This is not the sexiest or most glamorous or most exciting home improvement project, but it was lightning quick, really easy, and should make a nice difference in our utility use.

The basic gist is this: the average showerhead and sink aerator is set to a fairly high gallons-per-minute, or GPM, rate because energy used to be cheap and the ideal was to cover yourself (and/or your dishes) in as much hot water as possible while cleaning. Think those rain shower things. Which is all well and good if you don’t care about the cost of the water and the cost to heat that water, and then overall world conservation problems regarding water and energy resources.

But I care, because I hate paying more for bills than I have to, and I live in Vermont, and climate change and world resources and all that stuff is a Big Deal here. I mean, we’re going to mandatory composting of household food waste in 2016, so.

Previously, I had already done our showerheads, which was an easy thing to do. Last weekend, I tackled the three sinks in the house: kitchen and two bathrooms. Some of the aerators didn’t have info on them but the one I removed from the upstairs bathroom was marked as 2GPM. I replaced it with a 0.5GPM aerator, so I cut both water use and energy use in 1/4 by replacing it!

Here’s the step by step of the process. I used these aerators from Niagara; they cost about $1 apiece, which seems insanely inexpensive to me! They should pay themselves off very quickly.

The whole process took 10 minutes start to finish, and that’s partly because I was photographing. So let’s say for 7:30 minutes and $1, you can cut your energy use in one faucet by up to 75%.

On a more cheerful note than our insulation nightmare: the transformation of one of our back bedrooms into a library!

We have four bedrooms. We do not need four bedrooms, nor will we ever, probably. (8 weeks of marriage and the “so, when are the kids coming?” jokes started at the reception, to which my standard answer has been “ALL THE DOGS!”) We do plan to have large gatherings of friends for hiking and ski weekends, so we were not wild about completely losing that fourth bedroom (by, say, turning it into a master bathroom).

So! Library it is, which will leave the floor open for an air mattress, and we got one of those uber-expensive super-fancy ones for the wedding, like you are practically on a real mattress and it keeps itself inflated. Which should be just fine on occasions when we are truly full to the gills.

Previously, it was what we called the Lighthouse Room, for, well, obvious reasons.

So, Step 1: remove wallpaper. This went REALLY EASILY. After all the awfulness of the master bedroom, this was a joy to do. Then I scrubbed the walls and the whole “use the appropriate wallpaper paste wash” actually worked, which tells you just how bad that master bedroom was.

Step 2: holy mackerel was there a lot of patching in this room, and I even found spots I missed after I painted and they are just going to have to stay there, good grief.

Step 3: priming with Kilz oil-based primer just in case we missed any wallpaper paste.

Step 4: paint! We went with Sherwin Williams “Worldly Gray” which does not photograph terribly well but is a nice soothing and neutral sort of sandy gray. I wish maybe it had been a little more blue, but I am by no means unhappy with the color.

Step 5: goodbye rug! *happy sigh* Then a long vacuum, followed by a thorough mopping with Old English oil

Step 6: bookshelves! These are IKEA’s Ivar shelving system with a light white stain applied to plain pine. They were fine in previous apartments but now that they are in this much nicer room, they are sorely lacking. So they will be upgraded eventually. For now, they are serving their purpose.

Step 7, still in process: unpacking the books, whew.

Still needed: new curtains, new rug, and getting the radiator sandblasted and repainted. None of those things are a crisis, though. For now, I’m really, really excited to get all my books unpacked, put the old curtains back up & one of our extra rugs on the floor and have a proper room. I think I will also move my sewing table + sewing machine in, and strongly consider storing my extra yarn in that closet, along with my file cabinets to free up space in my office.

Really, this story should start with the energy audit. Vermont is Very Serious about energy efficiency, green building, etc., and there is a statewide agency called Efficiency Vermont that sponsors rebates, tax breaks, and all sorts of programs to promote energy savings.

So, soon after we bought our house, in May, we scheduled an energy audit. Which was…by turns interesting and depressing. We learned that our house leaks air like a sieve and has no insulation. None. ZERO. When they did thermal readings of our walls, the studs showed up as “insulating.” We had a hunch that was the case but did not know for sure.

The company we worked with to do the energy audit had a series of proposals to address all of the energy concerns which totaled $35,000 in costs. Yep. They also recommended basically rendering our walk-up attic unusable by blowing in cellulose to a remarkable depth in order to insulate it. We were very firmly against that, and back and forth and back and forth to get a workable plan finally landed us with the outline of tearing up the attic floor, then spray foaming, then adding 2″ of rigid foam above that, then putting down a new attic floor. Which would be a PITA, but would satisfy state requirements for energy renovations (which require fire safety + certain R-values depending on where the project is in the house).

Then when we did the electrical we discovered how unbelievably difficult the attic floor is to pull up, and we started thinking that if we insulated at the floor, we would basically discount the idea of ever finishing the attic. Which was not in our plans, but we felt was an important part of the resale value. I started shopping around for a different contractor to insulate the roofdeck, aka the attic ceiling and walls. I was primarily looking for more creative flexibility and a better price. I found both and in August, we scheduled the work to start October 5.

At 10pm on October 4, I got an email saying they were delayed and would not be there that day, maybe the next day? Then they weren’t there. Then the next day, and the next, and then I had to go out of town and wouldn’t be there to get the dog to daycare & lock up the cat & let the contractors in, and then there were more delays. Most of them without any advance warning: so I’d take the dog to daycare and wait, and wait, and wait. Progressively getting more pissed off.

Then, the owner of the company showed up, after I had left a work meeting to wait for him for 2 hours, and told me that we needed to do more prep work. I had specifically asked him about whether these pieces of wood needed to be removed three weeks previously, and he had dodged the question. So here he was, telling me unless these wooden soffit blocks were removed they would not start the next day. I was at the height of my recent plague, possibly feverish, definitely miserable, but I went out, bought a sawsall, and removed every last damn one in a very long two hour project.

The next day, they started. They got two and a half days of work in, and then did not show up the fourth day. I called. They said oh, we’ll be there at 10 am. I went to work. I left work. I waited. I called. They said oh, we’re not coming today, can we come tomorrow, Saturday? We were expecting 10 people for the weekend, but I wanted the work to keep going. So I said yes and we danced around it and it sucked, especially the last hour when everyone had to stay in our living room to be out of the way of the contractor, especially the dogs, who I did not want snuffling or tracking around the 8 million teensy pieces of foam flecks that get everywhere during the process.

Then Monday, they were supposed to come by to finish, cutting the foam away from the joists of the attic. They showed up at 1:50 pm and thank God finished that day. I sent an email to Efficiency Vermont as well as the company listing my grievances and their bullshitting ways, got a sleazy and only vaguely apologetic response from the owner of the company. In particular, I pointed out that we had spent over $100 sending the dog to daycare on days when they had not shown up, and they had failed repeatedly to communicate in a professional fashion. I’m still trying for some overall reduction on the bill, because they were a freaking nightmare to work with. I really, really regret not going with the original company who did the audit; they may have been a little pedantic but they were highly communicative and professional throughout. Live and learn, I guess.

So, now we have an insulated attic. Part One of the project is done; part two will happen soon-ish, in which we need to put 5/8″ sheetrock over the exposed insulation and tape and mud the seams in order to seal off the insulation as a possible fire hazard. I’m working on finding someone to do that right now. Originally we were going to do it, but I am 110% done, so, hiring someone.

All that feels like a very short way to sum up what has been the most frustrating and most expensive project we’ve done on the house to date. That said – I’m really glad we did it, and the house is holding heat noticeably better now. I have become an obsessive checker of our Nest thermostat via my phone, and there is a clear and easily noticeable difference of several degrees in how the house heats up and then how slowly that heat fades.

When we rewired the house, we had to replace all of our old smoke & CO detectors in order to bring them up to code. There were, approximately, 8 million of the things throughout the house, either battery-powered or plugged in or you name it, of at least three different vintages.

So we yanked them all out and I piled them up to donate (those that were still up to code just not the right kind for our house because code is complicated), and ordered new ones. The electrician had brought the regular wired-in kind, but I took the plunge and bought three of the new Nest Protect smoke & CO detectors. They talk to each other via wifi, and they talk to my phone, and lo, they are awesome.

That is a really long way of saying that when Efficiency Vermont started a new statewide study of Nest thermostats, offering to give them to homeowners for free as long as we met a few basic requirements (check) and allowed access to our utilities consumption for the next two years (check), I jumped on board.

I installed it that night, I was so excited. Here is a step by step.

Previously, on part one: I sent two of my old steam radiators out to get sandblasted.

They came back, of course, two days before we had to leave for the wedding. I had dire warnings from everyone not to let them sit around – to get them painted ASAP, since they were cast iron and would rust immediately. Of course, it was damp and rainy outside. Sigh.

So I drove the truck the whole half-mile to the sandblaster and picked them up and got a few more pictures of the place at the same time. Typically, they sandblast tombstones. (The city we moved to bills itself as the “granite center of the world” and has several major quarries and dozens of granite sheds for all manner of granite products.)

Worth every penny. I am so besotted with them. I don’t want to say I can’t wait for heating season, because wow am I not looking forward to those bills, but still, siiiiiiiiiigh. ❤

Radiators! We have a lot of ’em.

Our house is heated by steam, a slightly tricky but ultimately rewarding heating system. It is more efficient than many other older heating systems, and it offers a comforting, humid warmth rather than the dry, on & off of forced air. It also makes those wonderful popping sounds when it’s starting up.

However: all of the radiators in the house (there are eight in total) were painted to match their rooms. That paint is either a) ugly or b) peeling badly. In some cases, both!

I agonized for quite a while over what to do and how to do it. I talked to a ton of people, called places for quotes, researched online, and fretted. I thought about just getting radiator covers made – maybe something custom, to match the woodwork in the rooms. I thought about doing it myself, in place.

Eventually, our electrician recommended a place that was just half an hour around the corner from us. She said they sandblasted her radiators right down to the cast iron for a very reasonable price.

So that was the plan. Our radiators are older, but they have no fancy Victorian filigree on them that might be damaged by sandblasting. While my ideal would have been to have them powdercoated, I couldn’t find anyone who would do that locally, and I wasn’t convinced it would be as cost-effective for its supposed superiority.

Step 1: Get the radiators out of the house.

The guy who took charge of them for us was amazed at both the really ugly paint and how much of it there was. He shook his head in awe, and told us that they would be dramatically more efficient once he sandblasted them. Huzzah!

So now we await part 2: re-painting.

Whew. Previously in the master bedroom, removing the damn wallpaper took forever.

It took us nearly 3 months, but I am happy to say that the master bedroom is done.

Once we got the wallpaper down, removing the wallpaper paste was agonizingly slow. It was two steps forward and 1.99999 steps back. Over and over, as we tried different things. Finally? Sanding it. Not my first choice, given the age of the house and who-knew-what underneath the wallpaper, but we used respirators, cleaned religiously, and pushed forward.

Then we did a coat of Kilz oil-based primer to make absolutely sure, then tested out our chosen color: Sherwin Williams Sea Salt.

SERIOUSLY, who covers that up?!

Final decorating steps: new outlet covers all around, satin nickel Art Deco inspired metal covers that were expensive at $5 each but I just loved.

For reference, just so you can see how far we went, here’s the original room.

Then we moved our furniture in.

And huzzah!

The last remaining thing to be done is to haul the radiator away to get sandblasted and then re-painted. Right now, it is pink, and filthy, and chipping badly. I intend to repaint it a metallic silver color, roughly what it would have been originally, which will match any color scheme we decide on in the future. The radiator has been disconnected, and I have the place lined up to sandblast it, we just have to find the time and the energy to haul the thing out.

So, so, SO glad this is done, though, and it gives me hope for other future rooms!

When we bought the house, there was one big, glaring red flag up front: the electrical.

The owners estimated that 75% of the house was knob & tube, an outdated and potentially dangerous electrical system. None of it had been touched since the house was built in 1928. They supplied a quote from their electrician that said that rewiring the house would cost about $18,000.

Yikes. We hemmed and hawed and talked it through, then got two more quotes from different electricians, and when we made our offer, we basically offered their selling price minus the electrical work. After some negotiation, it worked out!

Next hurdle: homeowner’s insurance. In order to get a policy, we had to prove to them that we would rewire the electrical system within a reasonable amount of time. We scheduled the electrician and provided the date to our insurance company.

The electrician arrived on Monday morning at 8:30 am, and we got started.

We picked the electrician based on a couple of things: she’s a woman, has a truly stellar reputation, was smart, honest, and fun to work with in the quoting process, and she loves to teach. She told us that if we could supply some extra labor for the grunt work, our quote would probably even come down, and she would be happy to show us how to do basic work that we didn’t need a license for.

My father came up from Boston –  he’s very handy and actually has a master’s degree in electrical engineering. I took the week off to provide extra background muscle, and away we went!

On Monday morning, we figured out how to get wires up to the attic. This involved holes in the wall to determine whether the plumbing stack would provide a good “chase” – a clear way upstairs with enough room for many wires.

Monday afternoon, Tuesday all day, and Wednesday morning, we did the attic and second floor.

This is going to be a very short post that does not properly encapsulate the agony of trying to find this damn couch.

My fiances parents are the loveliest people ever (I seriously hit the in-law jackpot.) Even after doing so much for us already, they wanted to get us a housewarming gift. A few conversations later and we decided on a nice couch.

Fiance had his heart set on sectional, which is…not my style. However, he also wants to keep all the wall-to-wall carpeting in the house, because he hates hardwood floors, because he has no soul. So I figured: he can have a sectional, and I will win my hardwood floors.

However. Our living room, while quite spacious, is not a modern living room. It is a 1928 living room, and in 1928, they did not envision monstrous sectionals. We measured the walls, and we started visiting furniture stores. And more furniture stores. And mooooooore furniture stores.

First of all, 90% of all of them were too big for the space. Another 5% were out of the budget. Of the remaining 5%, 4% were ugly.

Finally, we arrived at a couch we both liked, with the measurements we needed, and we ordered it. And then we waited. I’ve never bought grown up furniture before, so it was a revelation to me that you couldn’t just go get it from the warehouse. (Okay, I honestly can’t remember the last piece of furniture I bought new that wasn’t IKEA.)

Friday, the new couch arrived!