Our first certification

I've been out of town for the past few weeks, but I got back to find this lovely certificate waiting for me:

Our house earned a Platinum certification from Earth Advantage, their highest level of certification for homes using sustainable building practices. Earth Advantage recognizes homes that meet high standards for energy efficiency, healthy indoor air, resource efficiency, environmental responsibility and water efficiency and conservation. We're excited to earn this certification! You can read more about their standards here: www.earthadvantage.com/compare.php

With all the furnishings

We've spent the past few weeks unpacking and hanging all our curtains, pictures, shelves, etc. as well as putting together a few IKEA things we're adding to the new house. So finally, I have a few photos to share.


Welcome to our new house...

Our numbers, mailbox and porch light look very nice:

Here are the wonderful under-the-stairs bookshelves, now full of books:

The living room:

Dining room:

Kitchen, with the awesome black subway tile now complete:

The office:

Stuart's side:

My side:

My craft desk:

The mud room, which is Pippen's domain during the day:

Our awesome garage storage shelves from IKEA:

Moving upstairs, here's the hallway:

This is the guest bedroom. Pippen kind of thinks it's his, so you might have to fight him for it when you visit:

Guest bathroom:

We quickly filled up our amazing master bedroom closet:

Master bathroom:

Master bedroom, which includes my writing desk:

That's all for now. Some great things have been happening outside the house as well. I'll get some more photos and share them soon.

Our awesome dog door

Some people have asked where we managed to get an airtight dog door.  After Blake and Stuart did some searching, Blake found an awesome door at http://www.freedompetpass.com.  Our blower-door (air-tightness) tests have included this pet door in the mud room door to the back yard.  And it works!  Our final test measured an extremely tight 0.20 ACH50 for the entire house (using the Passive House volume calculation).

Here is a video of the door during one of the blower-door tests.

We're in!

So we disappeared from the blog for awhile, and I must apologize for that. We've been so busy moving in, getting settled and other things. But the most important news to share is that we're now living in our awesome Passive House! I don't have many photos yet, but I will take some soon and share them here.

Our first night here was May 23, and over Memorial Day weekend we moved over most of the rest of our stuff. So far, my main thoughts on living here are 1) It's not cold, and 2) It's quiet.

Since moving in, we only turned on the heat once briefly, and everything has remained a nice even temperature. Despite the cool, rainy weather of the past few days, we've remained comfortable. I love it! We've also found that we don't really need our comforter on our bed at night, because using it actually makes us too hot.

With our super thick and well-insulated walls, doors and windows, it's been pretty quiet. I can still hear the trains running a few blocks away, but it's not nearly as loud as at my old house. It's also nice because Pippen doesn't run outside to bark at every little noise he hears. He spends a lot more time relaxing in his favorite chair. He also had no problems figuring out how to use his air-tight doggie door.

We've been using an energy tracking device to watch how much energy we're using, so we should have some interesting data on that later. What's been interesting to me is that because I know this house is very energy efficient, and because we're even tracking our use, I've found myself feeling like I should use less energy. I'm even more vigilant about turning off lights than before!

I'll have more to talk about later, but for now, I'll share the one photo we do have. This is evidence of how Abby has taken to the new house: