Hardwood flooring leads to rugs which. . .

. . .which lead to rug pads or mats. Another choice to make, not that I should complain!  Mr. W has secretly saved up for nicer wool rugs and they are going to be great in the hall and living room.

The floor care information left by the installer calls for an open weave mat under rugs. I find vinyl with tiny air spaces, and I find a nice-looking flat mat made of PVC material. Hmm.

I also found an "Eco Hold Non Slip" rug pad online. Says it is made from plant oils. So I've called my floor guy and will let you know what he says.

70-year old dining chairs

It hadn't sunk in how old this dining set was when I bought it. They were marked 1942, still with the label of the manufacturer, Showers Brothers. One looked like a throw-away, braced as it had been with plywood. The rest seemed sturdy, that's all I went by. That, and that the label underneath indicated "mhg" for mahogany, and we were enamoured with the idea of expanding our "Duncan Pyfe style" (we have lugged around a drop leaf table for 30 years) and we have mahogany (we thought) china hutches.

I didn't know whether it was realistic to refinish them, or anything about the process. Once I had made the trip a hundred miles to look at the set, I pressed on and bought it. Not good logic, I know, but the price came down quite low as I examined each item closely, and before I knew it, a friend and I were placing and padding, bracing, strapping and bungeeing for the trip back home.

I went to a local furniture guy who fixed the table's pedestal leg. So far so good. But he wasn't a specialist at refinishing and I began to think there was more to this than getting a bottle of stripper and cans of stain and varnish. (I was right about that.)

The chairs came out very well--pretty color and finish to match the table, which my photo doesn't show. Also "well" in the sense of healed--they are almost new in their sturdiness and first-rate finish. What the photo really shows is the construction underneath the seat. According to Kelly at the shop, that cross-piece business is the main key to the chairs' longevity. They are relatively lightweight (some of the high-priced new chairs are heavy, not congruent with gracious living) and Kelly has seen almost new chairs in to his shop because they came apart, even at the $300+ price level.

I found the right shop. Kelly knew to glue the de-lamination I hadn't even seen, then strip (by hand, no dipping), then glue again and patch a couple of places, then sand, stain with a special stain you and I don't find. Then, because the chairs are mostly maple and very little mahogany, some "toning" to even out the color, and finally the varnish. Joyce, did I do right?  I didn't buy new. $1,000 in refinishing went into the local economy, including the sixth chair that wasn't a throw-away after all. 

Magogany?  Kelly said it's too brittle--that's why veneers and small bits are used, but maple for the main frame.

Dining set: buy new or refinish a used set?

It's been a "Be careful what you wish for" summer, with one thing leading to another. The desire to pull out the upstairs carpeting in favor of a wood floor kept me busy for two months. No, I'd say three. And we didn't even install the floor ourselves. There was packing and moving out, at least to the garage and downstairs. And then painting. And then the question, "Do we really want to put all this stuff back like it was?" That question generated weeks of work. And back and shoulder pain. Kick me if I ever propose to install pull-out shelves in an existing cabinet again. This was for music storage, and it's nice, but the manufacturer wasn't kidding when they rated the alternate installation on exact-sized uprights as "challenging."

How we arrived at swapping out our dining table and chairs, who can remember? Oh, yes. The rolling office chair that was more comfortable than the hard dining chairs now is a problem--non-rubber wheels that likely would dent and groove our new floor. Skipping the details, let's just report that I drove our pickup to Renton for a Craigslist 1942 table and chairs in the Duncan Phyfe style.

When I got there it was clear the chairs would need refinishing, the table a repair, and were they really the mahogany we had set our caps for?

What we didn't know about furniture! However, the instinct to stay with "old" seem to be turning out well, if our repair and refinish expert is right.

So unlike the patio set, I didn't buy new from a factory far away, and instead boosted the local economy (the refinisher's business). We'll know in a couple of weeks how this calculus turns out.

Energy audit today

I felt like a corpuscle gliding throughout a hospital patient watching the doctor at work. The house was the patient. Every fan had a tube dropping down from the small gap under the cover. The cold air return was sealed off, half with green tape and the other half by the "doctor" who clapped on a cap, it's hose running to some digital measuring device.

That was one small part of nearly five hours of an energy audit. Darn it, I forgot to get a picture to post. But next week I'll sit down for the consultation and learn what can be done to make the house more energy efficient and comfy. Meanwhile I'll follow the advice not to use the fan in the laundry room--my technician Levi was able to induce a backdraft, which could be dangerous. It seems it can really matter what water heater you choose and how it is chimneyed. We (and the plumber) apparently didn't choose real well, given the furnace we have, the gas dryer nearby, and the vertical climb of the chimney to the roof.

I'm happy I did this audit.

Deal or no deal?

Isn’t it funny how we characterize commercial offers? Depends on whether we like or approve of the seller or not. A great idea is an incentive, like our local private electrical utility’s current offer. Called Green Power, they’ll put 100% of what we pay for our electricity into renewable sources—either buying the power or investing. We then pay a surcharge of 10%. Agreed, that’s not a savings for us the homeowners. But that’s not the deal. The current deal is they are giving out a popular local coupon book, “Where the Locals Go.” Right away I save the cost of the book and $10 off my favorite groceries. And this is just for our lights and fridge, not for heating and cooking, so 10% isn’t going to be a big sacrifice to be able to do good. I like this offer.

On the other hand, Chase Bank wants to buy new deposits, including ours, and this offer I don't call an incentive but a lure. A lure into a game that forgets about the recent history of big banking. They are offering a $200 gift card (with a few strings attached) for a new account.

Now, this is one month after I went in to one of their branches with my three-inch deep pile of their direct mail pitches and asked them to take us off their mailing list. They seem very confident that money talks. It does, but no deal. What may benefit me a little today can bloat Chase and other big guys. Then when they fall on us, it's crushing. I am not calling it cynical or intentional how scandals develop. I like business. But it just seems clear that in letting such "deals" concentrate financial power, stuff happens. Often when there's a Goliath, there's no David around. I'll stick with my credit union, which demonstrates commitment to the community and treats me well.

Now in the news is the falling price for natural gas. Credited is the “success” of fracking. So, do I just shut up and take my part of the savings?

Reaching 100 and time for tea

Done! See if I take on a rash challenge again soon. Last 15 makes 100:

86. Sign up for Green Power. OK, we did this awhile ago, before I gave myself this 100 action challenge. But let’s up our contribution. It’s really wonderful how alt energy projects are getting funded. And that’s green jobs as well as greener energy.

87. Organic cotton towels at the local chain store, with vegetable dyes, a new product line for Fred Meyer. I didn’t need more towels, but I bought two anyway. Just another vote in favor. And I like them a lot—nubby and the right thickness so they dry well.

88. Tweaking oven use. It's been suggested to cook more than one thing at a time. Like a whole pumpkin along with baked potatoes, recently. A friend has frozen her excess baked potatoes. They defrosted a bit soggy when I did it, but worked for hashed browns. So the next ones I roasted, quartered, and kept them in the fridge for reheating. Using glass pans for a lower oven setting can save energy because they cook in the same amount of time. And I’ve successfully turned off the oven 10 minutes early and finished baking, but this feels fussy to me. When I'm done, I just open the oven and let it raise my 65 degree kitchen a notch.

89. Outlet sealer pads. Little white pads for under the perimeter walls outlet covers, fitting around the outlets perfectly. Done.

90. I got to borrow a thermal sensor camera, to look for cold air leaks in the house. It seems to have pinpoint accuracy and fun to use. Still, I think interpreting its findings may be a job for a pro, who can also do the work much more easily than we can.

91. Get an electric or battery-powered mower for the remaining lawn. That was in the Watershed pledge I took on some time ago. I thought I’d make the need for it moot and just weed-whack what’s left, but Mr. W bought an electric mower this year. Said it can mulch leaves. We’ll see. Great if it does, because Leaves R Us. So far, a little tricky to get the timing right for leaves to come down without also a lot of rain.

92. Another item pledged was to use re-refined motor oil in my car. I think that is happening. Will check next time I have the oil changed.

93. Reading by a window rather than turning on a light. It’s just from habit that I set my reading on the interior side of our dining table. It’s nice to go to the window side and pull a chair back to the window.

94. Metal litter box scoop. I had a nice one for years till it broke. My pet food store only offers the plastic kind, so I asked about this. “We used to have the metal ones, but not anymore.” It would have been easy to sigh and go along with this trend. I almost did. But I said no thanks, and bought a metal slotted spoon at the Goodwill store.

The spoon is a bit too small and doesn’t have the nice square edges (Miss kitty likes the sides and corners.) So I’m open to improvement.

95. Kitchen garbage liner. Hmm. My town is banning plastic grocery bags next year. No problem for shopping. But for the pull-out garbage bag rack these bags are the perfect size. Now what? For starters I’ve used paper garbage bags I also had stashed—not as messy as I’d thought, since messy stuff is now mostly going to the Food+ Toter. But paper bags seem like just a transitional solution. Maybe be less trash overall we can get by with fewer, thinner, smaller bags.

96. Fair trade—coffee, chocolate, sugar. I don’t think I’ve listed that one yet.

97. Keeping the refrigerator full, for less air exchange when you open the door. Not hard with two tubs of homemade pickles taking up real estate.

98. Ask the city council to consider incentives for homeowners who maintain tree canopy. Did that this week. If they can do it somewhere in Texas, they can do it here. And how about cisterns or permeable pavement? Builders have griped for years that they are the only ones being asked to change. Retrofits for water-savings should be next. Grey water systems, now that I think of it. I forgot in my letter to urge legalizing grey water systems. I talked with a builder last evening at Green Drinks, and his firm is already up to speed on it and just waiting for the city to reverse its ban.

99. Waste less food. Composting food scraps is good, and I’ve been excited to take it up a notch recently (No. 74 on this list). However, here’s a sobering factoid from the University of Michigan report assessing the U.S. food system (report No. CSS00-04, page 38)

If a mere 5% of the 96 billion pounds of unspoiled discarded food were recovered, this would be enough food to feed 4 million Americans every day.

This has prompted me to give a close look at whether I’m throwing away food that I could eat. Like those greens that come with the beets—I can cook them to go with lunch if I have other vegetables for supper. Leftovers we’re pretty good with, but I’m having a close look anyway.

100. The romance of old appliances (not). I wonder about my use of time. Every time I get down on my hands and knees with a sharp tweezer to pluck out bits stopping up the dishwasher’s spray wand. What a rotten design that the arm can’t be taken apart for cleaning.

As for the oven, if I am baking or roasting, I have to go back every 20 minutes and, get this, turn on the stovetop burner which prompts the cooling oven to re-light. The Garland repair man charged $100 to tell me this association is purely coincidental and my oven is working well enough. But I know what I know. And recipes were taking an extra half hour before I instituted this work-around. I just try to get my baking done in an hour or so because the oven also coughs and sputters in the second hour.

Why keep old appliances going? Well, I admit that if I were flush with cash I’d replace my fridge, dishwasher, and stove. But meanwhile I appreciate knowing that I’m getting the most from the “embodied” energy in these appliances. It's surprising to learn how much energy goes into building new energy-efficient appliances. When you buy new you see the savings right away, but the planet doesn’t, not immediately. Fortunately, we don’t have to do calculus. I just let it keep me humble whenever I’m tempted to push for "the" green fix that involves buying something new. I guess that would include the new car I’ve wanted since the top of this 100 actions list. Hmm. I guess that’s right.

Little things 71-85

Fortunately, this post gets better as it goes. There's going to be some barrel-scraping this deep in the list of 100 things to do while pining for an electric car. If you are a new visitor, you might enjoy an older post better. See an index in the next post down.

71. Can I go a year without buying plastic food bags or plastic wrap? Plastic bags have their uses, especially in the freezer. How to repeatedly re-use them? I’ve double bagged and kept the outer one clean. Time to take it up a notch. I’m not thrilled with washing them, but the worst part is drying them. So I have drilled into a suitable block of wood (an old candle holder) and stuck in dowels like Sputnik and that way I air-dry them. It’s working and I’ll have no problem achieving this goal.

But I embarassed myself when sending leftovers home with relatives recently after a long-awaited family reunion dinner. I was asked, "Can I have a baggie, a zip lock for that?" "No!" I fairly shouted in my host-haze. We came up with something else, but the sisters-in-law may never look at me the same way again.

72. Carry used foil or containers to pack home Mom’s leftovers from our lunches out.

73. Run out of milk? It happens. In an effort to avoid silly trips for one item, I’ve been trying pantry substitutes. We’re not that thrilled with soy milk anymore. Have now tried hemp milk and found it not bad. Now I have a carton of rice milk at the ready for next time.

74. “Food-Plus Toter.” This one is actually a biggie and has me excited. Our sainted local garbage and curbside recycling company (I’ve written about it before) operates a food+yard waste program that isn’t widely known. I knew about it, but had a couple of barriers—the ten dollar monthly cost, for something I personally would barely half-use, and the difficulty in finding a smaller garbage toter to reduce cost on the other side of the bill.

Solution: Three neighbors sharing the Food+Plus toter. Now I can keep my own primo compost going, organic kitchen peels and maple leaves. And into the Food-Plus toter go my vacuum cleaner bags, chicken bones, flowering weeds, the harder to compost stuff. This is already turning out to re-route quite a few things that were going into the garbage headed for the landfill to make methane that we can’t use and hurts us. whew. And, a la late night commercials, “That’s not all!” Because a neighboring family of three not composting any food before now will be using the toter, their (valid) reason (critters) being solved by the toter. This is great. So I’ve rearranged the pantry pull-out to add a small pail for Food+Plus.

I could have kept the standard garbage toter as provided, but I guess I wanted not only to save that $2 a month going to half-size, but proudly show my deed on the street on garbage day. So I paid too much to get a cute wheeled model. Bright green, naturally. I have visions of taking it to a neighborhood association meeting and doing a talk in which I let people know how much smarter they are than I am, because anyone with normal strength and living a normal distance to the street can do fine to downsize with a cheap can they can get anywhere!

75. Re-subscribe to our local enviro newspaper rather than picking it up for free. The information on research about our lake and county—priceless. [the word "priceless" hasn't been trademarked, has it?]

76. Educate myself. Last month I went on a tour of our sewer wastewater treatment plant. Actually not too smelly. Definitely interesting.

77. So following that, I reinstated “If it’s yellow, let it mellow,” as a toilet protocol. You don't really expect me to boldface any of this one, do you? They said it helps if less water is coming at them. If this is not to your liking, you can, if you have old high water using toilets, place a plastic bottle filled with water (and rocks if needed to keep it sunk) in your tank to displace a liter or two and save that amount of water per flush. Toilets are our biggest household use of water.

78. Found a truly no-effort improvement I can make even this deep in my list. Today I read a tip that most cars don’t need a warm up before you start driving. Not being a car person, I have relied all these years on some rather old wisdom about warming up the car at idle for awhile. I've been idling for maybe a minute and a half. So I marched right down to the owner's manual in the glovebox. There it was: 10 seconds is all the warm up my car wants. Well, alright. I feel foolish, but on the other hand, I’ve ticked off number #78!

79. Efficiency/simplification in cooking. I figure that will keep me cooking more and opening cans less. So I’m trying the tip that was in the NY Times food section recently: Keep a kitchen scale out on the counter and use fewer measuring cups. So for instance this morning I put my bowl on the scale and poured water directly in till I had 8 oz for my cooked cereal. And why dig honey out of a measuring cup? Hate to waste any that the bees worked so hard to make.

80. Pumpkin bread from sweet pumpkin. It was heavenly. I’m starting to add notes into my recipes giving weights for the amount of the ingredient.

81. While I’m in the kitchen, what about lemons vs. living local? They are small and I have pictured them as rumbling up the coast by truck in a big, relatively efficient load. But now I read they are often flown, same as cherry tomatoes. There is a lot to be said for picking your battles, and this still seems pretty tiny, for something that is so delicious and hard to give up. But what if there is a substitute? No kidding, there is! Called “verjuice,” or “verjus,” it’s made from under-ripe wine grapes. The ever curious Mr. W bought some from TERRASONOMA®. We used it in a vinaigrette and something else, then I finished the bottle by making a wonderful dessert, verjuice bars. A ringer for lemon bars, only slightly gentler-flavored, which was more than fine by me. My foodie friends gave it a big thumbs up, too.

Yes, it was a disposable glass-bottle, so we're not there yet on emissions. And not made in this state. Not yet, that is. Maybe it’ll become one of those do-it-at-home things, like home brew or bottled apple cider. Or part of a subscription, added to a CSA farm operation? They pick up and re-use the waxed carboard boxes our share comes in, why not bottles, too?

82. Be a busybody. When I noticed that the plastic mugs + lids that a local retirement residence had issued to residents were worn out and Styrofoam™ cup usage had shot up, I looked online for a no-spill alternative. I am acquainted with the manager because my mother lives there. She was interested, so I sent her links to some cool double-wall tumblers with silicone lids.

83. Re-double my eco education and get ready to help others make changes. Got invited to commit 100 project hours in exchange for a ten week University Extension course on our ecological carbon problem. Heckova deal: Voluntarily jump into a pit of depressing information and then get to work my way out. Only an endearing and very enthusiastic person could induce me to do this. You know who you are, Joyce. Thankfully there are some uplifting and very cool projects (see photo of WWU X-car) that we’re learning about as well as the bad news, and my fellow community education volunteers are great new friends.

84. Bank e-statement instead of paper. Finally. Actually, I should say credit union. We haven’t used banks for awhile. Not since the 1970s for Mr. W. Who’d have thought someone so old could be so in step?

85. Protest erroneous journalism. AARP the Magazine (November) had a cheery, colorful graphic piece purporting to help the reader choose the “Fuel-Friendliest Way to Go.” With my new education, I wrote in that the comparison made it look as though air travel was close to train travel in efficiency. However, the chart didn’t actually compare apples to apples. The airplane figure reflected a maximal plane load (large 747-400 with 416 passengers) while the train figure was only an average passenger load. That changes the passenger-miles per gallon (pmpg) figure considerably--the jet figure may fall from 61 pmpg to more like 33 pmpg.

Aside from that, the comparison I’d have liked to see would be that of total emissions. Airplane travel contributes about 1.26 lb. of CO₂ equivalent per passenger mile.* We ARE talking jet fuel here. By comparison, train travel contributes only 0.35 lb. CO₂ per passenger mile.

*Source: The Climate Neutral Network and the Bonneville Environmental Foundation. So there. But I’d rather be wowed than be right. Today comes the news that Alaska Air is starting to use some biodiesel—French fries in the sky!