April 9, 2007
Bamboo Flooring
As Melanie briefly mentioned in the comments of the previous post, Kim and I will have solid bamboo flooring throughout the entire first floor of our house. Bamboo is actually a very fascinating plant, and there are several environmentally sound reasons for using it as a building material (and hemp, Melanie would say, don’t forget hemp!). But I’m not really an environmentalist in any sort of traditional sense, so I’m not going to preach about the use of bamboo over mainstream hardwoods for floors. I just happen to think they look gorgeous.
As such, we found such an amazing deal on some prefinished bamboo, that we’ve already purchased some 1800 square feet of it. This is not the best picture, but what you are looking at is 77 boxes of flooring, lines up in the sunroom of the extremely tiny rental house that Kim and are currently living in. One day I’ll write about a post about my penchant for finding deals on inexpensive flooring - best deal so far: tile for the powder room in the new house: 7.5 cents a square foot - and this bamboo will certainly be included in that post (though Kim actually found this one first). Anyway, this is the first major purchase for our new home, which won’t even begin construction for at least a month and a half.
Better pictures coming soon. And hopefully, floor plans!
March 13, 2007
The Bright Green Future
So about a month ago, I posted a picture of a weird, ugly little house. Kim and I own that house. It is nestled on approximately one acre of land which borders a local park in beautiful Tucker, GA. We are divesting ourselves of our current real estate holdings (the house in Sugar Hill has been sold, and we close on our Athens house in a few weeks), and moving to Tucker. We bought this tiny little house with one thought in mind.
Let’s tear this bitch down and build new one.
And starting in May, that’s exactly what we are going to do. We’re going to build a modern Craftsman style home where this little house currently stands. But, in a somewhat unusual step, we are going to build an extremely energy-efficient home out of non-conventional building materials. I’ve spent literally hundreds of hours researching this topic, and I’m going to talk a little bit about the process right now. If this sort of thing bores you, you can stop reading. If you want to learn a little, just click more.