![\"Squirrel](\"https:\/\/bigfootgardens.files.wordpress.com\/2018\/01\/squirrel-family.jpg\")
This Spotlight is about Caroline (changed name), who did a project with me for Green Needham.\u00a0 We had a couple of work lunches at her house and she started telling me about what she and her husband had done, and I thought it was worth sharing.\u00a0 \u00a0Caroline and her husband are young professionals with two preschoolers.\u00a0 So they’re um, kind of busy.<\/p>\n
Their 1960s house, when they bought it, was the picture of an energy-slurper — no insulation, a clunky old gas boiler, bad windows.\u00a0 They thought of it as their “starter home” – one they would eventually replace with something bigger and grander.<\/p>\n
Still, they wanted to not throw money out the window, so one of the first things they did was to replace the old boiler with a high-efficiency one – that just made economic sense.\u00a0 Then, they started to button the house up – one year, they put in triple pane windows, and another year, they had insulation blown in, and closed up the unused fireplace.\u00a0 That made things much cozier. They reprogrammed the sprinkler in their yard so it detects when rain is coming (and does not turn on).\u00a0 By 2016, their house was rated “top efficiency” for their neighborhood by the gas and electric company.\u00a0 Plus, they had replaced one of their cars with an electric vehicle, a spiffy, zoom-y Chevy Volt.<\/p>\n
All of this, Caroline said to me, “just made sense”.\u00a0 But as they were doing this another transformation happened.\u00a0 Caroline and her husband realized they were really quite comfortable in their starter home.\u00a0 The mortgage and the utility bills are reasonable.\u00a0 The commute to work is short, making picking up and dropping kids of easy.\u00a0 \u00a0This all makes it possible to live life more fully – including having spare some time to contribute to Green Needham.\u00a0 And they really didn’t need more space: “Small is beautiful” Caroline says.<\/p>\n
Their next step is to plant more trees in the yard for shade so they can enjoy the squirrels and bunnies, and not<\/em>\u00a0to move to a bigger house.<\/p>\n![\"Fox-squirrel-2-1000x520.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/bigfootgardens.files.wordpress.com\/2018\/01\/fox-squirrel-2-1000x5201.jpg\")
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