Food Waste Friday--June 29, 2012

It's time for Food Waste Friday, when the Frugalgirl encourages us to post pictures from the previous week of wasted food from our household. This accountability hopefully will help us to be more careful with our food and maybe save some money. 

Here is goes for this week.   

We had no waste this week, but here is some of the good food we ate so we would have no waste.

On another money saving note, I'd thought I would mention that you should check into your state and local government energy rebate programs. There may be a lot of money out there to be had to help with energy saving projects. We just made some energy saving improvements to our house and the state (along with the local electric company) paid for half of it. If you want to see what we did here's a link. Energy Audit.

A Second Look--June 27, 2012

This week I gave a second look to the day lilies in the yard.  Over the years with the encroachment of shade and weeds, the day lilies have been decreasing in numbers. However, I still found several colors of them blooming. Sometimes it was one lone lily and sometimes it was a whole row. I must say they are beautiful flowers.

Here are the lilies and other things I found this week.

The different color day lilies I found blooming this week.

First African daisy to bloom.

Butterfly on marigold

First hibiscus bloom

Yellow trumpet lily

Frank Lloyd Wright House

The Pope-Leighey House designed by Frank Lloyd Wright

Do you ever pass somewhere on a regular route of yours and think you'd like to stop there? However you don't have time right then, so you think you'll stop next time. But then you don't. Well, that's what I've been doing for a while now when we visit my father-in-law. Five minutes from where he lives is a Frank Lloyd Wright house that piqued my curiosity every time I saw the sign for it. I finally satisfied this curiosity last Saturday when Ward and I visited the Pope-Leighey house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

The house was completed in 1941 and was one of Wright's earlier houses built for the middle class. It was named for the two families that lived in it--The Loren Pope family and later, Robert Leighey and his wife. It was relocated to its present site by Mrs. Leighey in 1964 to save it from demolition due to highway expansion.

Screw head slots parallel to wood grain

The house has 1200 sq. ft., and Wright showcased his common theme of connecting to the earth by using natural materials of brick, glass, wood, and concrete.  He repeated rectangular shapes and cantilevering structures throughout the house tying everything together--including the furniture. He used compression (6'8" ceilings) and expansion (11' ceilings) to make rooms seem bigger. But what amazed me the most was the attention to detail. The screw heads were parallel to the grain of the wood they were in and the mortar between the bricks was different depths to emphasize different planes. I could go on and on about his design, but I now understand the hoopla surrounding Frank Lloyd Wright and his architecture. 

I'm so happy we stopped, and I want to visit more of Frank Lloyd Wright's houses. In the meantime, I am thinking about the next place that I've been meaning to visit.

More info.:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope-Leighey_House
http://www.preservationnation.org/travel-and-sites/sites/southern-region/pope-leighey.html?gclid=CJKr8ZXh7LACFQIQNAodnmfJxQ

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But wait there's more!
Loren Pope is famous in his own right. He was an independent college placement counselor whose most famous book was Colleges that Change Lives. If you have anyone that is considering college, this book is a must read. Even if you aren't going to college anytime soon or already have been, reading about his college philosophies is still very interesting.



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Energy Audit

Recently, we improved the insulation in our house and the state paid for half of our expense to do this. Below are the details of the process.

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We hired a local energy assessment company to do the audit of our house. This was the first step that the state required.

They checked the insulation in our attic and other places. They also used a heat sensor to see how much heat was escaping along various joints and openings.

They checked the burn efficiency of our furnace.

They did a blow test that measured air exchange levels throughout the house. This told them how air-tight the house was.

Surprisingly, windows are usually not the main leaks in a house. It is usually from normal construction openings (plumbing and wire passes, etc.)

After the audit, another company did the recommended work. Most of this work involved sealing gaps and adding insulation. They did both of these in our attic...

as well as in our basement.

They used blown insulation in both our cantilevered second story and our attic .

We also got 12 new energy efficient light bulbs from the electric company that they installed.

After the work was done, the audit company came back and retested the house to see how things had changed. We had a 40% improvement.

Then the paperwork was filed by the audit company. We didn't have to do anything else except wait for the refund money to show up!

Food Waste Friday--June 22, 2012

It's time for Food Waste Friday, when the Frugalgirl encourages us to post pictures from the previous week of wasted food from our household. This accountability hopefully will help us to be more careful with our food and maybe save some money. 

Here is goes for this week.   

Lost (and found) sandwich on the dirty floor of my car.

This week, somehow a sandwich from work got lost on the floor of my car for a couple of days. I'm usually starving at work, so I don't know why it didn't get eaten. Maybe that was the day that someone brought in brownies and I filled up on those. Boy, were they good!  I hope the birds and chipmunks enjoyed this sandwich as much as I enjoyed those brownies.