Cooling Your Home Using Box Fans

The average daily high temperature so far this summer has been 93 degrees where we live, and it has gotten as hot as 103 degrees one time, and broken 100 five times. That being said, we have an excellent central air conditioner which we have not yet turned on this summer. It's not that we're crazy or anything, it is just that we see the benefits of not using all of that electricity. Not only can we save the world, but we can also save our bank account.

Mrs. True wants me to make note of the fact that in the desert where we live, the night temperature is much lower than the daytime temperature. This is true, the night average temperature in our are has been 67 degrees - much cooler than the daytime temperature. This is also the linchpin of the entire scheme that I am going to present in this post, so it bears mentioning. If your night temperature doesn't seem significantly cooler than your daytime temperature (we're not sure how humidity affects this process), your results may vary.

If you visit Weather Underground, click "more," "historic weather," and type in your zip code you will see that it probably gets colder during the night than it does during the day. When cooling your house using box fans, you take advantage of this by opening up your windows at night and venting the warm air out of your house while pulling the colder outside air in.

Every evening we open up two or more windows on opposite sides of out house and vent the house by placing box fans in the windows. One window (the kitchen for us) has the box fan placed so that it blows air into the house, and the other window (the master bedroom) has the box fan placed so that it blows air out of the house. The rest of the house can have the windows open, and more air will exchange based on where they are in relation to the two master windows.

In the morning we just reverse the process by taking the fans out and closing the windows. It takes less than 1 minute a day to do this, so we spend less than 3 hours a year doing this. We have collected box fans from our local thrift store, for an initial investment of about $15, plus electricity costs, which we have not broken down but are certain total less than running an air conditioner.

Mrs. True notes that our house gets up to 80 during the hottest parts of the day, and it gets down to 70 during the night, so our house is still fluctuating in temperature, just not as much as the outside air. We did add extra insulation to our attic when we moved in, which probably helps and maybe makes up for the ancient windows in the bedrooms and not-well-fitting exterior doors that leak our our cool air. We also have a small one-story house; we believe the method would work in other layouts, but it might take some experimentation to find the correct windows.

And, of course, it is very important that we are comfortable at a higher temperature than many people keep their houses at. We think most people probably could be comfortable at 78 degrees, though, barring medical issues. Isn't that why Southern California is so popular? (Mrs. True adds that in past years, she has consistently turned on the air conditioning only during the time she is cleaning the house; other physical activities done in the home might also affect your perception of an acceptable temperature.)

Organized Simplicity: Step 2

This is a continuation of our series on Organized Simplicity.

After having cleaned the master bedroom, we set our eyes on the kids' bedroom, which also serves as their play room. This room is one of the rooms that is hardest to keep picked up in the house because the kids have so many toys and things that they like to get out every single day. Sometimes, when an attempt to keep the floor clean by reducing the number of toys available has failed yet again, we wonder if kids just have some psychological need to cover the floor with something, whether it be toys, clean laundry out of the drawers, torn-up bits of paper, dishes from the kitchen... whatever they can find. It's a frustrating room. We're hoping this process will do some good.

We took everything out of the room first and placed it in the carport. We did this while Mr. True was at work, so we didn't move the two pieces of furniture: the monkey bars and the bookshelf.

Mr. True and I made the monkey bars when the oldest Truelet was a toddler. I have never been confident in my upper arm strength, and I would like our kids to be better than I am. I enjoyed the ideas about the potential of babies in the book Fit Baby, Smart Baby, Your Baby and, although we don't follow the procedure exactly, I like having the monkey bars and other resources available to us. The monkey bars also provide the structure for hanging the kids' sleeping hammocks (see our hammock post here).

The kids' room consists of a 10' x 10.5' area with a 10' x 2.5' closet. The majority of this closet opens on the room and has a hung sliding door that can only cover one half of the closet at a time. Half of the closet is floor to ceiling shelves (usually open) and the other half is storage space (usually closed). A small portion of the closet space actually opens onto the hallway instead of the kids' room and is intended to be used as a coat closet. We hang a few coats there, but we have put a locking knob on it and most of it is the kids' toy library. They can ask for a toy (or a group of toys - stuffed animals and toy food, for instance) anytime that they have returned the last toy they had out. This is one of those attempts to keep their floor clean that I mentioned above. As I also mentioned, it's not terribly effective. But it does reduce the amount of stuff on the floor, so we stick with it.

The pile of stuff that we removed from the kids' bedroom made a pile about 11.5' long by 8' wide by 2' high, for a total of 184 cubic feet. This was surprisingly less than in the master bedroom, but then, I do go through this room and throw things out on a fairly regular basis. Despite these efforts, we added a decent amount of toys and clothing to the throw away pile.

Once the room was empty, we scrubbed all the crayon off of the walls (which was a bit of a Herculean effort by itself, because it is so difficult to scrub crayon off as it happens). The older two Truelets helped a lot. Though we usually use homemade cleaning products, it was worth it to break out the Magic Erasers to get the kids' walls clean. 

Next we moved all of the useful or beautiful stuff back into the room and placed it back where it belonged. There was a significant amount of stuff in the storage part of the closet that we hadn't thought about in years, but it mostly went back in (baby supplies and canning jars). We pared down our VHS collection, but we didn't get rid of all of it. (I inherited most of the Disney movies on VHS from my grandma and have no intention of paying money to get them on DVD.) In front of that, there is room for a large bookcase full of the kids' books. I like kids' books, but they always end up covering the floor (see above). So the books are in small boxes by first letter of the title (A-C, D-E, etc) and I take out one basket each week and put it where the kids can read the books, then put them back on the shelf and get out a different basket. The alphabetizing means that I can find a particular book when I'm looking for it, while alphabetizing by title means I don't have one box of Dr Seuss and one of Beatrix Potter; the books are spread out so you can find something in each box to match your mood.

The toy library was pared down to Duplos, stuffed animals, dress up clothes, toy food (the toy kitchen belongs in their room but is currently in the kitchen to redirect the youngest Truelet, who loves to "help" cook), dollhouse furniture and dolls (the dollhouse itself also belongs in their room, but they hauled it outside and it hasn't made it back in yet), and my Breyer horses (Mr. True's Legos are stored in another room until the Truelets are a little older). The shelves in the open half of their closet hold clothes in baskets (8 outfits each, plus pajamas, underwear, and church clothes), crayons and a roll of pink builder's paper (a thrift store find that has been wonderful for allowing them to do art without feeling annoyed by how much paper they go through - $5 and it's lasted a year),  and a treasure chest where they can keep a few always-available small toys (matchbox cars and My Little Pony toys at the moment). Some out-of-season clothes are stored on the top shelves. (The clothes were apparently all being washed in the pictures below).

Out in the room, they have the monkey bars with hammocks, a rocking horse, a bucket of books (rotated with the ones in storage), and someday the dollhouse and toy kitchen.

This was an impressive purge and we're happy to have less stuff. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem quite finished. In the master bedroom, walking in makes me happy and relaxed and filled with a desire to keep it so nice, which makes cleaning up easier. The kids' room just looks bare. Boring. Uninspiring. But I don't want to add stuff, because I like them having as much space as possible to play in. Besides, stuff means that we have to clean under it, and apple cores get stuck and rot, and they pee on it, and... yuck. So what do I do?

I'm still working on this question. I'm not a decorator and this is extremely difficult for me. So far I've bought some vinyl wall stickers to decorate the walls, hoping that will cheer up the room without requiring floor space. I'm also considering rearranging, possibly allowing the hammocks to hang from the monkey bars to the wall instead of along the monkey bars so that one can be left up during the day to use as a seat (our monkey bars are too short and low to allow the hammocks to fully extend, so an adult sitting in one ends up on the ground). I'm still toying with other ideas to make the room more appealing.

Writing these posts is apparently harder than cleaning the house, since it has been a few days since this all happened. Maybe we'll be quicker to report on the next room we finished: the front room.

The Top 10 Reasons to Sleep in a Hammock

Mrs. True just mentioned in a post about the fact that we sleep in a hammock. I came up with the Top 10 reasons why you should have a hammock instead of a bed awhile ago. I thought it would be good to revisit the idea here.

As a bit of a back story, we started sleeping in a hammock a little over a year ago when Mrs. True was researching the out-gassing of mattresses (in conjunction with having baby mattresses and being told to let them out-gas for a while so that the baby doesn't breathe toxic fume). Hammocks were only tangentially mentioned - they are, oddly enough, not much blogged about - but the few resources she could find always mentioned that they were excellent for your back.

Since I have had recurring neck pain for years (after I got in a bike accident), this interested her. It was also significantly cheaper (by at least an order of magnitude) and/or easier than non-outgassing mattress options, so we decided to try it out. We ordered a family-sized Brazilian cotton hammock and built a hammock stand out of 1" galvanized steel pipe from Home Depot, for a grand total of about $200. 

It took us less than a week to get used to sleeping in it, and we have never looked back. In fact, when we spend the night in a bed (on vacation or such), we are sore and unhappy. We have since bought smaller hammocks for each of the Truelets, freeing up tons of space in their shared bedroom/playroom (three kids' beds, even bunk beds, would make the room claustrophobic; three hammocks barely register), so everyone in our house sleeps in a hammock.

So, without further ado, here are the top ten reasons to choose a hammock instead of a bed:

1. When was the last time that you laundered your bed? That's gross! I heard from a reliable source (a stand up comedian) that there a 10 million dust mites in the average bed. Your bed might be super-average. The Truelets would invariably (when they were sick) come over to my bed and throw up on it. How do you clean that off? With a hammock you just put it in the washing machine.
2. Your back will thank you. I once got attacked by a car while biking to work. My neck was never the same since then... until we got a hammock. I now only have neck problems when I want them (which is to say when I sleep in a bed.)
3. You love your spouse and want to cuddle with them. A hammock enables (and even enforces) that cuddling. If you don't love your spouse (or cuddling (like that is even possible)) you can get two hammocks - one for yourself and one for your spouse. Just make sure that one of them is big enough so that if you want to cuddle sometimes then you can still cuddle.
4. Your bed is trying to kill you. What I mean to say is that hammocks do not have to be fire retardant like the government has mandated that all bed mattresses are. The out-gassing of fire retardant materials into your room from a mattress is guaranteed to kill you (unless something else does it first). Every person who has ever slept on a bed is either dead right now or is in the process of dying.
5. You can take your hammock and you can hang it up against one wall and reclaim your entire room whenever you are not sleeping in it. This allows you to have a smaller bedroom and still get a larger amount of use out of it than a normal size bedroom. Japanese people have been doing this for years by sleeping on small mats and putting them away during the day. The only problem with the Japanese method is that it is impossible that those little mats are comfortable (Unless you are Japanese, I guess). I played a game once called Sushi Go! which almost makes me Japanese but not quite Japanese enough to enjoy sleeping on a mat on the ground.
6. Hammocks allow you to sleep in a much cooler condition in the summer. They allow heat to radiate in all of the directions instead of just up so you can get cool from the bottom as well as from the top. This allows you to save money on cooling bills.
7. You can have multiple hammocks in trendy colors so that you can show off your fashion sense and style (the extra hammocks will easily fit in a closet or something. They don't take up that much room)
8. Hammocks are portable, so if you want to take your hammock with you to sleep on the road or something like that (not literally on the road, that's dangerous. Sleep in the gutter.) you can totally carry your hammock around with you. If you want to carry around your mattress you probably have to have a really big truck. Good luck with using a mattress on a camp out (or in the gutter for that matter). We have actually taken our hammock on camping trips. It is great. My sister's tent blew over and our hammock was wonderful.
9. Hammocks are far less expensive than mattresses and they're more comfortable anyway. You could buy 4 or 5 hammocks for the price of one bed and then you can change out your hammocks every season or however often you want to.
10. Unless you like sweeping out the underside of your bed regularly, underneath your bed is a really gross place (a breeding ground of filth to quote Mrs. True). Every so often if you move your bed you'll find that there is a desiccated apple core, or a dried up piece of pizza. You will never find such nonsense underneath your hammock because you move your hammock every single day when you get out of it.
11. If your kids decide to climb in your bed and have a cracker party it is difficult to clean it out. With a hammock, you just dump it over and all the crumbs are ready to be swept/vacuumed off of the floor.

There are a couple of downsides to a hammock, though these are easily outweighed by all the advantages. One is that it is very difficult to get out of a shared hammock without disturbing the other sleeper(s). If you cuddle kids down for a nap in your hammock and then want to get up, it takes a lot of skill and a dollop of luck to get away without them crying. And if you're not used to sleeping cuddled up to your spouse, do get two hammocks.

Finally, in the winter you will need to attach an underquilt to your hammock or else you will get an amazing amount of cooling (at a time when it is not desired). You could buy an underquilt like this (make sure to get the right size), but we just tied blankets to the bottom of our hammock, and it works great.

Organized Simplicity: Step One

This post is continuing our series about Organized Simplicity.

Cleaning the master bedroom was a monumental task. Though we did the whole house three years ago, Mrs. True has gone through every other room and removed the excess at least once in the intervening time. Not the master bedroom. It became where stuff went to die, crammed in closets and corners and out of the way. Dealing with that took a solid 12 hours of work for two adults, with the "help" of the Truelets.

We took everything out of the room and placed it in the driveway. We then wiped the walls and floor of the entire room and began to sort through the pile that we made. When we started to sort it, we had extracted a pile of stuff from the room that measured 17'x5'x3' on average. Considering the room is 13'x10', and that it has a 2'x10' closet, we could spread the stuff out over the entire floor to a depth of 1.7 feet. Looking at the room beforehand I would not have guessed that. Mrs. True kept moaning, "So much stuff! How do we even have so much stuff?" as we carried out load after load.

Here is the stuff pile:

Here is the empty room (except for a cheese fridge in the closet):

We were asking ourselves continuously: "Is this beautiful/awesome or useful?" If we couldn't honestly answer yes we did not bring it back inside. Things that made the cut: about half the books, most of the clothes (we did pretty well on having a minimal wardrobe, if nothing else), suitcases and bags, a trunk of mementos each for Mrs. True and I, a small set of drawers with craft supplies, a bag of fabric and a sewing machine, basic furniture. Things that didn't: the other half of the books, a ton of craft supplies (Mrs. True explains that somehow some part of her brain keeps believing she's crafty when she's at the store, but never when she's at home), and random junk that had been pushed into this room for lack of anywhere else to keep it.

Here is the room after the clean up (yes, the hammock is our bed; there should be a post about that someday):

And here is the pile of stuff that we removed.

A rough estimate says we put back about 150 cubic feet of stuff. It would pack much smaller than that in a U-Haul, with proper boxes and all, but that works as the first number. Given that we estimated pulling about 255 cubic feet of stuff out, we did very well; we got rid of almost half! Well done us!

The room looks amazingly better (Mrs. True accidentally-on-purpose forgot to take "before" pictures because it was so bad) and we are very pleased. It also is much more motivating to keep such a lovely-looking space picked up. We hope to find the same results with the rest of the house.

Organized Simplicity: Step Zero

As Mr. True and I have been listening to Walden and Thoreau's emphasis on minimalism and simplicity, we both remembered one of my favorite books, Organized Simplicity by Tsh Oxenreider. When I found this gem at our local library three years ago, I devoured it, recommended it to everyone I knew, and followed its ten-day, step-by-step plan to organize and simplify your home. We had intended to do it every year, keeping our home simple, but with one thing and another it's been about three years since the last time we did the entire house. After listening to Thoreau's inspiring experiences, we were both seized by the desire to do it again.

The book is about going through your life and removing everything that doesn't contribute to your purpose and enjoyment. It's in the same genre as the current bestseller The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, but I like Organized Simplicity much better. For one thing, the author doesn't make absurd claims that if you do it once you'll never have to do it again or if you use her method of folding laundry you will come to enjoy it. (My hatred of that concept is personal, since I detest laundry with such a passion that my husband sorts it and I stuff mine into dresser drawers without folding at all; I cannot imagine any method of folding that would make me happy to add such a chore into my life.) More pertinently, Organized Simplicity was written by the mom of three young children living in American apartments and suburbs (as well as occasionally overseas - I'm jealous), making her advice much more applicable than that of a single woman in Japan.

The first half of Organized Simplicity is theoretical, talking about finding your life's purpose and making sure your finances and calendar and life in general reflect it. It's not nearly as abstract as some "life purpose" books, but it wasn't something I had great need of at this point in my life, beyond inspiration for the second half.

The second half is a ten-day exercise in which you take every single item out of a room, clean the bare room, and look at each item while asking yourself, "Is this item useful? Is it beautiful?" before returning to to the room if it gets at least one yes. The first time I read this book and shared the idea with my husband, he said, "Beautiful? I don't have anything because it's beautiful," so in our house the question is, "Is this useful or awesome?" (In this one case, I will admit that the KonMari "Does this prompt joy?" might be more helpful if you also have a family member who balks at "beautiful.")

Another factor prompting my desire to do this exercise was seeing my parents, over the last month, downsize from their 3000 square foot house here in Utah to a 500 square foot tiny home in California due to a job change. It is amazing how much stuff piles up in houses. It also made me curious about how big a U-Haul we would have to rent to move ourselves, if for some reason we desired to move. So we decided to not only do an Organized Simplicity on our house but also to measure everything as we took it out and put it back.

This series will document the ten days or so of work we'll be putting into this process. Organized Simplicity divides up the rooms in a general way, but we'll be adapting it to our house's layout and our own schedule.

We have a 1070 square foot house with a storage shed and carport (no garage, basement, or attic) to work with. We do have a large amount of closet space, which I am very grateful for. In this area, we have two adults and three small children, ages 5, 4, and 2, with a new baby due in the fall. The first time we did this process, three years ago, we only had two kids and I had been starting to feel that we needed a bigger house with our third. When I finished the process, I though our house was huge and had plenty of extra space. We're hoping to find the same results this time, because we now expect to raise our family in a home no bigger than this. (Who wants to clean extra square footage anyway?) Minimalism and simplicity is our way to go.

Here is our room breakdown and anticipated order:
1. Master bedroom
2. Kids' bedroom/playroom (one room)
3. Front room (living/family room)
4. Bathroom (yes, we only have one; if we do stay in this house, there will be another half bath added)
5. Kitchen (I anticipate this taking two days)
6. Home office (which someday will be a second kids' bedroom, but they don't need it yet, so it's a catchall space)
7. Storage shed and yards

We are excited to see exactly how much stuff we have and how much we can get rid of. We're happy to invite you to join us on this adventure!

Strawberries: A mini-story

When we were picking cherries, I talked a little with the friends who told us about the cherries, and they told us about a patch of wild strawberries that is near their house as well. We decided on Sunday to go up to see the patch.

Since Mrs. True and the middle Truelet were taking a nap, I went with the oldest and the youngest Truelet. We were excited as we went out, and decided to bike there in the new bike. Mrs. True is very strong to take them all in that bike. It was hard on the small hills even.

We didn't exactly know where the strawberries were, just approximately, so we went out into a large vacant area behind a church to look for them. The first thing that we found was a gooseberry bush. It had some edible fruit on it, so we ate some and picked some, and we continued to search.

Next, we looked under some small sumac trees that were growing in the area, and found the patch. We noted its location, ate a few berries, and decided to come back the next day with boxes to pick a bunch of berries.

The trip was a success, despite the Truelets' tromping over the patch and destroying a lot of berries. We plan on taking their shoes off next time that we go strawberry picking (so that they notice when they step on a berry.)

We ended up getting over a gallon of berries that we froze for smoothies. We also made a pie, and the Truelets ate as many berries as they could.

The moral of this story is: remember to talk to people about your fruit gathering habits. Everyone has a chance of knowing about fruit that you do not know about!

Foraging from local fruit trees and step by step honey extraction

This week we have been picking cherries from a cherry tree in the neighborhood. This is one of the things that is the best about being in a neighborhood. Everyone seems to want to have fruit trees in their yard, however they never pick the fruit. We regularly pick fruit from other people's trees (with their permission of course), and from trees owned by the government. We also pick grapes from an old couple's fence and make grape juice in the fall.

Finding this free fruit can be frustrating when you first move into an area. I have seen several websites that attempt to help people locate fruit, but we don't have one that we've found useful so far. The most fruitful (ha ha - we're so punny) source we've cultivated is word of mouth. Every time we talk about spending all our evenings for a week picking fruit, our listeners become more likely to remember us the next time they see a laden, unattended fruit tree. Every year, we get at least one notice from a friend: "Hey, I noticed that this old/renting/never home neighbor of mine has a fruit tree - they'd probably let you pick the fruit so they don't have to clean it off the ground." We ask and almost always get a yes. We clear up rotten fruit from the ground while we're working and usually offer the owners a percentage of what we pick (although no one has ever taken it), and people seem happy about it. Our second most effective method of getting fruit is to watch when we're walking and biking and note the positions of fruit trees. We ask their owners if they will pick the fruit themselves. This succeeds less often (a decent number of these people want their own fruit), but some of the people do let us pick and we get a new, nearby source.

We have processed about half the cherries we picked so far. We have three gallons of cherries frozen for smoothies next year. Mrs. True tries to get herself and the kids to drink a fruit-and-kefir smoothie every day for the probiotics, so it's useful to have lots of frozen fruit on hand.

To process cherries is super easy if you have a cherry pitter. Just wash them off and pit them. You can can them if you want to, but that is way more than we are willing to do, so we just freeze them. This is the cherry pitter than we use, and it is excellent (terms of functionality, storage space required, as well as in terms of price.)

We harvested honey again today. I took some pictures this time, so here they are:

These are the tools that we use to collect the honey: A big bowl, a knife to cut the comb off of the top bar, and a hive tool (a small crowbar for breaking into a bee's home)

Here is the hive unopened, but with the roof up. I don't know why there are rocks on it. I intend to ask my bee mentor some day.

Here are both sides of the comb that I selected to harvest. It is more capped off than the one from last week.

Here is the comb after I shooed all the bees off of it, and cut it off the top bar.

I mashed it with a potato masher.

Placing the comb in a 2 gallon bucket lined with a colander and plastic mesh cheesecloth.

A few hours later most of the honey has drained, and the comb is left over.

We don't pasturize our honey, so pretty much the next step is bottling it in glass jars.

Finally, I just decided to read Walden for the first time. It is quite a fun book. As I was talking about it with my brother in law, he said it sounded like I was just Thoreau reincarnated

So far my favorite part has been the following quote:

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it.

This is so true! Whenever I want to go to Easter Island, or Italy and can't because I have to work my daily job I wonder weather all the stuff that I have it worth it, or if a simpler life with  would be better and allow me to be happier.

Mrs. True liked his idea of voluntary simplicity:

I intend to build me a house which will surpass any on the main street in Concord in grandeur and luxury, as soon as it pleases me as much and will cost me no more than my present one.

Speaking of houses, our current house is great. We have, however had this idea of a dream house that we have talked about for years. It will be a small house on a few acres in the country. It will be banked into the earth like a hobbit hole, it will be by a stream and in a forest. There we will be able to grow food for ourselves and spend time together all the time.
Of course this dream house will probably have to wait till I'm retired, since it would involve being out in the country, but we are hoping that through thrift and economy we can retire before too long. Mrs. True will probably write a post our retirement plans before too long.

For anyone else who dreams of retiring in a hobbit hole, we discovered a company that sells hobbit holes. Here is the website. We thought that this was a really cool idea!