Lord. Looking back over my back catalog of posts, I feel like I should have a lot more done by now. (I blame Apple: I’ve become so obsessed with the iPhone that all I do is Google news about it. I need to know when I should start camping out in front of the Apple store, obvs.) I’m aiming for the studio to get torn down and rebuilt by Labor Day, but at this rate I’m worried I’ll still be sitting on a concrete slab under open skies come October. Pretty soon here we’re going to have to move away from the exciting but ethereal possibilities and into the real nuts and actual bolts of building the thing. Our architect pal is coming over later today; hopefully he’s a faster mover than I am, and we’ll have some sketches next week.

Another thing that’s still in process is our home energy audit, which we finally had done last week – well, the brawn part of it, anyway. (The brain part is still in rumination.) Getting an audit, you’ll recall, means taking a look at how much energy – in our case, natural gas and electricity – a house uses, and what steps, if any, can be taken to reduce that use. My main concern for our house was its heating: In winter, our natural gas bills are fairly high, and I want to know where we’re losing heat. (After you drain your bank account on a new heating system, these things tend to worry you.)

Our auditor, Charlie Richardson, had two methods to check for this. The first (and, frankly, less expensive) is a blower-door test, which I’ve told you about. In a nutshell, the auditor uses a giant fan to suck air out of your house – at speeds simulating a 30-mile-per-hour winds – and you go around finding where new air is coming in: windows, doors, various holes in the wall. (We heard a shrieking whistle coming from one of our bedroom windows; slightly panicked me until I realized it was actually open.) The blower-door looks like this:

There are a couple of gauges that tell you just how much pressure is being created inside your house; high pressure means a tight house – nowhere for air to get in or out – low pressure, like ours, means a leaky house. From the gauges, Charlie could tell our house was about twice as leaky as the average home. Awesome. Air doesn’t come in just from doors and windows, though. We have a wood-burning stove inserted in our fireplace; I thought the former chimney had been sealed around the stovepipe, but apparently not: You could have run wind-tunnel tests in front of that thing while the blower was running. Huge air loss, right in our living room. Another culprit is the plumbing chase – a hollow, uninsulated wall that runs from crawlspace to attic and houses the pipes and drains for our bathroom and kitchen, creating a nice little funnel for cold air from the attic and crawlspace to move into our living space.

Charlie also took down all our heating info for the year – how many therms we used per month, how cold each of those months were – and is currently crunching the data to get a better picture of what we need to do. Yeah, summer’s coming, and us grasshoppers can’t care much about winter these days, but now is the time, when the sun is warm and the days are long, to seal up those leaks and insulate those chases. Otherwise you’ll spend those cold winter days cursing yourself for not getting around to it. Or at least that’s what I’d do.

The second method involved an infrared camera of various cold spots throughout the house; I’ll post and discuss those next week. Gotta get back to the important stuff.