Decisions, decisions...

We met with two contractors today to discuss conventional vs geothermal again. I hate to keep harping on this, but I've made my last 'green' stand on geothermal and I'm just not willing to back down, despite the costs. Dawn keeps telling me not to quote figures, so let's just say that the geothermal system has a life expectancy of 20 years, and a return-on-investment of 32 years. Obviously it makes no economic sense, but I've already backed away from solar electric, aerobic septic, sustainable lumber, recycled materials, and every other lofty aspiration I started with. To abandon geothermal as well would haunt me for the next twenty years. But we're already 400% over budget and I can't even find someone to loan us the money to do what we need, never mind to assuage my ecologic conscience... In other news, the general contractor started today, a few weeks later than we expected, and he's working by himself, so this is going much slower than I hoped. We'll wait and see. So far he's endeared himself by ripping out all of the collar-ties in the attic and replacing them with new wood. One interesting discovery: Inside the knee wall, in the north-west corner of the house, there was a hidden little cache under the floorboards. It was empty, of course, and you couldn't even access it before they took down the plaster, so it probably dated back to the original part of the house, before they finished the attic. Cool. The dormer, just a week after we paid the roofers to patch all the leaks