Trees are cut down, bricks are fired, metal is smelted; all to produce the building materials that go into a house. When a house is demolished, what happens to all this? By default, it all goes into landfill, never to be used again. It’s a terrible waste. In keeping with our green principles, we tried [...]
Archive for July, 2011
Rammed earth walls
Posted in Renovating the house, Saving the environment, tagged concrete, rammed earth, rammed earth walls, thermal mass on July 26, 2011 | 3 Comments »
One of the challenges for a timber-framed house is that while you can insulate it well, it has very little “thermal mass”. This means that if you open a door and all the warm air rushes out (during winter), or rushes in (during summer), then the insulation is for nothing. Thermal mass helps to buffer [...]
Renovating our house
Posted in Renovating the house, Saving the environment, tagged green, house, insulation, low VOC, rammed earth wall, renovation, reverse brick veneer wall on July 10, 2011 | 2 Comments »
The reason that we’ve been so quiet on this blog recently is that we’ve been preparing for the next big project: renovating our house. Tomorrow is the official start date, and we’ll be blogging progress as it unfolds. In theory, it’s not a big renovation. Like most federation houses, we have four beautiful front rooms, [...]
Tea infusers good for the garden
Posted in General chit-chat, tagged recycling, tea on July 4, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
As seen on the Madame Flavour teas website, describing how their special tea bags (“infuser pods”) can be recycled: Put several used infuser pods in the bottom of a hanging basket or pot, then put the soil over them. When you water the plant, the water is stored in the pods, a natural form of [...]
