Ready, Set......

Keep your fingers crossed it's a GO! The plans go to the Village of La Grange tomorrow. Keep your fingers crossed they get approved. If they do, we're off and running!

Appliances

We went to ABT this weekend to start the hunt for energy star appliances. I'm glad to report that there are a lot of options and ABT is a great place to go check them all out. We had a very helpful sales lady who really listened to what we wanted and pointed us in the right directions... and they offer fresh baked cookies and coffee! With my list in hand I'm going to shop around for the best price, but I have a feeling we will end up back there. I know it seems a little early to start shopping before we've even knocked down the old house, but we like to have things ready for the bidding process. Tony and I are good about making decisions and sticking to them. We are confident in our choices and rarely second guess ourselves. It makes the process go a lot smoother. Making decisions early in the process also helps with scheduling. Keeping things on time helps things go smoothly so we can move in just that much sooner. Also, we left the kids at home so no "I'm so bored" whinning and it was fun hanging out with Tony for the afternoon. :)

The Other Architect...

This is Darleen Stirn. (D, I hope you don't mind I borrowed your picture from Facebook.) She is a very talented architect with LEED credentials, married to an architect, a mom of three beautiful girls and my friend. I'm happy to report that she is going to be on board with our project. Tony and I are working together on the floor plan and he will be putting together the drawings. After that, they go to Darleen for review, she will revise as needed, stamps them and then they're off to the Village of La Grange for construction approval. I love working with her because she gets me. A few weeks ago she came over and helped me work on the flow of the house. We had a very helpful brainstorming session, fueled by lots of coffee, which made it easier for me to explain my ideas to Tony. That was very helpful! She is going to be involved in other aspects of our project but more on that as we go along. Glad your on board Darleen!

Murco and The ReUse People

Part of building a new green home is use as much of the old home as possible. There isn't much we are going to be able to reuse so passing anything along to others instead of putting it into a landfill is the responsible thing to do. Today I met with Jodi Murphy of MURCO RECYCLING, INC. She held an auction on our last tear down house and gave a second life to flooring, windows and doors that we would otherwise have pitched. She has incredible energy! If your interested in anything, look for the auction in late February. You can follow her website: http://www.murco.net/

Also, Jodi told me about Ken Ortiz of THE REUSE PEOPLE. They salvage up to 80% of recyclable and reusable construction material and channel them back into the market place through donations and sales at its network of retail outlets. I'm hoping that will happen right after the Murco auction. Check out his website at: http://www.thereusepeople.org/

Then, if all goes well, demo will happen early in March... so exciting!

And so it begins...

As a family we decided to keep a blog following our green building journey. It's a way to keep track of things, educate each other, and create a time capsule of sorts for our new home. It will tell our building story. I'm hoping each member of our family will make posts. This way we can share our family's green building story from each one of our individual points of view. We encourage any comments, welcome any tips and information you may want to share. Thanks for coming along with us!