A Tour Of Our Green(ish) House

You may have noticed that I haven’t done much here in the last 2 weeks. Well we’re going to be moving to Placerville soon and have spent a good part of the last 2 weeks looking for a house to rent. And what wasn’t spent there was spent here recovering from the trip there; 2 ½ hours one way with 2 boys three times and one of them was an overnight trip, ugh.

The reason I’m telling you all this is 1. I feel guilty for not writing and 2. after all the house hunting we ended up with one that’s actually quite green.

The house we’re moving into kind of fell into our lap and ended up being the most nearly perfect one of all.

It’s a brand new never lived in house at the end of a court with only 1 other house on it. It feels secluded but is part of a neighborhood and is within walking distance of downtown.

But those are just the things that make me happy, not what make the house green (or at least greener then most).

Here are some of the things that make it green:

The house is heavily insulated and has high efficiency windows. That means it will stay cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter without us needing to crank the thermostat like we currently do.



There are ceiling fans in every room to, again, cut down on the need for the a/c.




Every house we looked at had a fireplace. Now, fireplaces are kind of like BBQs, not really eco friendly but better if they’re gas. Unlike all the others we saw this is a propane fireplace. So it will not only keep our electric down in the winter, it will be less polluting then a wood fireplace would have been.



This is a tankless water heater. What it does is instead of holding water and constantly heating it throughout the day it has coils that heat up when you turn the hot water on, so it only heats the water when you need it.



Those would be lots and lots of blackberry bushes. What do they have to do with the house being green, you ask. Well for one it means I don’t have to buy them at the market anymore and secondly because they’re wild and have been doing just fine on their own hopefully I won’t kill them with my black thumb. By the way, these are Tyler’s favorite part of the house.


So that’s our green(ish) house. Hope you enjoyed the tour and thanks for sticking around.