But it is coming – get over it.

So the best thing, actually, that you can do right now is look at your calendar, wherever you are, and ask yourself the following question: When is the farthest we can count on daytime temperatures staying above 55 degrees F?

In my area, that time is probably mid-late October. Yes, we get frosts and freezes during that period, but we still can have most of a day where the temperature (especially if it’s sunny) over 55 degrees F. And having that date for yourself is a really useful thing because 55 degrees F. is the drying and curing temperature for lots of materials that you might want to be using between now and when winter shuts things down. Materials such as:

Paint: both latex and oil need hours of temperatures at 55 degrees F or better to dry on the surface and cure underneath.
Caulk of all types
Gypsum wall board compound
Glues and adhesives of various types

Ah, I see the light dawning. Aunt Toby is talking about the dreaded home projects which many families undertake in the fall to get ready for the winter. Whether you are replacing windows or just caulking around them; painting the outside of the house when the bugs are not as ferocious, or just doing ordinary maintenance when it’s a lot more pleasant to work than it is in July and August, looking at the calendar NOW and figuring out how much time you have to actually get things done (barring any awful rain and that can happen also) will help you plan.

Some things take longer than others. The DH and our son caulked all the windows in the house in a couple of hours (but then, we have a house with only three bedrooms so if you have a larger home, your mileage, as they say, may vary. Doing a home paint job takes so much prep work, that this is something that you might want to start right NOW, in order to be able to still have daytime temps over 50 degrees F to work with.

You have more leeway, naturally, with indoor projects, but again, the 55 degrees F still applies. So if you want to rip out some walls, put in insulation, wallboard and wall board compound, and then paint, this is still something you want to keep an eye on. We ended up having to do a ceiling repair in our living room in early November and even with fans, the wallboard compound and then the paint seemed to take weeks to finally dry up enough. As it was, there was still a section where we had to rip out the next summer and redo it because some moisture got trapped and we got bubbling and blistering coming to the surface.
So: check your calendar and think: “When will the daytime temps get below 55 degrees F?” And start thinking about what energy saving and maintenance projects you need to take care of between now….and then.

Adjustable shower curtain rods. You can find these to fit spaces between about 40” and 72”. So what I could have done would have been to have either put grommets into the top of the shades and then used shower curtain rings (and goodness knows there are a zillion different types of those; I could have found some to match the pergola, even). OR, I could have gotten those humongous curtain grommets (JoAnne Fabrics has them, as do other curtain supply houses), put those into the top of the shades and strung the adjustable shower curtain rod through those. The upside of that would have been that the shades would have been like curtains and could be opened or closed at will. Neato.

Cable. My dear friend down at the beach in Delaware uses this method to string her shades between the uprights. They pleat and fold back very neatly with this method (the tops of the curtains have grommets in them). She got her vinyl-covered cable at one of those ‘big box home center’ stores.

But since, in my head, I did not envision the shades ever being anything but either there or taken off for the winter… and since I am much more of a hardware store sorta gal than I am Bed, Bath and Barn, we went the hardware route using the very very nifty EasyKlip™, eye-hooks, and nylon cord.

Why EasyKlip™ rather than grommets? Well, since I only have one usable hand, and grommets require either a totally separate tool to put in (which takes the tool and a hammer) or, if you use ‘self-tapping’ grommets, again, a hammer(and I’ve actually had poor results with them), I was instantly attracted to the clips when I found them at this site: Rockywoods Fabrics . Another aspect that is advantageous in using these is that you can take them off. Let’s say that at the end of the season, the shades are grimy – they are white and red striped after all – and I want to wash them. If I want to, I can just take off the clips, throw the shades into a big washer at the laundromat and then put the clips back – or not. They are some sort of heavy duty plastic or nylon so they would not scratch or damage the washer. Unlike grommets, which are metal and which would damage the drum on the washer. The other thing is that I have seen some outdoor curtains which used grommets and they must have had some steel in them because there was rust stains on the fabric from them.

This is a two-piece item which uses the wedge principle to grip and hold the fabric. Put the fabric on top of the bottom piece. Shove the top piece into place (if you need a little bit of force, you can use a pair of pliers – I actually just hit mine into place with the handle of a knife. Easy as pie).

We installed the eye hooks into the cross-beams and the deck floor (you’ll need an electric drill for that). Then, we strung the EasyKlips™ with the piece of nylon cord and the DH and our won ran the cords through the eye hooks and voila! We did the same thing to the shade for the roof.

What would I have done differently on this project?
Well, the biggest thing probably would have been to have consulted with the DH BEFORE I measured, to discuss where we’d put the eye hooks. I measured from end to end, rather than between the uprights, so I ended up, even after hemming and so on, with shades that were actually a bit wider than we needed. The EasyKlips™, however were very handy in dealing with this, in that we could just fold over the excess at the ends and use the EasyKlip™ to not only hold the shade in place, but hold the fold in place too. Very handy feature, that.

There are numerous ways to gain shade:
Vegetative:
Plant a tree next to your house. The only down side to this is that unless you have a whole lot of money to get a 20′ tree installed, you will be waiting about 15 years for your shade to hit higher up than your knees.

Plant a vine with big leaves. If you live in Zone 5 or warmer, this is definitely an option, though again, you will be waiting for a couple of years for the wisteria, etc. to climb up to the top of the structure to cover it.
There are annual vines that you can grow but coverage might be spotty and of course, once you have a big frost, there is the slimy leftovers to contend with. Chez Siberia is in Zone 3 (zone 2 in spots), so vegetative was out.

Movable:
If you have a deck with no overhangs such as a pergola, there are several movable, temporary shading methods:
Umbrellas. Some of these are quite large and would certainly shade one or two people in chairs but not the whole deck.

Solar Sails: This neat trick from the land where no kid goes to school without a hat (the skin cancer rate in Australia is a national obsession; their rate of skin cancer is the highest in the world and skin cancer is the number one cancer in Australia) consists of artfully stretched pieces of shade cloth such as can be found here: Coolaroo

Actual Shade Cloth material: You can get shade cloth from greenhouse suppliers and some of them even finish them off with binding and grommets. Measure your space, choose your shade tarp and off you go. Not the most artistically aesthetic answer, but you can get percentages of shade up to 90% and sometimes in colors other than black.

Curtains or shades. You can find these made from shade cloth, acrylic-based fabrics such as Sun-Tex, Sunbrella, and PhiferTex (the fabrics themselves can be found for the do-it-yourselfer in places such as this: Seattle Fabrics). They can be found in conformations such as a shower curtain on a rod or wire, roller/Roman shades with installation hardware and so on or you can make them yourself. Another option for the do-it-yourself project here is (an embarrassment to me because I should have thought of this immediately when I started thinking about this) is hemp canvas, which comes in many different weights and which is, pound for pound, more durable, more resistant to UV and water damage (even salt water). This is the original fiber used in marine canvas and sails, sailors’ clothing and so on. It is also mold and mildew resistant and antibacterial. And not petroleum based like acrylic.

I shoulda thought of that first. Hemp canvas can be found in places such as Hemp Traders and Harts Fabric and Dharma Trading. Just do a search on ‘hemp canvas fabrics’.

More to come…
(photo courtesy of Big Nosed Ugly Guy)

This year, as we are reminded by our favorite weather prognosticators winter has come to the entire country. So, today I’ve got something for everyone.

Aunt Toby figures that by this point, most of the people in the US have got whatever form of heat they use cranked up about as far as it can go (or, everyone has unearthed their sweaters, hats, mitties, and long johns and are wearing them 24/7). And it has been that way for a while (for those of us who have had the heat turned on since November, this is not news; for those folks in the South, we feel your pain, truly). The air inside your house is dry and your eyes and your lips might be feeling dry too. Don’t forget to do what you can to put humidity into the air (hang laundry on racks, put out pans of water on registers and wood stoves, etc. etc.). And don’t forget to drink plenty of water.

But you might find that you or other family members are developing something that we refer to here at Chez Siberia as ‘Winter Itch’. When we had all the little Siberians at home, all it took for the first outbreak was for us to turn up the furnace (and the forced air heat). After about a week the kids would start to scratch. Our younger daughter was in such distress that we had to get a special lotion Rx’d for her which frankly had a little bit of cortisone in it.

What is happening (and I realize this hovers into “no, duh” territory) is that the dry air is wicking the moisture out of the skin, which starts to flake and that causes the itching. The trick here is to do two things:

First: get as much moisture into the skin (both internally and externally) as possible.

Second: Put a barrier in between the moisture on the skin surface and the dry air.

Getting moisture into the skin and keeping it there can be as simple as doing one or more of the following:

Take fewer showers and the showers you take, don’t use really hot water and use as little soap as you can (or a moisturizing gel or something like that; in a pinch, you can always use hair conditioner). If you swear you stink like a stevedore in August, you can always just rinse off/wash off those areas (you notice that no one gets winter itch in their armpits, right?).

After showers and baths, don’t rub every last bit of moisture from your skin; just pat dry and slather on cream or lotion that has a good component of oils in it. Cocoa butter is good; any product that calls itself ‘body butter’ is good. In a pinch, believe me you can use really light olive oil. Mix a couple of teaspoons in a spray bottle with warm water, shake up and spritz all over and smooth on.

When you buy products, check the labels:

Any product that claims to help with dry skin should contain stuff that does the following:

Water — this should be the first ingredient on the list.

“Occlusive” – these are things that block the evaporation of the water. Common ingredients that perform this function are petrolatum, acetyl alcohol, lanolin, lecithin, mineral oil, paraffin, and stearic acid. Popular silicones that act as occlusives are dimethicone and cyclomethicone. I am not particularly fond of petrolatum, mineral oil and paraffin – these all come from the processing of petroleum. If you want to just make lotion, use something that is liquid at room temperature such as a nut or fruit oil.

“Humectant” – these are things that attract moisture from within and without and are usually combined with the ‘occlusive’. The most popular humectant is glycerin.

Now, almost everyone has a tube, tub or bottle of some sort of lotion or cream at home that when they get dry skin they can smooth on. When you have winter itch, however, these do not necessarily have enough of one of those items listed above to really produce the effect you need. Most of the time, the issue is that the ‘occlusive’ is not thick enough or there is not enough humectant. Here are a few items that people many times have at home that can improve the result:

Vitamin E and lecithin capsules: If you are taking either of these, just take one, take a needle and poke a hole in one end of it ad squeeze it into your hand. Put a glob of cream on top of that and a little bit more water and rub your hands together. Smooth that over the effected area.

Let’s say that you want to make your own and don’t want to deal with chemicals. Well, hike yourself to the local drug store and look for a small bottle of glycerin and a small bottle of liquid Vit. E. Or, if they don’t have that, ask for Vit. E capsules. If you want to get fancy, ask for Lecithin capsules too. Put a drop of glycerin (teeny) in your hand, the Vit. E and/or lecithin and as much water as you can hold in the palm of your hand and rub your hands together. If you want to make up a bottle, fill a bottle that can hold up to three ounces of water half way with water, squeeze in the Vit. E and/or lecithin and fill the rest of the way with glycerin. Close, shake up and use. This will be like oil/vinegar dressing — you’ll have to shake it up every time you use it.

If you really want to go all the way, check out your grocery store in the international foods section for rosewater or orange flower water (this is used in Greek and Eastern European cooking). You can use this instead of the water in the bottle (or substitute as much as you want for the water, up to 100 percent, though they really have a very strong fragrance so you might want to go 50/50 with water) along with the glycerin, etc. and you will have produced a very traditional hand lotion that has a lovely fragrance. You may find that you need more Vit. E. as an occlusive, but this is the basic stuff.

Let’s say you want something with more ‘staying power’ – then you will want to make a cream rather than a lotion, which means that you will want to use something as an ‘occlusive’ that is at least semi-solid at room temperatures, such as cocoa butter, coconut oil or beeswax. If you can find a beekeeper source, you can ask for beeswax cappings that still have honey in them. Honey has the added benefit in moisurizers that it is hygroscopic, so it fulfills the humectant role and the wax is the occlusive so you have natural products there. Depending on the type of beeswax you can get, the honey will have a different fragrance, so you will be getting something that will add fragrance to the hand lotion or cream you make. If you use beeswax, you will have to warm it up in order to mix it together with your other ingredients. Do this in a double boiler (beeswax melts at about 140 degrees F – it actually has quite a high flashpoint but I would take the melting process seriously and not turn on the stove and leave it there).

A basic formula for this would be:
1/4 cup beeswax
1 cup of oil (you can just use one oil, such as almond oil, a very light olive oil, coconut oil)
1/4 cup of water (or rosewater or orange flower water)

Put in the beeswax and melt first and then add the oil and stir together. Last, add the water or rosewater or orange flower water and stir together and pour out into whatever glass or ceramic container you are going to store this in (an empty small jar with a screw on lid is a good choice). The mixture will harden up and then you can use it when you need it.

So, now you have products to use on the dry skin. You can get an improved result with the following: Just before retiring for the evening, take a light warm shower and pat dry. Smooth on as much cream or lotion as you can and put on something to wear in bed. This will hold the moisturizer next to your skin for a longer period and it won’t rub off on the sheets. If you have cracked hands or feet, do the same thing and put on socks.
( Dry earth photo courtesy of Martin Knaapen)

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)

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 2x4s 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

First, as is said in The Hitchhikers Guide: Don’t Panic. Don’t feel that there is nothing you can do because you have a landlord or are occupying a unit that is 60 feet up over the asphalt. The trick in your situation is to think: not permanent — movable. Let’s look at people’s costs of living one at a time in terms of what we can do to lower those costs.

Heating and cooling. What do you have control over? If you have no control (no thermostat, for example; central boiler and central air unit and everyone gets charged their “fair share”), then yes, you have no control and there is nothing to do about those costs. But if you do have a thermostat, your job is to seal up your place the best you can for the winter and keep the sun out of the rooms in the summer. Your friends are: rope caulk and those “shrink the plastic sheet around the window frame” kits that you can find at hardware stores. Don’t have a heat gun? That is ok also; the point is to seal up the place where the window frame meets the wall (use your rope caulk for that) and then seal up the window with the plastic and the annoying tape (takes a little practice, but after a couple, you’ll be able to make a seal just as good as the one with the heat gun).

Another friend are curtains. If you have insulated curtains, bravo. If you have lined curtains, that is not so good but you can always add another layer of lining (something like flannel sheets is a good bet – just cut to fit and either safety pin them to the back of the curtain or get out your sewing kit and tack to the top just underneath whatever the top treatment is – hooks, gathers, rings, whatever). If you don’t have lining, go to your local Joann’s or another fabric place that carries drapery lining – get the insulated lining – it’s worth the cost. You can always take it out when you get tired of the curtains and use it for the next set. Take one of the curtains with you and let one of the clerks help you by measuring it, etc. They are usually wizards at this. Take it home and again either safety pin it to the curtain back or sew it on (and yes, by hand if you don’t have a sewing machine).

Insulated curtains are great for both summer and winter because in the winter, they are another layer preventing the cold from conducting into the room; in the summer, they block the radiant heat from coming in. So, even if you use AC, it doesn’t have to work so hard. If you are really hard core, you can always go to the lumber yard, get some materials and make yourself insulated inside shutters – those are amazing and save tons of energy. When you leave, just take them with you. (How to Make Your Windows More Energy Efficient)

Wearables: I know a guy who claims that he absolutely positively needs to keep his house at 78 degrees year round. He literally walks around his house in the middle of winter in a tee shirt and gym shorts and bare feet. He’s lived in Upstate NY for thirty years. If you have control of your thermostat and you’ve sealed up the windows and any extraneous doors that you don’t use, then (cue scary music)it’s time to lower the thermostat. If you don’t own a sweater or two, go the Salvation Army/Goodwill/Volunteers of America and get a couple of good, thick, long sleeved, wool sweaters. Wool is best and the heavier the better. You’ll be wearing them over something else, so you have no excuses like “I’m allergic”.

The other thing to do is – forget the flip-flops in the house. Wear good warm socks, tights, etc. and shoes or sneakers. Put a good layer of warmth between you and the floor.

Food: can you grow your own in an apartment or a rental situation where you can’t rip up the lawn for a garden? Two questions: Do you get sun and do you have a terrace or deck? If you get sun and have a terrace or deck, then you can very easily get big pots and grow everything from squash to corn and anything in between, including climbing stuff (you just need lattice that you can get from the hardware store and secure it to the deck because when you are a hundred feet up, things can get breezy and you don’t want your planter of pole beans sailing out over the street). If you don’t have sun or don’t have a terrace or deck, your options are sort of limited to a grow light and greens. But you can grow a lot of greens that way.

Your friend is the farmer’s market. Some cities have larger regional markets where you can buy from farmers…and a lot of other people and wholesalers. To get the best selection, be the first guy there. To get the cheapest selection, go in the last hour and negotiate with the farmers because they do not want to take stuff home. Be prepared to deal with large quantities of the same thing (this is where partnering up with your neighbors can be really good). This is a good time to invest in some jars/lids/bands, a pressure cooker/canner and an instruction book. Also, there are things that can really well and some that do not. Anything that you see in your grocery store that comes in a can is a candidate (heh) for you to can in a jar. Things that you don’t see in a can (like broccoli, for example) are not good candidates, but if you have a bit of space in your freezer, you can get some extra at the farmers market and freeze it.

No space in your kitchen to store cases of home made spaghetti sauce, canned beans, and pickles? Best place to store boxes of home canned goods is: under your bed. There is nothing like the feeling, esp if there is a howling storm outside, of sleeping on top of several weeks’ worth of food that can’t go bad if you lose the electricity. You feel almost like Smaug.

(originally published at Oxdown Gazette)