorrie: And having the peace of mind, of knowing that they're gonna be comfortable, even if they don't have electricity for a week, is is one of the, one of the top reasons people are interested in it.

Lorrie: And interestingly when we were first doing passive house. I the words passive house were came out of my mouth and, in the majority of our interactions with clients, but

Lorrie: now clients come to us know that's what we do. And you know, it's not a weird thing, but definitely was in those early days.

Lorrie: But I would say yes, the energy savings and obviously the like health and comfort. The other thing, like we have, had a fair number of doctors who have been our clients who want a passive house because they want their children to have the best quality air.

James: Interesting

Lorrie: Yeah.

James: people who know

Lorrie: like the

James: I

Lorrie: of promise of the cheapest, operating, operating cost necessarily.

James: right.

Lorrie: That, that bring everybody to us, for sure.

James: And so as far as then your marketing of passive house, are you based, is it basically inbound? Do you just on your site, you talk about it and people find you by searching passive house, Nova Scotia, something like that.

Lorrie: Like in the early days there was definitely quite a lot of word of mouth and, but interestingly like our first few projects were slow to come in, which makes a lot of sense.

Lorrie: But even the, by the third, the, our third passive house client found us on the internet. And they were a somebody moving to Nova Scotia from Ontario and found us. And they knew the words passive house. I didn't have to tell them what a passive house was. So even as early as that was probably around 2017. So I would say most are inbound. Like we're not actively advertising. Although, and you know, I will say our team was flat out during all through the pandemic. There was

Lorrie: like the little blip at the beginning of. You know, kind of summer of 2020 where everybody was like, huh, I wonder what's gonna happen now. And then a lot of people got to put their feet up and clean their pantries and stuff.

James: Yes.

Lorrie: Our team was like the, partly I think driven by. Everybody was on social media and so we did have a kind of Instagram and, of a social media presence and our website. And then we got a few people, there was also an eastern you know, people moving east from we had clients from Calgary clients from Toronto who are like, Hey, Atlantic Canadian property.

Lorrie: Those people, most of the people that we worked with like that. People with family ties here. They weren't like random strangers coming to buy a property here, but they were like this, it was part of their life plan and they took that opportunity.

James: Right. I.

Lorrie: and yeah, so it's really only things have calmed down maybe in the last year and I think the sort of geopolitical situation for that.

Lorrie: Yeah. Yeah. So we're having, say, a little bit of a slow time relatively, but it's probably, it's a, nobody's sad about it at the moment because it's been,

James: This is

Lorrie: there's been a bit of burnout.

James: your chance to kick up your heels and clean out your pantries. Yeah.

Lorrie: Maybe.

James: Maybe. Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. What, before we move completely past it, I was curious to know if, when you went back to that first project that you designed after having built, 'cause I've heard multiple people say that passive house isn't difficult, it's just a learning curve.

James: It's like you learn it and then you're like, oh, okay. Now I know. So when you came, when you revisited that project, did

Lorrie: it a little bit

James: Yeah.

Lorrie: but I think that, we changed it for two reasons. One, because the owners had time to sit with it and lots of times, just

Lorrie: percolating on a design, or I don't know. Yeah. Certainly enough. Multiple years had passed, so they had evolved in their thinking. There was also, so this was again, a kind of a rural project. They had, they maybe had their choice of a. A few contractors, but really the contractor they had access to also had opinions. So there were some

Lorrie: changes just also related to that. Not bad ones in the end,

James: Right.

Lorrie: that they went with, we ended up working with fairly regularly and even adopted some of their details as go-to details

James: nice.

Lorrie: they were quite, they're quite thoughtful and, put quite a bit of thought into making it as economical, you know, the kind of wall assemblies and things as economical as possible.

James: Nice. Did you, do you find that people generally go to builders before designers? Do,

Lorrie: We advise them to, some people go to builders and don't even know they need a designer, and it's the, you know, I mean, some builders do have the capacity to develop plans, but you know, that's not always the case. Often people think that they're gonna come to us and work with us for, a few months and then go out to builders.

Lorrie: But because of the state of the industry, soon as somebody, like sometimes before they even hire us, we're like, so have you thought about builders? Have you been talking because it could take the entire time that we're working on the design to identify aligned builders in the right. Location

James: Right.

Lorrie: Do that. And if it's a, if you meet a builder who's not busy, there's something wrong with that builder right now. So

James: yeah. Yeah.

Lorrie: if they've got immediate capacity, it's a red flag. And there's, I feel like the construction industry has also slowed down a little bit, like ours has, but it's not, there's no slow down out there.

Lorrie: In, there's no slowness. It's just like a little bit, we're moderate pace. There, there's a lot of work to be done.

James: Speaking of a lot of work to be done and thinking about the sort of push right now, or, well, I haven't seen it, but I've heard about the push to build a lot of homes that seems to be like a mandate federally, like nationally.

Lorrie: Yes. And.

James: has Nova Scotia have you been involved with legislative stuff at all?

James: Is there.

Lorrie: Not related to that. And yeah and there are some of those sort of like there's a couple of big projects funded in Nova Scotia around like the housing challenge. But we haven't been involved in those and I think we haven't been involved in those because it's both projects. And I could be completely wrong on this, but my understanding is that there are code minimum and you know, build as fast as you can and so we really don't like.

Lorrie: We do the odd sort of we don't only do passive house in that if a project is targeting passive house and needs to back off because you know, the budget is really too much or, occasionally we'll have a project that doesn't quite hit the targets because it's the first time the builder has done a passive house.

Lorrie: And so there's a learning curve.

Lorrie: But really where. I told you about our PEI project. It was, we, there was an economic study done by the City of Charlottetown on that project and it cost 18 or 19% more than if it had been built to code. And

James: interesting.

Lorrie: like nobody's ever gonna hire us again. was my kinda takeaway from that. That was pretty extreme. Even acknowledging like the code minimum pricing was completely hypothetical. Like a best guess at what a code minimum would it cost for the same building. Our, the next project that we did that got built was built for the exact cost per square foot, is everything else that we were working on that year.

Lorrie: New build code, minimum new build. And, and renovations, like they were all right around at the time it was around like between three and 300 do 300 and $350 a square foot in my head that I might be a little off on that. but so we were like, okay, this is our second project and we did it for the same cost per square foot as every other project we did this year.

Lorrie: How can we go around saying let's do code minimum buildings?

Lorrie: We set that challenge for ourselves. To hold ourselves to only work on passive house for new construction. We, we do a lot of renovations. And, you know, you can't say we, we knew that we couldn't hold a renovation to that same standard.

Lorrie: Yeah. And

Lorrie: So,

Lorrie: we at that point thought this could be like business suicide. And it was very early in our business. But it really did, like we just started saying the words people found us. It's there was no marketing wizardry there. I wish I could tell

Lorrie: you that we're like super geniuses, but really it was just like making the decision and. Telling people,

James: Right.

Lorrie: seems pretty simple. Yeah,

James: Do you have any recollections of times where you did, where, when it was you that introduced the concept to a client and what landed with them to the point where they were like, yeah, let's do that. I always think about that.

Lorrie: Yeah. I think there definitely were clients that that, that. Listen to us and we're like, yeah, okay, let's this is what we're gonna do. And it really like I think spending money on a house, it's like almost always the most expensive thing somebody's going to do

Lorrie: in their life. Some people do it only once.

Lorrie: Some people do it many times. Some people never build a house, you know? We always like. Do get to know people and and understand their motivations for making that choice. And, build some trust to be like we are on your side. Like we, our goal is to give you the highest quality home you can have.

Lorrie: Here's why passive house is that. And,

Lorrie: If we've done a good job in listening to them, we can there's a lot of different ways you can tell that story. Like depending on the things that are important to them, but certainly absolutely comfort. Like I, and I can think of a few actually people more at the retirement end of their, stage of their

James: Right.

Lorrie: end of their life, but stage of their life where maybe they are, they're willing to listen to an expert and they understand. And also like your comfort and your health and making your life easy by making your environment easy and like easy meaning lower maintenance like the like.

Lorrie: That there's less maintenance with a passive house is something that when we explain it, people are like, oh, that totally makes sense, but nobody expects it. If

Lorrie: anything, people expect it might be more

James: fussy or, yeah.

Lorrie: exactly. So like those, I feel like I, I think I can think of off the top of my head, like three, retirement homes that we were like, we think that should be passive and here's why. And they were like, okay.

James: Oh, nice. Like multi-unit

Lorrie: you know, yeah.

James: Do you mean retirement homes or homes that retired people built? Yeah. Okay. Okay.

Lorrie: I wish. Yeah, no, if I could get the, long-term care on board, that'd be amazing.

James: Oh, and they would benefit so much and it would, it feels like a, it would be a good, so what are some of the things that make passive house lower maintenance?

Lorrie: Yeah. So when we design the passive house, we prioritize the passive elements. And so we're investing more money and more of our kind of detailing and effort in the building enclosures which are static. Like they don't move. Our windows move a little bit — they open and close, but they don't move much. And and the detailing of the building envelope is incredibly robust compared to a code minimum or a kind of typical construction. And so if you think about, particularly in Atlantic Canada, incredibly quick cycles of different kinds of weather and our high winds and just a lot of different conditions that you're building is encountering this robust, more robust building envelope, both from a sort of water shedding and primarily from the air tightness and the, a attention to detailing of the, the intersections of the building component. So all of that

Lorrie: makes makes the, your maintenance. Through the year, like in my neighborhood, every time there's a windstorm, my lake lawn is full of people's like roof shingles. That's the kind of thing that I'm like, you just have less of that to deal with when you have a passive

Lorrie: house. The other thing that you know, that and the big thing that makes, over the life of the building and pretty significant savings is that by investing in insulation and air tightness, we can dramatically reduce the size of the mechanical system in the building. And the mechanical system is the thing that needs the most service calls. And and in. If you talk to an HVAC contractor, they say that 90% of their service calls are emergency service calls. Somebody's got no heat.

Lorrie: You know, your equipment kind of servicing is an annual basis, less and over time. Also just any upgrades or replacement of parts of that, those systems is also. Less expensive because if it's say your building uses 80% less energy than this, if it was built as a code minimum building, then that means your heating system might not be 80% smaller, but it's probably, at least 60% smaller. And so it's just a sort of less stuff for you to worry about, less

Lorrie: things for you to call somebody about.

James: Nice.

Lorrie: Yeah.

James: Retrofits. That was when we first connected, we talked about how specifically Canada and specifically Atlantic Canada has a bajillion retrofits needed, right? Like we've got lots of old buildings and not enough money for everyone to build themselves new houses.

Lorrie: Yeah, so one thing that a lot of people d don't realize is that Canada, if Canada's going to meet the climate goals, we need to retrofit almost every building that we have that actually. Potentially includes some buildings that are being built right now just because the code minimum buildings being built today are not they're not net zero energy ready. And so they will need a retrofit if they're going to say by 2050 be a net zero building or net zero ready, depending. And. There's old buildings everywhere across the whole country, but we have a very high kind of percentage of our buildings in this region are are quite old. So I could say that more articulately. But, buildings that are, predate kind of the 19 90, late 1990s in our region, use roughly twice as much energy as buildings built like since then. In the two thousands

James: Wow.

Lorrie: And it's something in the neighborhood of about 70% of the buildings.

Lorrie: It might vary a little province to province. And we also have, and this is partly why we have a lot of energy poverty, like we have an

James: Yeah.

Lorrie: is essentially when people spend a disproportionate amount of their income on keeping their home warm. It also relates to transportation.

Lorrie: But and with the retrofit context, we're thinking about keeping buildings heated. You know, we have a, the kind of the highest incidences of that in the country. It's approaching 30% of people spend too much of their income to. Warm. And those same buildings typically also have a lot of building science hazards like mold or moisture, excess contaminants inside in the indoor air.

Lorrie: And yeah, it's just a sort of a whole bad recipe. So we know that we need to retrofit our buildings at habit we we've spent. A long time the space where every year we would do probably 50% of our projects would be passive house new builds and 50% would be a renovation of some kind.

Lorrie: And at a certain point we were like, you know, doing we're not gonna do like a kitchen renovation or something like that. We really wanna

Lorrie: have impact on people's health and wellness and energy use and the whole package. And so we started saying, we really only wanna do your a retrofit. Or renovation if it's a whole building.

Lorrie: From there, you know, we've just, we started trying to uplevel, so we did several like renovations that would be, that, that ended up being net zero, like with the addition of solar panels. But,

Lorrie: We never, even though it was on our bucket list, we never got to do a passive house retrofit.

James: And right an EnerPHit .

Lorrie: and so EnerPHit project, that's what that's called. And we in 2021 we bought a building and we did a, an EnerPHit principles. None of our projects are certified so far. We always, we. Regularly start certification with somebody with a client, and then they abandon it because it's expensive and they start to trust us and realize that we know what we're talking about.

Lorrie: And they're like, well, this money could be spent on something else. I really wanna go through the. To the end of that process, but we haven't managed to do it yet. And we didn't even do it on our own project because we actually bought this building. It was an 1850s house in Halifax. And I immediately, the first thing we did, I don't even think we owned it out yet, and I had an EnerGuide audit done, and it had, 24 air changes per hour.

Lorrie: It was like pretty pretty poor performance. And I was like, I don't know the, and. other thing, there were, they had a few marks against it, but we loved it. Frankly, we loved it because there's this like massive 300 year old maple tree in the backyard. Like literally we're like, but the tree, but it had a party wall and it had two exterior walls that were like right on the lot lines, like a very constrained site. And so I was like, we're gonna get it as far as we can. We'll go, we'll retrofit it to EnerPHit principles and we'll do, we'll probably get close, but I wasn't that confident.

James: Right.

Lorrie: in the end we actually in the model, it actually met EnerPHit, which you know, if we, you know, and people are like, well, you could red, you could do it retroactively, except we didn't take photos of sometimes the contractor put in the concrete under the slab or on top of the under slab insulation before we like.

Lorrie: Proved it, things like that.

Lorrie: Final. I'm not digging up

James: You don't wanna jackhammer it out for the

Lorrie: Yeah. So that said, on paper we've hit all of our targets, but we haven't hit our air tightness target yet. We're still working on that, but we've got it down to below three.

James: nice.

Lorrie: we still. There's a couple of, there's two big reasons for that.

Lorrie: One of them's in the basement and the other one is because during construction somebody tried to break in through our passive house door. They didn't break in through that door, but it has, there's a little

Lorrie: gap at the bottom, and so we're actually. We've been trying to correct that. So we've just made the decision that we have to replace the door slab because it's never gonna close properly.

Lorrie: So the robbers never got in, but they still cost me on my blower door test.

James: Brutal, but good. That's another bonus for Passive House, right? A different kind of resilience

James: stronger

James: Materials.

Lorrie: It is true actually. So the company, that company we sourced our doors from is called Veta, windows and Doors.

Lorrie: We, their windows and their doors and on their social media, they actually I don't know, maybe six months or a year ago, posted an actual like security camera footage of some somebody trying to break into one of their client's homes.

Lorrie: And this per, there was like, there were. Men with I don't remember, it was like a hammer or like a baseball bat or something, trying to smash down through the glass in their door and couldn't get in. so they're, they are, okay. I feel reasonably safe.

James: It's a, it's an angle. It works.

Lorrie: that's a little side story.

Lorrie: Like the security of triple glaze glass is pretty impressive.

Lorrie: Yeah. But because we bought this building, we're not millionaires, we're architects. Architects do not make as much money as people think architects make.

Lorrie: I'm just gonna go on the record and say that. but, and so we were like, this is our opportunity.

Lorrie: We're not, I don't think we're ever gonna do this again. Develop our own building with our own money.

Lorrie: So we documented the process. We, and we. Used it a marketing, but also as an advocacy effort. And so during construction we had, I've lost track at least 24 building tours, which,

James: Oh, nice.

Lorrie: Drove our contractors crazy. Like they would have to clean up and make it safe and everybody get out. And then there would be like three days because they would go do something on another site and we'd be like, are you coming back? So it caused a few delays, but we, we educated a lot of people.

Lorrie: We answered a million questions and we really shared the process people. You know, people came in and saw it with their own eyes and we continued it after construction like many people have. Been able to come in and experience what the environment is and it's, it's comfortable.

Lorrie: It,

Lorrie: Air is fresh, like it's a lovely space. The amazing benefit to our team is that instead of like our team worked in back to back, like stinky, dusty, rodent filled warehouse, cool looking

Lorrie: studios that were like very uncomfortable and unhealthy for, a decade. And now, and while working on, healthy, fancy, pretty beautiful. Like we would

James: The irony.

Lorrie: would be working in their coats and be like working on like the most energy efficient, project in the city. so yeah, so our team actually gets to benefit now from,

James: nice.

Lorrie: This investment. And then the other big thing that we did is we had it, we made a small YouTube series documenting it.

James: Yes, and I'll link to that.

Lorrie: yeah. And you know, it's just short. There's five I think they're only like three minute long. Little stories about, about the process, about designing it and also about the the suppliers that we worked with. I think there is. Definitely an assumption in the world that you can't get the, you can't easily get products that you need and that you need all kinds of fancy things. We did put some sort of, specialized membranes and things like that in the building, but also you can also make a passive house out of materials that you get at, the small Kent in, rural. Villages.

James: Right.

Lorrie: You know, we just really wanted to share like the nuts and bolts of what we did and to show people that, it's not the hardest thing in the world, which I do find people like me love to tell those stories. Oh my God, the design was impossible. And then, you know, like here are the 87 like war stories about the construction process. And I'm like, that is not what we need. We need to share the successes.

James: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. The great and a great mix of the storytelling, the, behind the scenes and also having all those people come through what. That seems to be the sort of two levers that are the easiest the most effective I think, like experiencing, oh, this really does feel different.

James: And also just like hearing the whole process and taking the scariness out of if you were thinking in your head that it was out of reach. Did you have any people that came on the tour who became clients or are sort of like in

Lorrie: oh,

James: process now? Do you know?

Lorrie: There definitely were some prospective clients. I think the ones that I'm thinking of it's all a blur frankly, but there's

James: Fair.

Lorrie: there was a young couple that working with some friends to develop like a kind of co-housing situation, and I

Lorrie: think that the land they were looking at, they. They were, they went they were hot on it and then they went cold on it. So I don't know if they've even done anything. A good question. I don't know for sure if any have turned into clients possibly.

James: Yet Seeds planted anyway.

Lorrie: is, architecture students wanna come work for us, but we're a small firm, so we can't like, hire everybody who

Lorrie: wants to come work for us, unfortunately.

Lorrie: I would love to and. Yeah.

James: Nice.

Lorrie: and yeah, and one of the tours was, a group of Halifax heritage planners. And so we

Lorrie: The opportunity to be like, you know, here are some of the ways where this project was a little bit trickier from a heritage perspective. And,

Lorrie: Were very sympathetic.

Lorrie: And you know, and that's something that I care quite a lot about is like that intersection of. There's a really important discourse between heritage and and retrofits or

James: Absolutely. Yeah.

Lorrie: like the performance. These buildings are vulnerable because, they're, lots of them haven't been touched in decades and, or, like in the case of our building, it had never been insulated and it had. Single glazed windows still.

James: Wow.

Lorrie: So it was very close to original condition in many, like probably 90% of the building.

James: Was it protected in any way?

Lorrie: It is not, it wasn't protected. But it's in a heritage like con conservation district,

James: Gotcha.

Lorrie: As a, at the neighborhood level.

Lorrie: And we, I mean, we were our approach is often like. We wanna be sensitive anyway. Like would typically be sensitive of that anyway. If it's like it's 170 year old building, like would think about, the alterations

Lorrie: more carefully than I would to, if it was like a 1950s building for sure.

Lorrie: Yeah. Yeah.

James: Awesome. I, we did, oh wait. I really wanted to just cover briefly the RECOVER Initiative,

Lorrie: so

James: and.

Lorrie: and I was like, it started off to say something about that and I like led myself astray. So, You know, we need so many retrofits in this region and they're just not happening. They're, they're the odd one, but they're definitely one-off projects.

Lorrie: And in 2020 like early in the pandemic. Pre pandemic, a couple of colleagues and I convinced the province of Nova Scotia to give us some money to do a little research study on can we can we speed up retrofits through a prefabricated panelization approach. We did that study. And we held a webinar in June of 20 June or July maybe, of 2020 when the entire country was in lockdown.

Lorrie: And so like over something like 150 people like signed up for our webinar and we were like, what the heck? And so we were instant retrofit experts and this led to us having a thousand conversations with people all over the country who wanted to also talk about retrofits. and that just spiraled.

Lorrie: So it led to a project working on a similar study for Toronto Community Housing, and then a study an EnerCan funded study that looked at six municipal buildings across the country. We went to Saskatoon to advise them on how to retrofit

James: Nice.

Lorrie: And a couple places in Ontario, you know, and then three here in Nova Scotia. Yeah. And so from that we turned, we evolved into is called Atlanta Canada's Deep Retrofit Accelerator. So it we gave us ourselves a name where the RECOVER initiative and and registered as a nonprofit. And so now we have. We've received in 2023 or 2024, it's all blur 17 and a half million dollars through the Deep Retrofit Accelerator Initiative,

James: Nice.

Lorrie: From Enercan and through the Greener neighborhoods pilot program, also through Enercan. And so essentially they funded us to, for some specific research, some specific projects. And and to spool up as an organization that is dedicated to working with property owners in Atlantic Canada to work on the barriers, which there are an awful lot of.

Lorrie: So I, you know, that was a big pivot that I did not see coming.

Lorrie: Like I, you know, I sort of organically started my first company and and then suddenly did the same thing with a second organization. And and so I spend my time 50 50 between the two organizations Now.

James: Nice. Very nice. This has been great. I'm conscious of time. Before we go, where can people find out more about you online?

Lorrie: Yeah you can go to Habit Studio's website. It's www.habitstudio.ca. Habit Studio's also on Instagram and Facebook, like the Usual Suspects.

Lorrie: Our brand new YouTube channel

James: Yes.

Lorrie: Out there. It's funny, we've just got the five videos right now that we have plans

James: I'll say they're great too.

Lorrie: Thank

James: enjoyed them all.

Lorrie: so glad you saw them. So yeah, that's how you can find us at Habit Studio and RECOVER. You can, if you are a property owner in Atlantic Canada and interested in a deep retrofit, maybe RECOVER can help you. So you can go to www dot recover initiative.ca.

James: Awesome.

Lorrie: on Instagram and LinkedIn and the usual suspects so

James: Great.

Lorrie: know, can find us on social media. Thank you so much.

James: Thank you. You've been listening to Marketing Passive House. I'm James Turner and I hope you'll join me again next time.