The Princeton House, Putting The "Fun" Back In Fundamental.

Mike and I are putting together the list of all that we want to do this spring and summer at the Princeton House. On the top of the list is to repaint a few rooms and put our personal touches on them. Right now three rooms have paint swatches up in them so we can see the paint in different lights before making the decision.


This spring once the weather turns a little warmer so we can do some substantial work outside, we plan on adding a few rain barrels with weep hoses around our property to help in watering our parameter garden, as well as expanding the garden into our yard more and planning out some front yard landscaping and improvements on the already installed landscape lighting we have.



If the video above doesn't stream, here is the link on how to make your own rain barrel.

One of the selling points of this house (to us) was the fact that we have a garden on 3 of the 4 sides of our property. Mike and I love gardening and the sense of pride it gives you serving food that you grew.

We already have a compost going pretty strong with much thanks to our friends and neighbors Jake and Cassie, and we are now in the process of getting the recycling totes from our city so we can do recycling at the curb.

With the rain barrels and eventually the addition of some solar heating panels, as well as the proper sealing of our crawl space and interior pipes I think that we can make some big strides in being more self sufficient and helping out with heating/water bills.

This is a fun process, seeing where we can improve upon systems in place.

One thing is for sure. When you have a house that was built in the 1950's, you have opportunities to update the efficiency of the house. While we all know that putting your personal touch on the appearance of a house is pretty fun, however the foundational things such as proper insulation and sealing to assure that our house is as efficient as possible are just as fun!

It requires a new type of creativity. How to accomplish an output while making sure that the system is ecologically and financially responsible.

The sense of accomplishment we feel at the end of the day when we have installed something new or made a decision on what purpose we want a space to be used for, it makes home ownership more than just having a pretty home. It feels like we are making our house a home on a whole new level of functionality, sustainability, and responsibility.