Well, the house came down on Monday. It's nothing but a hole at the moment...
For those interested, I cut together a quick video of the house coming down:
http://www.360winnett.com/videos/demolition/
@Joe - Geothermal will set you back quite a bit... we got some ballpark costs, and it was looking like it would be around $40K. Even with $7K back, it's still hard to swallow those costs. Most of the cost came from the vertical well drilling that was required. It would be cheaper if you have the option of using horizontal wells, but that's a little unrealistic in the city. We've decided on a very high efficiency natural gas furnace + a heat pump (instead of an A/C unit) + an HRV. At $11K, it's all still quite expensive... but it's a fraction of the geothermal, and we'll get about $2400 back in rebates.
The other downside of the geothermal rebate is that it's so big. As crazy as it sounds, the $7K actually made it less attractive for us because we qualified for a variety of additional rebates. The maximum rebate you can get is $10K, and with everything taken into account now, we'll be getting about $9600 back. Had we gone with the geothermal setup, it would have been far less attractive for us to do everything else we wanted to simply because we would have reached the cap a lot sooner.
@W. K. Lis / Hipster Duck - The house won't be LEED certified, simply because there isn't a residential program available in Canada yet (apparently it'll be an option in 2009). However, we are trying for Energy Star certification (which is similar to R2000 in many ways).
I'm not sure what, if any, benefits we'll see by getting the certification... other than saying we got it. There are a number of hoops we need to jump through, one of which is hiring a "consultant". This seems like such a waste of money to me, simply because all of the documentation is available online so I know what we need to do to receive certification. We're going to build to these guidelines anyway, so I don't understand why I need to pay a consultant to explain it. Sigh.
I'll be writing about the requirements soon, which will hopefully put it perspective a little better... stay tuned.