A pretty good house
While we wait for the builders to lay out our plumbing and pour the concrete slab, I have continued to work on my trail system. Inspired by our neighbor Melissa, who made a little trail system of her own, I have been installing steps in sections of the trail that are too steep for comfort. Melissa recommended I use some of our logs for the steps and then stake them in place with branches lodged deep into the ground. I found plenty of just-the-right-size logs, but for staking them in place, I splurged on manufactured garden stakes from Home Depot. I also bought a rubber mallet for driving them into the ground and, reluctantly, a new bucket for hauling dirt and rocks.
What began as a project using items exclusively found on our property ballooned this week to include a few brand-new purchases that I probably could have found pre-owned—a bucket, for example, or a heavy rake for grading the soil along the trails. Each of these purchases came with a little guilt about buying a new item that will inevitably end up in a landfill. But as I have learned, holding out for a used item comes with drawbacks, too.
Back in July, Mark and I drove to several estate sales trying to find used gardening equipment. Each time we showed up at the sale, we found that any tools and gardening supplies had already been scooped by savvy buyers who had arrived much earlier in the day. What’s more, these estate sales cost an hour’s roundtrip drive, which meant my car was burning gas—and since it was nearly 100 degrees outside, there was also the energy expended to cool my car as it baked on the road.
All this hand-wringing about our project’s environmental and economic impact usually brings me back to a concept I read about early in our decision to build: the “pretty good house.” Construction, like so many fields nowadays, has a long list of concepts you can claim loyalty to—Susanka’s “not-so-big house” (also one of my primary inspirations), Wright’s Usonia, net-zero and passive homes, biophilic and green homes…you can really get lost trying to find the right lunch table to sit at. In fact, it was this exact problem that led me to the “pretty good house.” I saw value in many of the schools of thought that I read about in residential architecture, but none felt like something I could pledge my unwavering allegiance to. The pretty good house aims to be the middle way of construction, committing to values I hold while allowing for concessions when certain factors (most often financial ones) threaten to derail the project entirely.
You can see an example of this in our decisions about insulation. Excellent home insulation is a primary focus of eco-friendly construction, and most often, spray foam insulation is the preferred method. For those who don’t know, spray foam insulation looks sort of like Redi-Whip when it’s installed: The foam shoot outs onto the wall and balloons into every crevice, creating an airtight seal that regulates indoor temperature much better than fiberglass batting.
It’s also very expensive—sometimes more than double the cost of fiberglass insulation.
Plus, spray foam isn’t environmentally innocent, either. When installed improperly, the foam can leach toxins out into the air that homeowners breathe and that eventually end up out in the natural world. When a house with spray foam insulation is remodeled or demolished, the foam adheres to the walls so well that dismantling it leads inevitably to particles ending up in the air. In fact, the people behind the pretty-good house concept updated their principles in 2019 and specifically discouraged builders from using foam insulation of any kind above grade.
The cost of insulating the Dog House with spray foam wasn’t prohibitive exactly, but it added several thousand dollars to a budget that already seemed out of proportion to our square footage. Plus, the rest of the project embodied steps towards environmental friendliness, the first being square footage itself—866 square feet total, compared to the 2,600(!!!) square feet of the average new single-family home in the U.S. in 2018. So, a smaller house meant less heating and air conditioning in the first place.
Our house is also buried into the side of a hill, and almost all of our windows face north. Both of these choices block a significant amount of unwanted solar heat, and the fact that half of our house is underground helps to regulate the temperature indoors. So, when it came to choosing spray foam insulation or traditional fiberglass, we went with the cheaper approach. The decision seemed, in respect to our project’s philosophy, “pretty good.”
I was inspired to write about this today after my friend Kyle sent me Nashville author Margaret Renkl’s recent essay “The Case Against Doing Nothing.” In it, Renkl describes the black hole of criticism you can wind up in when you try to make personal changes to affect the environment:
You’re covering your leftovers with beeswax wraps instead of plastic, and you never drink from a straw anymore. You’re skipping the Roundup and pulling the weeds in your garden instead. You’re careful about how you use pronouns, making no assumptions. You’re writing to your elected officials to demand affordable health care and sensible gun laws and a humane immigration policy and full enfranchisement of your fellow citizens. You’re giving as much as you can to advocacy organizations that work full time to protect the environment, the poor, the victims of prejudice, the rights of women.
There’s also a good chance that every single time you’ve made one of these changes, someone you know, someone who shares your concerns, has informed you that such changes are not enough. Someone has looked at the brand-new hybrid in your driveway and wondered why you didn’t go for the fully electric vehicle instead. Someone has looked at your fully electric vehicle and informed you that the power company in your area still relies in part on fossil fuels. Someone has seen the solar panels on your roof and informed you that you’ve undone all the good of those panels merely by taking that business trip to London. Haven’t you heard what air travel does to your carbon footprint?
Renkl argues that doing nothing—and worse, shaming people for doing something—is no way to create good in the world. Doing nothing means giving into despair, throwing up your hands and saying that we’re all doomed anyway, so why try? To those who do nothing, Renkl responds: “Many small efforts, especially when amplified by those of others, can have a big effect. What if every homeowner in the entire subdivision stopped using poisons and planted a pollinator garden? What if all the neighborhoods in a city, in a state, in the nation, did likewise? These efforts alone are unlikely to save the pollinators—on whom so much of our farming, and thus our very lives, depends—but they are the first steps toward the kind of collective consciousness raising that can be leveraged into political will.”
Reading Renkl’s essay alleviated some of my anxieties about our construction project. I think she is in favor of a “pretty good” approach to life, too. Choose fiberglass insulation over spray foam if you’ve weighed the pros and cons. Buy a Home Depot bucket and rake so you don’t have to spend hours looking for used tools at estate sales. Make decisions mindfully and don’t get so entangled in anxiety and indecision that you end up doing nothing.
I don’t expect this house to offset the carbon emissions of my next cross-country flight, but I do plan to tell others about the choices we are making to minimize our impact on the earth and support a moral economy. The act of doing, combined with the act of sharing what I do, is making this whole project feel more purposeful and aligned with my morals. Today, I feel pretty good about that.