LEED tagged posts

On August 20th, the local newspaper, the Sierra Vista Herald, published an article on my house, since it’s likely to get a LEED for Homes “platinum” rating, the highest. Unfortunately, the article is behind a pay wall on the Herald’s web site, so I’ve attached a copy here. You can use either this link

Living ‘lightly on the land’ article, svherald

and then click on the image of the first page of the PDF file to download it, or you can click on this link to download it directly.

While this post is NOT about the circa 1970 British blues/rock band Ten Years After, it is about moving in and ten years after. I’ll answer the question, “After what?” a little later.

The last three weeks have been, well, chaotic. As I wrote last time, I was moving from the old house to the new one the way Johnny Cash built his Cadillac: “One piece at a time.” Which is a lot harder to do than it might seem. At least, it was for me. Not harder physically, although there was plenty of toting and hauling. In fact, with apologies to Ned Washington and Dimitri Tiomkin, I came up with my own version of the Rawhide theme:

Movin’, movin’, movin’,

Keep them boxes movin’,

Movin’, movin’, movin’,

Boxhide.

Pack ’em up, move ’em out, move ’em in, pack ’em out,

Pack ’em in,

Boxhiiiiide. Yaah!

OK, great ...

There’s been good news and bad (or, bad-ish) news on the counter-top front this week. The good news is that the counter tops in the kitchen and pantry were installed on Monday. Take a look! Here’s the kitchen.

And here’s the pantry.

The material we’ve used here goes by the brand name Curava® and this particular version is called Arctic Blue. It’s made of crushed white quartz and a binder, plus pieces of recycled clear, gray, and blue glass (which should get us a LEED point for using recycled materials). You can see the glass bits a little better in this close-up.

(And yes, the bowls of the sink are two different sizes. Different depths, too.)

The not-so-good news is that apparently that piece of Blue Storm granite was broken so badly in transit to Tucson that it was unusable...