The price of going home

A friend asked me yesterday if we were likely to live in Newfoundland year round anytime soon. This came on the tails of a conversation in which I inquired about tips on closing up a house for the winter, since that is what we will be doing in a little over a month.

My emotional answer is that I'd love to live in Newfoundland year round. Nothing I'd like more. Just the thought of going back to the big city is giving me nightmares. Back to house alarms, pass codes, pool closing, multi-bathroom cleaning, etc. Not something I look forward to.

So what's the problem, you ask? The problem, she answered, is heat. This old house is 120 or more years old. It was built before furnaces and insulation and R-factors and climate change. I've been told that retrofitting a house like this to bring it up to 21st century building code is well nigh impossible since it appears that the structure of the house can't take it and it will rot from the inside out. It has to breathe, summer and winter.

We've had a few cold days and nights so far and I have to say, the house is less than cozy when the wind is blowing or the rain is pelting. The crawl space is quite wet and the dampness moves up through the floors, keeping everything humid (nice in hot dry weather, but not on a cold day). We don't yet know what's in the exterior walls, if anything. We understand it's probably sawdust. There is nothing in the attic except very warm air. We do have a furnace which is bolted to the underside of the living room floor. It does provide a great deal of hot air most of which I fear seeps outside long before we can benefit from it.

And that brings me to my point - can I live with myself if I'm burning barrels of heating oil just to keep the house at a livable temperature? Surely this is not in keeping with how I live my life otherwise - to make the smallest footprint possible.

Saying this here though is not going to win me any friends. Most people here live in old, very drafty homes and crank up the furnace to keep them warm. They can spent more than $2500 a year on heating oil. Surely some of this, spent to upgrade the homes, would be a better investment and a kindness to the planet.

So. Am I staying here this winter? No. Even if the above problems didn't exist, we haven't made plans for it. Much preparation needed if we are to become resident Newfoundlanders again.

Next winter? Not likely, although one of the reasons for my reluctance to live here seems to be falling by the wayside. A comparison of health care experiences is showing the big city to be falling short of what is available here. If what I've learned is true, I would have been better served to have been diagnosed in Newfoundland than in Ontario. Would have gotten attention faster, by far.

Maybe it's time to just start researching what can be done with century old salt box houses. Can they be retrofitted to be energy efficient? I would love that to be the case. Our only problem then would be to find something for John to do as a photojournalist here that would interest the rest of the world. So far, we've not had a not of interest from other parts of Canada in what's happening in Newfoundland. It has been ever thus.