Randall's Blog

Follow this link for photos from the KBB going away party for Debbie. It was hosted by Laura on Aug. 3rd.

Party photos!

It was a lovely party and I really appreciate all of the kindness and support from all of my friends at KBB, the BPL and beyond!

Debbie.

This week I am painting and painting... I had started a while ago but have been concentrating on the moving process so a lot of the painting was put on hold. Our house had three rooms that really needed paint. We call them the pink room, the blue room and the brown room - for no particular reason.

The Pink room will be Debbie's office, the Blue room will be our bedroom and the Brown room will be my mother's room. I was quite concerned about the Brown room as the walls seemed to be vinyl and I didn't know how hard it would be to remove the covering. It turned out to be dead easy to pull the stuff down. Then all I had to do was prep the walls and paint.

You can see the replacement windows in the above shot as well. More on them later. Here are the Pink & Blue rooms in process.

I'm getting near the end, yeah!

On Thursday evening Debbie & I went out to My Thai with Amanda, Neil, Zarin and Darren.

We always have a good meal at My Thai and this was the first visit for everyone else. I think they had a good time. One more place we will miss eating out and more friends we will miss as well.

On Friday we helped Rebecca & Ali move to Watertown. They have a nice new place on a quiet street. Later on we went to the Border Cafe in Harvard Sq. Another good eatery.

Debbie & I have a new home outside Albany NY.

We are attempting to make it as energy efficient as possible before the snow flies. By request, I'm going to try and blog some of the improvements and changes we are making to the house. It's a small home built in the 1930's. It's quite sturdy but not that energy efficient.

The first thing that just about everyone can agree on is that any home should be properly insulated and sealed BEFORE anything else is done - it's not that smart to replace the heating system with an expensive "geothermal" system but not insulate. In the first place, the new system will probably be sized differently depending on the amount of insulation. If you insulate after it's put in it will be somewhat over-sized. Insulation can also fairly cost effective - translating into savings quickly. There are also comfort advantages. In this house there were "cold areas" that insulating will hopefully fix.

We know this because we have been working with a contractor that knows the house very well. This is a great advantage for us. He has done work on the house over many years and the previous owner worked for him. He also does high quality work.

Finding trustworthy home improvement contractors is not an easy task. There are lots of guys out there but also lots of horror stories. You would think there would be a lot of internet resources to help people sort through this and find reputable contractors but you would be wrong! There are lots of sites on the internet but most of them are just set up to get ad revenue and don't provide any useful information about specific contractors. Angie's List is one good site but doesn't have enough users in every city. There needs to be a "critical mass" of users or the site isn't really that helpful.

This is just a bit of an introduction. I will go into specifics about home energy audits, insulation, replacement windows, heating systems etc. in future posts.

Here are two worthwhile essays:

At TomDispatch.com
The Military-Industrial Complex - It's Much Later Than You Think
By Chalmers Johnson

and from the New York Review of Books
The Battle for a Country's Soul
By Jane Mayer