I can usually judge my depression by the number of empty bottles in front of me. At the moment, let me just say it’s a sea of glass out there, folks. It’s all Stella, too, imported all the way from Flanders; that’s a lot of food miles adding up. (Or is that beer miles?) I might not even recycle them – that’s how low I’ve sunk.

I josh, of course. But only a little. We uncovered a kink in the Grand Studio Plan, one that will likely bump up the overall cost, and that’s bumming me out a bit.

As it sits now, the studio rests on what’s known as a slab-on-grade foundation. Basically, you level off a plot of land, pour a few inches of concrete on top, and construct your garden shed or bike shop on top of that. One of the troubles with slab-on-grade, at least in our little studio, is that it rests in direct contact with the ground.

Meaning when the ground gets cold – as it tends to during that thing we call winter – the slab gets cold, and that sucks a lot of heat from the studio’s interior. Not an overly big deal in itself; our plan was to lay a course of rigid foam insulation on top of the existing slab, lay down some pipes for our solar radiant heating system, and pour another slab on top. This little layer cake would have shielded our floor from the cold of wintertime earth, as well as provided a nice bit of heat for our little feetsies. Like this:



The other trouble with it is structural – or so say the fine folks of the City of Boulder. According to the building code, the four inches of concrete we’ve already got can’t legitimately bear the weight of the studio. Never mind that the building’s been there for nearly 20 years and the slab’s still holding, the code says no! The reasons for this are a bit beyond me at the moment (I’m reading up on my foundation sciences quick as I can, promise) and the solutions, at least how I’m hearing them, seem like a lot of work, a lot of digging and rented jackhammers. (I once dug a 30-foot-long, 16-inch-deep trench for a friend’s dad in Taos, New Mexico. Took all summer. I was 12. Child labor. Awful.)

I mean, realistically all this will add another grand or two to the final tally, which won’t make that much of an impact, especially if it’s spread over a number of years. But I’m already starting to get the sense that this is how it’s going to be – a thousand bucks here, a thousand bucks there, pretty soon you’re talking about a lot of money.

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I also want to remind my wide-reading and handsome audience here that the studio is only one of quite a few biggish projects that I’m considering. We’re still ruminating the possibility of installing a solar PV array, and there are a host of minor projects – weatherproofing, insulating, appliance upgrading – that would be swell to cross off our list. But like I’ve said, the money bucket is only so big. So one of the things I’ll be considering over the next couple of weeks is which of those things is most important, which of them will get us closest to our goals – a better, smarter house; less dependence on natural resources; warm feetsies.