Category Archives: Awake to Earth

What We Leave

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Our current home is now officially on the market.  This beautiful acre of trees that has been such a wonderful place for us for the last ten years.  I have so many powerful memories in this backyard.  The morning songs of the cardinals, the four baby chipmunks who came out to play one afternoon and let me sit near them and even film their antics. The many deer who wandered through. The chickadee I held in my hands. The mornings of prayer in the screen tent, as the sun began to peek out through the spruce trees.  The golden slug crawling through the grass on its way to a mushroom. The turkeys, the neighbor’s chickens, the porcupine.

This place has been such a blessing for me, and for us.  We’ve planted daffodils and violets and day lilies and many other perennial flowers.  We’ve planted forsythia bushes, and a small hemlock tree to stand alongside the two larger hemlocks. We’ve planted raspberries and blueberries, and eaten wild strawberries that came up on their own. Of course, all that is hiding now, under a blanket of snow, but we included spring, summer and fall photos in our listing, so folks could see the loveliness of its other seasons.

We still have a couple of days before there will be any showings.  Time to do more de-cluttering and cleaning, so others might be able imagine their own lives here.  I hope that someone will come along, really soon, who will want to love this place and care for it, and be cared for by it, as we have.

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Chipmunk babies

The Blower Door Test

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Blower Door Test

Today, Margy and I are working with our realtor to do the paperwork and photos to put our current house on the market. Lots of de-cluttering and packing up work to accomplish in a very short time.  So to give myself some extra energy for the day, I want to quickly write about our blower door test at the new house yesterday.  This technology measures air-exchange in the house, and thus, how well sealed and insulated your home.  One test is done before doing any work, and a second test after the work is done.  Our house passed with flying colors!

And here is why–last week they raised the level of the attic floor by eight inches, sealed cracks, and pumped in a whole bunch of insulation into the attic, and created an insulated hatch cover.  This might be the most important step we have taken for greener housing! It is good to remember that goal in the midst of all the hard work involved in making a move.

Attic Insulation

Cellulose insulation is also under the raised boards.

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The hatch box showing the eight inches that was raised up, and the hatch cover to the side.

Garage Door

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Garage During

Double wide opening complete!

Today, the new garage door is being installed.  I don’t have a picture yet of the completed door, but here are “during renovation” and “before renovation” pictures. Maybe someday we can shift to being a one car family, but with me working, and Margy with a disability, we still need two cars.

Or maybe someday, that one car can be electric, and be charged by solar panels on the roof of the garage–dreams for even more green journeying in the future.  But we do the steps we can do in the time we have right now. Thinking back to one of the other houses we liked, that one would have required we build a whole new garage.  So we are grateful that this garage was able to be easily renovated to meet our needs.

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The Garage–Before

Icicles

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Icycles

Here is what a house looks like with NO insulation.  Icicles and potential ice dams.  We got a snow storm the day after our home performance company took out the old insulation, and then they had to wait a few days before they could put in new insulation. (Mold discovered and then remediated.)  Today they brought the big truck with a long hose and blew in cellulose insulation.  Almost done.  Hopefully, during the next storm there will be no icicles.Insulation hose

 

Freecycle

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As part of our de-cluttering process, we have had such great fun passing along things we don’t need any more through Freecycle.org.  So far in the last week or so, we’ve gotten rid of:

1. A Sleep-Number mattress that didn’t really live up to its claims of better sleep for people with back troubles.

2. Old exercise equipment that was in our basement when we moved in:Exercise Equipment DSC09841

DSC03215And 3. A Training Toilet–that is actually for potty training a child on the big toilet, (and able to be used by grownups too). Why did we have one of those in the first place?  We thought it might help during my attempt to toilet train our cats four years ago. (Sadly, it didn’t work out.)

Each of the people who took our castaways were totally thrilled to get these free new things in their lives.  And we enjoyed meeting the folks who came by our house to disassemble them and take them away.  What a great way to ring out the old year, and welcome in the new!

 

What is hidden

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Attic/before photo

The Attic–Before

Insulation work on our new house started on Monday with the attic!  The plan is to take up all the plywood flooring, remove the old pink fiberglass batts, then frame up another 8 inches. They will make a box around the doorway as well, and create an insulated cover for the door.

Next they seal all the joints, and then blow in cellulose insulation. Oh, and before that the electrician will do a bit of work on the bathroom exhaust fan, and also some other electric work that is easiest to access from the attic.  After that they will put down the plywood flooring again on half of the attic so we can use it for storage.  At completion, we will have insulation value of R-50.

IMG_0554But then we got the news yesterday that there was an area of mold on the ceiling of the attic, over the bathroom area.  We were surprised because we hadn’t picked up any mildew odors. IMG_0556But it was all hidden beneath some rough plywood which you can see in the photo on top as a partial ceiling, and the next photo shows where they took it down. (And look, there are the new framing boards :)) And next: a picture of the mold. (These two photos sent from the crew, to keep us in the loop.)

The good news is that our crew found it, and contacted the remediation company they like to work with and today they came right over to the house to check it out, and also checked out the rest of the house.  They will let us know how much it will cost.  Everything always costs more than you think it will. But happily, they use ecologically safe methods for removal–basically baking soda in a soda blasting process.

So we are waiting to see what has to happen with all of this before the insulation process can resume. But the other good news is we really like the folks we are working with.

Tomorrow morning I will go over to meet the electrician; he will be continuing his work during the hiatus of the other work. Along with the bathroom exhaust fan, he will be fixing the doorbell, adding the wiring for future lighting in the living room, and adding a switch for the kitchen light next to our back door. Every day a little more is accomplished, in this second phase of our search for greener house.

Billie helps with the sorting

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Billie helps sorting

This week we really got serious about decluttering and downsizing in preparation for selling our house.  One room at at time.  I started with the hall bathroom.  It has a huge closet in which, among other things, we store our many candle holders of all sorts. I dragged all of them out onto the counter, and Margy and I decided which ones to pack for the new house, and which ones to pack for Goodwill.  Our cat Billie, as you can see, was very interested in helping.  Or at least supervising. I am happy that more of them are going to Goodwill than are coming to our new house.

One room done, many more to go… I went to bed exhausted, but it feels really good.

Abundance

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Equals the gift of free food? Margy and I went to Winslow Park beach yesterday and visited our favorite apple tree.  It was surrounded by ripe apples on the ground.

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We have gathered apples from this tree in some other years–but in November.  And never so big or abundant as these.    DSC03061

Our friend Bob made delicious applesauce at our house that November.  The best applesauce ever!  (Well, recently, our friend Susan gave us a gift of homemade applesauce that might compete for that title of best ever.)

We scooped up a couple dozen apples, and carried them in our pockets back to our car, and then to our house.

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Back home, we turned on some music (Eliza Gilkyson’s Beautiful World), put parmesan chicken in the oven (Johnson family recipe), sat at the island counter in our kitchen, and cut and cored the apples. We cooked them in a pot with just a bit of water.  Nothing else needed. Then we sat down to Christmas dinner, with hearts full of gratitude.

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They fixed it.

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After my complaints about the poor job on the doorway flooring, the lead carpenter came out yesterday morning and re-did the doorway… looks good this time.  We decided not to sand and refinish all the floors so we’ll have to wait for the natural colors to catch up with each other, but the floor boards flow from one room to the other as they should.

Hurray for speaking up.  (And thanks for all the moral support from commenters!)