This Odd House

Ryan and Mark Johnson, planning the replacement of the heating system.

The furnace, or more properly, the boiler, since this is the term used to describe the heating plant that generates hot water for heating a house, has now been replaced.  The previous unit had held up for half a century, and could probably have gone another many decades, but its efficiency in converting the latent energy of natural gas into useful home heat was low, maybe 50%.

Unfortunately, substituting a modern high efficiency boiler is not cost effective.  The expense of the new equipment, and the labor to install it, far exceeds the winter heating bill, even looking many years ahead.  This is an obstacle to reducing our country’s carbon emissions and dependence on finite fossil fuels.  The immediate economic benefits do not yet warrant the conversion expense.

But I had other objectives.  I was eliminating the requisite chimney, reclaiming its volume and floor space, and saving some of the expense of repairing it.  I was fulfilling a moral choice to become a more energy efficient citizen of the planet.  I was bringing an old house up to date to provide shelter in a new century.  I was taking on a renovation project at a point in my life where that project was providing a renovation for me.  These are intangibles, not subject to strict fiscal accounting optimizations.

I obtained several bids for the job.  All caused a gasp when first reviewing them.  Modern boilers capable of keeping This Odd House warm through a Minnesota winter are approximately $5000 and require another $5000 to install.   Mine was a bit more, because I had removed the asbestos-clad main feeder pipes, and that part of the house infrastructure had to be rebuilt.  To be fair, these costs included replacing the about-to-fail old water heater with a “boiler-mate” tank that ran off the main heating plant.

I chose a local plumbing and heating company, a father and son team that seemed to have a lot of experience with low overhead.  The process of installing the new boiler took four working days!  The first day saw the removal of the old water heater.  On a Friday.  For the next week, it was cold showers only.

The new boiler is a testament to modern energy engineering.  What previously required a vault-like fire box the size of a refrigerator and a tank suspended from the ceiling, now needs a miniature unit not much larger than a desktop PC.  In fact there is the equivalent of a PC in there, busy optimizing all of the combustion and heat demands of the system.

Ryan chisels through the foundation, the rubble accumulating below.

The four days of installation is an indication of the scale of the project.  Early on, the air supply and exhaust flue needed to be routed.  Modern heating plants don’t need chimneys anymore; their exhaust temperatures are low enough to be vented through common PVC pipes to a convenient sidewall.  In my case the nearest sidewall happened to have 18 inches of concrete in the way, the foundation of This Odd House.  Ryan Johnson, the son, claimed that he had never taken more than two hours to install the venting pipes.  Two hours later, he was still chiseling to reach the exterior of the house.

A sampling of the collection of fittings that plumbers need for their work.

The water heater, previously a self-contained gas burner itself, was replaced by a heat exchange system provided by the new boiler.  All the interconnections between “boiler water” (the heat source to the radiators) and “hot water” (the water we drink and wash with from the tap) had to be plumbed, never the two to meet or mix.  All in all, over 150 plumbing connections needed to be made, all of them to be water tight and perfect.

It’s small, it’s complex. This interconnected system now runs the heat and hot water for This Odd House.

The result looks like Rube Goldberg to me, but I’m sure it makes perfect sense to a HVAC professional.  And it looks like a modern home heating system.  The best part is the tag that boasts 95% efficiency.  If I must burn fossil fuel, at least I am squeezing out nearly all the energy it contains.

The best part.

It had resisted the best efforts of many; and the “cat perch” remained.  This design feature had served as a home for a stuffed gorilla when I first toured the house, and provided the entry for a “tunnel” into the bedroom.  I had no desire for the tunnel and no need for the perch.  I wanted it gone, but everyone who tried to destroy it had been thwarted.  This included the powers applied by my weight-training nephews, their friends, even their friends’ mothers.

Like Excalibur, it seemed that only one true superhero would be able to remove it.

My son called me last week and offered to try his hand at it.  With a few judicious cuts of the sawzall, and some carefully aimed, but high impact blows with the sledge hammer, the perch came down.  It had met its match.

With a mighty blow, Derek demolishes the overbuilt structure.

“More nails is always better” must have been the philosophy of whoever built this.

Cat perch and tunnel removed, ready for some un-rewiring, doorbell and landline replacements.

The General Electric P7 Americana, a classic in its time.  And in avocado green!

I’ve always preferred gas stoves for cooking, but I recognize that electric ranges have their place.  Some people worry about the gas leaking, or incomplete combustion and inadequate ventilation, but I find the instant-on, instant-off, immediate heat control with no time lag, to be features that are more important than possible asphyxiation.

And when This Odd House was operated as a duplex, the metering of power could be exactly assigned to the kitchen upstairs or the kitchen downstairs (the gas, interestingly, was shared– with the single thermostat residing upstairs).

When the house evolved to a single family dwelling, the stove downstairs was moved even further downstairs– to the basement– in order to make room for more important things on the main level.  Things like disco lights and amplifiers.

Now this is not an uncommon occurrence.  But the usual scenario is this: the old stove gets replaced by a modern one with all the latest features.  The old one, still as functional as it ever was, gets moved to the basement where it will be placed into service on those high demand days when holiday cooking could use an extra heating and warming station.

My plan is to remodel the upstairs kitchen (and install a gas stove).  I moved the existing electric stove down to the main floor to provide a mini-kitchen as I camped there during the renovation.   The 220V outlet was already there, ready and waiting.  I plugged it in, and looked forward to the next morning when I could heat water for coffee and enjoy my first day after moving into my new house.

It never occurred to me that the stove might not work.  Inspector7 had investigated everything in the house, and if it had been defective, it would have been noted and highlighted.  Instead, after finding that my tea kettle was no warmer after five minutes on the front-right burner set to HI, I discovered that the outlet was defective.  It was not connected.  No voltage could be detected by my meter, and without a source of electrons, the water would never boil.

I knew better than to try and solve the stove problem in my caffeine-deficient state.  Instead, I brought the teakettle to the basement and set the front-right burner to HI.  Five minutes later, the kettle was whistling.  Coffee was brewed and I could focus on how this situation came to be.

It’s really quite an interesting sequence of logic.  One can’t just drag an electric stove to the basement and expect it to work.  It needs a specialized power outlet– 220Volts at 50 Amperes, probably the single highest electric load in a home (apart from recharging an electric car, but that’s a contemporary exception).  To get that stove running means that someone had to divert 50 Amps of the total available incoming power to one outlet in the basement.  Someone had to decide that rather than just moving the stove a few feet to the street with a “Free” sign on it, that it was better to maneuver it down the stairway to the basement and spend additional perfectly good money to run the power to it and keep it running.

To power the stove in the basement means that 50 Amps is NOT going somewhere else in the house.  Well, where could we find 50 Amps to spare?  How about that big outlet on the main floor?  There’s no stove there anymore, so it’s just completely unused.  I can imagine the perfect logic of it.  The stove moves from first floor to the basement, so too does the power.  But the first floor outlet is still there!  It is just not connected to anything.  Who would do this?

Still, I’m impressed that an expense was made to support that stove in the basement.  The wiring is specialized and it was clear that the stove was intended to be used from time to time.

My GE P7 Americana, plugged into its home outlet, sharing space with its buddy, an electric clothes dryer, both consuming vast quantities of electrons to do their jobs.

The stove itself deserves some mention.  Its avocado color scheme dates it solidly in the seventies.  I have since learned that this is a model with an impressive pedigree, the 1960s version of the GE P7 Americana was the first stove ever to have a self-cleaning oven.  Self cleaning!

I looked into this feature, as it seemed that the stove could benefit from it.  I threw the self-clean lever into position, but it would not go.  Some mechanical interlock seemed to prevent it.  The stove was handicapped.  Like a cat with a cone around its head, it could not clean itself.  And with the passing of decades, the accumulation of carbonized food had tarnished its glamorous good looks.

I’m not sure what my long term plans for this classic stove is.  It is well situated with its personal 50-Amp circuit.  I just wish I could restore it to its former glory, but I’m not about to help a self-cleaning oven clean itself!

The excavated window seat. The overburden upholstery has been removed (yellow carpet on the floor), and the front of the box has been penetrated with an exploratory aperture.

In addition to the large scale projects I am undertaking, there are some minor changes to make.  The bedroom is small, which is ok– a place to sleep and sometimes to languish, apart from the other active and public areas of the house– but it does need to accommodate my clothing and storage needs.

Including a chest of drawers, a garage sale treasure from years ago, stripped and lovingly restored to its original mahogany splendor.  Unfortunately there is no obvious place for it, but there is a window seat in the bedroom, unused and unlikely to be used, which could be removed and the space recovered as a bay to park my dresser.

So this was the plan:  attack the window seat with my demolition tools, patch the wall, touchup the floor and whatever else, and move the chest into the space.  It was a simple plan, and I set about the first phase of it today.

The window seat was essentially a box, upholstered in 1980’s vintage carpet.  Really upholstered.  A nail every inch.  A pry bar and 2-pound hammer were applied until the substrate plywood was exposed, but the box was still unyielding.  Attacking the sheet rock from the front created a small penetration.  I peered into the hidden space newly exposed to the light of day after all these years.  I felt a little like Howard Carter, shining a candle into King Tut’s tomb and discovering “things, wonderful things”.

In my case, the wondrous things included two lamps and a magazine of gay pornography.

Peering into the window seat cavity reveals treasures of a previous era.

Not exactly treasures of the imagination: stashed money, rare books, artifacts, or Apple stock certificates, but still, a little history of This Odd House, revealed.  I wonder how this set of items became entombed there.

Also under the window seat, a section reserved for conducting the heating pipes to the second floor.  The overdesigned foundation (16-inches of concrete) forced the vertical avenue to be well inside the inside walls of the room.  This box provided cover for the intruding pipes.

So now I don’t have a window seat, and I don’t have a space for my furniture.  I will need to review my options.

Pipes that must come up through the floor ten inches into the room, then bend back into the wall to make their way to the second floor. This end of the window seat covered the plumber’s tracks.

I have been flattered at some of the responses to my posts in this blog, and some of my readers actually want to know when I have something more to say.  I’m always skeptical at this level of interest, but if you really want to be notified whenever a new post is made, here is how:

At the bottom of the blog web page is a “footer” with some discreet information about the host of this blog (wordpress.com), and a little gray “+Follow” button.  Click on it and it expands into an offer to get the posts delivered as email.  This seems overkill to me, I’d rather just get a note that a new post has been made and let me decide if I want to go read it.

Anyway, if you are willing to have your email cluttered a couple times a week, go ahead and subscribe.  You will need to confirm this decision when you receive the email response from wordpress.  I think there is a way to unsubscribe.  When I find it, I will post instructions, maybe.

Thanks to those who made it this far,
Torr.

Britain abandoned its measurement units in favor of the metric system long ago, leaving the US as the only industrialized country still using them.  There was a moment of opportunity in the seventies for us to join the modern world, and a plan was in place and had started to do so, but then the newly elected president’s wife panicked.  All her recipes that called for teaspoons, cups, quarts, ounces and pounds would no longer work!

She successfully lobbied to maintain the system of inches, feet, yards, gallons, pounds and slugs (yes, slugs) to remain the official measurements of the land, nevermind that they were arbitrary and incohesive.  The plan to convert to metric was derailed and reversed.

Nancy Reagan was able to procure her measures and ensure that her recipes would always turn out, but it left us as an island speaking an antiquated dialect in a world that had moved on to a more successful way of communicating essential quantities.  Many errors have resulted, one of the most embarrassing was the failure of a Mars mission, where the space probe received last minute instructions for a thruster burn that was based on pounds rather than kilograms.  The orbiter failed to enter orbit and crashed into its target instead, oblivious of the engineering documents that had miscommunicated the course corrections.

Today we cope with the units we live with.  One of them has come to importance as I learn about the requirements of a new heating system for this odd house.

The “British Thermal Unit”, BTU, is at first look, a rather abstract measurement.  It is a measure of energy disguised as a measure of heat.  In fact, as we learned in freshman physics, heat and energy are one and the same, but it’s ok to not recognize this; it is not intuitive, at least not to me.

But once you learn that a BTU is the energy needed to raise one pound of water one Fahrenheit degree, it starts to make sense.  One pound of water.  One Fahrenheit degree. Pure British.

A pound of water is about a pint, an eighth of a gallon.  So your 40 gallon water heater tank can be warmed up by a degree by applying 320 BTUs of energy.  You probably want that 60-degree water from the city to be warmed up to around 120.  That will take 320×60 = 19,200 BTUs.

Oh, and how soon would you like that warm water?  If you can wait an hour, then your water heater needs to deliver 19,200 BTU per hour.  If you are less patient, you will need to boost that rating.

To heat an entire house in a Minnesota winter requires much more.  The old boiler, now removed, was rated at 150,000 BTU/hr.  Not all of it stayed in the house, much of it went up the chimney (now also removed).  The new boiler will be 100,000 BTU/hr, 95% of which will actually do the useful function of keeping the house warm.

I will be asking the gas company to switch me to “high pressure” gas delivery.  High pressure is also called “two pound” gas, meaning that the pressure in the gas line is two pounds per square inch (in familiar British units) above atmosphere.  To do this, they need to know my total worst case gas consumption.  So I considered what it might be.

Here’s the scenario.  I have invited guests to stay over the cold winter holiday, the house is being heated at full capacity.  The guests are taking long hot showers before the big dinner party.  I’m washing and drying clothes while preparing a full dinner with baked potatoes and lutefisk in the oven and all burners going.  And there is a turkey being cooked in the backyard gas grill.  All together, I’m going through 230,000 BTU/hr!  (This is almost 70kW for those of you in the metric world).

This is an obscene amount of power, and it would be unlikely that this scenario would ever actually occur (there would be no lutefisk).  But this is what the gas company needs to plan for, so I will report the numbers.

I will take satisfaction in that the energy being consumed by burning natural gas is being efficiently burned and efficiently consumed.  When winter comes I will be monitoring the duty cycle of the boiler.  It would be nice if it approaches but never reaches that full-on condition.  I’ll be checking the BTUs per hour, and thinking of Nancy Reagan’s recipes as I do so.

The cap is taken off as a preliminary step for chimney removal.  The power chisel lies ready.

When I discovered that the cost of removing the chimney was the same as repairing it, a whole new set of possibilities opened up.  I decided to remove the chimney, at least the upper portions of it, in order to expand closet space, open the kitchen, and install a skylight.

I had researched how to remove a chimney and concluded this was not beyond my skill level, but it was beyond my physical limits and time constraints.  I found a demolition company that specialized in chimney removal and asbestos abatement.

It is a mutually beneficial combination.  Asbestos removal requires specialized equipment and procedures to contain airborne particles.  In removing a chimney, there is a tremendous amount of dust and dirt that is generated, and the same equipment can be used to constrain it.

I contracted Erickson Enterprises to remove my chimney.  They arrived at 7:00 am with two large trailers: one with equipment, the other to haul away the bricks.  They did an appraisal of where the chimney was with respect to the doors and windows of the house, and planned their strategy.

I was immediately impressed with their methods.  Drop cloth runners were placed along any path through the house the crew of five might take.  Plastic sheets were taped to the ceilings and walls to isolate the chimney.  A blower with a HEPA (high efficiency particulate air) filter was lugged into position to create negative pressure in the containment area, preventing dust from entering the rest of the house.  A relay system of buckets and ropes were used to bring the bricks and debris down from the roof, the second floor, then the first, to the waiting trailer.

I had the experience of climbing up to the roof (my first time up there!) and seeing the deteriorated rubber membrane that started this chain reaction of renovation activities.  Even though the footprint of the house is almost 1000 sq ft, when one is on the roof deck, outside, looking across at trees and streets and sidewalks, it seems rather small.  I kept to the center region away from the edge.

One of the crew members was elected to dismantle the chimney top.  He lugged up a power chisel and the extension cord to run it, but then discovered that it was entirely unnecessary.  He made an incision on the rubber membrane that wrapped around the chimney, and without the support of that skin the bricks essentially collapsed.  The mortar was already dust.  He plucked the bricks with gloved hands, chucked them into a bucket and when enough but not too many were in it, his partner would lower the bucket on a rope to another crew member at the bottom, who loaded it into a wheelbarrow.  A few bricks per bucket, a few buckets per wheelbarrow, and a trip to the trailer would be made.

The rubber skin is cut, and falls away to reveal a stack of bricks and mortar dust, barely held in shape by the eroded chimney liner and outer membrane.

I found this all fascinating of course, and appreciated the teamwork, but my real interest was in seeing how the house was built under the roof surface.  With the chimney being removed, I would have access to a cross sectional view of its structure.  Inside the chimney was a metal flue, which easily pulled out, and the chimney liner, a rounded clay ceramic object that fit closely in the brick rectangle, but had been seriously weakened and eroded.  Once again I heard expressions like “I haven’t seen one this bad before!”

The bricks, mortar and liner were removed from the top, using an occasional assist from a pry bar or hammer.  Course by course, the bricks were removed, reaching below the roof level and into the framed hole.  Eventually they were below the ceiling level of the second floor kitchen.  At last I could see the cross section I was looking for.

The exposed cross-section of the roof and “attic”. The topside excavation is reminiscent of Indiana Jones.

It was actually rather promising.  Below the rubber roof was a layer of styrofoam insulation (yes, styrofoam!).  A ceiling covered the 4-inch “attic”, which had fiberglass and blown cellulose insulation.  Below that was the attic floor, the second story ceiling.  I could also see the kitchen soffits, which also had been filled with pink fiberglass.  I think the fiberglass and styrofoam make for a very good insulating layer, qualifying this roof as a “cold roof.”

Once the chimney had been decapitated, work progressed to the second floor.  Some power chiseling was needed, as this was no longer decayed weathered brick; it still had structural integrity.  Again, a few bricks per bucket, lowered out the window, a few buckets per barrow, and the dismantling progressed steadily.  The HEPA fans exhausted the dust to the outdoors.

The secret to removing a chimney is to do it one bucket of bricks at a time.

The HEPA filtered air pressurization system.

By noon, the crew had moved to the main level and devised their next brick removal plan.  The chimney was in a closet, with tight access.  They chopped and drilled their way into the side of the chimney, about three feet above the floor.  Using this as an access port, one worker would chisel out the bricks from above, they would drop down and be intercepted at this porthole, thrown into the bucket, carried to the wheelbarrow; and the trailer just kept on filling.  Eventually, chiseling from below became easier than from above, and the remainder of the chimney rapidly found its way to the trailer.

The side access port to divert bricks from above. Note the use of the flattened metal flue to act as interceptor/diverter.

The crew then cleaned up.  They were meticulous.  Every dusty mark and footprint was erased as they packed up their tools.  If I had not been there, I would have concluded that the chimney had somehow magically vanished.

One chimney fits into one trailer.

John Jepsen showing the removed post. Small plants had taken root, something he and his crew had never seen before.

It was one of many defects in the house identified by Inspector 7, not exactly hidden, but easy to overlook, given that large catchall category that so many other defects fell in.  The  annoying problems of inadequate home maintenance like toilet flapper leaks or aging caulk and peeling wallpaper, were so numerous that a mention of possible moisture damage to a basement beam did not trigger an alarm.  Instead, the condition of the roof was the focus of attention while I was making the purchase offer.

But as non-conclusive as the observation was, it deserved some attention, and I contacted a structural engineer to assess it.  When I told him the address, his response was, “Oh, you are outside that unstable zone near the creek…”   I was impressed that he had a working mental map of the solid and shifting geology of South Minneapolis (and relieved I wasn’t on unstable ground).

John Jepsen of Jepsen Construction Services came by to look at my suspect beam and immediately recognized what needed to be done:  a post had decayed, the beam had rotted, and both needed replacement.  His pocket laser level projected onto my basement walls showed that the back end of the house above this beam had sunk.  His firm could repair it.  It was a small job for them.  He was straightforward, easy to ask questions of, young but somehow experienced.  I liked him, his bid was reasonable and two weeks later, he and his crew showed up to do the work.

It is not unlike what I imagine surgical transplants to be.  One must somehow provide substitute functions, heart-lung machines, or blood bypasses, while the diseased organ is removed.  The replacement is then installed in the calm and stress-free zone, and when it is ready, the support systems are shunted back to the main pathways, the organ comes to life, and resumes the job it was designed for.

In the case of structural support beams, the house is shored up by an assembly of temporary side beams and house jacks.  They are put in place, and a noisy process of wrenching them up is done, lifting the house to its new elevation.

The pressure on the old beam is now gone, its post bears no weight and it can be removed.  When my basement post was removed, the crew marveled at it.  They’d seen plenty of posts that had gotten moist and rotted at the bottom, but had never seen one where the decay had progressed so far that new plants were rooting themselves in it!

The beam was removed next, and its end showed the advanced stages of moisture rot, the wood softening and dissolving in its environment.  Again, the crew was impressed, and conveyed the sense that this was being taken care of in the nick of time.  This is a little different than my mental image of these thing;, it seems like there should just be gradual degradations of material; there should be no “nick of time” moment.  But there have been plenty of examples where a threshold is crossed, the most dramatic local example is the 35W bridge over the Mississippi that collapsed due to a structural member exceeding a threshold on a warm summer day.

The end of the beam the previously held up (barely) the west end of the house.

The replacement beam was made of “microlam” a kind of super-plywood that has incredible strength and can extend for large spans to bear heavy loads.  A new post was installed, its foot protected from moisture-wicking concrete.  This end of the house will now be supported for at least another century.

The end of the new microlam beam is covered by a product with what must be the world’s best name for this application.

As disturbing as it was to have a defect like this in the house I had just bought, I took heart that it was detected and repaired by modern engineered materials.  A century ago, things were designed with what was called an “ignorance factor”.  It wasn’t really known what the limits of structural materials were, so they over-engineered to provide some safety margin, the margin of ignorance.  Today, we know much more precisely the load bearing capacities of materials and the limits of structural geometry.  We still include a safety margin, but now we know just what it is.

The new post keeps its foot dry.

My grandfather’s desk, moving into its new home. Both were built at about the same time 100 years ago.

I inherited my grandfather’s desk.  I’ve had it now for years, unused, holding old papers and postcards and artifacts of his time.  Many were momentarily interesting as I went through them, and I packaged them up for my dad to review.  The desk can now be used again, but it hasn’t found its natural home with me yet.

Dad augmented his recollections with research into his archives of old family photographs, studying them to examine the furniture in the scenes, finding clues of its origin.  The desk was originally crafted by my grandfather’s grandfather, Hans Jacob Upjörden, a ship’s carpenter, with the tools he retained from that trade.   He left the ship’s commission in 1868, married a US citizen, and moved to Minnesota to homestead a farm, while his wife became the local schoolteacher.

It is a simple piece, without delicate or fancy features, yet carries a style that is more than just functional.  The writing surface folds up on a hinge to provide compact protection for cubbyholes and small drawers to hold pens and envelopes.  There are several large drawers below, the top one must be pulled out to catch and hold the writing surface when it opens– a simple solution to provide the stop for the hinge.

The desk has spent earlier times in disuse, at one time stored in a barn or granary, the source of a mouse hole in its back.  The desk stayed there for many years until discovered by my young grandfather, who restored it, refinished it and gave it a new, modern, linseed oil based writing surface.  The linoleum has since stiffened, the finish has taken some wear and tear, but it still holds its unique style.

I now have a home for it, and it seems that it will fit well in the 1910 building I am renovating.  Perhaps the wood in the frame of this house is the same age!  Maybe the desk will again find its purpose as I use it to hold papers, photos, memory cards, and artifacts of my time.

Michelangelo once explained that David had always been in that block of marble, he merely removed the parts of the stone that was not David.

I don’t pretend that This Odd House contains a world treasure to be discovered within, but the concept of increasing value by removing things is an interesting topic I’d like to explore.  I am currently in the process of paying good money to remove things that someone, at some time, paid good money to install.  On my list now or soon:  a kitchen, a furnace, water heater, insulated pipes, chimney, buckthorn hedge, garage.

Mario, of Affordable Abatement, next to the “mains”, the large, asbestos wrapped heating pipes that will be contained and removed from the basement.

Today’s “progress” on This Odd House was to remove the asbestos clad pipes feeding the radiators from the old boiler.  Mario, from Affordable Abatement Company, set up his equipment, cut the boiler into pieces so he could lug it out of the basement, and then proceeded to wrap, slice, and cut the large asbestos covered, gravity fed heating pipes, and haul them out too.  Today I can walk the length of the basement without stooping!

One could argue that the things I am removing carried a perfectly good functional value.  The boiler was reliable, the pipes and radiators did their job.  Removing them decreases the value of the house.  And in one sense it is true, today I have a house in Minnesota that has no provision for heat!

So after paying for the boiler and asbestos removal, is my house worth more today, or less?  When I pay for the buckthorn removal, or the demolition of the garage (with fractured concrete pad and swaying roofline), have I increased my equity?

One of the founders of ecological economics, Herman Daly, promotes the concept of a “steady state economy” where sustainability, not growth, is the goal.  One of his observations is that we define our Gross Domestic Product, GDP, to include the economic activity to demolish, discard, dispose, and otherwise remove previously manufactured and functioning items from our environment.  Why do we include the value of creating the item in the GDP if we also include the cost of scrapping it?  From a resource standpoint, this can only misguide us.

More locally, when I demolish the chimney, does this add to the value of the house?  Should I add this expense to my home equity?  Could I turn around and sell it for this additional amount? These are complicated questions, especially since “the market value” of a house is simply what someone is willing to pay.  Whether the house has a chimney or not does not seem to be one of the factors in buyer appraisals (it certainly did not enter into mine).

Ah, but if I can put a skylight in the place where the chimney had been, maybe then I can parlay that removal expense into something worth more.  Certainly I would enjoy it.  And  maybe that is what matters right now.  I’m not trying to reveal David in a rough block of stone, I’m just wanting a nice place to live.