FOSS, govtech, and open data.
I’ve been wondering what the inputs and outputs are of my home energy usage. For some months now, I’ve used a CurrentCost Envi to track my house’s energy usage, so I know the numbers in kilowatt hours: 8,166 kWh in the past 12 months, an average of 680 kWh/month, with a low of 454 kWh …
Continue reading “Calculating my home’s energy inputs and outputs.”
Our loan officer was insistent: we’d be nuts not to get an adjustable rate mortgage. It was October of 2007. We’d met with this SunTrust loan officer—I’ll call him “Jim”—a couple of times so far, and we were moving ahead with a construction loan to be rolled into a permanent loan when our new house …
Here are a few hard-learned tips about how to deal with the procedural aspects of working with your general contractor when building a house. Let your builder pick his own subs. You might think that it’s a good idea to have that good friend of your good friend pave the driveway, or your aunt’s neighbor …
Continue reading “How to have a house built with your sanity intact.”
We’re this close to finishing building our house. It’s occupied an enormous amount of time for years now (for example, I spent six hours milling lumber from felled trees today), and while I know we’ll have a lot of work even once we move in a couple-few weeks from now, I’m looking forward to getting …
This is what the insulation in the walls of our new house looks like: It’s euphemistically referred to as “blown cellulose,” but it’s really just shredded newspaper. If we look closely, we can read some words on it. The amount of newspaper used to insulate our house is as much as we’d go through in …
For all the complaining I do about how building a house keeps me too busy to do all of the other stuff I used to have time for (and I’m not even swinging a hammer!), here’s a photo of where it’s at. The roof is on, the (unpainted) siding is on, all of the windows …
The great majority of my time in the past couple of years—and certainly the past six months—has been spent on the design and construction of our new house, which is slated for completion by the end of winter. The process has been enormously educational, and I’ve been intending to share some of what I’ve learned …