Here is our house. Built around 1870, it is drafty and costs a fortune to heat. Even with the thermostats at a toasty 62 degrees, we are still paying $445 a month for natural gas on the budget plan. We added a woodstove last fall which keeps the kitchen at a temperature suited to sustaining human life, but other than that our house is c-o-l-d. Hoth cold.

I love to look at design websites and read about all of the nifty eco-vations that are available to new homebuyers, but not much attention has been paid to the retrofitting of older/antique homes. My assumption has been that in order to really tighten up our home we would destroy most of the charm — adding double paned windows, replacing the slate roof and cladding the exterior with insulated panels would reduce our energy consumption but at what aesthetic cost?

today as I was fooling around on the internet researching green trends I came across a reference to a Victorian home in England that has been totally greened up. Two women are in the process of retrofitting their brick town home to be as energy efficient as possible.  They have reduced their heating costs to something like $30 a month by making about 25 improvements, the biggest ones being the addition of a ton of insulation, a new roof (insulated with old newspapers) and a roof-mounted solar water heater.  They have further reduced their carbon footprint by adding a rainwater recovery system which funnels rainwater through copper pipes into a holding tank in the basement. The captured water is then used to fill the WC’s and to water the gardens, and the copper acts as a mild disinfectant, helpful given the source of the water.  The Guardian has a great tour of the home, and an interesting interview with the architects/homeowners, which you can link to here:  The Nottingham Ecohome.

I would love to find out what an energy audit of this house would reveal. It would be helpful to have a plan, even if it took us a decade to implement all of the suggested improvements. Heck, what’s a decade in the life of a home that is already nearly 140 years old?

If the road to hell is actually paved with good intentions, I’m certainly on my way.

Hopefully, the coffee will be hot….

But now that I think about it, if it’s going to be my own personal hell, it will be from Starbucks.

And lukewarm.

Am I the only one Trying To Be Mindful, Trying to Do The Green Thing…and is totally paralyzed?

Every time I crack open the internet I am assaulted by proof that I will never be as lean, green and in tune with the world as I should be.  And I am constantly shamed by the plethora of wrong decisions I am making.

Take milk for example.

I have 5 sons.

I know I know, I am solely responsible for exploding the population, but it is too late to send them back (and frankly, I don’t think they’d fit).

We go through more than a gallon of skim milk a day.
I know, I know, cows in pens, mucus, hormones, PLASTIC BOTTLES…

But seriously. If I had a local, organic dairy deliver to my house it would be, what, 14 glass half gallon jugs a week? Where would they go? And who would rinse them out? And how would I pay for all that?

The economic truth is I buy the store brand. I hate to even pay for the special milk in the light-block-bottles. So not only am I polluting the environment, torturing cows and generating gobs of mucus, but I am robbing my children of essential nutrients that are killed by light.

I’d like to think I am doing my part? Making a difference?

I guess it could be worse. I could be going through that many 2 liter bottles of Pepsi in a week.

Help?

They say that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

I am on track to be the incredible hulk: really strong and kinda green.