Here are things we want to do to reduce the environmental impact of whatever house we wind up buying.
- Add solar panels
- Plant a vegetable garden and fruit trees
- Insulate, insulate, insulate
- Install weatherstripping
- Recycle
- Compost
- Set up cisterns for water catchment
- Put in an attic fan
- Build a windmill (okay, a turbine) (J is Dutch) (half Dutch)
- Set up some sort of gray-water system
- Cover the windows with triple-cell honeycomb blinds
- Buy a front-loading washer
- Use a clothesline (we air-dry a lot now, but it takes up a lot of floor space inside)
- Build a water-permeable driveway
Hmm. It seems like we have more goals than that. But it’s a start.
I tell you, insulation is the best thing ever! Our house was built in 1876 and never insulated (in upstate New York! How did anyone survive the winters??). We bought the house in September and had it insulated by November. Not only did it cut our heating bills in half (versus what the previous owner used), but the house is also insulated from street noise. Definitely worth every penny!
At one point we had some plumbing repairs done, with resulting holes knocked in the wall (in our building, the holes stay open for longer than you’d imagine) and our neighbor said, “Yeah, you don’t want to get mold in the insulation.” J and I turned to each other and said, “There’s no insulation! No wonder we can’t keep a constant temperature in this place!”