Inspected Thoughts

Home Inspectors are seen as nitpicking, so the frugal homeowner has to find ways to do the job right. Here are some tips to that end.

Home inspectors on the web seem to consistently write two types of posts: why do you need a home inspection; and look what was done wrong by this homeowner. Of the latter type, there consistently seems to be the attitude of looking down at the home handy man and his efforts to repair his own house. Ask any home inspector about their own house, and they will have to admit that another inspector would find the same problems. It comes across as a double standard.

Last week at a home inspection in the 77084 zip code, I found a house that looked beautiful, but there were many small mistakes. Either a newly minted general contractor had done all of these repairs, or it was a homeowner who knew the basics of home maintenance. I mentioned the zip code for a reason. If you know this area, then you would know that many homes here are smaller, and the residents range from working class to middle class. Every time that I am in this neighborhood, I see many do it yourself repairs. With the current economy, this trend makes sense. I grew up in a family that did many repairs or maintenance on our own, so I always have thought of doing things myself. The problem is that most of us like to take shortcuts. We use parts and tools that we have at hand. When we go to buy parts, we make do with what we find, but often this is not the proper piece.

Is hiring a service company that much better? Not always. I singled out “newly minted” professionals in the previous paragraph; however, in the last three months, I have run into a plumber who used the wrong parts on a job. He defended himself at first with the statement that the parts are correct, just mislabelled. Afterwards he stated that since the building inspector had approved his work that he does not need to correct his mistakes. An HVAC technician informed that he had the ability to carbon date soot marks to the month through a visual inspection. How does someone develop such super human powers? With another technician, I was trying to explain a problem that I noted on a unit. He had just completed the job, and he did not want anyone questioning his work. He did not actually listen to my question, and he answered by referring to another part. It turned out that a month later, another technician had to perform the same job. This man was surprised when we mentioned that this job was performed last month. He showed us the evidence that it had not been done. The problem with these service men is that they were at established companies with a long period of personal experience. If they cannot do the job correctly, there is no point in using them. A contractor should always listen to you, and they should be able to reasonably explain their work.

I had fun repairing a leak under my kitchen sink yesterday. A pipe had a small crack which caused a small drip. Even a small amount of water does a great deal of damage over time. I took apart the P-trap to discover that the pipe which had the crack was welded into another pipe. I cut it out, then I go to a big box home improvement center to buy the parts that I needed. Problem: they did not have everything I wanted to make the repair in the right way. I did what many people do; I bought what they had to make the fix. Being a home inspector, I was thinking to myself: if I am selling this house, will another inspector point out this job? I am not planning to sell, but this thought has occurred to me recently, because I have been considering what homeowners who are selling are facing. I ended up constructing the parts that I needed from what was available with the help of some marine epoxy. I could have gone to a specialty plumbing supply store, which would have been the best option, but it was out of the way. When I looked around me in this warehouse of a store, I saw a man standing in front of some fittings asking a passing employee for help. The employee only had a vague knowledge that the part he needed must be in this section. I came to his assistance, and we found the part. It struck me that the average homeowner is best served by a smaller hardware store. Much of the time, I find the precise part that I need there, and the staff frequently has a better understanding of how to do the repair, so they can offer good advice. That is my first tip: if you are not sure of the best way to fix your project, avoid the big box home improvement center. If you have a clear idea of what needs to be done, then this big boxes can be great, but I would not expect to obtain all the help that you may need in one.

Practice makes perfect in home maintenance. If you are an occasional do it yourselfer in repairing your home, the best tip that I can give you is to plan extensively before you begin any project. Going back to my plumbing project, replacing a pipe under the sink is really quite easy. However, I faced the problem that the part that I wanted was not available to me. Things go awry, and a project which should have lasted a half hour ended up lasting several hours. The job was expanded by a further problem caused by me. The food waste disposer has a gasket between the mounting flange and the basin. When I moved the disposer to fit my new pipes, I broke this gasket, so I had a new leak. I had gasket material on hand, so I made a new one. Trying to fix one item can lead to problems with another, so it is best to be prepared. I try to visualize what I need to do, and what may go wrong, so the job does not get away from me. My second tip is to take a breather to think about what you will need and what you will have to do for your project.

Even experienced people need help would be my third tip. Right now I am working in my attic. I have little space up there, so I stay in a crawl or seated position for my adventures in that realm. I am installing a radiant barrier, and to be honest, the whole process would be so much better if I had help. My son does not realize it yet, but he will be recruited during the holidays for another project that I have in mind up there. Sometimes we just need someone to look over our shoulder for a little advice, and sometimes we need a little knowledge. For the knowledge part, I think that there are several home maintenance books that suffice, and it is good to consult those before a project. Your project may entail something that you had not considered.

Thoroughly check out your work. Getting back to that house which I inspected last week, there was item that could have been a simple wiring mistake, or it could have been something more serious. A popular project for a homeowner to obtain some energy efficiency is to update their thermostat to a programmable one. This is a do-able task for most people, but you do have to make sure that you followed the steps correctly. I had difficulty with the jumper wires that were needed to make the thermostat work. These wires are about a half inch long, and they are used by the control system of the thermostat to send messages to your unit. You have to determine the set up by looking at your old thermostat, and then set the wires to the correct positions in the new one. In the case of this home, the heater never would engage. When you set the thermostat to heat, the air conditioning began. The heat did not start in any setting. My guess was that whoever installed this nice thermostat failed to look at the wiring of the old unit. Since it was installed when the weather was nice, I can imagine that either all of the settings were not tested, or if they were, the installer decided it would not be noticed. The problem now is that the old thermostat is no longer there. A service technician will now have to figure out the proper way to wire the unit.

Study up on how to do a job. In this house, there were many small mistakes evident in the repairs. Before becoming a home inspector, I think that I could very well have made many of these mistakes. We gain a bit of knowledge about how to make a repair, but we really do not understand how the system is meant to function. For example, the weepholes in a brick wall on this home were sealed. These holes let moisture from behind the wall escape, so that moisture will not damage the framing. Most of us know that pests use these holes to enter the home, so we want to block them, thus causing another problem. You could place a wire mesh in these holes. This prevents pests from entering (at least most types of pests), while allowing the moisture to escape. There are a few internet sites that can help you learn, but I think the best solution is to have a home repair manual, like the one from Reader’s Digest or Home Depot.

I one time produced a home inspection report which had every item listed as in need of repair. Many items were small issues like the weepholes. I realize that sellers may find this to be nitpicking. The biggest bone of contention is mentioning that a home built fifty years ago is not built to current standards. Next year, I will have to mark service panels (breaker boxes) as deficient if they do not have an AFCI breaker in place for the bedroom areas, because it will be required by the state of Texas. The reason is that it is a safety issue, but I can hear a seller now saying that it has been safe all of this time, so why do I need to put it down. Here is the heart of the matter: a home inspection report focuses on safety issues as well as problems with the home, but it does not require sellers to make any of these repairs. Looking at a home inspection report can be daunting, but a seller needs to discuss with the buyer what is important to them.

Those are my tips. Do you have anything to add?

A Houston home inspector looks at steps to a green home conversion

Have you had a moment of epiphany? You look at something and say, oh, yes that makes sense. I had such a revelation recently when I was in a meeting with other home inspectors. We were discussing factors that make a home green, construction methods of such homes, and the current programs that define a green home. Most of these discussions revolved around the upcoming code, the ANSI 700, which will help define many of these ideas. We were also looking at the Green Home Verifier program for home builders, which can be a good business opportunity for home inspectors. At one point, our talk dealt with the idea of the building envelope and how it effects energy use. This led to a focused consideration of attached garages.

My home has an attached garage, about half the homes in my neighborhood have this arrangement. I was inspecting a home in a subdivision where all of the houses had attached garages. It is a great convenience. The space can be converted into another room. I use one bay as a play area for the kids when the weather turns wet. However, I have seen people create family rooms from their garages, since they leave their cars outside. Storage is a big deal for many. I have at times taken jobs organizing garages for people. With the remodeling of my home, my space is filling up with old furniture that we will eventually be sending to family in Mexico. Sometimes it becomes a work area. I have a ‘64 Beetle that I am restoring in the other bay. Mainly, I think most of us use this area in our home as a catch-all for everything that cannot fit in the home proper.

When this space is being built, it is not treated like other rooms inside the walls of the building (the envelope). The attic above is not insulated. Rarely is natural light used. Then we have the doors to allow the cars to enter that also allow the cold wind to blow into that area. During a Houston summer, the garage becomes unbearably hot, because there is no air movement through it. During the winters, the garage can feel colder than the exterior, with no sun to warm the surfaces there. Yesterday morning, as I was taking the trash out, I stopped to look around the space. I had not turned on the lights. Around the side door I could see streams of light. The garage doors allowed a good deal of light to flow through. I felt the chill from the night’s near freezing temperatures linger. Now consider what is happening to your home.

Imagine a cooler that you use for your picnics. If you have placed an item from the refrigerator inside of it, and you have kept the lid closed, the interior of the cooler stays quite cool for a good while. This is the idea behind insulating your home. Super insulated homes can be heated or cooled with little energy. Now cut out a corner of this cooler. Place a cardboard box into that space. You have broken the envelope of the cooler, but you do have a wall between the cooler area inside the chest. Warm air in the cardboard box does eventually move into the chest, which causes more energy to maintain the temperature in the cooler. This is the same principle behind the attached garage breaking into your envelope.

Taking steps to prevent this energy loss is not too difficult. If your house is like mine, you will have attic space above this space. Insulate this area like you would the other areas of your home. My favorite insulation for a do it yourself project is batts sheathed in plastic made by Johns Manville. Loose insulation is great for certain areas, but to achieve good coverage, you need to blow it in. Other types of batts work perfectly well; however, the exposed insulation will be exposed to your skin. The batts covered in a sheath help reduce this discomfort. Covering the area in the attic is not too bad, even in a low roof like mine. The garage door presents another problem though.

There are two steps to dealing with the door. First, the easier procedure is installing a door seal around the sides of the door. This is a gasket material which can be tacked into place with nails. A lip of the seal fits against the door when closed preventing drafts. It took me about forty-five minutes to seal two doors. Here is the fun part. Like many people, I have a metal door with two foot wide panels. They are four inches deep. I do not want to add too much weight, and I am looking for a product that is readily available. I have seen insulation that would fit, but most home centers have batts that would fit in a sixteen inch stud space, which leaves eight inches to fill my bay. These are the batts that are R13 in value. Any larger than this number, and the batts are too heavy. You do not want to add much more weight, because this will cause problems with the system that allows you to open the door.

Since I wanted to have the R13, I went with batts, cutting pieces to fit into the extra space. I used wire to hold the pieces into place. If I did not want to go this route, I did have other options. There are 4×8 feet sheets of insulation that you can cut to fit into the spaces. These sheets are about an inch thick, and they equate to an R3. Do you use one of those insulating covers for your car’s front window to reduce heat? Well, that product is made for the home. It is mainly used in the attic, but placing it on garage doors gives you about an R8. It is also simple to cut, and you could glue it into place. To be honest, I think that these last two options are best for most people. They add less weight, and they are faster to install.

I am considering adding a window to this space. I like the idea of not having to turn on a light when I am just passing through this space to the side exit door, or if I am getting something that is stored there. Placing a window in the garage door would not be hard. I could cut out part of a panel to be replaced with plexiglass. Another option would be to add a window into the side door. Going through the wall takes more effort. You have to remove the exterior wall; expose the framing on the interior, so you can reframe that area for a window. Not a simple diy project. Looking at the side door, I realized that most of these doors do not have weather stripping or insulation strips around them. The peel and stick thin insulation strips are the easiest for this task.

Lastly, you may have created an insulated space, but I would still treat the walls inside your home proper which butt up to the garage as exterior walls. In a previous post about insulating to be green, I mentioned the foam insulation pieces that can be used behind outlet covers. If you just used these on the exterior walls, you may have skipped the walls adjacent to the garage. I did. The garage space is still not conditioned, so try to isolate it from the home with this action.

In all, I spent under two hundred dollars on this project for a two car garage. What will be the benefit to my energy costs? I have not exactly calculated that amount. I think that it could equal the savings that would be achieved by installing CFLs in your house. In a few years, the energy cost savings will pay for the project.

I had cut an old bookshelf in half to create two shelving units in two different parts of the house. One was sliding under a countertop in the kitchen; while the other was going up on a wall above my daughters bed. I had two problems which caused this set up to look a little unprofessional in appearance: the walls are not perfectly level; and the cabinet had rounded edges which highlighted the gap.

Most cabinets that are meant to be installed on a wall have a small lip which can be scribed so that the surface of the cabinet follows the wall. It is not really hard to do, but unless you have the skill to make the cut, something goes slightly wrong. In my case, I was taking a unit that was not meant to be used in the way that I was now intending. No wall is perfectly level, so butting my cabinet against the wall would not have worked. Measuring down from the ceiling at different points along the length of my shelf, I found that the ceiling drops down a quarter of an inch over a span of four and a half feet. This meant that there would be a quarter inch gap on one side that would stand out like a sore thumb. Here in this picture, you can see that the rounded edge of the cabinet frame with the uneveness of the wall makes for quite a gap.

By taking a quarter inch round molding, I can cover over that space. In this picture, I tacked the molding up to demonstrate how it will make for a better appearance.

Now, this trick of using molding to cover gaps or mistakes is a great way to make something look as though it belongs. Molding is sold in various lengths, sizes, and styles. I picked a simple quarter round, but I could have used any number of pieces to make that joint stand out. I also used this technique recently on my brothers home. His fascia board had pulled away from the soffit and rafters during the hurricane. I used lag bolts to pull the fascia in towards the rafters, but a small gap remained, so I used a small trim piece there to cover the small gap.

The one thing to plan when adding trim to these cabinets is your cuts for corners. I cut one length at a times, then I determine how to make the cut for the corner joint. I fit everything together before attaching it to the cabinet and wall. If you take your time, you can make it look quite professional. Small joint mistakes could be covered up with wood putty. You smooth it into the joint to make it look even, and then you paint.

I was performing a home inspection on the West side of Houston when I came across a method of creating air flow in rooms that was a bit unusual. I thought that I would share it with you as a continuation of part 3 of this series, but I am not sure that it really works too well. My simple test did not show much air going through it.

I noticed that there were a lot of return vents when walking through the rooms then in the hallway. Pictured below is two large returns in the hall, and then below that is a picture of a room. On the ceiling of the room, you will notice two vents that use a cover typical for registers. One is a register, while the other is meant to be a return.

Great, I thought. They have no ceiling fans in this house, so they are trying to get the air to flow by using ducts attached to the return plenum in each room. I noticed that one of the hall returns did not have a filter in it, and this should have been my first clue to its true purpose. I then go up into the attic. While wandering around, taking in the sights, I find two plenums above the returns in the hall ceiling, but something looked off.

I checked the duct work to see that the ducts from one return were going to the return plenum on the HVAC system, but the other plenum had ducts going to the returns in each room. I wondered if this could work. The drawing below is demonstrating what was meant to be happening.

The air goes through the returns in each room to the vent in the hallway. When the return in the hallway draws air, it is meant to suck air from this vent connected to the room returns. They could have hooked those ducts up to the plenum created for the return air since it was right there.

I took some tissue paper to the returns in the rooms to see if there was any air movement when the air conditioning came on. There may have been a little, but the tissue was not pulled by any suction, like it was at the actual return. This method may cause some air to move, but I doubt that it helps much. I would just take the fake return ducts, and attach them to the return plenum.

After turning off my air conditioning after some cool weather, I find that today was quite warm. I did not want to turn my AC back on, so I opened windows to allow the cool breezes through the home. This would have been great if my home was designed with the idea of using this passive means of cooling, but I had to make due.

Houston, it is said, would not exist without its air conditioning. We are the most heavily air conditioned city in the world, but people did live here before the advent of this mechanical means to cool themselves, so how did they do it. (Granted the first settlement here was called Germantown, and we Germans may just be a bit nuts thinking we could live here). The traditional home in Texas was the dog trot (drawing below). The rectangle in the drawing represents the roof line, which provided shade for the two rooms below. Each room had a window directly opposite. The area between the rooms was a porch. The house was situated so that the prevailing breezes blew through the porch and windows. Coupled with the shade of the roof made for a cool spot to sit and work. One room was the kitchen/work room while the other was the bedroom. The attic may have contained beds, but it was also frequently used for attics. The air flow through the home was good. Another feature of later homes was to increase the height of a room. Since heat rises, many ceilings in older homes were much higher than our current homes allowing the summer heat to rise above the living area.

Modern home design was freed from this reliance on placing the home on sight to allow air to flow smoothly through it by air conditioning. In the drawing below, you see a section of my home. The house is not situated to catch the breezes, and the window placement does not prove conducive to allowing air to flow through all of the rooms. I do open my windows, but an entirely passive arrangement is not possible. Let me explain the term passive here: if I do not need mechanical means (like a ceiling fan or air conditioner to cool my home), then I can cool it without any energy; that is what I mean by passive. My solution would be to create window spaces to catch the breezes, but to be honest this is not possible in my home’s design. I do open the windows, but then I rely on ceiling fans set on low to help move the air about.

Consider your home. Can you add windows to catch the breezes? If not, ceiling fans coupled with open windows can be an alternative for most modern home designs. This is the most practical solution when considering the design of most homes from the fifties to the present. I will do one more post on this topic, where I will indulge in a bit of fantasy about how we could possibly improve upon on our home’s design, for little cost.

My wife and I are expecting our third child to arrive any day now. We have been busy rearranging one bedroom to meet the needs of our youngest (a two year old girl, and the new baby, who will also be a girl). This involved redoing my teenage son’s room too. We were not planning on three children when we bought our home, so we had not considered how the space would be used in such an event. We picked a 1700 sq ft home because it had various aspects we liked (one being that smaller homes take less to cool and heat).

I have known people to purchase larger homes for growing families, and this may be one reason why home sizes have been increasing in the United States, but with this idea of the New Frugality, we may see people devise ways to make better use of smaller spaces. In the room, we had two large bookshelves. Books are stuffed all around the house, and loosing two bookcases meant finding homes for these volumes. In the room, we also needed storage areas for toys or other items for two young girls.

My wife and I made our plans by carefully drawing rooms to scale, and playing with pieces that represented furniture. This is great when figuring if there is enough space, but you can easily forget that rooms are three dimensional. I looked at the walls to realize that there was a good deal of unused space up above other pieces of furniture. I cut my bookcases in half to have them attached to the ceiling. The lowest shelves can be reached by my daughter, while the upper shelves store things not needed all of the time.

I have often used wall space to store things. My collection of musical instruments hang from walls as if they were pieces of art. Guests are often surprised when I start pulling them down to let the children play with them, because they think that they only are for looking at. It is nice to see the instruments, instead of having them hidden away in a closet, and now people use them. You may consider storing things on your wall.

As an afterthought, I should mention my wife’s solution to a storage problem. She created a little hanging system behind the door of the bedroom for various objects. When the door is open, no one sees this, so it helps make the room feel uncluttered, but my daughter knows that her purses and things are there to play with, so she closes the door to her room to access them.

We determine comfort not by temperature, but by air flow. I wrote a post for Homescape that makes a perfect fit into this series (and I am sorry for not working on these posts recently, too much to do right now). I am going to send you there to read, instead of repeating it here. The link is Keeping Your Home Comfortable.

I wanted to add to what I wrote there by providing some drawings to illustrate my intent, but they did not scan well, and I tried experimenting with Gimpshop to see if I could improve them. Here are the two drawings which may come out well. The second illustration is on a topic not mentioned in the original post: controlling air flow into different parts of your home with diverters. Your air conditioning system is blowing out air at the same pressure to all of the ducts from the plenum to your registers. A register closer to the unit will dump the air faster into the room, so more air can be excepted into the duct. This makes rooms closer to the plenum more comfortable. Rooms further away do not obtain the same amount of air, since more has to be pumped into the duct. To correct this, you could have doors to the ducts which control the amount of air flowing in the duct. Less air for closer rooms, more air for ones farther away. In this way, all of the rooms will cool or heat at the same rate, so the system will not shut off before the entire house has been cooled or heated. Frequently, people will set the temperature hotter or cooler just to have those farther rooms reach a comfortable temperature. The basic idea of creating these restrictions in the plenum is simple, and a homeowner could install them, but the adjustments are best handled by an HVAC professional.

I wish that I had my camera on a recent home inspection to show you how badly some of our homes are insulated. This home was in the process of being remodeled, so the interior wall coverings had been removed to expose the wood frame and the sheathing for the exterior wall. There was no insulation in these cavities created by the studs. The home was built in the sixties, and there was a construction paper in place, but this set up does allow heat and air to move through the wall.

In order to make our air conditioning units more effective, we have to control what air is being conditioned, and where that air is going. The ultimate solution is to fill those spaces with insulation, and you will find companies which specialize in this process. It involves cutting holes in your walls to access the cavity to blow in insulation. Then the holes have to be repaired so you do not see a hole every sixteen inches. A homeowner may be able to rent this type of blower, and you can definitely by the insulation, but making so many wall repairs may not look good. My solution for the do it yourselfer would be to cut the holes at the top of the wall to blow the insulation down, then placing crown molding in the room to cover those holes. The one problem with this method could be that fireblocks were put into place, which would mean that some spaces would not be insulated. (You would have to run a wire down your holes to see if the space goes all the way down to the floor.

For most of us this may not be the most affordable option, so let us look at steps we can take which helps us accomplish a tight seal for our home. First look at your window frames on the interior where they meet the sheetrock (or other internal wall covering). During my home inspections, I find many spaces between these two elements. My own home had such a gap. One winter I felt a cold breeze from the window area, when I looked up I saw the gap. This was a simple fix. I bought a silicone caulk for a window. Around windows and doors, you may find gaps too. There is a foam insulation which has one side with an adhesive, so it can be stuck into place. The only problem that I have found with this material is you need to purchase the right size for your door or window. Too big will prevent you from closing the opening, while too small does not work.

A product that I just recently came across was foam insulation for outlet covers. At first, I thought this is just a gimmick; however, when I thought about air flow through a wall, I changed my mind. Think of a brick veneer on a home. At the base there will be weepholes that allow moisture to drain out from the wall (there is a one inch gap between the brick and the sheathing attached to the framing. Air could flow into these holes, and it could make its way to that uninsulated cavity. Your light switch or plug outlet is an opening where that air could flow through. For that reason, I decided to install these foam pieces on my outlet covers. I admit that you may not experience significant heat loss through a cover, but the tighter the home, the less work for your air conditioning system.

There are some spots you may not consider when looking at energy loss. Here in Texas, fireplaces are not commonly used, but I find dampers open during my home inspections. You are sending conditioned air right out of the house. Doors or windows which do not properly close leave gaps too. Rehanging a door or adjusting a window may be needed. Cracks in your exterior wall veneer. These cracks allow rain to come into the walls causing damage, but otherwise you face the same idea as the weepholes mentioned above. There are many styles of caulk or other means to seal these cracks. Along the lines of cracks are expansion joints or wall joints. I find that after five years the caulk in expansion joints need to be redone. I have even found wall joints and expansion joints that never had caulk.

Just take a walk around your home to consider each opening in the wall from the obvious (doors and windows) to the not so obvious (outlet covers). You may find quite a few spots to work on. Lastly you should turn your attention to the attic. You should have at least six inches of insulation in your attic over all living quarters. During my home inspections, I try to crawl through most of the attic to see what is going on. I frequently find that insulation is great around the attic opening, but further away it is non-existent. My favorite insulation right now are the batts which come in a plastic sheath. These are the easiest for a homeowner to handle. If you have little insulation, go with a high R-number. These numbers represent how easy it is for heat to pass through it, so the higher the number indicates that heat has a harder time. What I did in my home had to do with cost. I installed an R-32, because that is what I could afford at the time. Later, I bought batts of R-13 to place over the previous ones. This gives me an R-45 which is pretty good.

Before you move onto any other projects, insulating your home should be the first priority. A new air conditioning unit can be great, but it still would be useless if you have not dealt with tightening the seal of your home.

Oh the joys of heating and cooling our homes. Each month we are reminded of how much our utilities cost, and we begin to think of something like solar power to reduce that expense. Look through magazines which touch upon the subject, and you will see some family living happily not having to pay for electricity. We all can dream, but is this realistic for someone in an older home?

Do our homes need conditioned air? When my son and I jump in the car to travel around the back roads of Texas, I stop at as many historic homes that I can find. The joke is that Houston would not exist without air conditioning, but people did live here before the advent of a heating and cooling system. By incorporating design elements which encouraged air flow from breezes through the home and taking advantage of various shading features, people could live reasonably comfortably (as Jimmy Carter suggested they did have to wear sweaters).

Can we take advantage of these features on our current homes? Many of the homes which I inspect were built between the fifties to the nineties when builders did not consider many aspects of saving energy. Even after the energy crisis of the seventies, we did not make some simple choices in our homes which would allow for going without power. We did begin to look at ways to improve efficiency, but I noticed that this trend has generally been used in homes being built in the last ten years.

In most of our homes, we have to look at improving the efficiency of our home by tightening the seal. Preventing air flow from the outside in and inside out is the first step to lessening the work load of our air conditioning system. Once we are not sending our conditioned air out into the world, the units will save on power usage. Then we may look at how to use passive systems so we are not using any power at all.

My next post we deal with how to tighten the envelope of an already existing home affordably. After that, we can look at what one hundred year old homes could teach us about not being reliant on power. Finally, we can take a look at how to better use the power we need to make our homes feel better.

The seller had put in new carpets the previous year. The buyer decided that they wanted wood floors. A perfectly good carpet was going to be set out for heavy trash. Knowing a home which was in need of new carpet because of storm damage, I asked the buyer (a friend of my wife) if I could take the carpet. I would prepare the floor, so they could have no issues installing a new floor. They agreed. Driving through the neighborhood, I saw many homes which were being remodeled, and I wondered how many items could be saved for other homes.

Before considering tearing out your cabinets and floor coverings, consider that it is not very green to throw out items for the dump. For me, going green does not mean replacing items which are perfectly good with a products which is considered more ecological sound, just to fill the dump with older stuff. The first step in converting your home is thinking about what will happen to those items removed from the house. Salvage yards or Habitat for Humanity may need the item, or it could be someone you know.

The next step is to consider what do you need to remove. A neighbor of mine created a wonderful looking new kitchen, but much of it was not new. The appliances were working fine, and the cabinets were in good shape. She fixed the broken knobs, and she refinished the cabinets, but the kitchen really looked new because of a new countertop and new sink. By careful planning, you can have a new kitchen at a lower cost than a totally new kitchen. Many parts for standard equipment can be found at home improvement centers.

Could it be that a “new” used item be right for your home? Like the carpet above, remodelling projects may offer you an item that you need at a lower cost. However, you may find what you need at a salvage center. With a little sweat equity, doors or cabinets from a yard can be beautiful additions to your home. When wanting a new green product, research its claims to being green. So many firms are making claims that their products are better for the environment, but in reality, many claims have not been verified. Take a cautious eye when buying a green product.

Evaluate your project, and make decisions about what you can reuse, or how (or if) what is being removed could be reused.