Green Living

I have recently become fascinated with "green" living. Last week was Green Week, and local cities (like the one I was visiting in Bristol, Rhode Island) were sponsoring "green clean-ups," in which, ironically, multitudes of men on gasoline mowers were cleaning/polluting all in one.

Now, Home and Garden TV is having a sweepstakes, and the prize is none other than a "Green Home." HGTV describes the concept home with 7 main environmental goals: (1) Conveniently Located so long travel isn't necessary; (2) sustainable site, in which the environment around the home is not unduly affected; (3) water efficiency--reducing home water use by about 40%; (4) energy--the home will use approximately 25% less energy than a comparable home in a regular neighborhood; (5) materials and resources all locally provided or made; (6) indoor environmental quality; and (7) education--the sweepstakes educates the public about all the potential options for "green homes" (HGTV, 2008).

So this got me wondering: how environmentally friendly is my own home? Within the last year we remodeled the kitchen, throwing away all the old cabinets in the local dump (no green there); we bought new cabinets instead of refinishing the 1970s ones (nope); we bought mostly Energystar appliances (50% on this one--the frig was a good deal and so that one isn't so efficient); new siding makes the home more efficient (that counts); we replaced stone pavers with green grass (great for the O2 but still takes on water, so 50% there).

Here's where I can go green: new bamboo flooring, as it's a rapidly renewable resource (so says HGTV) and that can go all throughout the downstairs. We can also buy environmentally friendly paint for any future remodeling job; we can replace the overly cold-running refrigerator with an Energystar appliance; we can run fans instead of air conditioners; we can turn off lights (I'm already a fanatic about that); we will replace all old windows and the door with better materials so that the home is fully insulated; we can keep the old, crooked tree in the backyard that is upending the air conditioner because it provides great shade to the house; and, finally, we've replaced all bulbs with the newer halogen ones so that we save on energy.

Well, it's not much, but it is a start.

References Cited

Home and Garden TV. (2008). Green Home: How Green is the HGTV Green Home? Retrieved April 28, 2008, from http://www.hgtv.com/hgtv/green_home_2008/article/0,,HGTV_30916_5816498,00.html

My Blogging Community: Ideas

If I were taking ENG 112 and had to come up with my blogging community, the first thing I would do is isolate what community I am in. Realistically, my blog can be a part of multiple communities: those of English teachers, those of writers of classroom-based blogs, those of people who are interested in home improvement for a variety of reasons.

Because the assignment for the analysis paper requires students to discover which genre community they are a part of, this means that the focus should be on the actual content of the blog. So from all of this I understand that my community for a paper in ENG 112 would have to be other home improvement bloggers.

Here is a list of bloggers that fit the bill:

1. Heather Goss's Diary of a Fixer-Upper, which is linked in Washingtonian Magazine. This is a refreshing look at a successful career woman who is investing in a home and trying to do the work herself. Great photos abound, and her writing style is easy, conversational, yet informative.

2. Houseblogs is a community of bloggers with very up-to-date information on the mortgage crisis, "green" (or environmental) building, how to build the debt-free way, etc. The Houseblogs site is quite like the Huffington Post site. One main page links me to dozens of home improvement bloggers. I could get hundreds of bits of data on this site daily, and I include all of its bloggers as multiple sources yet linked in this easy-to-access site.

3. And now to a real expert. Bob Vila's House Blog is a great site because of his vast experience in home improvement. Anybody who has watched "Bob Vila" or "Bob Vila Home Again" on PBS or the DIY Network would recognize him. And his name is big in the industry--sometimes we just need to go to the "experts." He has 27 years in the industry, and so I feel quite comfortable taking his advice. I would use his site by fact-checking other suggestions from other bloggers and seeing if Vila has commentary on that issue. That way, like with academic research, I both know who I'm quoting and making sure that I have the most informed information possible.

And now-on to the paper!

99.152% Done My First Post-Blog House Project

I never thought it would happen, but hell as frozen over. Well, maybe not. But my hallway project (with exception of one corner's light touch-up and the remounting of a new light) is complete. Because this wasn't a necessary project (like fixing a leaking toilet), it was more of a labor of love. And here's what we did to get the "hallway project" done.

The initial problem was the wooden paneling was that it was, well, wooden paneling. I can't see any real justification for it. My childhood bedroom was a child's wood paneling fantasy, and that was in the 70s and 80s, so maybe this remodeling project is about escaping my childhood bedroom for something more "grown up." The panels graced the stairwell as nicely as any 1970s cheap plywood could, attached by nails and glue, made to look more like wainscoting than an actual wood wall because it only went partially up the walls. It was both cheap and incomplete. Coupled with tacky eagle-encrusted light switch plates, my husband and I think we bought this townhouse simply to rectify my 1970s flashbacks.



And so we tore down paneling, sanded down the remaining glue, patched holes, painted walls upwards of 16 feet in spaces (the stairwell itself soars up two storeys), and at one point I was teetering at the top of a ladder, inhaling fumes, trying to be a perfectionist and getting the job done right. It was a one-time-only study in perfection for me. I don't think I'll go back to that soon.

I think the most important thing about home improvement is that the job actually improves the home. I go up those stairs at least ten times a day, and before the redo I could feel my blood positively bubble over to boiling when I wondered why it took me three years to get to the job. But now that I have completed it, I wonder what I can do next. So if you read this, answer the poll above. I promise to tackle the job that gets the most votes!

The Association...

One thing that homeowners might have to deal with while working on home improvement projects is the dreaded homeowner's association. The purpose of that association is to keep your neighbors (and you) in line. They take dues (ours is double--we have a neighborhood association and the Reston Association [RA]) for things like garbage and landscape maintenance, management of parking issues, and basic oversight of each home. When a home gets into disrepair the homeowner's association (in our case, RA) can put a lien on the owner's property, which requires the homeowner to fix the problem or pay a penalty before they can sell the home. RA actually did this to a neighbor of ours because her front porch light wasn't the right shape. Unfortunately the acceptable light design was discontinued years ago and RA hadn't updated their documentation. $120 dollars later, the lien was finally gone. But talk about bad blood...

The purpose is protection, one guesses, from crazy neighbors who might bring down the value of other properties with trashy front yards (think 50 garden gnomes) or tractor trailers parked on the lawn. But what we have experienced with our neighborhood association is a partnership with predatory towing companies, an interest in cheap holiday decorations (which have only come down last Sunday, four months later), support for the local solicitors such as the ice cream truckers, who blare horrible calliope music in the form of the repetitious "Music Man" in the neighborhood every day at least twice a day, and a general interest in unrest.

There are sites on the web that are out to help homeowners learn the real problems with these associations. For example, the American Homeowner's Resource Center attempts to shine a bright light on the real legalese that these associations can use to take power from homeowners. The goal of these associations was once a good one: support your neighbors and community, keep the neighborhood clean, and everybody's property will benefit. Short of starting a revolution, however, I don't see what we can do to remove Reston Association from our lives other than moving. However, with the way the housing crisis is looming large in our neighborhood (at least 6 foreclosures or short sales at last count), that isn't a possibility.

So what are homeowners to do? Maybe all one can do is fix up their property to code and neighborhood standard and wait it out while maniacal neighbors snoop and intrude and just plain make nuisances of themselves. In the meantime, I'll be buried up to my eyeballs in paint.

Home Improvement's Not Always Been So Pretty

As I was priming the stairwell walls this week, I was thinking about the turn to "hipness" that home improvement has taken. It's now considered a cool thing to do to take a house in disrepair and to do all those fixer-upper things (painting, carpentry, drywalling, plumbing, electrical work) that we used to hire out for ages ago. There are even titles for people who do this as a career: "flippers," who fix up dilapidated homes in the hopes of a big payday. But, back in the day, those jobs related to home repair were solidly blue-collar. You didn't do them because you wanted to make a lot of money, but you took those jobs because there wasn't really anything else available.

One of the many people involved in home repair was my grandfather Bernard (a.k.a. "Pete"). Pete was a WW2 vet who came back from France and Germany scarred, grumpy, silent, but ready to work. He took a job as a painter and worked 6-day weeks until his health deteriorated. Some of it was from a youth of smoking and blowing up cherry bombs in friends' cars. Then there was the war. The years of painting (I remember the most famous building he painted in Worcester, MA, was the Polar Bear Cola Co. building, and it must have taken weeks). Every night that I spent in his presence I can remember him drinking a beer and pouring a pat of salt on his hand, in the space between his thumb and index finger, to replenish all the salt he lost as he sweat through 10-12 hour days of painting.

It was not glorious work. It was strenuous, backbreaking: when Pete died he was inches shorter than when he was young, with a stooped back, replaced knees, arthritic hands. And then there was the emphysema. Of course that wasn't all from painting, but who knows about what fumes he breathed in for 40 years during his work? When he came home, he was covered in paint, smelled like paint, and just wanted a smoke or two or five. On his days off, my mom remembers that during the summers he would drive his wife and daughters about an hour to get to the beach. Even on his days off he wasn't off: coughing, hacking, curling under the strain of making people's homes and workplaces brighter.

And so while I was painting my one small stairwell, I thought about how Pete handled doing it, day after day, month after month. It had to have gotten monotonous, ingratiating, irritating. To deal with unfair practices and health issues, Pete had joined a painter's union (does this explain why I'm so pro-union?). But in the end all his health issues caught up with him and he died in a haze attributed to emphysemic senility.

Why am I reminded of this? When I was at Home Depot the other day, after I had my paint mixed (Ralph Lauren's "Architectural Cream"), I wandered over to another aisle in which "environmentally safe" paints (called Freshaire) were being sold. Of course I was lazy and just kept the paint I had mixed, but a part of me wondered what damage I might be doing to not only me but future people who buy my place. What ingredients are in the RL paint? What is better about the environmental stuff (more on this in another cross-over post)? Could these technologies (even in paint) have helped my grandfather have a better end-of-life? If I breathe in this stuff, what will happen to me in 10 years?

So maybe this is silly, or over-exaggerated, but I continue to wonder ...

The Day of Two Jobs

Well, we've begun early. And added another home improvement job to the list today. Because it was beautiful, sunny, and in the 60s, I decided to go ahead and reseed and dirt the front lawn, take the panelling to the dump, buy paint and edgers, and sand the stairwell walls.

Here are a few things I've realized about home improvement jobs. One has to be really patient and do things perfectly to get the job done right. I am neither patient nor do I care about perfection; that would explain the so-so paint job in the kitchen. But this time I let my husband take the home improvement lead. He sanded while I had the glorious job of holding the vacuum. An hour later, it's 90% done (batteries died on the orbital sander and are recharging).

Even though I didn't do all the work, I have been reading up on Internet home improvement sites so that as I move along this semester, I can learn and tackle as many jobs as I can.

The first great site is "Hometime" by the PBS home improvement gurus. What's great about this site is not only the written text, but the buried videos and purchase lists that come along right on the main page. Talk about navigation ease. In addition, the Do-It-Yourselfers have great tips on painting our tricky stairwell. What's nice is that you can also view videos on this site, or if you have cable just turn on your trusty DirectTV and watch shows like "DIY to the Rescue" and "Sweat Equity" because really, there are two fundamental reasons to do these renovations: enjoyment of having a nice home, and resale value.

References Cited

DIY Network. (2008). Home Page. Retrieved April 1, 2008, from http://www.diynetwork.com/diy/tv

Hometime. (2008). Drywall. Retrieved March 30, 2008, from http://www.hometime.com/Howto/projects/drywall/drwl_8.htm