Stuff
Since we were building such a small house, and I knew I would be taking time off work to be highly involved in construction, I had hoped from the beginning that the project could be a sort of model for how to build ethically. Back when we planned to build the big house first, I had contacted a residential builder who specialized in “green building”—geothermal heating, solar panels, SIPs, that sort of thing—and when we met up at the site, he told me that a lot of construction has already moved toward “green” practices. Low-flow toilets are readily available (too available, if you ask Mark). High-performance insulation is the standard. Most paints are low VOC by design.
What isn’t the norm, he said, is “greening" the parts of construction that you don’t see as an average homeowner. Yes, you bought a low-flow toilet, but it came wrapped in plastic, then styrofoam, then cardboard. What happens to those materials after the toilet is installed? And what about all the leftover building materials, like the scraps of treated lumber and broken cinder blocks? What ends up in a landfill? The water table? The air?
When our house was being framed and insulated, I pulled up to the site on an icy morning and saw a worker tear off a chunk of foam insulation and use it as kindling to start a fire so he and the rest of the crew could keep warm. I mentioned it to our builder disapprovingly, and he said, “Oh, that’s nothing. The other day I saw a guy start a fire like that and then throw a frozen burrito into it to warm up his lunch.”
Yesterday we moved out of our temporary apartment and into a temporary hotel. Since we aren’t able to move our belongings into the house yet—we could be fined for occupying the house before receiving our official certificate of occupancy—we had to get creative and complicated: Perishable or breakable kitchen stuff went into the Dog House cabinets in the hopes that an inspector wouldn’t notice, delicate and electronic items went into a climate-controlled storage unit, and heartier belongings went into a POD sitting on our property. I used to pride myself on how little stuff I thought we had, but this past week embarrassed me when I found boxes of belongings that hadn’t been unpacked since we moved out of Bowling Green—four moves ago! Turns out, I’m just a consumer like everyone else.
And that stuff has to go somewhere, even if you make the high-minded decision to live in a 866-square-foot Dog House and downsize. We already owned a second queen-sized mattress with box springs and rails and a headboard; if it wasn’t going to fit in our new home, where else could it go?
The fate of our guest bed is a good example of how difficult it can be to act responsibly as a consumer. Start with the headboard, which was from IKEA and has served us well for five years. However, when we relocated to Nashville, one of the movers broke off one of its two support legs. We tried gluing it back on, but the leg dried crooked and never felt stable enough to reuse. I tried selling it online; I showed it to neighbors and said they could have it for free. Nobody wanted it. So, with four hours left yesterday before I had to turn over the keys to our apartment, my father-in-law and I chucked it into the dumpster. Ten minutes later I saw the garbage truck pull up and gobble the headboard into its belly, off to the landfill to decompose with the other stuff we couldn’t take with us, sell, give away, or simply didn’t need anymore.
As for the mattress and box springs, well, nobody wanted those either. We tried—we really did! I called reuse centers around Nashville, but nobody would take a used mattress. We tried giving it away to neighbors who we thought might trust our hygiene, but they all turned us down. While picking up lunch at McDonalds, I even heard Mark’s dad asking people, “Hey, we’re giving away an immaculate mattress. Do you want it?” Finally, a mattress store told us that they would recycle the mattress and box springs, but it cost $15 per item. Mark’s dad thought he knew someone back in Kentucky who could use the mattress, but when we loaded it onto his truck and started driving down the road, it became clear that hauling it three hours on the interstate would not be safe for the cars behind him. We pulled into Mattress King, paid $30, and dropped the mattress and box springs in their alley, hoping that they would indeed recycle the items and not just chuck them into the landfill with our headboard.
(By the way, my dad’s new favorite trivia tidbit is that 90% of a mattress is recyclable.)
When it came to the bed rails, Mark’s dad was able to convince a neighbor to take them. He also tried to give her our loveseat, but she said, “No, sorry, I have a thing about used fabrics.”
So does Goodwill, it turns out. After trying to sell and then give away the loveseat, which admittedly showed signs of use by our dog for the past five years, a Goodwill employee let us offload it but said that in such condition, they were likely just going to throw it away.
I don’t have any thoughts about consumerism that Wendell Berry hasn’t expressed more elegantly. I’ll just say this: When it comes to building a house in a way that meets my personal ethical standards, I don’t know whether I have succeeded or failed. I wanted to source materials from places like Habitat ReStore, but when I needed a certain type of screw at 7 AM, I drove the five minutes to Home Depot instead of the 35 minutes to Habitat. And maybe that’s not such an unethical move after all; is it more environmentally friendly to buy a new item nearby or a used item far away?
There’s also the trade-off of buying new, energy-friendly materials versus existing, energy-hungry ones. You could ask that question of construction materials, appliances, or even the house itself. Is it better to move into an existing home that is much bigger than we need, one that is poorly insulated and full of inefficient items? Or was building a small house with new materials the right choice?
After a year of asking myself and other people these questions, I still don’t know. The process of moving really forces you to reckon with the footprint of your life, so I guess I'm a little raw and down on myself in the wake of our move yesterday. I know that I want to continue trying to make decisions about our house that align with my values. I want to keep learning how to make better decisions. I will also try to give myself a break, knowing that if I'm asking myself questions like these in the first place, then I’m probably doing okay.
