Calculating my home’s energy inputs and outputs.

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 …

How we got our mortgage. Or: Why so many people bought houses they couldn’t afford.

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 …

How to have a house built with your sanity intact.

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 …

Our house is insulated with newspapers.

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 …