Recently, the city council announced their new zero-waste plan, a 32-year strategy to reduce to zero the amount of garbage sent to landfills by reusing, recycling and composting materials instead. They are starting with improvements to the recycling program.

The City of Austin's Solid Waste Services Department plans to unveil a new program this year that will expand what Austinites can recycle and eliminate the need to sort recycling into multiple bins.

The new program, set to begin in October and be rolled out over three months, replaces the familiar blue bins with 90-gallon carts that can be filled with new items, such as brown medicine bottles and cereal boxes, along with the cans, bottles, jars, paper and cardboard that are currently accepted.

I love the idea that my recycling can would actually be larger than my garbage can, and I've been keeping a close eye on our trash to try to figure out whether this new system might actually work.

Our number one waste material is paperboard--you know, the boxes that cereal and snacks come in, the 6-pack cartons, the excess packaging that surrounds our toiletries and new shoes and toys. Our city doesn't recycle paperboard, and the local Ecology Action station downtown was so overloaded with the stuff that they asked me to just throw it in the landfill, thanks anyway.

Under the new system, recycling collection will occur once every two weeks, instead of weekly, which is expected to lead to savings on gasoline and reduce harmful emissions. Also, rather than workers lifting recycling bins manually, newly outfitted trucks will pick up the carts and dump the recycling inside.

I'm setting two ongoing goals for myself:

1. To keep track of what we throw away most at any time (currently paperboard), and

2. To focus for the next 30 days on trying to creatively reduce, reuse or recylce that particular type of trash (by purchasing in bulk instead of in boxes, for example).

With paperboard, I already know that recycling isn't the optimal option... yet. And I'm not the creative type who saves toilet paper rolls to make into crafty little projects. The truth about crafty little projects around our house is that they end up cluttering toy bins or activity drawers or the floor and then they end up in the trash! The truth about paperboard is that we simply need to bring less of it into our home.

One small step I began to take last December: leaving the packaging at the store. It drove me nuts how much paperboard waste we ended up with after Christmas morning 2006. I decided I was going to unwrap everything in the parking lot, fill the bags back up with the waste, and take it back into the store for the store to deal with (and many thanks to the folks at Target who were very willing to take the trash).

I think the next step is to try to avoid packaging whenever possible. I'll try to let you know how it goes.

I've been trying to figure out since how we could put a screen door on our own house without ruining the aesthetic appeal of our fabulous "Pasadena."

We had found a number of companies which make awesome reproductions of the oldies and goodies:

Moonshine Shades offers the standard scrolls with the ever popular heron and palm tree silhouettes.

La-Ti-Da Retro has herons with cattails as well as other old Florida retro ditties like the sailboat and ducks.

Hansen Aluminum has a large variety of old school inserts including the heron, flamingo and manatee, but also carries more geometric designs, and they do a limited amount of custom work, too.

But none of these compares to Austin's own Susan Wallace. Check out the "Grover" with the "Red Ganesh!" Her custom pieces are amazingly affordable, and we're working with her to do some Crestview Doors-inspired designs for some of our clients too. Very exciting!

All of this just confirms what we already knew: a fabulous modern front door deserves a spiffy retro screen door! A match made in heaven, just in time for Valentine's Day.

Whatever you pick, I'm thinking it needs to go with these kick-ass wall sconces! No offense to the ones that David made, but these things are the boss.

Now that we keep separate websites and separate blogs, I don't blog much about Crestview Doors here anymore. But I have to take a sec to brag about our awesome new site design!

David and I have been working loooong hours to figure out how to best address three issues:

1. "Your doors take too long." Last fall, our lead time jumped to 8 weeks on standard door orders. We've been doing everything we can to bring that back down to 3-4 weeks maximum. Inventory orders ship in 2-3 business days.

2. "Your doors are too expensive." Relationships with our suppliers have changed as we have grown, and we have been able to bring those prices DOWN without sacrificing quality. The "Allandale" with double-pane, frosted glass is now almost HALF the price it used to be. Cha-ching!

3. "Do you do sidelights/transom windows/double doors/etc?" Some of the most satisfying projects are the ones where we are forced to think outside of the... doorway. We are ready to take on more custom entry projects including fire-rated doors for residential multi-family and matching interior doors for that mid-century redo.

Free shipping has come and gone, but for a short time our doors are ON SALE. We saw a purchasing slump in January (which can be downright deadly for a small business like ours), so we are hoping to see things pick up as people like us strive to save their neighborhoods from ugly, period-inappropriate doors.

Let us know if you see anything we might have missed in our upgrade. More soon!

We now interrupt this houseblogging moment to make a political announcement.

If you haven't already heard, Barack Obama is bringing record number of voters to the polls including independents and Republicans. Here in Texas, one of the reddest states in the country, we see our conservative neighbors and friends showing a positive interest in Obama. They are ready for change, too. And we see our Democratic friends and family members getting excited like never before. It is time for a change!

But Texas is not where our concern lies... If you are in a state that is voting on Super Tuesday, it is more important than ever that you stand up for change now. We must send a clear message that dynasties are no longer an acceptable form of democratic governance.

With Barack Obama as our candidate, we are convinced that we can win in a landslide in 2008 and usher in a new era of positive politics that collaborates across the red and blue lines for change.

Vote for Obama, tell your friends and neighbors and co-workers about him, put a sign in your window and a sticker on your car. Get out the vote in the Super Tuesday states!!! We can all be a part of the change!

Thanks in advance!
Christiane & David

This message paid for by the Erwin House Political Action Committee for Peace and Peanut Butter Sandwiches.

So, go ahead! Ask us any three things you've always wondered about us zany Erwins! But be prepared. I'm sure to ask back ;-)

Although David and I agreed with the intent of the rule (to prevent house flippers and other developers from outrageously maxing out the buildable square footage of a small urban lot), we were very disappointed with the lack of due process.

A couple of days ago, a former Austin resident left us this comment:

"The question that doesn't seem to get discussed much around this issue is how big does a house really have to be for a modest family? In the U.S., I think our first answer is always "as big as I want it and can afford!" . . . [H]ow is it that 40 years ago, many of the same houses being demolished in Crestview to make a 3 story, 2800 sq' mod box for 4 people probably were used to raise families of 6 or more?"

I ask myself the same question ALL the time. We're raising a family of five (plus a dog and a cat) in 2100sf. It feels exactly right, sometimes even a bit generous. We probably could do without 200 of those square feet, but we've also talked about expanding the family at some point... Why did it seem so impossibly to raise our five-person family in 830 square feet?

I have talked to people who grew up in our neighborhood, families of four, five or six in 800 square feet, adults in one bedroom and all of the children in the other, all of them squeezed around a tiny kitchen table to eat breakfast or dinner. Where did they put all their stuff?

My mother-in-law and others I know have explained that they didn't have a lot of stuff growing up. They had two outfits, one for school/church, and one for play. Their clothes were washed in the sink daily. They didn't have many toys, and they ate many of the same meals over and over again, mothers shopping for fresh food at the market daily rather than stockpiling in the cabinets.

Call me shallow: this all sounds very spartan, like something I half admire and half fear. The people I've talked to don't look back on these times fondly. They remember feeling poor and being constantly hungry. They resented the lack of privacy. My mother-in-law explained that they didn't really choose to live in a small house, they had to. They weren't trying to be environmentally conscious, most people simply couldn't afford a larger home. And many parents who had grown up during the depression were afraid to purchase a larger home, one they might not be able to afford were the market to suddenly crash again.

We started with a drawing for a 3,600sf home and whittled it down to 2,100, partly because we realized that we had originally drawn a bedroom the size of an airplane hangar (things look smaller on paper, I swear!) and partly because we simply couldn't afford to build that big.

What is too big? What is not big enough? Are today's standards gluttonous, or were yesterday's homes too tight?

This is a HUGE deal to me. I've tried three other times over the years to sign up for this program, but I've never been able to get online on time. The seats are gone in seconds. This time, we just plain got lucky.

I wish I could say it would help us save those pennies for the solar installation, but the truth is that this good deed will cost us almost twice per kWh compared to coal ($0.055 instead of $0.0325). Thank goodness for that handy dandy tax rebate ;-P

Over the years, I have slowly been upgrading my arsenal of cooking tools. It started with the array of colorful silicone spatulas (don't laugh at me, but aren't they fun?!). Then it moved on to plain-jane restaurant grade serving bowls. The black plates from Salvation Army are still around, on the other hand.

When we moved into Erwin House, I desperately needed a great dutch oven. I'd been eyeing the La Crueset line at Whole Foods for years, but I didn't feel ready to shell out the $100+ for one of their cast iron pots, so I picked up the $60 version at IKEA. That still felt like a HUGE chunk of pocket change, but it has produced some fine meals, let me tell you what.

About a month ago, David finally tossed our nasty little fry pan, Teflon flakes and all, into the garbage. We bought a Le Creuset 10-1/4" iron-handled skillet. This thing gets used daily to fry eggs, brown chicken, and for Saurday's dinner, it seasoned and softened fresh corn tortillas for David's favorite: enchiladas. (I would have posted a picture, but our camera was stolen.)

I can't say I yet see a difference in the quality of the materials between the La Creuset and IKEA products. I've been trying to figure out what the socially responsible thing to do is. Are the IKEA products being made in sweatshops? Is the enamel hazardous to my health? How come it was half the price--is it just the branding?

One thing I learned the hard way when we were remodeling: you get what you pay for. I can't tell you how many times I wished we had bought up and swallowed the cost. Certainly I feel that way about the doors we make. I'm trying to figure out how to drive our prices down, but the fact is that our doors aren't made in China by 12-year-old boys, the pieces and parts are made in Florida, in San Antonio, in Houston, and even right here locally in Austin. I want to feel as good about buying stuff as I do about what we make, but sometimes it all feels very overwhelming. If nothing else, at least the fresh produce we eat is local!

I will tell you one thing, though, I support well-made stuff. The fact is that we live in a disposable world and it's killing us. The La Crueset skillet will probably be around longer than I will.

In the previous installment, I talked a bit about purchasing our IKEA kitchen cabinetry, and in the first installment, I had discussed designing the kitchen using IKEA's products. When all is said and purchased, most of the dirty work is obviously still not done. I don't consider David or myself to be do-it-yourselfers. We needed to pinch some pennies, however, and assembly didn't seem like it should be too hard.

Our experience installing our kitchen cabinets from IKEA in many ways wasn't your typical experience. We had gone through pain-staking steps to make sure that the items we ordered were all accounted for. This can be difficult to do when you take one look at your receipt and realize that all of the pieces and parts are in a foreign language. Our sales rep advised us to spend time organizing the parts upon arrival.

First things first, make sure that you have the room to set about organizing and assembling the cabinets. For those of you who are living in your remodel, be prepared to give up your dining or living room as well as your kitchen as you do the pre-installation prep. As you can see, the cabinets before organization took up most of our living room.

Again, I need to emphasize the importance of checking and double-checking the inventory list with a sales rep before you leave the IKEA showroom. It is easy to leave without a cabinet door or two on the list, and because the wait time for receiving your product can be weeks or even months depending on the popularity of your choice, it is worth those ten minutes of anal retentiveness.

We were very lucky to have chatted a wee bit with Caro about her experience. She and her husband also did a self-install of their cabinets and had also learned the hard way about pre-organizing. As a result, when the cabinets arrived on a big palatte, David knew to put everything in piles according to the numbers on the receipt (on which the sales rep had handwritten notes for us in english regarding what was what). After organizing, things were much more manageable.

David had scheduled to take a week off of work to do the install figuring that organzing and measuring would take the most amount of time, and that the installation would then move along smoothly. I think this would have been the natural order of things, except that our house was broken into the night before he was ready to start installing. David's piles remained when he arrived the next morning, but the receipt, instructions and warranty had been stolen leaving him completely clueless as to what to do with all of the pieces and parts.

Again, we were lucky to have Caro in town. She offered to let us borrow her instructions. IKEA was able to send us a copy of our receipt a few days later, but the handwritten notes our sales rep had made were not on it, leaving David to decipher the Swedish code.

By this time, David's week was half over. In a fit of desperation, we started looking for a professional to help us with the install. We installation how-to video over at IKEAfans.com to brush up. When my bio-dad came to visit after the birth of our youngest daughter, he and David set to work. Amazingly, they had the entire thing finished in two 12-hour days.

See the progress here.

Our Flickr photos tagged with "ikeakitchen".

In the last installment, I'll talk a little more about living with an IKEA kitchen: thumbs up or down?

See also:

Kitchens, Part 1: Purchasing Your IKEA Kitchen

IKEA Kitchens, Part 2: Purchasing Your IKEA Kitchen

I suppose I spoke too soon. Maybe this year we should be concentrating on making Erwin House safer? I'm still spooked.

But my main goal at Erwin House this year is to go green. We tried to incorporate many green intentions during the remodel. We recycled our old windows (good for landfills, bad for energy efficiency). We chose bamboo floors for the kitchen and dining (good for the earth, bad for an area that is wet a lot and sees a great deal of traffic). We went from having no insulation to full insulation (great for energy efficiency; even though we more than doubled our square footage, our energy bill hasn't budged a penny... except that first month when the doors were open all the time, ha ha!). We angled the roof for solar panels and made room for a 500-gallon rainwater tank (and now we just have to install them!).

It is time to go the extra mile. My eldest's school has gone green this year, and it seems like we should be walking the walk at home too. We're starting with something really quite simple: a shower timer. I admit it, we are hot water hogs. We designed the house such that all of the water facilities are centrally located. The bathroom and kitchen share a wall downstairs, and the two upstairs bathrooms and laundry are all directly above the water heater. This has reduced the amount of time it takes to get hot water, and the fancy shower temperature gauges make it easy to get the temp and pressure just right. Unfortunately, it means we spend a lot of time basking in the flow.

It seems fitting to start the new year with a daily reminder of our commitment to using less of the earth's precious resources. Won't hurt our pocketbooks a bit either ;-) I plan to put those saved pennies straight towards the solar panel fund!

I haven't yet picked our next step, but I'm contemplating buying a composter since our "pile" isn't exactly composting much of anything. What are you doing to go green this year?

Best line in the story:

Its distinctive flat roof is now angled like the propped-up lid of a grand piano.

That's all. We'll let the pros do the writing today.

BEFORE

DURING

AFTER

What a HUGE difference it made! I suppose it had to wait. We were told by a few contractors that you have to let cedar age a little or it won't take the paint (and its natural resin might even bleed through). It looks so good now, I don't know what to do with myself.

I have great plans for landscaping, but first we have a project that requires some planning. As you can probably see, our deck doesn't actually provide any cover for the area underneath... including our front door. Heavy rains drip directly through the deck beams and form a lake right in front of the picture window. We are going to have to build some kind of under-cover, provide a gutter to redirect the runoff, and then grade the soil so that the water won't collect in one spot. Only then can we finish the concrete screen fence under the deck and landscape that area.

I've been saying that Erwin House was completed in August of 2006, but I suppose a house is never really done, eh? ;-)

Our lot is a strange triangle with the acute angle in the back. We quickly realized after moving in that most of the yard is in the front whether we saved the backyard or not. And the front yard lines a busy street. If we were going to enjoy soccer scrimmages and frisbee tosses, we were going to have to build a barrier between the people who regularly ignore the speed limit and us.

Hence, the hunt for the perfect fence material.

David and I had long admired the Modern Phoenix homes.

We so admire the creative and often elegant use of concrete screen blocks to privatize or decorate the home and landscaping. But we also appreciated the iconic nature of the screen block. The varying types of screen blocks used throughout the 50's and 60's symbolized a new age of mass production that could manipulate materials decoratively and affordably in ways not previously possible.

Unfortunately, decorative concrete screen block is as difficult to find as a retro front door. We searched and searched, finally asking Amy's Ice Cream to tell us where they had procured the blocks for their concrete wall at the Burnet Road location. They pointed us to Featherlite, a concrete company with a location just north of Austin in Round Rock.

My first phone call to Featherlite was a bust. They told me flat out that they didn't make these blocks anymore--Amy's had special ordered them from El Paso. So, I began to try to hunt down another distributor.

We caught a blurb in the summer issue of Atomic Ranch. The Editor mentioned that many people were looking for similar decorative concrete bricks and she welcomed all readers to submit their info. We surfed our way to Orco, a California company, that still manufactures a variety of vintage concrete blocks... but they don't ship outside of California. The freight would be staggering, warned the sales rep. We told Atomic Ranch about Orco, but they already had the scoop.

I tried Lowe's; one of their commercial sales reps was very kind but couldn't find anyone to help. We called every landscaping company in the county, but again no luck.

I called Featherlite again. This time I spoke in more detail with a sales guy, asking him if he could check if there were any leftover blocks from the Amy's job. Lo and behold, he said they had a few left onsite and we could come take a look and grab what was left.

David and I made a trip up to their McNeil lot on Friday. They didn't bring us the Amy's block... they brought us the mother of all atomic-age designs. And we instantly bought 68 of them to fill in the gaps in the cedar fence David had been working on all summer.

You should have seen the look on their faces when we started plotzing over the blocks. They thought we were out of our minds. We told them about Atomic Ranch magazine and how lots of people were looking for these blocks and we had been searching forever and would even consider buying all 934 of the blocks left in their inventory. The sales rep handed me his card and told us to spread the Featherlite gospel far and wide. They have to make 500 at a time, he explained, and there simply hadn't been enough demand to keep them in stock.

So, house renovators, mid-century advocates, and modern houselovers, we ask thee to go forth and prosper with the new knowledge you have of concrete screen blocks. Don't let iconic architecture die with the end of the 20th century. Demand retro and contemporary designs to be fabricated regularly and abundantly. Block-heads unite!

Many blog about their work in order to share progress with family and friends. Reading others' blogs, meanwhile, helps renovators share ideas, find inspiration and support -- and sometimes just be entertained.

Our story wasn't in the print version of the WSJ, but was mentioned in a sidebar to this story. I had never thought of having a home renovation party, thought it was a great idea on first review, and then started to read in horror:

One reveler near Chicago hung a sheet of drywall backwards, while a partygoer in Seattle messed up the host's bathroom floor by installing the tiles crooked. During her recent "Martini Bash" renovation event in Toronto, Debora Beam wandered upstairs to find one of her friends halfway through sledgehammering out the wrong wall. . . . Contractors say these parties have become a marketing opportunity. Orange County, Calif., handyman Paul Maceyka says a couple in their 30s recently paid his company almost $4,000 to undo a mess their inexperienced friends had made with a paint sprayer.

If I had thought of having a masonry party to finish our concrete screening wall, I am now of the mindset that the broken toes aren't worth it. It sure does make for entertaining blog posts, though ;-)