Let’s skip the new green studio for a minute. The big task of the past few days has been in the main house. Some background: as I pointed out a while back, I had thought that Boulder city code would require our new studio building to have a backup heating source in addition to whatever solar-powered source we were planning for it. I was misguided: Boulder considers the building an accessory structure, one that nobody plans to live in, and thus it needs no heating system at all. But, the helpful folk down at the city planning office pointed out, should we or anyone else want to someday live in the new studio, it would need a city-inspected and -approved heating system—so why not just throw one in now, while the tools are out anyway?

Me, I don’t care about the backup heating source. I’d like to have the studio—which I’ll be using as a home-office-slash-bike-workshop-slash-rumination-space—as off-grid as possible, so the sole solar-powered system we’ve been planning was ideal. But my wife and I will probably sell this house, probably sooner rather than later. And having a nice, new, super insulated, eminently livable separate building in the backyard—one heated by the all-powerful new boiler in the main house—is a swell selling point, especially in a town with a high share of the officeless and self-employed. So we’re going to dig a trench from the main house to the studio, through which we’ll run hot and cold water pipes; the hot, obviously, will heat the studio.

Which is why I was under the house all Sunday. Our main house is heated with a mix of in-floor radiant pipes—copper pipes that run between the floor joists—and baseboard radiant heaters—copper pipes housed in metal sheathes that run along our, uh, baseboards. (Like, duh.) The two systems run at different temps—about 160 degrees Fahrenheit for baseboards, about 120 for in-floor. The in-floor, for a number of reasons, is a more efficient system than the baseboards—for starters it creates a more even heat while running lower temps, meaning our natural gas-fired boiler has to work less. As you might recall, our super-efficient new boiler cost us quite a lot (*koff*twelvethousanddollars*koff*), so we’re always looking for ways to up its efficiency—weatherproofing the house, heating our domestic hot water to less-than-scalding temps. Ditching the baseboards and replacing them with in-floor pipes is another—rather more involved and time-consuming—way to get more efficient. So I was under the house all day Sunday pulling decades-old cellulose insulation from between the joists so that our Austrian Master of All Things Heating, Raymond, could come over this morning and staple up a bunch of new Pex tubing between the joists.

Yeah, OK—what’s this got to do with the studio? Well, we’re shooting for a twofer. Laying a new concrete slab imbedded with radiant pipes for the studio would cost more than two grand—per-yard costs for concrete plus labor plus price-per-foot of Pex tubing—probably at least $2,500. But that doesn’t do anything for the main house. On the other hand, installing new in-floor Pex in the main house—price-per-foot of tubing plus Raymond’s labor—is going to cost us $1,000 to $1,500, and we can throw the old baseboards into the studio. The main house gets a nice bump in efficiency and energy savings, the studio gets heated, and we spend less money to accomplish both those goals. (The studio, protected as it will be by thick walls of straw bale, should hold heat quite well, so the baseboards in there can run at lower temps—or not at all.)

That’s the idea, anyway; the final numbers may tell a different story. For now the reality has been yanking down decrepit insulation and heaping it into organized piles—well, as organized as a forest of 40-year-old shredded newspapers can be.

Seriously, it was like an archaeological dig down there, the subfloor detritus of constant renovation: the leftover ducts of a now defunct forced-air heating system, some petrified raccoon poop, a copy of Rocky Mountain News so old it had a Hi & Lois comic on page B12. Good thing I’d bought a mask.