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Just Take a Deep Breath – Part 1

You may be wondering why I have a picture of a Eugene, Oregon EMX bus in a post about taking a deep breath? “Is Bill going to talk about air pollution, greenhouse gases, or our car-dependence?” Actually, none of the above.

I’ve talked before about how so many things are interconnected. Today I want to talk about how we over-schedule our lives and simply try and squeeze too much stuff into a day. Not the stuff like consumer stuff: shirts, tvs, cars. Stuff like: I need to deposit that check on my way to my whatever appointment and do that before my whatever appointment because I’m coming from another appointment across town. But in doing so, I don’t REALLY have enough time (and frankly, it could wait until afterwards anyway), so it makes me five minutes late.

Now most of us probably wouldn’t typically think five minutes late is a big deal. And, while I personally think it is (it’s disrespectful, for starters), there’s a bigger picture here I want to talk about. And that is our busy-ness in our lives. Which brings me back to the bus.

I was privileged to attend the Oregon Planning Institute’s 2010 conference this week in Eugene at the University of Oregon. I didn’t want to drive my car (parking sucks at the UO, plus it’s $8 a day if you can find a spot), I’m still more of a fair weather bicyclist (that’s changing), so I rode the bus ($3 for an all-day pass, about the same as the gallon of gas I’d burn going to and from).

About a year ago, I “discovered” the bus during the Business Commute Challenge. I realized it broke down ALL my misconceptions (no one rides the bus except hooligans, it’s inconvenient, takes along time, etc). Our local bus system (Lane Transit District) actually works quite well, a lot of “normal” people ride (and both buses yesterday were almost full), and it’s quite convenient from a time perspective.

And that’s my point: perspective. When I ride to work (and I do at times), it takes me about 30 minutes. If I drive, depending on traffic, it takes me 15 to 20 minutes. And here’s where we all need to take a deep breath. I can say “the bus doesn’t work for me because it takes TWICE as long as driving.” OR, I can say “the bus only take about an extra 10 to 15 minutes; and I can read a book. Or meet someone.” I choose the latter.

And I choose that largely because of the realization I had riding to the planning conference. First session started at 8 am. The way my schedule and transfer worked, I could arrive at about 7:30 or about 7:50. If I arrived at 7:50, I could get off the bus, walk briskly to my session, sit down and probably be ready to go by 8:00. BUT I chose to arrive at 7:30, walk calmly to my session (observing a dog barking at a squirrel he had treed), get a cup of coffee, and make a new friend with another person who had arrived early, too.

This is also something that is WAY bigger than just riding the bus and reducing my carbon footprint. I think so much of our current culture wars and political wrangling come from us simply not building enough “margin” into our lives. I have a LOT of thoughts on that and it’s those areas of margin I want to talk about in my next post.

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Hannah’s House Freedom Walk

Hannah’s House, a local faith-based recovery program had their Freedom Walk yesterday to help raise money for their very effective program.

You can visit their website to learn more about the work they do, but I just wanted to post how I’m personally glad they also care about our environment. The walk ended with food and snacks and as you can see by the enclosed photo, they separated compost, trash and recyclables. Kudos to Hannah’s House for caring for people and for our world.

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Save Ink and $$

My wife, Brenda, was looking through a magazine and came across an article on back to school stuff. Now, just a reminder, our kids are adults and out on their own; that’s why we’re wanting to downsize our house.

But this article intrigued her. It talked about a software program called EcoFont that saves 25% on the ink needed to print text. Some time ago, I talked about going paperless as much as possible. But sometimes, you do have to print. And when you do, this may be a great option. EcoFont leaves small voids in the text that don’t get filled with ink. This, in turn, saves the amount of ink you use (greener, because you’re consuming less and that saves all along the way from manufacture to product to disposal) and it saves you money.

You can download a basic font for free at their site. I did and printed out various sizes of text, from 10pt to 64pt just to see how it looked. And it looked fine for your basic text sizes (10pt and 12pt). At 14pt, you can start to see the holes and, as you can see from my picture with this post, at 64pt, it becomes a decorative font.

But most of our printing is text, and most is usually around 12pt font and this is where it shines. Based in the Netherlands, the software doesn’t appear to yet be available in the US. And it currently is only for Windows based computers running MS Office. So being a Mac guy, I’m a little disappointed. But they SAY, they’re working on other versions.

So, EcoFont, I’m waiting with anticipation! I just printed a sustainability report for a client and it was 20 copies with 24 pages, so it would have been nice to be able to print in a more responsible manner.

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my aha moment

A couple of weeks ago, Mutual of Omaha came through Eugene. Someone from their organization had wandered across our website and contacted me about recording my “aha moment”. I thought, “why not?”

So, on a warm, sunny August day, in an Airstream trailer in downtown Eugene, I spent a few minutes chatting with Jessica Henry and recording a snippet of what started stirring in me in late 2008. It was that “stirring” that led to the beginning of thesimpleHOUSE and our whole concept. You can watch my aha moment at

my aha moment

Let me know what you think. I’m usually fairly calm in front of people, but found myself a bit nervous with lights, camera and microphone. It was still a great experience, though and I’m glad I did it. It’s always good to tell your story and fremind yourself just what it was that brought you to the point you’re at.

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Toothbrushes and Running Water

I was talking to a friend a while back who was visiting his grandchildren in England. They asked him why he left the water running while he was brushing his teeth. This gave him pause to think about that. And this caused me to think about the times we leave the water running when we don’t really need to.
So this post tags onto my previous post about saving water.
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Don’t Halve Your Friends

I know this post will be a little different than many of my previous posts, but I felt I needed to get some balance back into what we do. Halving things is good, but some things simply shouldn’t be minimized. There were a number of factors leading up to this that I need to explain, so stay with me, OK? This might be a bit of a circuitous journey today.
First, the picture is of my wife Brenda on the left and her friend Shelley. They grew up together and both couples of us are all still friends. It’s from a hiking trip the four of us took a couple of years ago. But that isn’t where this post started.
Last night I was at a BBQ and was talking with another friend of mine. He mentioned how he was blogging at a local coffee shop with some friends of his and related that story to me. But that isn’t where this blog started, either. It was, however, the trigger.
What it did was remind me of the day, some weeks ago, I was at that same coffee shop (the best coffee shop in Eugene, by the way), waiting to meet a friend when the most vivd example of friendship unfolded right before my eyes. And this is where this blog started.
As I was waiting for my friend, I was people-watching. Coffee shops especially are great places for this activity. And what I saw was the most incredible thing. Carefully, methodically, two men came up to the door together. Not typically unusual except one was in a wheelchair and the other was pushing him. Also not terribly unusual except the man pushing him was blind. Now before we go to “a blind guy was pushing a guy in a wheelchair” jokes, stop and think about what was being played out for a minute.
As they approached the door, the man in the wheelchair was speaking directions to the blind man pushing him. He was carefully, descriptively letting him know what to do, left, right, wait a bit while I get the door handle, now inside over a bump, here’s a table, there’s a chair to your left. The blind man sat down next to the man in the wheelchair who then looked up at the menu and said “I see something you’d really like” and proceeded to describe it to him.
It was the most amazing and beautiful example of friendship I think I’ve seen. Their relationship was one of mutual need. The man in the wheelchair needed a push, the blind man needed direction. They each had something the other needed and willingly shared it. In a word, relationship.
And that brings me back to the BBQ last night. That was the simple, but often missed point my friend was making: that we need to concentrate on building our relationships with each other.
Because we need relationship. So halve your electricity use, your driving, etc, but don’t halve your friendships.
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the Lawrence Street House – Rainwater, Part 3

Another area we are looking at to save water is our toilets and clothes washer. These two appliances probably use the most water inside the home as any other. And they are easy “targets” for rainwater use. That’s because they don’t need to use drinking water to be effective. Our thought is to also plumb our home to use some of the rainwater we collect to flush toilets and wash our clothes. 
We will likely have to balance the amount of rainwater we can collect with our irrigation, toilet and clothes washing demands. Our rooftop has the potential to collect far more than we can store practically, but we can’t practically store all we could collect (about 15 to 20,000 gallons), so we’re looking at where to hit that balance. I just received our irrigation estimates and, in our climate, we face the challenge of very wet winter months and pretty dry summer months. So the challenge is to know how many gallons is best overall for storage.
Plus, another challenge we’re facing is our clothes washer. Conventional wisdom (ie LEED points and marketing) says we should get rid of our 28+ year old Maytag washer that uses 40 gallons per load and get a new Energy Star washer that uses 15 to 20 gallons per load. HOWEVER, my question is what happens to our old washer (landfill or reuse?), we only run 2 to 4 loads per week (family of 2) and about half of those are  cold water, if we’re using rainwater for those cold water loads and we’ve never had a problem with our washer in those 28 years (The lonely Maytag repairman ads were right), does it make overall sense to replace our washer? Right now, we’re thinking it doesn’t. So we are probably going to forego that 0.5 point for LEED in lieu of what we feel makes more sense overall. 
I’d be interested in your opinions.
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The Lawrence Street House – Rainwater, Part 2

Our primary us for rainwater will be for landscape irrigation. We’re designing our landscape first to need less water to start with. That’s the way it is with good design in anything, reduce is the first “r”.

So we’re being strategic in our plant selection, using the concept of the right plant in the right place. We’re reducing our actual lawn area to just about 100 sq ft. Lawns are the largest irrigated “crop” in the US, and we often use clean, drinking water to do it.
Then, after we reduce, we’re going to reuse (the second “r”) our rainwater that already would have fallen onto the ground where our house will be. The landscaping that needs irrigation will largely be fed by a drip system. Drip irrigation is hugely more efficient than pop-up heads.
We’re also looking at using rainwater for two of the major water-using “appliances” inside our home: our toilets and clothes washer. More on those next time.
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The Lawrence Street House – Rainwater, Part 1

In addition to harvesting the solar on our site, we are seriously considering harvesting our rainwater. Eugene gets about 50 inches of rain each year. The rooftop of our main house is about 3,400 sq ft (remember, this includes porches and the garage), and our secondary unit has a roof area of about 1,570 sq ft.

There are several resources you can get online to calculate how many gallons of water this translates into. that’s helpful as we get into our irrigation demand and other things we might want to do with our water.
I’ve talked with the people from RainTech in Jacksonville, Oregon, just over 150 miles from here. Their system (pictured above), is called RainSpace. It’s underground, simple low-tech and just seems elegant to us. Visit their site, watch their installation video and see what we mean.
We’re hoping to use rainwater for all our irrigation and maybe even flush our toilets and wash our clothes with it. I’ll get into a bit more about that tomorrow. Meanwhile, check out RainTech, their green certifications and learn a little more about their company.
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The Lawrence Street House – Front Porch continued…

I know it’s been a while since my last post. There are a couple of reasons for that. First, I’ve been in the final stages of completing my Sustainable Building Advisor class and the last part of the class got even more intense. Second, we’ve been also finishing the working drawings so we can get bids and find out just where we’re at on our budget.

In this post, I want to kind of tag on to my Front Porch article previously in April. This has been a huge part of my wife and my personal culture shift and paradigm that it became a major part of our design. It is also a major part of our landscaping layout. Thankfully, our landscape architect, David Dougherty (Dougherty Landscape Architects), who designed our landscaping in our present house 11 years ago was called into service to design our new one. David understands our desires (our current landscaping is incredible), sustainability and front porch philosophy.
Because our house faces probably the major bike and pedestrian east-west connection through town, we wanted to have our house relate well to that. It’s interesting that our City code allows us, because we are on a corner lot, to pick one side as the “front” and the other one as the “side”. This means, if we wanted to, we could build a 6′ high, solid wood fence the entire 150 foot length of our lot along this wonderful ped/bike corridor. Real neighborly, huh?
Of course, that would be totally contrary to what we envision for this house. We want to be part of the neighborhood, not project this idea that “this is my space; stay out.” Yet, because we are on a major circulation path, we do want some level of privacy for our outdoor living space. From the street as well as from the secondary home. Therein lies the challenge.
And David met that challenge. The image above is a segment of our conceptual plan, showing the porch and the yard. You can download a full size plan by clicking here, but I want to focus my discussion today on just the front porch and the yard.
I’ll start with the yard first. As I said, we wanted some level of privacy when we’re out having a barbecue or family gathering. After all, this is a major circulation path. Not a wood fence or hedge of arborvitae. This isn’t a major path for cars. We were mowing our lot the other day and in a fifteen minute period or so, I counted 22 bikes, 6 pedestrians and 2 cars passing by. So sound privacy isn’t much of an issue. We also don’t want to be completely on display. David captured that essence wonderfully and we are now taking this conceptual plan to that next level with only minor changes. We are reducing the lawn size even more (that IS our only lawn area — about 250 sq ft on a 9,000 sq ft lot) and providing some more patio for our outdoor table, chairs and umbrella. I’ll go into more detail as this progresses in a later post.
If you’ve read my April post about front porches, you’ll understand why our front porch is the way it is; if you haven’t read it, do that now, then return to this spot. We are envisioning some stone insets between the porch steps and the sidewalk wrapping around the corner. This allows people to cut the corner walking from 15th to Lawrence (they will anyway, so why not go with it?) and makes a hugely-inviting “front” to our home. My wife and I can see ourselves sitting out on the front porch on a Saturday morning, greeting passersby and maybe even inviting them up for a cup of coffee or ice tea (if summer ever arrives…). Neighborhood is all about this interaction and that is some of what we’ve lost in our recent trends in house and subdivision design.
That’s probably enough information for anyone to process in one sitting. As I mentioned, I’ll talk in more detail about some of our other landscape ideas later.
But this parting thought: most people design a house, get everything done, sometimes even start construction, THEN think about colors, plants, patios, etc. It needs to happen sooner, in this earlier stage of design, so the indoors and outdoors have some cohesive connection (and so it fits into the budget). Good design is comprehensive.