Hello… Anybody Home?
Howdy, and a belated Happy New Year!
I owe you an explanation for why the frequency of new articles has dropped so steeply in the past couple months.
I’ve got a pretty good excuse: we welcomed a new kiddo into our old home a few months ago. She’s happy and healthy, and we’re enjoying slowly getting to know her. Watching a child’s unique face and personality slowly emerge out of the tiny, sleepy, squishy, more-or-less-identical-to-every-other-baby newborn phase is truly amazing. Every time.
However, in the years since the previous kid arrived, I managed to forget how difficult it is to accomplish anything in the hours between feedings and changings. I haven’t had much time to sit down and type, let alone to execute and photograph weatherization projects for you all, and certainly not in the optimal order that I’d like to present them to you.
You may be wondering: Didn’t you know this was happening when you started the website? Why would you commit to writing multiple articles per week when you knew you had a child on the way? My wife, in fact, had similar questions!
The short answer is that I think Green Old Home is a good idea. I think it needs to exist. And when the concept came to me, I wanted to bring the site into being before I lost the energy and excitement that comes with a new idea. How many times have you waited for the perfect moment to do something, only to eventually realize that the perfect moment never arrives?
A Public Service Announcement for Optimizers
The disruption of my usual routines has, in my better moments, given me a healthy dose of perspective. In particular, I’ve spent a lot less time thinking about my house and a lot more time living in it.
I spend my professional life thinking about old buildings from a technical perspective: how to keep the water out, how to keep the heat in, how to stabilize deteriorating materials and structures—and on a “meta” level, how to prioritize those repairs. And that detached, analytical perspective of an architect or engineer is what Green Old Home is intended to help you with as you navigate energy- and money-saving decisions around the house.
However, I’ll be the first to admit that this approach has tradeoffs. Given that you have a fixed amount of hours in the day, there is an opportunity cost to pursuing only the most “rational” projects. We have had many conversations in my house along the lines of:
Wife: I’d love it if you’d tile the bathroom wall today. We’ve had the tile sitting in boxes for a year.
Me: I hear you, but I’ve only got 3 hours and heating season is fast approaching. I need to finish sealing the ductwork!
But over the last few months, I’ve been prioritizing those other projects—the ones that never made it to the top of my idealized ranking. I did tile that wall. You might think this is all another way of saying that I finally listened to my wife, but it’s more than that. With the baby coming, it was time to think about all the little details that go into sleeping in shifts, being up at odd hours, and washing baby clothes and bottle parts. For example:
- We rearranged furniture to help isolate the sleeping older kids from the crying newborn.
- I oiled our hinges and doorknobs to keep them from squeaking.
- From the basement, I demolished the plaster below our staircase so that I could tighten it up from the underside and keep it from creaking and groaning on our way up and down in the middle of the night.
- We bought some used rugs at auction to help quiet our floors and warm our feet at night.
- My wife picked out secondhand light fixtures that I rewired and restored. One replaced the broken light over our kitchen sink, dramatically improving our visibility when doing dishes. The other was a table lamp for a room we’d be needing to use for nighttime feedings that previously only had a bright overhead light.
- We got a free used chest freezer from a friend (an Energy Star model, of course) that I wired up in our basement so that we had room for breastmilk and for meals we prepped in advance.
While there’s an inarguable logic to prioritizing projects that save you money—either by paying themselves off in energy savings, or in slowing or preventing future damage—I’m not sure that list of projects ever truly ends. And focusing on those exclusively means essentially never getting any of this other stuff done.
Maybe I’m the only one that needs to be reminded that there are other priorities out there. But I have a suspicion that readers of this site are inclined to be “optimizers” like me, and the reality is that there’s always more optimizing to do. It’s been great for me—and probably my marriage—to spend some time focusing on our living experience within these walls rather than on my spreadsheet of our natural gas usage.
So What’s Next for Green Old Home?
That’s all well and good, I hear you saying, but I came here to save money and energy. When can we get back to that stuff?
Well, I don’t know how long it’s going to be before I can get back to posting in-depth how-to articles. (Because I don’t know how long it’s going to be before I can get back to those projects!) But as things settle into a rhythm here at home, I plan to start posting the kind of stuff I can write while sitting with a kid on my lap.
Some articles will flesh out some of the concepts introduced in the earliest posts, for example, different types of heat transfer. Others will offer tips for living an economical life in your old home—tips that don’t involve The Great Air-Sealing Project. Finally, having another baby has reminded me that there are lots of safety issues to think about when living in an old home, particularly when you have kids, and I’m planning some articles on that subject.
I’ll look forward to getting the ball rolling again soon. Until then, wish us luck!