I’ve been getting a little flack lately from certain quarters about how all this green building stuff seems too complicated. The insinuation is that I’d spend a whole lot less time and money by putting up a new studio with plain ol’ regular building techniques— “brown building,” as one of my beloved readers put it. Stick frame it, throw up some insulation and call it D-U-N. Maybe that’s true. I don’t think it’s true, but if it is, it’s only marginally so.

If I’m going to build something—even a little workshop—I want it to be the best I can feasibly manage to build. (I mean, hell, I spent $12,000 on a freakin’ heating system.) That’s just part of my perhaps too perfectionist personality: If I worry about stuff a lot up front, I won’t have to worry about it once it’s done. So that means a lot of research, a lot of questions – and a lot of time. Especially because I’m learning as I go along. As I’ve pointed out from the get-go, I’m not what anyone would call an expert at building. Believe me: It took me almost a year to tile our bathroom floor – and that was about 15 square feet of tiling. Call it procrastination, or maybe I’m particularly inept or particularly keen on examining every last detail and possibility, but getting things done —especially things involving what any carpenter would call basic knowledge—takes me more time than most, be it green building, brown building, or even something as relatively simple as installing a dishwasher. (That one took me four days, by the way.)

Here’s another submission in my defense: We’ve lived in our house for three years now. For most of that time we’ve known that the studio is a bit of a crapper. We saw the water damage, listened to the ants chew their way through the roof, felt the winter breezes sneaking in between the walls. For a long time, the plan was to repair it with traditional brown means: I was going to pack it full of petroleum-based rigid-foam insulation, slap on some unsunstainably harvested wood siding, coat it with some killer pesticides and call it D-U-N. And it still took me forever to get started. Indeed, it was over-cogitating through that scenario that led me to the idea of tearing down the studio and starting over.

Anyway, all of this is merely to say that it’s only as complicated as I make it. To wit: Me and the architect have been talking about ways to heat the studio, and last night we had a local big-cheese energy genius named Larry over to talk about our options. Passive solar. Active solar–fed radiant heat. Annualized geo-solar, in which we’d run solar-heated water through pipes deep under the studio that would heat the ground in summer and the ground would slowly release the heat in six-month cycles and…

LARRY: What kind of heating does the house have?
ME: Radiant.
LARRY: So why don’t you just run some radiant pipes from the house into the studio? If your new building’s gonna be super-tight and well-insulated and is gonna have some good southern exposure, you’ll probably turn it on for one week in January.
ME: Uh.

This is a guy to whom major, unnameable international corporations give lots of money to help them design more efficient whiz-hickeys and doo-bangs. When he talks energy and using that energy efficiently, he knows his greens from his browns. And his solution to my Great Studio Heating Conundrum was, basically, Dude, keep it simple.