Enough about Dave. We were talking about me and my house. Now that we’ve got the boiler all sewn up – well, installed, anyway, even if the efficiency numbers still need hashing out, but more on that later – let’s get back to our other projects.

While we’re not doing a full-scale remodel, we are trying to upgrade to green where and when it makes sense. But coming out of that green building conference a couple of weeks back, I had a whole new list of projects rolling in my mind. As you might recall, I sounded a little cranked when I posted about the conference. The truth is I come out of those things with a mix of inspiration and despair. Let’s hit the inspiration part first with some highlights from my new Overly Ambitious, Swear-I’ll-Get-Around-To-It Master Springtime Project List.

• The small sunroom on the western side of our house. It has a hole in one wall. It has very, very little insulation, and what insulation there is has been compromised by the many streams of water that leak from the roof, mostly thanks to the homemade skylight sitting in it (from the looks of it, the skylight is actually an old glass door, tacked to the roof). Said skylight faces south, and happens to be angled perfectly to completely miss the low-rising winter sun; the high hot summer sun, however, pours right in, heating the brick floors, which radiate that heat all night into the rest of our house. I’m going to tear that mother down, rebuild it with structurally integrated panels, and skip the skylight in favor of some flat-plate solar thermal collectors.
• Solar preheating. A friend of mine picked up some used thermal panels off craigslist that he, in turn, needs to get rid of. (He doesn’t want to cut down the old trees in front of his house in order to get the sunlight he needs to make the panels useful.) Those panels will be mine. We’ll use them to preheat incoming city water from 40 degrees to 90 before it heads to our hot-water tank.
• Graywater garden. Our washing machine goes through two rinse cycles with every load. That’s a lot of water that could be put to better use. I’d like to turn the two flagstone planters in front of our house into some kind of graywater filter, one that can feed water lilies and whatnot before filtering out into the rest of our garden.
• A homemade hot tub. We currently use the concrete pond in our front garden for catching rain water and growing mosquito larvae. But I feel it has a higher calling: with a lo-fi solar thermal panel attached, it would make a really swell solar-powered hot tub.

Everybody’s got their to-do list – paint the kitchen, plant some gardenias – but some things are obviously more important than others. Obviously, the homebrew solar hot tub isn’t quite as practical as, say, reinsulating the attic. (Easy to say when summer’s on the approach. What I wouldn’t have given for a hot tub when those four feet of snow fell.) So where to start? We’ll get to that next time.