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I’m sorry for all of the late and low-content posts, but the end is in sight! We plan to put up trim and paint over the next two days and move into the house this weekend. And not a moment too soon. We’re getting pretty tired of being stretched between two (or more, with house-sitting) places.

Right now, we’re focused on paint. We went to the local paint shop to meet with the designer on Monday and she was very helpful. I’ve been taking copious pictures, so we printed up copies of some good ones of the rooms we’re painting as well as our couches. The blue of the couches turned out to be a problem, since they’d combine with most strong colors to be overwhelming but white is just too boring for us.

We were a little worried that there’d be no low-VOC (volatile organic compounds) paints available in the colors we wanted, but Benjamin Moore’s Aura line is low-VOC and works with the lighter half of their color line. We’re not the only ones to run across it. Reading reviews leads me to believe that it’ll be a great paint. Not only is it more environmental than most paints (although not the most environmental), it should last 3-4 times as long as a cheap paint, the color is supposed to be amazingly vibrant, it’s self-priming, touches up well, and dries quickly.

The plan is to check out the different finishes and then order the paint at the Benajamin Moore event at the paint store tomorrow. Maggie will report back once we’ve actually used the stuff.

The drawbacks are that it’s expensive (although it doesn’t seem out of line compared to other premium paints) and that it’s only low-VOC rather than no-VOC, especially when pigment is added. We’re not the only ones wrestling with green remodeling. Tearing stuff out has been reasonable. We’re re-using most of the trim and we’re passing the old carpet along to a local woman who can use it for pond beds or mulching.

Painting, on the other hand, is pretty ridiculous. In addition to the paint itself, we had to get roller covers (plastic, basically), caulk (not the most environmental thing), insulation (pretty much the worst thing environmentally), plastic paint trays, and a big plastic drop cloth. We’ll be able to use most of it again, but it’s still disheartening to see how much waste this will produce.

To be honest, we probably could have gotten better stuff if we’d looked harder. The alternatives are so overwhelming, though, especially given our time constraints. If we had weeks to look, we’d probably get some samples of no-VOC paint and try them out to see how they work. Without that time, we’re just not willing to try a no-VOC paint and have it end up not working well for us.

Still, it’s easier than it would have been even 5 years ago and it seems to be getting better. And my next project (installing a ceiling fan) will be leisurely enough that it’ll green enough to make up a little bit of the difference.

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The Indiana Office of Energy & Defence Development (the OED, not to be confused with the dictionary) just released their grant programs for fiscal 2008-2009. There’s some interesting stuff for small-scale demonstration projects and a variety of things for non-profit and commerical, but really only one program for residential, the aptly named Geothermal Residential Rebate program.

This program allows you to apply for $1500 toward installing a new geothermal heat pump or $1000 if you’re replacing an existing heat pump. A geothermal heat pump would still be several thousand dollars more than a traditional furnace, but it helps make it more attractive.

The OED also released a PDF of the results of last year’s program. It’s a very cool look at the economics of geothermal heat pumps in Indiana. The report gives the average cost (including installation) of each size of heat pump (from 2 to 6 tons) that got the rebate last year. Even better, it compares those costs with the cost of a different type of furnace over several years.

In the final analysis, they find that geothermal heat pumps have under a 6-year payback no matter what the alternative is. If you’re using heating oil, it could even pay for itself in under 2 years!

According to the report, the OED calculates that every dollar spent in rebates has saved consumers two to three dollars and stimulated spending within the state (since geothermal heat pumps are local business).

Maggie is making fun of me for thinking about this when we haven’t even painted the front rooms of the house yet. I figure that now is the time to start saving money so that we’ll be able to afford it when our current furnace fails. Until then, at least a natural gas furnace is the second-best option!

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This is Henry, one of the four dogs we are watching this week.  They are all very sweet and generally mild-mannered but we have noticed that Henry is special.  Henry is a weed-eating dog.

His owners have carefully planted a selection of tomatoes and peppers in big pots (well, some of them might be labeled as “five-gallon buckets” by the unimaginative) out on their back deck.  They told us to enjoy the bounty this week so we’ve been munching on cherry tomatoes as we sit around the pool (oh, the perks of housesitting).  We happened to look over yesterday and saw Henry carefully eating the grass out of the containers.   He showed no interest in the tomatoes or peppers but was very thorough in his grass annihilation.

As an amateur organic gardener, I am always looking for new tricks, tools, and secrets.  I don’t think it gets much better than a weed-eating dog in terms of environmental friendliness and minimal labor.  Plus you get the companionship of man’s best friend!  Alas, I have no idea how to actually train a dog to eat weeds.  That would be the million dollar trick.   Pretty much all the dogs I know will eat grass sometimes.  However, Henry has access to an entire lawn so I’m not sure why he prefers to eat his grass out of the tomato planters - perhaps it is sweeter and better fertilized?  Whatever his doggy logic may be, I am quite impressed and hope one day to have a weed-eating dog of my own.

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I’m dog sitting tonight and Maggie is out of town, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to write a proper post later.

On the house front,  we’ve talked to a plasterer and he thinks he can just scrape most of the glue off and then cover the rest with a thin layer to make it smooth.  He’s going to come in on Monday to do that and replace the mirror with drywall.  If Nathan and I can remove all of the paneling from the front bedroom by then, we’ll also see if we can get him to do that.

We thought about taking out the plaster entirely and re-insulating, but it seems like such a waste to get rid of so much plaster that’s still in pretty good shape.  It’s also been remarkably cool in the house despite the big windows and lack of A/C.  Of course, we also don’t have any people or appliances producing excess heat either, but hopefully it’s a good indication that the current amount of insulation is sufficient.

Apart from that and painting, we’re just about ready to move in.  The current plan is to make the big move next weekend, which will be neat.  If you have any green decorating tips, let us know.  We have a lot more room than in our current place, so we’ll have plenty of spacet experiment on.

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Ever since I learned that a 3 kWh a day lifestyle is achievable, I’ve been very curious as to our current usage. Since everything we have is electric (and much of the 3 kWh number is based on offloading things like heating to natural gas), I thought I’d have to wait until we actually moved.

Then I got this month’s electrical bill and realized that it’s about as good as it’ll get anywhere. We obviously didn’t use any heat this month but we also didn’t use much, if any, cooling. Given that, the only significant difference between here and the house is that here we have an electric stove. However, I think we use the stove for about half an hour a day (on average), which only adds up to 1 kWh a day, so that’s pretty easy to adjust for.

This month, we used 200 kWh over 28 days. That’s a little over 7 kWh (modified to 6 if we take off the electricity for the stove), which is about twice my eventual goal. That still seemed like a lot, so I decided to track down where all of that electricity is going.

Least surprising to me is that our refrigerator uses up to 3 kWh a day (50% of our presumptive housing number!). The refrigerator at the house only uses 2 kWh a day, which will help some as well. A new EnergyStar refrigerator can use as little as 1 kWh a day, so there’s room for improvement there as well.

So now we’re down to 3 kWh a day that are unaccounted for. The next things I thought of were basic appliances that we run intermittently, like the dishwasher, washer, and dryer. We haven’t used our dryer this month (hooray clotheslines!), but we wash dishes and clothes about once a week. That puts the dishwasher at about 0.3 kWh a day and the washing machine at 0.5 kWh a day. More efficient appliances would help some, but since we run them so infrequently, they’re not big culprits.

That puts us at 2.2 kWh a day that disappear into the unknown. I thought it might primarily be lighting, but that would be enough to run our lightbulbs for 110 hours a day, which seems unreasonable. It’s hard to estimate light usage, but I think we use about 24 light-hours a day (since mostly lights are off during the day and while we’re asleep and Maggie and I tend to stay in the same room and use one light in the evening). That’s only 0.1 kWh a day (thanks, CFLs!).

Not much of a change, but we’re down to 2.1 kWh. There are some other appliances that we use occasionally, like a microwave and clock radio, but they probably use less than a tenth of a kWh each, so that still only brings us down to 1.9 kWh. If we didn’t have most of our appliances on power strips, I’m sure that phantom power would increase this number considerably.

Oh, computers, of course. Maggie and I both have laptops. She uses hers about half an hour a day (at least, at home) and I leave mine on about 10.5 hours a day. With an average useage of 30 watts (based on 45 watts when in use and 10 watts hibernating), that comes out to a third of a kWh a day.

Well, 1.6 kWh is better but is still a lot of “black” energy. In fact, it’s 26% of our presumptive electrical use! If it takes you less than a day to figure out where that energy is going, you’ve got me beat. I’ll give you a minute to think about it.

Ready?

The culprit appears to be our hot water heater. It’s stuck in a closet and we never think about it except when it’s not working and yet it’s using half as much energy as a refrigerator! It would be even more except that Maggie and I use it infrequently (especially in the summer). The EnergyStar sticker on the side says that it’ll use 4773 kWh a year, which is over 13 kWh a day! Obviously, the sticker is way overestimating (and we’re using less hot water than the typical family), but that’s still a lot. Even though it’s “only” using 1.6 kWh or so now, when the weather is cooler and it has to work harder and more often, I bet it uses at least as much energy as our refrigerator (which will be working less hard in the winter, so this is about as bad as it should get).

A tankless water heater is looking better and better! A conservative estimate would put the tankless water heater at about half the electricity as an electric tank water heater. That still puts us well over 3 kWh a day, but add in a better refrigerator and we’re starting to get somewhere!

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We got a lot of work done on the house yesterday with my parents (thanks Mom and Dad!) so when today turned hot and sticky we both decided to spend the evening at home relaxing.  I’ll take my turn on the mower tomorrow, probably in the morning before it gets too hot.

We really can’t complain much since so far July has been unseasonably cool but it was quite pleasant.  I rather enjoy having unseasonably warm winters and cool summers but I do worry that it’s indicative of global warming and associated climate change.  On the other hand, it’s hard to tell what falls within the range of normal variation.  I’ve heard that the Indiana motto for weather is “Don’t like the weather?  Wait a few hours.”

Tomorrow a professional plasterer is supposed to come by the house and tell us what to do with our living room walls.  I hope he has some ideas about the mirror, although a friend suggested we glue glass tiles on it to make a mosaic, which could be really cool.  Ya know, if we actually did it.

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Lest you think Maggie is doing all the work herself, let me tell you about our new lawn mower. Until yesterday, I hadn’t mown a lawn since sixth grade, when my family moved to a house without a lawn. At that point, I used an ancient reel mower along with a rusty manual edger.

Lawn mowers have come a long way since then. We were hoping that we could get away with a reel mower (one of the few occasions where the green option is the cheaper one!), but with a half acre lot, it just didn’t seem feasible. On the other hand, a riding mower seemed like overkill (although most of our neighbors seem to use them) and I’ve never liked gas mowers (which pollute as much in a hour as a car does over 350 miles). Fifteen years ago, that would have been it.

But now that we’re living in the future, electric mowers are an option! We’ve been looking at corded mowers for a week or two now and they seemed like a good option. They mow well and, although the cord would be unwieldy, they’re cheaper than battery-powered mowers and last longer (as long as you have handy outlets).

Saturday evening, we had to go to the mall, so I suggested we head through Sears and check out their mowers. Their online selection seemed slim, but I thought it might be useful to see them in person. They did have some nice reel mowers, and a million gas/rider mowers, but we didn’t see any electric ones at all. At least, not until we saw the clearance section off to the side. There, right in front, was a nice Craftsman battery-powered mower. It was still about 50% more expensive than a similar corded mower, but it was almost 50% off. We went home to think about it but, when I found a 10% off coupon for refurbished mowers that expired that evening, we decided it was the way to go.

Next door neighbor Nathan and I took the mower over the house on Sunday and plugged it in so that I’d be able to mow yesterday. I had a moment of fear when it conked out after just three passes, but it turned out that trying to cut grass that tall had flipped the circuit breaker. Once I reset that, and set the height to 6 (out of 6), I was able to cut the whole front and most of the side yard. The battery could have kept going, but I couldn’t. I’d been a bit worried that 40 minutes of mowing time, the amount I’d seen on the Internet, wouldn’t be enough. It seemed to run longer than that and certainly as long as I wanted to mow.

Unfortunately, the gras was so high that Maggie is going to take her turn mowing tomorrow, this time at a lower setting. She’ll start in the back, though, so that everything will be mowed at least once.

I won’t say that it was fun, but it was another adventure (rite of passage?) in home ownership!

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As Will said, we’re busy excavating the layers of wall material in our living room.  The top layer was ugly wallpaper, the next layer was wood paneling, and now we’re down to plaster.  (I actually don’t mind wood paneling since it covered the walls of my childhood bedroom but it’s not the most attractive thing in the world, especially when it has been coated in wallpaper paste and patched up randomly with non-matching pieces of wood.)

Alas, we have no experience with plaster and haven’t found any friends or family that do either.  There are holes in the plaster from where the paneling was nailed in and big globs of glue where the paneling was glued into place (you gotta make sure your walls don’t wander away) so *something* needs to be done.  We’re just not sure how big of a project it will be.

Oh, and there’s also the 5′ x 6′ giant mirror that appears to have been installed to replace what used to be an outside window.  We haven’t been brave enough to pry it off the wall but it looks like there’s no plaster underneath, so we’re not sure what to do next.

Any suggestions from the peanut gallery?

From an ecological standpoint, plaster doesn’t seem too terrible and it would make more sense to patch it than to cover it over with totally new material.  I got a book from the library about mixing natural plasters but I’m not sure if you they would stick to the old stuff.  I’m hoping to get a professional in to look at it and give us some advice.  My biggest concern is if we need to get the glue off before we put fresh plaster on.

On the plus side, we also pulled up the carpets in the front room and the hardwood floors underneath look BEAUTIFUL.  It was nice to reveal at least one treasure in our excavating work…

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I apologize for the lack of a post last night. As soon as my head hit the pillow, I was asleep. It’s been a crazy couple of days, with work stress, the sleeping schedule that won’t regulate, and–oh yeah–we got a house and are slowly tearing it down.

At least, that’s what it feels like. Maggie and I have spent several evenings over there working until it got dark (we have the electricity off). We’ve peeled off most of the wallpaper, some of the trim, and two sections of wood panelling. Underneath is plaster, so we’re going to have to figure out what you can do with that. Paint it? Wallpaper over it?

On Wednesday, we took a break from tearing things apart to do some electrical baselining (that’s a word, right?). I’ve complained before about how difficult it is to figure out where our electricity is going. Starting from scratch gives us a unique chance to do just that.

I think this is a great opportunity to make great strides with our electrical use. Several years back, when I first took control of my finances, my first move was to track exactly where my money was going. That information helped me decide where to focus my efforts for the biggest gains. In my case, I wasn’t able to do much about my rent, but I was able to cancel cable and cut my car insurance by two thirds without feeling like I was sacrificing much.

I’m hoping that creating a baseline for our electrical use will help out in much the same way. To get started, we went around the house and unplugged everything (including the refrigerator and built-in microwave). The meter was still turning, so we started flipping breakers off until we found what we’d missed in the first go-through (an exterior safety light and a sub-panel that goes to the electric water heater).

Now that we’re sure we have no shorts in the system, we can start plugging things back in and see what our base load is. Since most of our appliances are powered by natural gas, I expect it’ll be relatively low. Our biggest power draws will be the refrigerator (according to GE’s information on the model, it’ll use about 700 kWh a year) and the water heater (I have no idea yet).

From there, we can add stuff to the system and see how it affects power consumption. For example, we can turn on all the lights and see how much more electricity that uses than having no lights on. Or, we can run the microwave and see how much electricity it takes to make soup.

Once we’ve got a good month’s worth of data, we can figure out which changes will give us the most bang for the least work.

But first, we’ll have to finish redoing the front room so that we can actually move in!

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We’ve had the house for less than 24 hours and I’m already psyched to pull off all the crazy textured wallpaper and rip up the carpet to reveal hardwood floors.  Alas, it’s a lot of work!  We spent several hours today pulling the top layer of wallpaper off the family room walls (the backing and paste tend to stay behind).  A guy from Vectren came by to turn on the gas and told me that I should make my life simpler and buy a gallon of magical solution called Dif that supposedly takes wallpaper right off.

I looked it up and learned that Dif is a wallpaper stripper with a “unique patented enzyme formula” and “a superior, more effective blend of wetting agents” that have made it a must-have for wallpaper removal projects.

Of course, my question is, what is the environmental impact of this stuff?  I looked at the MSDS (Material Safety Data Sheet) but it is really designed for firefighters and hazardous waste clean-up crews so there wasn’t detailed information about its overall environmental impacts.  I’m pretty sure Dif is more environmentally harmful than using hot water but I’m also pretty sure it’s a lot faster.  At what point can a person justify an increased environmental impact to save some physical labor?  For this project, I would feel a lot better sticking with the manual labor - I could use the exercise!  But the question of trade-offs comes up a lot and it’s almost always impossible to get all the information needed to make the best decision.

My dad says that someone needs to come up with a Green Consumer Reports that would crunch all the data concerning the environmental impact of how an item is produced, how it’s used during its life, and how it gets disposed of.  I keep telling him it’s a great idea except I don’t think that data even exists for most products.  But maybe someone just needs to give it their best shot and refine as they go.

Any publishing moguls out there?  I’m handy with a blog and a wallpaper scraper…

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