Our local Woolworths: carrots at $1.45 each!

We saw this sign in our local Woolworths over the weekend: carrots for $1.45 each.

My goodness! A packet of seeds costs about $3.50. At that rate, it would take only 3 supermarket carrots for the seed packet to be ahead.

There’s 500+ seeds in a typical packet of carrot seeds, and the seeds last 2-3 years.

It’s days like this that growing your own food makes perfect sense…

Key elements of our eco-kitchen (click to see larger version)

Our kitchen has ended up a little out of the ordinary. Starting from a clear focus on low chemical use and simple materials, we’ve made a few decisions that might be interesting.

The key points on our eco-kitchen:

• We’ve completely avoided using melamine-covered particleboard (“whiteboard“), as this  emits huge amounts of volatile organic chemicals (VOCs), is considered industrial waste when the kitchen is taken apart, and can’t be recycled. This is truly nasty stuff.
• Instead, we used an E0 FSC-certified birch eco-ply from Finland (of all places!). “E0″ indicates the lowest level of VOC emissions, and this ply has every certification going. It’s also a truly beautiful material.
• The inside of the cupboards are protected with shellac, a lot friendlier than many of the artificial sealants.
• The benchtops are unsealed solid kauri, with experience in other kitchens showing that while they wear and mark over time, ongoing gentle cleaning keeps them looking beautiful.
• The cupboard fronts are solid kauri, painted with low-VOC Haymes paints (no two-pac polyurethane coatings here!). In addition to being much better for the environment, the semi-gloss paint gives a much softer and warmer feel to the kitchen.
• The walls and ceilings are also painted with low-VOC Haymes paints.
• The floors are solid kauri floorboards, with a tung oil finish (no polyurethane finishes again).
• LED lights are used throughout, including the downlights in the ceiling and the strip lighting under the upper cupboards.
• The large servery window (which can be opened onto the deck) and the upper window behind the cooktop both bring in lots of natural light, reducing the need for artificial lighting.
• The moving glass is double-glazed, while the fixed glass is triple glazed.
• The fridge (brought from our old house) was purchased as the only 5-star efficient fridge at the time, slashing our electricity bills.
• There is an under-floor vent beneath the fridge to draw in cool air (increasing efficiency by up to 20%), with a wall vent that goes into the pantry cool cupboard (more on this in a future post).
• We chose a water and energy efficient Miele dishwasher, installed new as part of the fitout.
• We have an on-bench compost bin, collecting scraps for the big compost bins and worm farms outside. There is also a recycling bin inside one of the cupboards.
• There’s a walk-in pantry beside the kitchen, which is cool and dark (also to be covered in a future post).

We love the kitchen, and it’s both practical and beautiful (we think).

As it turned out, commercial kitchen companies couldn’t cope at all with our requirements. So we had it made by a local craftsman, Ian Thomson (see his website for more on this work).

While it isn’t a cheap option by any means, we’d highly recommend going down the route of a bespoke kitchen, as it gives the time and opportunity to really refine what will be delivered.

A good starting point is a summary of the insulation that went into the house: walls, roof and floor.

Our insulation choices

• Roof – Polyair Multi, a multi-layer combination of reflective foil, foam and bubble wrap. 9mm thick, it sits directly under the corrugated iron roof.
• Ceiling – R4.0 Greenstuf batts, which are conventional insulation batts but made out of recycled plastic rather than fibreglass. Manufactured in New Zealand.
• Walls – R2.5 Greenstuf wall batts, fitting into the standard studwork walls. Then R1.6 Air-cell Permishield wall wrap layered under the outside cladding, with a 20mm air-gap to allow the reflective layer to work properly.
• Floor – R1.5 Greenstuf underfloor insulation rolls, under the wooden floorboards (the house sits on piers, as is typical in Federation houses in Sydney).

So that’s six types of insulation from three different manufacturers. In each case, we looked at a range of options, and picked the one we felt would give the best outcome for a reasonable price. While there are undoubtedly a large number of possible ‘right’ choices, it shows that there isn’t a one-size-fits all product (or even manufacturer).

How does this compare to typical insulation?

This is a lot more insulation than a typical Australian house (although only a fraction of what would be installed in colder European or North American climates).

It greatly exceeds what we were required to do according to government regulations (BASIX), but more on that in a future post…

How much did it all cost?

The total spend on insulation was approximately $3,800, for a 100m² extension. That probably seems like quite a lot, but it all comes down to the payback period.

The house had underfloor ducted gas heating when we bought it, and this will be extended to the new portion of the house. The better insulated the house is, the more warmth it will retain, and the lower our gas bills. But exactly how big a saving — hard to tell.

What we can be confident of is this: we don’t have air conditioning, and we won’t be needing it. So that’s an up-front saving of $3-5k in avoiding the purchase of an aircon unit, and then the yearly savings on electricity from that point onwards.

So the payback period: immediate. A sensible use of our money, we think.

We decided to sell items worth more than about $50 on eBay. Anything worth less than that didn’t seem worth the hassle (and the eBay fees) so we offered them for free on Freecycle.

Freecycle Sydney Central is a group for people in the Central, InnerWest and Eastern Suburbs of Sydney who have things they don’t need or want anymore and are looking for the item to be reused rather than thrown away. Don’t dump it or send it to landfill, give it away instead!

Nearly all the items we gave away on Freecycle were snapped up within 24 hours, so it’s a great way to get rid of things that are still useable that you don’t want any more. If that fails, there’s also a Vinnies box in Lewisham, it’s tucked between the junior school and the church on Thomas Street.

It’s great to use a comparatively unusual way of building, and then to spread the word about it. Thus the short video, giving a little more insight into our rammed earth wall. (Apologies for a slightly blurry video, first day with a new camera!)

For us, we did the rammed earth wall because it was a way of creating a beautiful feature wall that keeps the house cool in summer and warm in winter.

If you care about the Greenway project please sign the petition and ask your neighbours to sign it too!

We're going to call it the "Great Wall of Lewisham"

Phew. Our rammed earth wall is finally finished, now that the weather has cleared.

As outlined in the earlier post, this will form a spine wall down the middle of the new extension, completely enclosed within the shell of the building.

We think it’s rather beautiful, as well as providing lots of thermal mass to keep our house cooler in summer and warmer in winter.

In all, it took 5 days to construct the wall. The first day to set up, one day for each of the panels, and then a day of clean up. While it took quite a lot of labour, it required only 20L of petrol for the compressor, making it a truly green option.

Better photos, and a video, to follow…

The newly created compost heap, alongside the weed tea

With the winter growing season drawing to a close, it’s time to clear the garden beds to make space for spring planting. So out come the huge broccoli plants that have kept us so well feed over the last few months.

With our two compost bins and one worm farm already full to the rim, a new plan was required if all this green material wasn’t to go to waste.

So I decided to construct a hot compost heap, consisting of layers of green and brown material, at least one cubic metre in volume. In went the old plants from the garden beds, and all the weeds from out the back. The brown material is mulch donated by the local tree trimmers and a pile of old leaves.

Hopefully if I turn it a few times, I should have a big pile of rich compost in time to top up our raised garden beds.

And in the same vein, beside the new compost heap is the council green bin containing our weed tea. With an unlimited supply of weeds, they get drowned in water and anaerobically “brewed” for at least a month. The result is a liquid that smells really nasty, but when diluted keeps the fruit trees extremely happy.

Nothing goes to waste!

It’s surprising how some of the simplest things can be some of the most beautiful … including the humble cabbage.