10/16/2011
Yay, we finished our kitchen remodel! Just in time as we are expecting our newborn any day now. The final details came together as Brock from Peacock Electric put up our new lights from Western Montana Lighting. We now have LED lights under our cabinets and beautiful track lighting up in the rest of the kitchen. The final touch of a new water filter from Culligan water made the kitchen complete. Thanks again to the Montana Radio Company for making our house so cool and green!
9/30/2011
After much anticipation, our Cool Green Home projects finally took off over the last couple of months. It started in July with the delivery of our new greenhouse from Rockin B and compost from EkoCompost. Thanks to them, we’ll actually have some nice red tomatoes this year!
Then, we broke ground on our new kitchen in mid-August. We started by removing our old cabinets and dropping them off at Home Resource to be put to good use in someone else’s project. Then the boys from Kingdom Builders came in and knocked down three walls, built up some new ones, and created a nice, more open kitchen space for us! Thus far, we have fitted it with beautiful marmolium flooring from Carpet Brokers, no-VOC paint from Abode, and a new stackable washer and dryer from Vann’s.
In the next couple weeks the project should be complete – we’ll update you with the final details then!
7/18/2011
Holy cow! Yesterday we picked up a quarter cow, courtesy of Lifeline Farms. Today we enjoyed grilled organic cheeseburgers for our neighborhood BBQ – what a treat – thanks Ernie! We’re also starting to move on our kitchen remodel. Renee, from Double Happiness Design, came up with a great idea to build an island cart for the new kitchen. With our gift certificate from Home Resource, Jesse at the Revamp shop refurbished a big piece of cutting board that came in, custom built to fit our cart. It looks brand new and is beautiful. Next, Renee helped us pick out some really cool track lighting and really efficient LED lighting for under our new cabinets from Western Montana Lighting. Then, we worked with Bob down at Vann’s to help us pick out a new stove and a new stackable, energy-efficient washer/dryer. Kingdom Builders is scheduled to break ground on Aug 9 and we should have a new kitchen in mid-September!
5/3/2011
We sat anxiously awaiting their arrival. They were coming today with an “update” on our application status. “Would they really come to tell us ‘no’ in person,” I said to my husband. We thought not, but being somewhat superstitious, we didn’t want to get our hopes up. Since we heard from Ross at the Montana Radio Company the night before, we had already been trying desperately not to dream up too many eco-improvements for our house. “What if we can get a new green kitchen floor?!”…”New lighting would be so nice in here!”…”That greenhouse would be so awesome in our backyard!” Then, Adam saw the cool green car coming up the street. Two gentlemen came to our door and didn’t make us wait any longer – they came right out and told us we had won! We won!! We are one of the lucky winners for this year’s contest! Woohoo! We want to extend a huge thank you to the Montana Radio Company and to all of the incredibly generous project partners – we are so excited to be a part of this!
-Erin Switalski, for Erin and Adam Switalski
5/22/2011
We’ve decided to do a small kitchen expansion since we’ll be under construction this summer. Mark from Kingdom Builders, who specializes in energy-efficient construction, stopped by last week to discuss some ideas with us. We decided to expand our existing kitchen into our garage space, which means our foot print will stay the same. Then, Sam from ProBuild came by yesterday to talk cabinets with us. We learned that our new cabinets are certified to have sustainably-harvested wood. Sam’s pulling together some mock-ups of what our new kitchen could look like and we’ll decide on next steps in the coming week. All of this has added some time to our project, and we expect that we’ll break ground in early August. We can’t wait!
-Erin
