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The homes of the future, almost everyone now agrees, have to be greener -- use less energy and consist of materials that don't pollute and don't need to travel far -- to do their bit in cutting the greenhouse-gas emissions (GHG) that are warming the planet.

But what about the homes of the past?

"The biggest environmental challenge [is] improving homes that are already built," says Lorraine Gauthier, who leads a tiny yet ambitious project in East York to show how some of Canada's most humble and ubiquitous houses can be retrofitted to cut their GHG emissions by two-thirds.

The National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy estimates that 66 per cent of the residential buildings that will be standing in Canada in 2050 have already been built. And Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. reported in 2003 that homes accounted for 17 per cent of Canada's total energy use and 16 per cent of its GHG emissions.

"So there's a pressing need for these retrofits if we ever hope to have a sustainable future," Ms. Gauthier says.

She answered a call by CMHC last year for contestants to build a "Net Zero Energy Healthy House."

The agency's criteria for such a house were: It must produce as much energy as it consumes, have no harmful health effects, use local resources and be affordable.

The contest was aimed at developers of new homes, but Ms. Gauthier, who heads a green-design consulting firm called Work Worth Doing, decided to "take a flier" and submit a retrofit plan instead. The federal housing agency could hardly say no -- she was proposing to retrofit one of the 30,000 Victory homes CMHC built at its inception for veterans of the Second World War. Orderly clusters of these 1½-storey prefabricated homes dot every major city in Canada, and the homes and streetscapes were used as templates for subsequent subdivisions.

The retrofit project, which Work Worth Doing has designated the "Now House," had already made it through two rounds of the contest and, on Wednesday, was among 12 homes across Canada chosen to receive $50,000 from CMHC to offset construction costs.

The residence -- at 12 Topham Rd. in the Topham Park area of East York -- is one of the original Victory homes. Built in 1946, probably from prefabricated panels delivered by truck, it's set on an almost circular cul-de-sac with a central field that serves as a play area for children from the dozen homes on the street, which is linked to similar cul-de-sacs by long boulevards.

Topham Park is named in honour of East York Second World War hero Fred Topham, who was awarded the Victoria Cross for saving fellow soldiers under attack even after taking a bullet in the face. Now, 12 Topham has become another source of pride for the neighbourhood as the Now House -- a demonstration model showing how an old building can be turned into a "green" one by using currently available materials and technologies.

Homeowner John Van Dusen, 39, shares the trim little dollhouse with his 130-pound bloodhound, Alvin. With a footprint of a mere 650 square feet, it has two rooms plus a galley kitchen and bathroom on the ground floor, two tiny bedrooms flanking the stairwell on the second floor, and a basement that has space but needs refinishing.

Mr. Van Dusen is so excited about the project that he's willing to open his home for public tours for six months after the retrofit is complete, as required by the contest.

"I've always been into nature and environmentalism, and I was a volunteer for Habitat for Humanity for four years," says Mr. Van Dusen, who lives on disability insurance after a serious accident.

He got involved by chance when a member of Ms. Gauthier's team found him while knocking on doors in Topham Park last summer. "I was just coming in and I started talking to the guy about my new roof, how the temperature inside had dropped 10 degrees, and the next thing I knew they wanted to work with me."

In a design charette last December, architects, designers and engineers pitched ideas to transform the house into a Net Zero Energy Healthy Home.

The morning was spent being idealistic, Ms. Gauthier recalls. Plans that would have led to full achievement of the target would have cost $150,000 and entailed either covering the backyard and part of a neighbouring school yard with solar panels, erecting windmills on the field in front of the house, or digging up the grass to install geothermal heat generation.

Realizing that these solutions would involve doing battle with neighbours and city planners, the group scaled back the target a little -- but still came up with a plan that meets 94 per cent of the objective while costing closer to $70,000.

At present, Mr. Van Dusen's humble abode pumps 9.7 tonnes of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere every year -- considerably less than the average Canadian home, which belches out between 12 and 15 tonnes annually, Ms. Gauthier says.

The retrofit will cut emissions by six tonnes, a reduction of more than 60 per cent.

To achieve it, the team will:

Install two south-facing solar panels on the roof. They will produce enough energy to provide all the home's hot water, including subfloor radiant heat in the basement, and to sell enough power to Ontario Hydro at 42 cents a kilowatt-hour to cancel out the cost of heating the house with gas.

Beef up the insulation all over the house, saving money by putting the existing siding back on after adding the insulation, and keeping the existing roof.

Replace old, drafty windows with E-rated windows and add light tubes and light shelves on the outside of the windows to reflect light indoors.

Install heat-recovery systems, including air exchangers and tubing that reclaims heat from water going down drains.

Put in phantom-load switches, which save electricity by cutting power to appliances designed to be left on standby.

Replace appliances with high-efficiency ones and build a "drying room" beside the furnace so the clothes drier will be needed less often.

The Now House project has the backing of Peter Love, Ontario's chief energy-conservation officer, and Lenard Hart, co-creator of the EnergyStar for New Homes project in Ontario, as well as pledges of financial aid from the companies providing materials and processes for the retrofit.

"It's time to stop thinking of homes simply as users of energy which is produced elsewhere; a house can generate power in many ways," Mr. Hart told the design charette. "We want to create the conditions to make it an easy decision to make."

Already, six other homeowners on Topham Road have expressed interest in having their homes retrofitted, Ms. Gauthier says. And the price tag should come down as more homeowners sign up.

"We're building the design costs into John's house," Ms. Gauthier says. "Using the Topham Park retrofit model, we will roll out the new Net Zero Energy Healthy House know-how to other wartime housing communities in Toronto, in Ontario and across the country."

jgadd@globeandmail.com