I’m here to shake the pompoms for vinegar as a utility item. If you are concerned about chemicals in the house (and I’m not even thinking about some little person getting their hands on oven cleaner out from underneath the sink), then Aunt Toby is here today to tell you that you all you need to clean stuff in your home is baking soda (another topic for another time) and vinegar.

And I’m not even going to tell you that you should be using one vs. another. I’ve used cider and white vinegars to clean with and they really are the same. Same strength, same result. Some uses I’ve put vinegar to which have worked amazingly:

Toilets, bathtubs, showers: We live in a hard water state. Stains the toilets, holds that nasty detergent/calcium deposits on the floors and doors of showers, etc. Vinegar, because it is acid, dissolves calcium (remember earth science and the whole thing with stalactites and stalagmites – same deal).
How to clean a toilet: You’ll need 1-2 gallons of vinegar for this, so buy the cheapest jugs of the stuff you can find. You’ll also need a bunch of paper towels. Do this when it is NOT freezing outside because you will want to open all the windows (it’s just that the smell will make you go bald, ok). Empty out the toilet. Yes, it’s gross. Use a yogurt container or something else that you will not feel guilty about throwing away to empty out the last bits at the bottom (yes, the last bits. OK?). Put a gallon of vinegar in the toilet bowl. Put paper towels all around the toilet bowl so that the surface above the vinegar to the top of the bowl is covered. Carefully pour more vinegar into the bowl so that the paper towels wick up the vinegar. Make sure the paper towels are clinging to the sides of the bowl. Close the lid of the toilet, close the bathroom door. If you have family members (ahem, teenaged boys) who would not think about using the bathroom while this operation is going on, take something like masking tape and put a big slug across the door, like crime scene tape and a sign: “Bathroom out of order” or something like that. Go do something else elsewhere for 30 minutes. Then come back, take out the paper towels and throw those away and using a toilet bowl brush (or if you are brave and have lost your sense of smell by this time, 3M ™ pads work great for this, scrub the inside of the toilet. Clean as a whistle. This even works on those nasty blue stains in the bottom.

It’s harder to perform the same trick on tubs, but you can dilute vinegar and scrub the tub and showers with that – 1/2 cup in a couple of gallons of water will do the trick.

DO NOT, I REPEAT, DO NOT MIX VINEGAR WITH ANY COMMERCIAL CLEANING PRODUCT (or ammonia or chlorine bleach or anything like that), THINKING THAT SOMEHOW YOU WILL PRODUCE SOME SORT OF SUPER-CLEANER. My mom tried that, and we found her unconscious on the kitchen floor. vinegar and water is great. Period.

Cleaning stained aluminum pots and pans: I love my heavy cast aluminum pots. They will outlive me, but sometimes you end up with stains on them or you burn something in them (yes, yes, I know) and you feel they are ruined. Au contraire, mes amis. Just take a half cup of vinegar, put in the pot, put more water in the pot, put on the lid and put on to simmer for 30 minutes (and yes, open the damn windows…). Stains gone.

Want to clean dishes and glassware and don’t want to use ammonia (and you shouldn’t you know) – put a little vinegar into the rinse water (takes the spots off if you live, as we do, in hard water country). Even if you don’t rinse it enough, no one will be poisoned by it. Little ones might end up making a face such as the one on the young lady above, but it is not poisonous, won’t freak up the environment or melt your pipes.

Great stuff. And oh yeah..it’s great for a lot of cooking, too, but that’s another topic for another time.

I hate to tell you this but with the best will in the world, sometimes power outages can last for days. In some cases (like, during an ice storm such as the North East had in 1996), we’re talking WEEKS. And I realize that right now is not perhaps the most auspicious time to talk about this…but never let it be said that Aunt Toby would not take the opportunity to put something out there, especially since Accuweather is predicting another major snow storm (this time for the Northeast) as of this coming Wednesday.

I’ve talked about ‘being prepared’ here.

Let’s talk about some real down on the ground issues:
1) Stay Put. If you live in an area where the climate has heretofore not been exactly snowy, the whole issue of having road crews and equipment might now becomes extremely important. Because if nothing is moving, that means services such as ambulance, fire and police are also not moving too quickly either. Aunt Toby cannot be too enthusiastic in making this statement: Don’t do anything stupid.
And stupid includes things such as: shoveling snow when you have high blood pressure or other medical issues. Stupid also includes things such as worrying that your roof has too much snow load and climbing up ladders to go check…or climbing up on your roof to shovel it off (if you live in Watertown, Oswego or on the Tug Hill Plateau, however, you can sort of ignore this message because so much snow comes down there that if you do shovel your roof and fall off, you will be falling only about 5 feet and can then crawl into a second story window). Stupid also includes doing things like dragging your gas or charcoal grill into the house and cooking with it in the house – can we all say ‘carbon monoxide poisoning’? Knew you could.

2) Shoveling. The Inuit supposedly have a zillion words for different sorts for snow. Aunt Toby’s words for this snow are: Damn Heavy.
People who are not used to shoveling snow do not understand just how much sheer physical labor is involved. We had a next door neighbor who had heart attacks two years in a row doing snow removal in his driveway. With a snow-blower. That’s right – pushing a snow blower through heavy wet snow is damned hard work too. So, if you have issues, call for help. If you don’t but are not used to heavy physical labor (and that is 98% of us since we are all chained to desks with computers now), take it easy. Take it easy means ’shovel in short 10-minute sections, moving slowly, and wait for the snow to stop first.” It does you absolutely no good to shovel snow (unless you have a doggy that has to go out to do his business) while the storm is still going on. If there is wind, it is even worse. While you are waiting, check your yellow pages for people who plow and call for an appointment when the storm is done. If you pop a disk in your spine shoveling snow, with emergency services either extremely slow or not able to reach you at all, you will have an extremely painful and upsetting time until someone can help you. The snow will still be there when the storm ends. Trust me; it’s not going anyplace and neither are you.

3) Power outages. When there are widespread power outages from trees falling on lines (rather than just having one substation have an issue) and the weather is still bad, the major issue for the utilities is getting the crews out there to restore power SAFELY. Sometimes that means waiting for the entire storm to stop. it is not safe for line crew members up at the end of the bucket when the wind is gusting. The truck might be secured down but the bucket is at the end of an articulated arm. And there are only so many crews, so people in one part of the area might get their power restored a long time before you do.If the weather is still bad, trying to restore power might be a bad idea – more trees may come down. Depending on your utility, they may be waiting this out. Which means that you may be sitting in the dark and the cold for a while. Why is that? Well, although furnaces are actually quite simple in terms of what they really are (a metal box with fire bricks inside that burns some sort of fuel to make either hot air or hot water), the system of getting the hot air to where you want it requires either a blower (for forced hot air) or a pump (to send the hot water to radiators, baseboard, etc.). And blowers and pumps run on…right. Electricity. So, even if you could get the furnace to kick on (and they usually have an electric start of some sort), there is no way to get the blower or pump to work. If you find your family in that situation, do this:
Close off all the rooms that you can and gather everyone in one room and live there. Make sure you close the curtains as soon as the sun starts to go down and open them in the morning to get as much solar gain as you can. Bring down extra clothing, blankets, pillows, bedding and set up there. Cuddle up. If you have a fireplace with a wood stove or insert or natural gas that doesn’t depend on power, so much the better.

4) Food: Food in the freezer will stay frozen for several days; the food in the fridge part will not last that long. Eat that up first. If you have a grill – bring it as close to the house as you can (on the deck is fine) but do not bring it into the house. You can use the grill to cook with as long as your fuel lasts. Anything you can cook on a stove you can cook on a grill. If the power outage lasts longer than 3-4 days, the food in the freezer will start to defrost. Cook that up, store in a cooler outside (as long as the temperatures remain cold), and eat that up. You don’t want to leave meat in the freezer to defrost completely and go bad. If the weather improves and the power outage is still in effect, then you should check with your utility to see if and where they handing out dry ice to put into refrigerators. Pick up supplies of that and follow their directions in terms of use. Eat the food in the fridge and the freezer before you go to canned foods – those will not go bad.

5) Water: For those folks who either live in the country or live in areas where you have your own private sewer and water (read: septic system and a well), here is a hint for the future (and the future might be this coming week because supposedly we are going to get another one of these storms). Go to your local grocery store and ask if they have five gallon buckets that you can buy. If they don’t, try whatever big box home/lumber yard place you have and ask them. Get several. If you have kids and dogs, you might want to put away 6-10. Before the storm hits, clean and rinse them well. Fill with water, close up and store someplace where it will not freeze. If you lose your power, you will also lose your water, not only for drinking and cooking but also for such activities as flushing toilets. You don’t need a whole 5 gal. bucket of water to flush a toilet, but you will need a good gallon to do it with. The other thing is to tell family members NOT to flush with every toilet use. Yes, I know that has a very high ‘yuck’ factor, but only using two gallons on one flush in the morning and one flush at night is much more efficient than using one every single time. And if the power outage lasts for more than a couple of days, you will wish you still had that water to use to flush the toilets or cook with instead of having used it all up on Day One with toilet flushing.

6) Fire. If you are using candles for light or the fireplace for heat, do it safely. Keep flammable materials such as curtains and bedding away from both. Again – you don’t want to burn the house down and you don’t want anyone to get burned – emergency services are not going to be able to get to you quickly.

Stay warm, stay inside, stay safe.
(snow photo courtesy of Sage)

I recall once doing a trade show in January in Anaheim, California. It rained for several days and hovered in the high 30s. We were all extremely miserable (and I thanked myself numerous times for hauling around my wool-lined raincoat). A cotton sweater at that time and in that place would have been useless.

Why IS that? Why are plant based fibers such as cotton, flax (linen), rayon, etc. actually worthless in the cold? And why are animal based fibers such as mohair, wool, angora, etc. so useful?

The secret is at the top of the page. That is a photomicrograph of a fiber from a sheep. Those ‘plates’ along the outside are referred to as scales and they are the secret to the warmth of animal fibers because they trap and hold warm air.

We used to raise sheep and I can assure you that with even only a ½ inch of a fleece on, there is no such thing as a cold sheep. As a matter of fact, we often used to go out in the winter, locate the sheep in the snow drifts by their black noses, call them in to dinner and they would rise up, encrusted with snow and ice, leaving a completely melted spot underneath them. If we put our hands into the fleece, parting it, steam would actually escape. On the one hand, the fleece would trap the warm moist body heat of the sheep – but on the other hand, it would insulate at the outer edges, allowing the snow to remain frozen at the top – providing them with a sort of weather-proof roof.

All those scales provide lots and lots of little pockets to trap warm air and that’s what keeps you warm. That’s why the common wisdom is to dress in layers. The more layers you have, the more pockets to trap warm air.

Another factor in terms of wool is its uncanny ability to absorb moisture and still keep you warm. Sheep’s wool can absorb up to 40% of its weight in moisture. That makes wool garments warm..but also very very heavy if they get wet.

Now, back to plant based fibers. The reason that plant based fibers won’t keep you as warm as animal based ones is that the fibers themselves are totally smooth. There are no scales. On the other hand, this makes them absolutely magical in terms of warm weather garments. They breathe wonderfully, allowing body heat to escape. But if you get wet (sweaty tee shirt, anyone?), unless you are someplace where the air temperature is pretty close to your body temperature, you will feel cold and clammy – your body heat is being wicked away through the wet fabric. That is the major reason why wearing cotton denim jeans to go hiking, climbing or skiing is not a good idea. Hypothermia is NOT fun and is many times fatal.

So, given that most of us are not doing the Sir Edmond Hillary bit and are wondering more along the lines of ‘how do I lower the thermostat inside the house and still feel comfortable?”

Here are a few tips.
Moist air feels invariably warmer than dry air. No matter what your heating system (forced hot air, radiators, electric baseboard, wood stove), the hotter you make the indoor air, the lesser the capacity for that air to carry moisture. So, merely by lowering the temperature, the air will have more capacity to carry moisture and will feel a little warmer. But you have to have moisture to put into the air. Here are a few ideas:

If you have clothes drying or airing racks, do your laundry and put it out on the racks around the house, preferably where people are actually doing their activities. If you have forced hot air, putting them over or next to the grates will perform two functions: The clothing dries faster and it will put moisture in the air. If you are short on laundry, soak towels, wring out and hang those.

Put shallow pans or non-melting containers right next to hot air grates, on top of radiators or on wood stoves. Just make sure they are full of water at all times.

Cooking puts a lot of moisture into the air. Pull out a fan, put it into a doorway and use that to pull moisture into another room.

Dressing correctly always helps. There are certain clothing items that definitely give you warmth bang for the buck.
Non-cotton socks and tights. This year, Dame Fashion is smiling on women and heavy tights are in stock everywhere and worth investing in. A good base layer – look for tights and socks with acrylic and/or wool. Silk sock liners are a good addition as well and are very thin. You may have to order over the internet.

Lined clothing. A lining in anything ups the warmth factor, especially (ahem) if it’s made with some wool. In items such as dresses and skirts, look for a skirt that is flared, pleated, or gathered and has a lining (again, we are applying more fabric to the job of capturing more warmth. Pencil skirts are foxy but don’t have enough room to trap warm air). In items such as slacks or pants, look for brushed surfaces, wool, and lining. I know in men’s slacks, most of the time the lining only comes down to the knees, which is better than nothing. If you are stuck waiting on an open platform, walking to work etc., investing in some of the high tech knit fabric base layer “long johns” or silk or, ahem, wool is a good idea, as is wearing layers on top and a knee length top coat or lined raincoat. With skirts and dresses, adding a slip or petticoat does marvels.

Undershirts (aka top ‘base layers’). Wearing ANYTHING close to your body underneath the top half of your clothing makes an amazing difference. Sleeveless tanks in something other than cotton are great; silk if you are feeling luxurious. There are also finely knit merino wool base layers around. Polyester and nylon are, frankly, worthless in my opinion.

Multiple thin beats one thick. If it’s really cold, I find that wearing one huge heavy sweater just doesn’t do it. Part of the problem is that invariably, I end up someplace where it is warm enough that I need to take off the sweater but then I freeze. So, my trick is to wear a thin warm sweater (I like wool but I also like snuggly acrylic knits too. The fuzzier the better) and then a slightly heavier sweater on top. That covers everything. The DH has his own version of this – in the winter, he wears a knit vest with his wool suit. If it’s really cold or he has to spend a lot of time out of doors, he wears silk underwear and sock liners under his suit and a vest. If it’s totally brutal, he wears a thin wool pull over under his suit coat.

Shoes and boots. I realize this may sound like a ‘no, duh’ but this is another item that amazes me in terms of people’s negligence of it. I know there are a lot of people out there who do not wear shoes in the house. I also know people who go barefoot in the house. No matter what school of thought you hold, feet need to stay warm. Some people wear sneakers everywhere. Sneakers are not made to keep you warm. As a matter of fact, since they are meant to be worn while performing physical activity, they have built in means to allow warmth and moisture to escape. Even if you are inside the house, if you have cold floors, sneakers and cotton socks will not keep you warm. Better to wear slippers and wool socks than sneakers and cotton socks. (and no, I am not an agent of the Sheep Producers…) No matter where you live, unless you have radiant or copper pipes running through your floors, the floors are cold in the winter. Feet have the least amount of insulation of almost any other place on the body besides the hands. Put a good layered system between your feet and the floor: warm socks and slippers or shoes. The same goes for out of doors: Insulated boots and good warm socks. Looser boots that allow more than one layer of socks are better than tight boots – this helps the circulation in the feet. If your boots have leaks, get creative with keeping your feet warm and dry – putting your feet into plastic bags before you put on the boots does work. Take care of your boots – keep them greased up and polished.

Hands: mittens beat gloves every time but Bob Cratchet and his gloves with the ends of the fingers cut out had a good idea also. My son found that his hands got chilly when he was working at the computer at school – I made him gloves with shortened fingers. Mittens ARE more effective in terms of keeping hands warm but they are not the most elegant answer. If you want your gloves to be warmer, look for silk glove liners.

Wear a hat. I know this sounds totally Victorian, but people in the old days wore hats to bed for a reason and it was NOT to keep their perms looking nice. We lose a lot of heat through our heads. Wear a hat and not just outdoors. Sometimes, the most effective way to up the warmth and comfort factor is not to load on a sweater, it’s to put on a knit hat.
(photo at the top courtesy of Technology in Australia)

One of the things that we found very unique and intriguing when we bought Chez Siberia, lo these many years ago, was the stucco treatment on the house. It was…sparkly. We found out later that the way this was done was that after the final surface coat of the stucco was put on, the plasterers would take scoops of broken up shells, dishware, glass, etc. and throw it into the surface. It would stick there and provide surface interest, a little color and yes, it was sparkly. It was a popular stucco treatment in our area for about 10 years, from the mid-30s on and it disappeared – it was too labor intensive. But it made the house unique.

So unique as a matter of fact that over the years, the former owners had done some..mmm..shall we say…repair work to it when they had issues. Stucco is an ancient building surface – it has multiple layers and frankly, requires a solid base surface to support all the weight because most of what we’re talking about here is various grades and colors of cement.

It literally weighs a ton. Any movement or settling in the house, any infiltration of moisture that freezes and you are going to get cracks.

Big honkin’ cracks.

The former owners had used various sorts of white caulk, probably butyl, which contrasted mightily with the grey cement background (we won’t even talk about the broken up shells, dishware, glass etc.). The repairs looked awful. With all the work we were doing inside the house and the window replacement and the landscaping and so on, we were still faced with big cracks and horrible filled in cracks. We asked our contractor if he knew of any ancient plaster guys in the area who might know what to do – he reminded us that even if we could find someone who knew how to do the treatment, what is available NOW to do stucco work is totally different. We’d spend a lot of money to get a repair that would end up looking totally different than what we had.

Then we brainstormed. One of the projects in the house was that with all the new beams in the basement and first floor (and the four two-ton jacks and the cement pads, can’t forget those), we’d hoisted the center of the house 4”. And destabilized the southeast corner where the front porch rested on some pretty poor supports. The cracks there had opened up big enough to put your hand inside and we knew that we needed to get under the porch, put down some cement piers and hoist that up also, and hopefully close those cracks. At the same time, the last owner of the house had done some..mm..creative window work which frankly looked like one of those ‘Hey, I got a great deal on some odd sized windows” and we wanted to open up the porch, put in some energy efficient windows, insulate and so on.

The opening up part was the answer to our problem because it required the contractor to use a cement saw (the porch was an outside porch, so there was stucco inside AND out) to square up the holes for the windows. We had all sorts of chunks of the stucco available to us.

The DH took a sledge hammer and broke up the chunks into little chunks and cement dust and we combined that with some pretty aquarium gravel. We figured the ‘fill’ part of the job would be done with clear caulk and then we’d press the combination of cement chunks, dust and pretty colored gravel into it and on top. We knew it would not be a perfect repair, but we hoped it would do two things:

First, we were going to squeeze so much caulk into the cracks that no more moisture could get in there to make the cracks worse.
Second, the surface treatment would be enough and would match enough that to the casual drive or walk-by observer, it would not be glaring.

We could not be happier with the results.

Why not insulation? I just checked the price on that – one roll of R19, 15” wide, is $15.67.

We just did a little project as a final little ‘zip up’ for winter, and it hit me when I went to the ‘large chain building supply place because we don’t have a local hardware any more’ how cheap caulk was in terms of what we were getting versus how much insulation was going to cost if someone were going to try to insulate an attic, for example. I bought a 4-pack of silicone caulk for about $15.00 (a caulking gun was another couple of bucks but we already own those). Now, in the hands of a real pro with non-shaky hands, one tube of caulk will theoretically cover 3-4 standard (not huge floor to ceiling) sized windows. As part of our ‘just a little work in the kitchen and bathrooms that turned into gutting the entire house, putting in beams in the basement and the first floor and basically rebuilding the house while we lived in it nightmare”, we replaced 90% of the windows in the house as part of the energy saving investment. As part of that, they were all caulked on the inside and we recently went around and made sure that they were all caulked up the gazoo on the outside too. We were able to complete 15 windows with that $15 worth of caulk. We knew the doors and upstairs windows had been done, so from that aspect, we are buttoned up.

The trick to energy efficiency and plain old ordinary comfort is keeping the warm air inside and the cold air outside.

Did you know that the word ‘window’ comes from the Middle English word, ‘windeye’ meaning an opening that allowed the wind to come into a dwelling?

No kidding.

One of the first things we did when we moved to Chez Siberia was that we insulated the attic. Hugely. And in the winter, the house always felt drafty, chilly and nasty. We will not discuss the fact that there were times when people could see their breath in the kitchen and would eat meals at an Indianapolis Speedway clip so that they could jump up and run off to the livingroom where a) the sun would come in the south side of the house and b) the thermostat was located so that was always the warmest room in the house. Even with that insulation, we were damn cold.

It was the windows. We tried rope caulk. We tried putting plastic over them. It was amazing how like a ship in full sail that plastic used to look shrunk across the window, bowed out into the livingroom, reminding us just how much bone-chilling air was coming into the house. Living conditions were bleak, to say the least. No one wanted to come visit US during the winter. Sitting at a computer or watching the tube in a room like that is as close to self-induced paralysis as I can think of. First the feet start to lose feeling and it moves up from there. Uncomfortable does NOT even begin to describe it. The fights over the setting on the thermostat were amazing. A lot of energy got used. A lot of energy got wasted.

The attic insulation was basically being overwhelmed by the amount of air exchange that was taking place because of the leaks within the windows and around the windows. That’s why I say that your best ‘first dollar’ investment in terms of energy efficiency (if you don’t have enough money to replace the windows themselves) is on caulk to seal up all the leaks. If, once you’ve caulked around the 90-degree angle where the frame meets the wall inside and outside the windows, you still have infiltration (use the candle or blown out match trick to watch the direction of the smoke), THEN use plastic on the inside of the windows (you can use any form you want – the plastic window kits from the hardware store, rolls of plastic and double faced tape – your choice). If you own your residence, start saving your money for replacement windows. Even if you can only do one at a time, every time you replace the old leaky window with a new window (and new caulk!), you will achieve more insulation quality and more comfort.

While you are at it, look for more opportunities to use caulk:
Around the edges of doors
Where the bottom of the walls of your house meet the foundation
Any place where there is a hole made in a wall such as a dryer vent, a kitchen fan, etc.
Here’s a great little .pdf from Dow with a check list. It’s made for their foam based product but these are good locations for caulk as well. caulk checklist

One thing to remember at this point in the year – if you live with daytime temperatures in the 50s NOW, get this done NOW. Caulk does not adhere well or settle in temperatures lower than about 50. Go to whatever store carries silicone caulk, get it and then the next nice sunny day where the temperature gets into the 50s, “get ‘er done”. If you wait too long, it will be too late.
We made this a family project and got out two caulk guns and went at it so that everything got done while it was nice and sunny. A couple of hours work was all it took and was a great load off everyone’s mind.

The other thing to think about is if you do NOT own your residence – you rent. It is not as if you can replace the windows or put insulation in the walls. But with clear silicone caulk, you can seal around the windows on the inside of the living space. The landlord won’t know and it will add a lot of comfort in the winter.

And it’s cheap. It’s your best first investment when you don’t have the capital to do major insulation and window replacement to improve energy efficiency. And with the drafts cut down, the comfort level will go up and there is less incentive to raise the setting on the thermostat.

Works for me.
(photos courtesy of girly sin and neutral existence)

And this week, basically everything was completely finished. The paint on the walls was dry, the picture molding was installed, all the metal strips and supports had been installed on the back wall for all of the DH’s books. So, we could break out all the thrillions of boxes of books (if the DH has any sin, it is his overwhelming need to collect books. And videos and DVDs). So, here are a couple of pictures of how the room looks now. For a hint of what it looked like before, click on the link above.

As the video from the link starts in the northwest corner, that’s where I’ll start with the photographs. All of this computer and office storage was hovering in the livingroom. Since we have completely changed the livingroom into an area where it will be nice enough to entertain, the computer/office function had to go.

While we’ve been working on the house, the tv/vcr/dvd etc. and the futon were upstairs in our daughters’ old bedroom. That room is going to be turned into a sewing room/guest room, so now those items could be moved down to the den. In a pinch, with the futon unfolded, this room can be used as an overnight guest room because there is a bathroom right next door.

And, the piece de resistence — putting about 90% of the DH’s books on shelves. A good deal of this used to be in our front porch..not the best place for them at all. The DH now has his recliner and books right at hand and we have a few places to display little odd pieces of pottery etc. Happy camper, the DH is..

But frankly, for all the attractiveness factor, the big improvements in this room are the fact that it now has fiberglass insulation in the walls and it has new, energy efficient (read: non leaky and high efficiency glass) windows which replaced the old leaky wood ones that had (also leaky) aluminum storms and screens on them. This was a room that we never used unless we absolutely had to because it was cold, dark and damp. Much nicer now.

And that has not changed.

I don’t care what the economics pundits and MSNBC bozos wave around. “It’s over.” “It’s NOT over.” “Green shoots” “Turned a corner.”

I could not care less what some of these know-nothing self-interested gasbags say, actually, because I know that there are a lot of people in a world of hurt right now and a lot of them have been that way, frankly, for years. A lot of them used to be middle class and owned their own homes and had retirement. And then things happened..

Job transfers overseas. Outsourcing. And now the economy is in the crapper. For some people, their emergency happened 3-5 years ago – they lost their homes a long time ago and have been living with relatives, driving around the country looking for jobs that are no longer there, or working in places like WalMart (which is really pretty ironic given that the price pressure that companies such as WalMart put on American manufacturers combined with the changes in the laws during the Reagan Administration were the two engines that moved all those jobs out of the country overseas..but I digress).

To get back to my point: One of the things that makes what is going on right now WORSE than what happened in the Great Depression is this: In 1929, people were a lot closer, in terms of skills and knowledge to being able to provide for themselves and to being able to cope than people are now. People who lived in places such as New York City, or Chicago, or Atlanta or a lot of other places were not only within one generation of growing and raising their own food, but were also still doing things such as making and repairing their own clothing, doing their own carpentry, canning and drying food and so on.

Today? Even people who have a piece of ground that they can grow something on if they want to and need to are at a loss as to what to do and how to do it. Additionally, for the last 30 years, we’ve been encouraged to live in a ‘consume and throw away’ society fed by loose credit. That credit threw gasoline on the economic fire and we all went along for the ride, encouraging companies to produce throw-away goods, which fed the economy and the landfills.

Only now, we aren’t buying so much. The savings rate at the latest report is at 8% – a huge increase for US consumers. Doesn’t do squat for the retail sector, but for people who are concerned where their next paycheck is going to come from, socking away money is the only way they know of to have some feeling of control over what is happening.

Now, there is not a whole lot Aunt Toby can do – the president and the head of the Dept. of the Treasury have not picked up the phone to give me a call and ask MY advice. And the only way I know of to help people is to put some knowledge into people’s hands. The only question is: How to get that information into the hands of people who need it the most. If you are really hurting, how are you going to find out what you need to know?

Let’s put it this way – if you know someone who is hurting, who has lost their home and is in a shelter, who is dealing with this situation please help them to get information. Even if it is not here – there is all sorts of info out there, both at a local, regional and national/international level. And to get to it, they need to find where they can get access to it.

In our area, that is at the local public library. In some places, the state labor department has free access in their offices or in job training areas. In some local school districts, or community colleges, they have free local access for community residents.

If you want to do one thing (and you know Aunt Toby is very big on ‘doing one thing’) that will enable you to help someone who’s having trouble in this economy(and it might even be YOU), pick up the phone or go to the public library and talk to the reference librarians and ask them where free internet access is locally. At the same time, ask them if they do workshops there at the library on how to use the internet, what resources there on locally and regionally in terms of finding information on topics such as:

–Job training and apprenticeship programs
–What to do if your home is in foreclosure – any resources out there to help you stay in your house.
–Food pantries
–Programs where people can grown their own fruits and veggies – do such things exist locally?
– Clothing banks
– If you lose your housing, what programs are available to get you and your family into some sort of shelter as soon as possible.
– Free programs for your kids for the summer
– Home heating assistance (it’s summer now, but winter will be here before you know it)
– Home energy efficiency assistance (as in money and help to get your home more energy efficient, whether it’s to keep the heat out or the heat in).

And if you are finding out the answers to these questions for someone else – if you find that in your community, things are not as effective or efficient in terms of these issues, perhaps it is time for you to make some calls, let other people know what the situation is and organize to get some programs started. Yes, I know the economy is in the dumper – but I’ve got to tell you that no one wants to find out in January that there are people sleeping outdoors because they’ve lost their housing and there is no program or not enough spaces for them.

When times are good, it’s easy to hide the ‘worry gene’ – because we all think that somehow, everyone is taken care of — well, before this is over, a lot more people are NOT going to be taken care of and in order for us all to get through this, we are going to have to be a lot more generous with one another. But like the guy in the photo at the top has on his sign: What people want and need is not charity (though charity will get people through the immediate need). What people need are tool that will help them survive – in his case, it was a job. A lot of people need jobs too, but a lot of people can also make use of information right now — people know that there are things they can do for themselves and others.

But to help take care of the immediate and the long term, they need information. Help to be the conduit for that information; it’s the most charitable thing you might be able to do right now.
(photos courtesy of renny67 and merfam)

I finally came to the conclusion that no matter how much the DH truly WANTED to do rehab in the house (which needed it desperately – actually more desperately than even WE appreciated), he had ‘fear of screwing up’. So, he was great at starting…and abysmal at…continuing. Finishing was about as within his grasp as performing cold fusion on the kitchen table. The amount of money wasted on started projects was really bad.

When ‘an estate situation’ (ahem) brought me a bit of money, I did not stop, did not hesitate, did not even argue myself out of it (because we’d already decided that we wanted to stay in the house). We sat down with a contractor and talked about the house. We already knew what we were really good at – and we knew we were horrific at almost anything else.

If you want to save money on DIY – watching shows like “This Old House” is really sort of useless unless you grew up in a family where your father was a contractor, one uncle was a plumber and the other one was an electrician and you also had a finish carpenter in the family tree someplace. Unless you have spent your youth actually learning skills, performing tasks and so on, doing DIY consists of a whole lot of frustration. So it behooves you to sit down with yourself and family members (if family members are making themselves available to you) and being honest with one another and yourself. What are you really good at? And what do you suck at?

In our case, we are really good at: demolition, putting in insulation, painting and cleaning up. Even with living in the country (which in our case means that we could do electrical and plumbing if we wanted to and felt competent to), we find that it’s best to use the experts to do the really important stuff. This little video here is a visual tour of the very last room to be rehab’d at Chez Siberia. You see in it – the old leaky wood windows, the plaster work and the saw kerf made by our contractor to help us take out the plaster.

Important stuff includes: Things that will cause flood or fire, blow up the house, cause parts of the house to collapse or kill someone. Also, stuff that people actually SEE, like spackling and taping the seal on wallboard, the installation on the windows and all the trim work.

We’ve learned a couple of tricks from doing all the demolition work at Chez Siberia, which was built in 1939: the plaster work in the corners (see the video) of the walls and where the ceiling meets the walls was done on top of extruded metal lathing, which is really hell to try to pry off. We asked the contractor to run his Saws-all™ in the corners and the seams between the ceiling and the walls (see the video); at that point, we could use pry bars and a truly amazingly nasty tool that can make very short work (see the video). Believe it or not, we were able to take down all the walls in the room, get out all the nails and clean up in about an hour. Now, being that this was built in 1939, the plaster technology had already moved away from the multi-coat/wood lathe system to the first gypsum boards. These were about 18” wide (since buildings were being done with 2×4s 18” on center) and almost an inch thick, and as you can see from the video, once the DH had punched a hole in the wall and gotten his tool in, he could pretty much pull out the gypsum wall boards in rather large chunks. We threw all of that into wheel barrows outside the windows and put that next to the garage – we wanted to get everything done before we ordered the dumpster (a ‘tip’ for any UK readers; sometimes referred to as a ‘roll-off’ in other areas), which will be coming this week.

You’ll notice a couple of things in the videos – I showed the empty walls for a reason. As I mentioned, this house was built in 1939 – when we started this process two years ago, we had a lot of complaints about this house. It was cold; it was dark; it was unpleasant. There were people who did not understand why we did not just sell or use a bulldozer on it. The first room the DH and our son worked on was the kitchen, which was the coldest, darkest, most unpleasant room we had and almost immediately they discovered exactly WHY it was so chilly and unpleasant (the dark part had to do with the lack of windows and the fact that it faces the north side; the dark brown carpet and dark brown cabinets had nothing whatsoever to do with it – oh no, they did not..hehe). The entire rest of the house was built in exactly the same way and the video showing the walls after we got rid of the plaster board show it too: Right – there is nothing there. Zip. Zero. No insulation whatsoever. The entire house’s insulative quality consisted of dead air in the walls and wooden windows which a former owner had tried to improve with aluminum triple track storms and screens. Talk about your ‘triple threat’ in terms of energy savings: no insulation, old leaky windows and storms made with aluminum (which transmits the cold like nobody’s business). No wonder we could practically see our breath in the kitchen during the winter time. It WAS cold. The only thing that saved us was the fact that we had a closed in staircase between the kitchen and everything else in the house; otherwise the entire house would have been that temperature. As it was, the rest of the house was only marginally better; the livingroom on the south side, on sunny days, was a major improvement on every place else in the house.

So, the role for the DH and me, in terms of doing the DIY in this house – so that we really would save as much as we could while at the same time getting the quality appearance that we wanted, was our doing what we do best. We are not against people deciding to ‘learn by doing’ – but we felt that since we only had enough money to do it once, it’s better to invest the money in having people with the skills we did not have do the stuff that we are not competent to do. We’ve done spackling and taping – it never came out looking right. We can’t install windows properly. We didn’t try to do that. We can’t do trim work – a miter box may as well be a nuclear reactor as far as either one of us is concerned – the trim work that the contractor has done for us looks great and fits the rather strange walls that we have in several of the rooms. In an old house, sometimes you have to fiddle around with things a lot.

And that has paid off for us. This room is now ready for the trim work to be put in. It’s been insulated, wallboarded and spackled (and NO bumps or bubbles!!). We finished the painting this morning. It’s a great deal – worked well for us.
It’s great to work with someone who has a lot of experience in old houses. We had a contractor who discovered that the entire center section of the house was not supported the way it was supposed to be so that not only could we not put the ceramic tile on the kitchen floor without it cracking, but we were also in danger of losing said staircase as well (so, needless to say, some of that legacy money went into having an engineer look at the house, the basement, and Rx two beams, some cement slabs and four two-ton jacks for the basement). We also had someone who had the skills on his team to open up the staircase and move the thermostat so that the heating system in the house could be balanced — pretty much all the rooms on the first floor are extremely pleasant now. We also got someone who had the experience with old houses that he could crawl under our front porch and tell us what was absolutely necessary so that it did not fall down either.

But that doesn’t mean that you can’t work with your contractor. We saved money by doing the demolition and hauling ourselves. We saved money with painting (and by the way; the major way you can save money on painting is: buy the best quality interior latex you can get and choose…one color. We did and it saved us a boatload of money and we did not end up with cans of odd colors that don’t go with anything else. At the same time, we find that the color doesn’t look the same, depending on what side of the house the light is coming in and what time of the day it is – it’s as if we really did get four different colors of paint). Another way to save money with your contractor is to understand that they are in the business of selling you ideas and the more ideas they can sell you on, the more money they can make. So, it pays to know exactly what you want and unless the contractor can show you a much better technology or idea, you stick with it. Even with discovering all of those ‘problems’, it helps if your eyes don’t get too big for things like lighting, handles for cabinets, special systems inside cabinets, downdraft grills for islands built in the center of your kitchen and so on.

It also helps if you go into it with a budget in mind. Contractors really do understand when you tell them, “We only have xxxxx to work with; what can we get for that in terms of doing yyyyy? They will be able to tell you what they can do and what quality level they can do it at for a certain amount of money. But they do need to know if you have a firm idea of what you want to do. “A kitchen and 1.5 baths” is one thing; “work on the house” is just too amorphous to deal with. But especially if you live in a house built before 1965, however, you will have to expect to find problems, mistakes made by former owners, old technology, or totally missing technology, which may raise your budget considerably. So you might want to take the figure of the money you have, remove 1/3 in your mind and give your contractor THAT reduced figure so that when he comes to you and says, “We found a problem” you will have money set aside to deal with that.

At the same time, though, talk to your contractor about what you and your family can do. Most contractors will be more than happy to let you take care of demolition, hauling, painting, etc. – they can work up their estimate in detail and can, when you sit down with them and the detail, take items off as you divvy up the jobs.

And that way, you can get not only what you want, but also what you’ll be able to afford.

For the past few days, as anyone on the East Coast knows, it has been hot. Really hot. Hot like you wrote the word ‘hot’ on every grain of sand in Death Valley. And it’s April, so as per usual, a lot of people are just not prepared to deal with it.

And Aunt Toby is here to say, “Go with that feeling…” because guess what, my little pumpkins…it’s going to get hot again and it’s going to stay hot. It’s called ‘summer’ and the theme song is “Summer in the City”. And despite what Jim Cramer on CNBC says, the economy is STILL severely ill (I’m thinking that Swine Flu is pretty much the best description of the what happened to the economy and who caused it as I’ve seen anywhere), people are still losing their jobs, and anxiety doesn’t make us sweat any less when it gets hot. And if Aunt Toby’s readers are trying to lower their costs of daily living, it would not be a surprise because – cranking up the A/C is as common a thing for people to do now as brushing your teeth – but you may not feel like you can afford it.

We forget that there was a time when there wasn’t A/C. That was also the period when Washington, DC was a fairly sleepy place, and no one was moving around a whole lot south of the Mason Dixon Line. It doesn’t matter where you live, there are certain basic rules about staying cool, the first of which is this: Keep the inside of your living unit as cool as possible.

Keeping the hot air outside out of the living unit: There are two ways the outside can heat up the inside of the house. One is if the windows are open and the hot air replaces the cooler air inside. Another way, even if the windows are closed, is that the sun’s energy passes through the glass and heats up the air inside (the ‘closed car on a summer day’ thing).

You can tackle this issue two ways: Put something over the windows that won’t allow the sun’s energy through, such as shutters; or put something just inside the windows that won’t allow the sun’s energy to get to the air inside – these can be inside shutters, or you can use insulated curtains. (See Urban Gardening). Something else you can do that will help immensely is to cool the air just in front of the windows by throwing those areas into shade. People have used everything from planting trees (though this takes a bit to take effect), putting up trellises and planting fast growing annual or permanent vines, or installing awnings. They all perform the same function – throwing that area in front of the windows into shade. “The temperature under a medium-sized tree is at least 3 to 4 percent cooler than the air around or above the tree. In fact, well-placed trees can reduce the need for air conditioning in a home or building by as much as 30 percent.” Trees Another thing to remember is this: If you have windows on the north side of your living unit, they will have been in the shade pretty much all day. In the evening, open them up and if you have a fan, you can either pull in cool air or put it in another window facing another direction, and get some cooler airflow into the house that way. If you have an attic fan, this goes double in terms of using sources like north facing windows and/or a basement as sources of cooler air to be pulled through the living unit.

How to keep the air inside the living unit as cool as possible. There are several things that we take for granted that generate a tremendous amount of heat in a living unit – refrigerators, freezer, stoves, other appliances, computers and incandescent light bulbs. If you have not replaced incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent lights (or if you want to really invest, LEDs), you can not only save a lot of energy, but also eliminate a lot of heat by doing so. Make sure your computer(s) are totally turned off if they are not in use. If you can put your freezer and/or refrigerator in an outbuilding or a shady outdoor porch, then you are moving a huge source of heat out of your house. If you live in a house with a basement, you have an absolute ‘cool air savings bank’ down there – you can put those appliances down there, where they will stay cooler and use less energy to keep things cool and therefore throw off less heat. You can also use the cool air in a basement as a low tech source of AC; with a big enough fan in the doorway, you can move some of that cool air to the first floor.

Basements are really wonderful things. During really hot weather, my kids were known to drag their computers down to the basement and with a long phone cord (you can find really long ones at places like Radio Shack) they were able to do their work, use the internet, and still be comfortable. Our basement was many times 20 degrees cooler than the outside temperatures. My son once or twice even slept down there. That’s another thing to remember: The lower you go in a living unit, the cooler it is going to be in the summer. This goes triple if you live in any large city in the MidAtlantic or Northeast. With the buildings acting like heat sinks during the day, and as radiators at night, the coolest place to live is…in the basement. The view might not be terrific, but you will be in the coolest part of the building and below the level of all that hot brick, asphalt and cement.

Some cities, such as Chicago, are encouraging commercial buildings to put in two major items on their roofs to keep the buildings cooler and to use less energy. The first are ‘green roofs’, which not only keep a building cooler in the summer, they also keep the building warmer in the winter and provide habitat for insects and birds, reduce CO2. The second is really low tech: paint the roof white. The overwhelming majority of commercial buildings in the US are covered in a roof membrane that is…black. Can’t get more heat absorbing than that. “Painting all roofs white could nudge the Earth’s albedo from 0.29 towards 0.30. According to a very simple “zero-dimensional” model of the Earth, this would lead to a drop in global temperature of up to 1 °C, almost exactly cancelling out the global warming that has taken place since the start of the industrial revolution…” white roofs
If you own a home and have a shingle replacement in your future…get the lightest shingles you can.

OK…so you’ve done everything you can to keep the hot air OUT and the cool air IN. You’ve eliminated as many sources of appliance-generated heat inside your living unit as you can…and you are still too damned hot. What can you do?

Well, the little guy in the photo has the right idea. Laying in a tub of even just luke warm water is going to improve the evaporative quality of what is going on – you will feel cooler. The more you drink, the cooler you will also feel. If you and yours have to get down to underwear (Aunt Toby leaves it to your discretion as to where ‘the line’ is) or a loose dress, then so be it. If things get truly unbearable, the cheapest time you may have is to spend the day at the mall. In terms of eating, Aunt Toby’s favorite thing to do when the weather is hot..is to NOT cook. That’s right. Make sure there are plenty of fresh fruits, veggies, and protein sources that do not need cooking in the fridge and eat out of that – cheese, hummus, dairy products. Take a dozen eggs and hard boil them – turn some of them into deviled eggs for a treat. If you have to cook – use the grill and do it outside. You can basically do anything you can do on a stove on top of a grill, from cooking veggies to grilling a pizza. But at least all that heat is out of the living unit.

If you have small children or an elderly person living with you who are suffering from the heat, here is a low tech trick. Once you know that they are adequately hydrated (and taking any medications for things like high blood pressure, etc.), put them in the coolest part of the living unit. If you have a fan use that. Take a small plastic bag and put some ice on it and wrap that in a tea towel and have them hold it on their necks. This chills the blood just a little bit going into the brain and fools it enough that you can keep a child comfortable for quite a while that way, as long as you have enough DVDs around. Aunt Toby has used that trick successfully to bring down fevers. If you have someone who is becoming ill from the heat, call up your local health department and find out if there are any centers for AC set up so that you can transport the person there for relief.

In the meantime, remember: It’s only April now. You have a little bit of time before June…July…August…September and it might be worth it to think about what you can do NOW to reduce the amount of heat you are generating inside your living unit…and reduce the amount of heat that is hitting your windows from the outside of your living unit. Worth a thought.

Photo courtesy of sunrise.seven

Here it is: Investments are things that you spend money on that bring in income.

Income. Real cash flow. Revenue streams (sort of like the Mississippi only with greenbacks). Dividends. Interest. Rents. Payments to YOU.

Why am I saying this? Because Aunt Toby reads, on a regular basis in the media, on the internet, etc. pieces where the writer associates the word ‘investment’ with something that does NOT bring in revenue streams. If nothing else, this debases the entire meaning of the word investment.

It also puts false ideas into people’s heads. Ideas such as “Owning your own home is a good investment.”

I beg your pardon? Even under the best of circumstances, unless the total cost of owning your home (mortgage, insurance, maintenance, taxes and fees) is less than what it would cost you to rent the same amount of space, under the same conditions, owning your own home is….expense, pure and simple. If you were to buy a house and rent it out and the amount you got in the rental was greater than the amount of money it cost you in all the other costs associated with that piece of property, then THAT is an investment. And Aunt Toby would like to remind her gentle readers that the value of homes in many parts of the United States today is LESS than it was even a couple of years ago, and of course, if you are trying to sell your home in a depressed market, you may find, for all practical purposes, it has no value whatsoever.

No value? How can I say that? Because, my friends, if you have something that no one else will pony up the shekels to buy, that means it has no value. Value is in the eye of the beholder.

But, let us return to the issue of investment. One of the reasons that people have been led to believe (and have deluded themselves into believing) that owning a home is an ‘investment’ is that in a world where real estate seemingly never stops increasing in value, then the money that one had put into the house (in terms of purchase price, maintenance, any additions or rehabilitations, etc. ) would be recouped in a sale…and then some. Ah…when that happens, indeed, one has truly made an investment because one received the ‘revenue stream’ at the after end, in the sale. If one does NOT recoup all that money, then it’s all been expense – and people are made to feel somehow cheated and stupid when that happens.

And they should not feel that way. The government set up everything to benefit the home builders – they set up tax laws which encouraged borrowing to purchase homes, borrowing to improve those homes. We won’t go into all the shenanigans that banks have gone through in terms of loans, mortgages, home equity loans, reverse mortgages, etc. Something to remember is this: In some parts of the country, the past 20 years have not been a boom time in terms of the prices of homes. Homes have kept their values for sure; homes have not seen the precipitous drops in sales prices. But they never went through the roof either. No one was making the big money in those areas in terms of selling their real estate.

Another piece of mythology about ‘investment’ comes in the form of encouraging people to buy certain types or pieces of clothing or accessories in terms of their being ‘investments’. Aunt Toby read a headline just today that made her smile: “Getting more out of your closet investment.” Now, they were not discussing the building of a closet and renting out the space therein – THAT would be an investment. What they were discussing was the various items of clothing that were in the closet.

Clothing and accessories (except for fine jewelry, which carries its own value, which Aunt Toby has found much to her disappointment is not as much as one would think) are NOT investments, unless you have been bequeathed vintage things that are of the quality and provenance as those in the picture at the top – those are one of a kind, couture created pieces of art. And in an auction situation (and even to the gimlet eye of an insurance company), these would have value and the longer you have them and keep them under museum quality environmental conditions, when you sell them, you will achieve a revenue stream from them and therefore…they are an investment.

But the clothing in your closet, no matter how fine or nice; no matter how well you maintain them, is just another expense of daily living. We don’t consider food to be an investment – and although we should not waste money buying clothing that will fall apart and need repairs or further expense, we should not try to delude ourselves that the clothing items themselves are some sort of investment. Buying well made clothing that with maintenance will last a long time and through many wearings is a good in itself. Ultimately, it will reduce one’s expenses, which will, in a roundabout way, increase one’s savings which if placed in a bank or into an investment grade item such as stock or a bank account, will throw off a revenue stream. But by itself, it is not an investment.

So, be extremely careful about using that word ‘investment’, and thinking about what you are actually doing when you spend money.

(photo courtesy of Maia C)