Chapins 1, Earth 0

Chapin Spolded House

Earth.

How many opportunities in life do you have to replace an entire house AND two cars????

Hopefully not many, but we have had this chance. However, we have not been able make use of many Earth Friendly options in either our cars OR the rebuilding of our house due to the prohibitive cost of the materials, labor or lack of knowledge by the building code dept of Canby.

So far we have been able to

• reuse some of the wood from the old house
• replaced the Expedition with a used better mileage Toyota Matrix - 33 mpg v. 12 mpg
  
• got some earth friendly insulation, bu could not do the entire house with it because of Code rules and cost
• we will get energy efficient appliances, EVENTUALLY, including washer/ dryer
  
• we opted for the 90% efficiency furnace
• we are going to TRY to afford a tankless water heater
• going to try to get SOME earth friendly flooring options if we can
• we are reusing the granite that was only a month old when the house exploded
• replacing the washer, dryer, cook top, oven, dishwasher and fridge with energy star ones
  

Here are the things we wanted to but could not afford to do:

• two hybrid cars
• Solar power on roof
• solar water heater
• wind turbine on roof
• denim insulation
• soybean insulation
• bamboo flooring
• recycled glass tiles
• recycled glass countertops or tiles on floors/walls
• concrete countertops
• dual flush toilets
• syncrete (concrete made of garbage)

There were many more, but almost all of these things were just completely cost prohibitive. Some of them save money in the long run, but cost a LOT upfront. For example a tankless water heater is $1400. a regular water heater is like $200. see what I mean? The point is that most people cannot afford to tear down their house and rebuild it, and replace both cars, They just cannot do it. We did that, but we could not afford much in the Earth Friendly category because it is all just sooooooo expensive.

On the good side, I do not use grocery bags anymore, and I always bring my own. My favs are the HUGE ones you can get at Costco for about a dollar each They hold like three regular bags of groceries. I keep them in the back of my car.

COSTCO Reusable totes: $1.10 each, and HUGE. This is not my picture, though.

LOOK how much they hold!!!