Welcome to Naked Sustainability Podcast. This bold podcast helps busy millennials navigate real-life sustainability with practical tips, no-nonsense advice, and a zero-fucks-given attitude, all through a transparent and authentic lens of living in the real world. Join Ginny for lively conversations, expert interviews, and hilarious anecdotes. From eco-fashion to zero-waste living, we’ll empower you to be an eco-warrior without compromising your badass lifestyle. Get ready to kick some eco-ass.
Ginny is thrilled to be back with the weekly podcast, catch up with the exciting eco-friendly updates and projects she has been working on.
Hey, hey! Long time no see! I’m so excited to be here with you guys today. We have so much to discuss and we both know that I get detoured so easily, but I’m back in the podcasting game and I’m excited to share everything with you. Welcome back to the Naked Sustainability Podcast, where we discuss living our busiest lives as sustainably as possible.
It’s Ginny, and I’m back after taking about a nine month break off from podcasting, due to some life events that we’ll get into in a little bit today. Today, I thought I’d catch you all up on everything that’s going on over here and let you know some eco-wins that we’ve had this past year, everything we’ve learned, as well as what we’re currently working on. And maybe a little sneak peek into what might be next.
So let’s get started. Okay, but first, why did I take a nine month break? It’s really been a very long journey for me, so I started podcasting last year in, like, April, May, June, somewhere around that timeframe. And I did it through about the first or second week of July last year. And it just kinda stopped when my little, baby-est kitty, Drifter, died very suddenly and unexpectedly, and that led to a lot of demotivation in, you know, getting these conversations started with you guys, even posting on my blog, doing anything in my business.
It just…I was going through the motions and not doing much else. We actually binge watched a whole Netflix series, Suits, in this timeframe. And didn’t do many of our project things, and it was just not a very productive time period for us, but we needed that time to process our grief and get through things in our family with our three other cats and our two dogs missing their sister and us missing our littlest baby fur child.
So that’s why the podcast thing took a little mini break. And then, since we got back kind of on the productivity train, I’ve been really working on, gaining so much knowledge for you guys and trying to share it with the world on my blog. And we’ve been very busy on the DIY home renovation front and all that kind of fun stuff.
So, during the same time (around last July-ish), while we were going through these demotivation periods and this period of grief, I actually got diagnosed with some pretty severe environmental allergies. And I got put on some new Immunotherapy allergy medicine. So last year gardening was extremely hard and the Boyfriend ended up doing a lot of the planting, harvesting, weeding, watering, all of that fun stuff from like June all the way through the end of the season because I was having such a problem being outside.
I was wearing N95s and wiping pollen and everything off my face when we came inside, and immediately taking a shower. I just could not focus through the allergy brain fog that I had every minute of every day. This brain fog actually led me to be, like, super frustrated about life, and occasionally take some frustrations out on the Boyfriend, and we ended up having some communication difficulties because I couldn’t see through this fog, right?
Like, literally, I could see, but I couldn’t visualize our projects; I couldn’t help with much because I just couldn’t focus on anything, so we had to work through that and figure out what was going on. And I’m happy to say that we’re finally getting my head back to where it’s supposed to be.
But, the allergies led to us harvesting a lot of our vegetables last year and then freezing them. So most of them that we got from the garden last year didn’t end up being canned or processed or made into anything. We just froze the straight vegetables. So we’ve been pulling tomatoes and leeks and everything else basically, from our freezer to use in like our stir fries or our veggie meatloaves and stuff like that.
So it’s been really fun to play with things in new ways. And we have a whole freezer full of tomatoes that we can literally make into sauce or paste or whatever we need in big batches when we need to. We just throw the tomatoes into the pot and just let it cook down for days. So that’s exciting and fun.
Last year, right around the same time, we had a lot going on on our home. We ended up wanting to move forward with getting solar last year and when we originally signed our first contract, they told us we needed a new roof. So we didn’t think we were going to be able to move forward with solar without getting a new roof.
Somehow we ended up making it work, but along the way, we realized that solar energy sales companies kind of suck. I hope to be able to talk more about that in the future, but like, it was a long, drawn out, sucky research project that we wouldn’t wish on anybody. Suffice it to say, we have a new metal roof that is American made and American recycled steel.
And it’s fabulous. It’s helped so much with our energy efficiency, just having that metal roof on our home. And, then we were able to add solar as well. It’s been really fun to watch how much energy we use and how much we produce. We’re in about mid-ish March right now, and we’re producing all of the energy we’re currently consuming and that’s really fun and exciting to see. In Pennsylvania I didn’t think we would get that until maybe towards the end of April when we got more sunshiny days. So it’s fun to see it in March.
As far as homesteading and life updates: we’re still in the middle of our closet update. We have so much shit to declutter, guys. Like, I have clothes from high school, and then I just keep getting new hand me downs from, like, my mom, or my sister, or, new clothes for birthdays or Christmas, and we just need to go through it.
It’s causing chaos in my brain. It’s causing chaos in our closet. I have a chair in the closet, and it just holds, like, all of the clothes. And, honestly, we try to, separate out to donate or to declutter but every time we try to go to the thrift store near us, it’s closed for donations. So we end up having those back into our house and trudging them back into a box.
So…we are working on it, guys. We’re actively doing the decluttering that I talk about all the time. We’re trying to make a more simple, minimalistic life. You know, get our closet to where we want, and just really organize our house. So I don’t feel like it’s chaos all the time. We are getting there and I’m excited.
We just have to rip out a couple more walls in order to, move our bed and finish our closet. And that project is moving along just fine. It’s been fun. We also moved our fence.
So we have about a two acre property and we had about an acre-ish fenced in for the dogs. We moved to fence in, I don’t know, maybe another three quarters of an acre, so that most of our property is fenced in. And now both dogs get to be able to enjoy the garden with us, which has been really fun.
It makes life easier now that we don’t have to like go outside the fence to get into the compost bin system, or you know, go outside the fence to check on the garden or water the garden, those kind of things. The funniest story, though, makes me a little frustrated, was we had some, brussel sprouts that had somehow overwintered, right?
I don’t think they’re really perennial plants in our zone, but they had survived our really harsh freezes so far and they were starting to to bloom out again this year. And I was excited because we didn’t get very many brussel sprouts last year and so I was watching them and babying them and just like peeking on them every day…Only to find that my dogs had also discovered the new baby brussel sprout plants that were still surviving from when we planted them last spring. They carefully cleaned off any every new brussel sprout of each individual plant one by one and when I finally found out about it they guarded this brussel sprout like it was their new baby and played a game of tag with me. They would tag the brussel sprout and then back up real fast. And then they’d come forward and try to grab the brussel sprout again. Then, at one point they decided they just had to remove the plant from my personal space.
So they just took the whole plant (beautiful roots and everything) out of the ground. And ran so far away from me so they could eat the Brussel sprouts in peace. I had to say bye to those beautiful Brussel sprout plants. But I’m excited that they survived our winter and that gives me hope for planting them in the future.
So that’s a fun, new, exciting thing. We’ve recently, in the last month or so, been able to complete our new three bay compost system. So our other one worked just fine. It was made out of all of our homemade ingredients and we hadn’t outgrown it yet. We planned to in the future, right? But we hadn’t outgrown it yet.
The problem with our old system was that our smallest, newest edition puppy was able to get into the compost system. She was digging out all of the vegetables and stuff that we were throwing into it and creating holes and coming back super filthy and covered in everything. So, we ended up having to build our system that we’ve been wanting to build for a couple years way earlier than we had originally projected.
Our current three bay system is partially completed. We’ve got the bins done and they look absolutely freaking beautiful and we’re so excited to be using them. We have plans for a roof on it just to keep some of the rain off. But right now it’s fully functional. It’s just not as completed as we want it to be. I’ll be sure to share those photos on the blog and on the podcast whenever I can once it’s all done and we have the roof completed.
In other partially completed or ongoing projects around our homestead, we have started renovating our basement, which is a dusty, concrete, drabby, dark thing. We decided to put our home office down here in order to increase our living space and have a second spare bedroom upstairs. And it has been really fun to work on this project with the Boyfriend.
We’ve done everything ourselves from subfloor to framing, insulation, drywall, ceiling, electrical, lights, all of it. It’s been so fun learning new things, working with the Boyfriend just to see how we can continue to communicate and to build that relationship with each other. The basement’s not finished yet, we still have to work on the flooring and other finishing touches.
Some of our outlets don’t have electricity to them yet. We have to figure out what we’re doing with our furnace. We have to probably upgrade our hot water tank that’s over 30 years old. And maybe move it to a different portion of the basement. But we’ve (so far) been able to create a relatively temperature controlled room.
It doesn’t have any heat or cooling in it yet. It’s just in the basement, so it’s just a standard temperature all year. As we start to think of removing our furnace, we’ve been trying to figure out if we want to put another cold climate mini split in for heating, cooling, and dehumidification purposes, or if we want to add a secondary heat source.
Which kind of, in Pennsylvania, is how we’re leaning. We didn’t want to continue to use the fuel based oil furnace that we have around the house. The water based heating elements (the radiators) on the ground level, gets in the way of everything. We can’t put cabinets or shelves or anything around those.
We’ve been wanting to remove the radiators for a really long time. Plus our furnace is old and it’s loud and I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, you can literally smell the fuel oil when it kicks on downstairs. It’s a dinosaur. Every time the furnace guy comes to check on it every year, he’s just like, “Oh, I’ve never seen a model this old.”
So it has to be about 60 years old, like our house or very close to it. We installed our cold climate mini split system to kind of supplement the use of our furnace a couple years ago, while we figured out what we wanted to do.
Our current thought process is to add a wood stove to our basement. It’ll add this really cool, vibe that we’re kind of going for. I don’t know. It’s it matches our industrial aesthetic. Right? And it’ll be fun to just be able to, in the winter, stoke it once and then have a warm office all day. But thoughts on a wood stove are semi-controversial, if you do any kind of research. There’s issues from environmental allergens inside the home…which with my new severe allergy diagnosis, we’ve been trying to avoid, and we have air purifiers going everywhere. To other issues like releasing the carbon from the wood, how well it burns, the particulates that it burns, and is it even more environmentally environmentally friendly than fuel oil?
It’s been a lot of research and wrestling that we’re doing around it. Plus it’s going to be a lot of work. We have a partially unfinished portion of our basement office right now with our furnace in it and our hot water tank. And we’re hoping to upgrade our hot water tank in the next couple weeks, to a month or so.
Again, we’re doing all of this ourselves. So it’s been a fun learning experience and we have to do it on and around our day jobs and, you know, walking our girls and being healthy individuals. So it takes a hot minute.
After we move the hot water tank, we’re hoping to start being able to rip out the furnace now that we have no more fuel oil. We finally used it after about three years of not using it or buying anymore. Our tank was just that big, apparently. So now we can start ripping out the furnace, and begin planning to see how well a wood stove would fit in that area. Because it’s a nice sized area where a wood stove would probably be able to fit.
And then we need to know the specifications, like how far from the wall the wood stove needs to be. Honestly, we need to talk to someone who’s installed one before because everything on the internet, and in the research that we can find, is vastly different everywhere. So once we talk to someone and we kind of gather all of the information, we’re thinking of adding a wood stove.
But again, I’ll keep you guys updated on that. It’s kind of one of those fun, trying to be eco-friendly and sustainable as possible projects…but also trying to live our lives, right? If we switch to a completely electric heat source and utilize a mini split system, and we have those, like, zero degree days in the winter in Pennsylvania, like we do get occasionally, our mini split has to work really, really, really freaking hard.
Which is fine, but we want to make sure it lasts as long as possible. So having that secondary heat source, which according to some research (I still haven’t finished mine) is more eco friendly, right? It’s not like I’m chopping down a forest. I’m hoping to use a lot of the dried wood that we have around here from our fallen sticks and trees.
We won’t have to have this on all the time. It’s really going to be that supplemental heat source so that our office isn’t cold and we can continue to typey typey in our day jobs on our laptops without losing digits. Right now we’re working on hopefully purchasing our new hot water tank, which I’ll have an update for you guys soon and completing the flooring.
So our flooring we have used throughout our entire house (it’s one of my favorite projects that we’ve done so far). It has been these wide plywood planks that we end up putting down in eight foot sections and then offsetting them, and then we stain them. And it’s a labor of love, right?
You have to rip down the plywood, and then you have to sand it, and then you have to put it in the basement to let it acclimate, and then you have to sand it again, and then you have to paint or stain it once it’s installed. So hopefully looking forward to finishing the basement office project sometime in 2024…But it’s like the middle of March already, and I have no freaking clue how we got here.
This has been such a fast year already. But, I think that’s all the home-ish updates that we have. In terms of what’s next, obviously we’re going to hopefully be adding in our new hot water tank. And finishing our basement renovation, and hopefully finishing our closet updates. I’ll have gardening updates for you guys coming soon.
In terms of health and kind of personal updates for me, I’ve been recently trying to get back into being a little bit more healthy. You know with what we’re eating and the timing of when we’re eating and having more dedicated workouts than just the walks and the runs that we do with the dogs on the daily basis.
And, you know, the homesteading yard work and stuff that we do around the house. We signed up for a 15k Tough Mudder in September, and we did a 5k last year…in which I basically died, right? Completed it, YAY! But I basically died following it, and so now that we’ve tripled our obstacle count and tripled our distance that we’re going, I really feel the need to start preparing as early as possible.
So, I’m trying to add some weightlifting, some flexibility and yoga, in addition to the cardio and endurance that we’ve been adding to our daily and everyday life. That’s kind of where I’m at. We did just start sourdough, which has been really fun. I’ll have lots of updates in the future, but like, send me all of your sourdough recipes.
We’ve made pizza with it in our Ooni, and it was so good. So bomb. It was so good and I don’t even think our sourdough starter was as perfect as it could have been because it was like our first time ever using it. But we followed a YouTuber’s recipe on a sourdough pizza and it was just fantastic and we really enjoyed the process.
We’re looking forward to experimenting more. I have some recipes for some sourdough granola to make. And recipes for some sourdough chocolate chip cookies to make. I’m excited to be entering this world and I’m excited that I can share it with you guys again because, for some reason, I really have all of these side thoughts that need shared with you on this podcast that are really hard to write in a blog post.
I’m excited to be back here with you guys and publishing weekly so that we can have these discussions. But I think that’s gonna be it for now. I don’t want this episode to be too, too long. Thanks for listening. Feel free to reach out at nakedsustainability.com. Don’t forget to subscribe, leave me a review, and join us next week as we explore more badass ways that we can care for this planet while living our lives, as busy or as overwhelming as they may be.
Until next time.
