Small space ecofrugality (and its opposite)

I generally think of tiny homes (under 500 square feet) as inherently ecofrugal. After all, a house with fewer square feet naturally costs less to build (or buy), less to furnish, less to heat and cool, and less to maintain than a bigger one, and it takes less time to clean. But a recent story in the New York Times caused me to question that view. 

I initially clicked on this piece about a 450-square-foot studio in Manhattan hoping to see what sorts of  clever design tricks the homeowner had used to make the most of the space. But not only did the apartment not look at all spacious to me, the price tag on it literally made my jaw drop. The owner, Michael Ingram Jones, paid an eye-popping $799,000 for this tiny apartment because it met his very particular requirements: it was in the West Village, and it was in a prewar building constructed by architecture firm Bing & Bing. Now, you would assume that, if he was willing to pay that much to live in a Bing & Bing building, it must have been because he loved the look of their homes—but apparently that was not the case. He loved the view, but he thought the freshly renovated apartment's layout "was inefficient and wasted space." So the first thing he did was spend another $300,000 to have high-priced architecture firm Messana O'Rorke redo the place from top to bottom.

And what did they do for that exorbitant price tag? They divided up this tiny space into a series of even tinier spaces by enclosing the bed in a huge black box (oh, excuse me, I meant "deep aubergine-gray") in the middle of the room. The architect claims this "creates an object in space, as well as sequences of spaces that can actually make a small apartment feel larger," but based on the photos, it certainly doesn't look larger. It looks like there's a huge block of unused space right smack in the middle of the room, and much of the remaining space is devoted to narrow, dark little corridors for getting around that obstruction. And when the doors to this "bedroom" are opened, all they reveal is a dark enclosure containing a queen-size bed and literally nothing else.

I was equally unimpressed by Messana's "great" bathroom and kitchen. The kitchen cabinets are done in a dark wood with no handles, and the tiny counter and backsplash are in a no-doubt-pricey black granite. The photo caption claims this design creates "visual calm," but what it looks like to me is a tiny, dark, featureless hole. The bathroom, decked out with even-more-pricey white Carrara marble on all horizontal surfaces, has more light, but it's still flat and bare-looking. The vibe it gives off is "expensive hotel," not "home reflecting the owner's personality." The other "rooms" in the apartment, the sitting area and desk nook, have more character, thanks to the owner's collection of nice furniture and art pieces. But they're so tiny that everything just feels crammed in.

In short, this little apartment might just be the least ecofrugal home I've ever seen. Between the purchase price and the remodeling costs, the owner paid a whopping $2,444 per square foot for it, and he ended up with a space that feels dark, poky, and cramped. For clever use of space, Brian and I agreed, this high-end home has nothing on the model apartments at IKEA, which could be replicated for a tiny fraction of the price.

This extravagant and unappealing remodel was so exactly the opposite of what I'd hoped for that I decided to go hunting online for a small-space design that was closer to my ecofrugal ideals. I typed "450 square food apartment" into the search bar and clicked on the first hit, from Apartment Therapy. And the minute I saw the first picture, I felt much more cheerful.

Although this Brooklyn apartment has exactly the same square footage as the one featured in the Times, the contrast between the two could hardly be greater. Where one is dark and confined, the other is bright and open. The first one feels like barely enough space for one person, while the second houses two people and a cat comfortably. It has all the same spaces—seating area, dining area, bedroom, kitchen, bath, office—but all of them are in one big room. And while 450 square feet is small for an apartment, it's very large for a single room, making every part of the apartment feel much more spacious.

Even when you focus on the individual "rooms" within the studio, they feel much bigger and brighter than the tiny roomlets in the Manhattan studio. The kitchen is a real kitchen, with a full-sized stove, sink, and fridge, plus a dishwasher—amenities there clearly isn't room for in the Jones kitchen. Counter space looks limited until you realize that the couple's butcher-block dining table (a family heirloom) is counter-height and can do double duty as a roomy island for food prep. And when the meal is ready, the table can comfortably seat four people, while the tiny table in Jones's "dining area" barely has room for a single plate. Jones said he didn't care about space since he considered the city itself to be his "living room," and presumably, if he wants to entertain guests, he takes them out on the town. But the Brooklyn couple (Eva Medoff and Delaney Rohan) have plenty of room to cook and serve dinner for four or, with a bit of squeezing, even six people if they choose. And after dinner, they still have the entire city at their disposal.

Likewise, the bathroom, though small, feels warm and welcoming, with wood and copper accents, a bit of art, and a shower curtain "so soft it feels like a blanket," rather than a uniform expanse of cold marble. The desk faces a large bookshelf crammed with books and a few family photos, as opposed to the handful of books stacked on two tiny shelves above Jones's desk. And the bed, rather than being hidden away in a big dark box, has its head tucked into a little niche in the corner, next to a sunny window from which the cat likes to look out on the street. This does leave it visible from most parts of the room, which might not be to everyone's taste, but the little corner wall creates enough separation to make it feel like a room of its own. And if they ever feel uncomfortable having it visible while people are over, they could always block it off with a translucent screen or curtain.

Since Medoff and Rohan are renters, they didn't do any actual remodeling on this space. However, their "dream landlord" has allowed them to make lots of cosmetic changes—all of which they did themselves on a budget, not with the help of a high-priced design firm. They redesigned their "cookie-cutter" kitchen by painting the cabinets a dark bluish-grey and adding copper handles, and they covered the laminate countertops with butcher-block contact paper (a trick I once used myself in my little apartment in Princeton). The result, to my eye, looks much more elegant than the flat, dark wood and granite kitchen surfaces Jones paid a bundle for. They used the same color scheme in the bathroom, and they picked up on the copper theme throughout the apartment with a shower rod, towel racks, pot racks, and light fixtures made from copper pipe. (All these pieces were DIYed by Rohan. Medoff says her number-one decorating tip is "marrying (or co-habitating, or befriending) someone with secret carpentry skills.")

The only thing I found disappointing about the Apartment Therapy article is that it said nothing about how much this frugal design cost. There isn't a single dollar figure anywhere in the piece, either for the rent or for the renovations, so there's no way to draw a direct comparison between Medoff's and Rohan's total budget and Jones's. However, it's evident that this DIY decor job, using paint and off-the-shelf copper pipe, was much cheaper than the one done by Messana O'Rorke. Since the couple simply changed the appearance of existing elements rather than ripping them out and replacing them with brand-new hardwoods and stone, it was clearly much greener, too. The rent Medoff and Rohan are paying in trendy Williamsburg would no doubt look high to anyone who lives outside the Big Apple, but the total amount they've spent on the place has still got to be a fraction of what Jones paid for his. And their DIYed space is both elegant and cozy, filled with elements that show their personality. 

Of course, I suppose Jones's high-end space is a reflection of his personality too. I mean, it must be, or he wouldn't have paid such a bundle for it. But living in a shoebox-sized showroom wouldn't be to my taste, nor, I suspect, to most people's. If I ever somehow found myself in Jones's apartment, I'd no doubt find it very uncomfortable, but in the Brooklyn apartment, I'd pull up a stool and make myself right at home.

What's the most ecofrugal car?

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that I didn't post anything last weekend. That's because we were away visiting some friends down in the D.C. area. Like us, these folks are eco-conscious, and in two major ways, they're ahead of us on the green scale: their house has solar panels, and they drive a plug-in hybrid car. Brian and I have already determined that solar panels aren't really an option for us, and we've now subscribed to a community solar project instead. But on the way home, we got into a discussion of whether we could be driving something more ecofrugal than our small, fairly fuel-efficient Honda Fit. If we had to replace the Fit this year, we wondered, what would we get instead?

Last time we had to make this decision, back around the beginning of 2011, we decided a hybrid car wasn't worth the added cost. It was much more cost-effective to buy an inexpensive, fuel-efficient gas-powered car and pay a little extra for carbon offsets. But since then, the math has changed. Electric vehicles, both battery-powered and plug-in, have grown steadily cheaper, and experts are predicting that they could reach price parity with gasoline vehicles as early as this year. And electric cars were already cheaper than gas vehicles to fuel and maintain. So, in theory, the most ecofrugal ride would be a small car like our Fit, but one that we can plug in to power it.

But in practice, it's not that simple. Because while electric cars are getting cheaper and more prevalent, most of the choices are battery electric vehicles (BEVs). Buy one of these, and you're limited by its driving range. The EV charging network is much bigger than it used to be, but charging stations—especially the ultrafast kind that can power a car in "as little as 30 minutes"—are still nowhere near as easy to find as gas stations. And even if you can find one of these fast chargers, half an hour to refuel is much slower than filling up the tank with gas.

True, today's BEVs have much longer ranges than before, but it's still not always possible to avoid charging up while on the road. Even the longest-range BEV, the $87,000 Lucid Air, can't go more than 520 miles on a charge—not enough to get us all the way to Indianapolis. More affordable options, like the Chevy Bolt or the Nissan Leaf, can go between 200 and 250 miles, which would require us to recharge at least two or three times en route to Indy at a minimum of half an hour per stop. A shorter trip, like the one we made last weekend, might be possible on a single charge, provided we could plug the car in at our destination. But we probably wouldn't want to count on it.

So, if our Fit were to die tomorrow, there's no BEV that could replace it for all our driving. Our best choice would be a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV), which would allow us to do most of our driving on battery power alone and have the gas tank as a backup for longer trips. What we'd really love is a PHEV version of our current car, the Fit—a hatchback with folding seats that combines fuel efficiency with ample storage space. But unfortunately, no such car exists. (Non-plug-in hybrid versions of the Fit are available in some parts of the world, but not only does Honda not offer them in the US, it no longer offers the gasoline version either.) 

In fact, there's no PHEV on the market that's even remotely similar to the Fit. When you search for "PHEV hatchback," the only model you find is the Hyundai Ioniq, which is no longer available; Hyundai now makes the all-electric version only. Lists of the top PHEVs at sites like Edmunds and US News are dominated by SUVs and luxury cars, with only one non-luxury sedan (the Prius Prime) making the cut. The closest thing to our Fit would be a smallish "crossover" SUV like the Kia Niro, but it's still an SUV, and we hate SUVs. Even an electric SUV that doesn't guzzle gas is still big, heavy, clumsy, hard to park, and dangerous to everyone else on the road. We just aren't SUV people, and we never will be.

After discussing this dilemma a bit, Brian proposed another solution: We could get a BEV as our main car and keep the Fit as a backup. The vast majority of all trips we make are well within the range of the Bolt or the Leaf, so we'd only need the Fit for long drives. But there are obvious downsides to this plan as well. Although our driveway is technically big enough for two cars, it's a tight fit, and keeping two cars parked there all year round would leave us with no place to dump the snow after a big snowfall. (Not that we've had any of those this winter, but we can't assume it's ceased to be a problem.) And even if we weren't driving it often, the Fit would still need insurance and at least some maintenance every year. So owning two cars would definitely be more expensive than owning just one, even a more expensive one.

Perhaps a better option would be to buy a BEV and plan to rent a car for long trips. Renting a car for just a few trips every year would be a bit of a hassle, but almost certainly cheaper than maintaining and insuring a second car year round. And we might not have to keep doing it indefinitely, since the charging network could eventually get good enough to make taking the BEV all the way to Indy a reasonable option. Our biggest concern is that this may not happen by the time gas-powered cars are phased out completely. Then it will be impractical to drive across the country with our BEV and impossible to rent a gas-powered car for the purpose. Under those circumstances, our only choices will be to fly out to Indy for the holidays—which has a much bigger carbon footprint than driving a fuel-efficient car with two people in it—or make the drive significantly longer than it is now, possibly spanning multiple days. Or, I guess, stay home.

Of the electric options available now, this BEV-plus-rental setup is probably the best. But for us, it seems like the best approach of all is to keep our little Fit running as long as possible. Then we can hope that, by the time we're finally ready to replace it, there will be more options that actually work for us: either PHEVs that fit our preferences or EVs and chargers that can reasonably take us 700 miles in one day. Our failure to jump on the EV bandwagon right now may damage our green cred, but it gives us the best chance of making the switch in a way that will work for us long-term. And you can buy an awful lot of carbon offsets for the price of an EV you're not really happy with.

Recipes of the Month: Two low-carb pastas (that we probably won't use in future)

One of the things I've missed most on my new reduced-carb diet is pasta. Even the high-fiber varieties made from whole wheat, chickpeas, or red lentils, which my doctor once recommended as a healthier alternative to plain noodles, have more carbs per serving than I'm allowed to consume at a meal. So, much to my disappointment, this former staple has dropped out of our diet almost completely.

But lately, Brian has been experimenting with ways to bring it back. In the past week, he's tried versions of two of our favorite pasta dishes using alternative, lower-carb noodle alternatives. Both were kind of successful, but one was a lot more complicated than the other.

His first attempt involved making his own low-carb pasta from scratch, using the almond flour pasta recipe from Little Pine Kitchen. The only required ingredients are almond flour, eggs, salt, and a bit of xanthan gum, though the recipe suggests mixing in a bit of melted mozzarella to help hold it together. You mix all this up to form a ball of dough, then roll it out, cut it into pieces, and fry them in olive oil. This recipe, naturally, is very high in fat—18 grams per serving—and has 222 grams of sodium to boot. But, hey, only 3 grams of net carbs, so that's good, I guess?

Little Pine Kitchen provides directions for a variety of different pasta shapes, including cavatelli, farfalle, and orechiette. But Brian decided to try something different: making it into flat sheets and using those in a lasagna. Fried to a crisp, the almond-flour "noodles" certainly didn't look or taste anything like pasta; they were more like slightly crumbly crackers with an agreeably nutty, lightly salty flavor. But layered in a pan with sauce, spinach, and cheese, they did in fact produce something reasonably lasagna-like. The flat sheets didn't have the same texture as real lasagna noodles, but they did do the job of keeping the layers separated. Brian thought that in a way, they were superior to regular noodles, since the layers didn't tend to slide apart on your plate. And they certainly worked better than the previous low-carb substitute we'd tried, Palmini heart-of-palm "pasta," which not only lacked the flavor and texture of pasta but also slid around all over the place.

Nonetheless, I wasn't entirely convinced that this low-carb pasta substitute was really worth the amount of work that went into it. Since all the almond-flour sheets did was keep the layers separated, I suspected we could accomplish the same thing much more easily with a ready-made alternative, such as the Carb Balance tortillas we've been using for Mexican dishes. These would also most likely have a texture and flavor closer to noodles, if still not identical. And since they're much lower in fat and calories and higher in fiber, they'd probably be a healthier alternative too.

The other low-carb pasta substitution was a much simpler one: shirataki noodles. These low-calorie noodles, which you can find in the refrigerator case at many supermarkets, are made from a type of Japanese yam that's naturally low in carbs and high in fiber. The refrigerated packages are more or less ready to eat; all you have to do is rinse them and heat them up. An entire 7-ounce bag of them has just 10 calories and 6 grams of carbs—most of that from fiber. Their taste and texture aren't identical to regular pasta; they have a slightly stiffer chew and no flavor to speak of. But hidden under any kind of sauce, they're virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. 

Brian tried adding a bag of these to our new Brussels sprout pad Thai recipe, and the result was an unqualified success. They weren't quite the same as the rice noodles we used to put in our pad Thai, but their texture and flavor blended right in with the other ingredients and made the dish feel quite a bit more substantial than it had with nothing but veggies. He also tried mixing some of them with an equal volume of real spaghetti in a batch of pasta Romesco to create a carb-light version that I could eat a reasonable quantity of. If you looked carefully, it was possible to tell the individual strands of actual pasta from the shirataki, and if you tasted a bit of each separately, you could discern the difference in texture. But if you just twirled up a forkful of the combination and put it into your mouth, you'd never notice that what you were eating wasn't the genuine article.

So does this mean shirataki noodles are going to become a regular part of our diet moving forward? Well, maybe not. One problem is that they're a lot more expensive than regular pasta: around $3 for a 7-ounce bag, or about a cup of noodles. That's equivalent to about 4 ounces' worth of regular pasta, which even at today's prices costs less than 50 cents. So eating this stuff on a regular basis would definitely add quite a bit to our grocery bill. But if we knew we were going to be sticking with this low-carb regimen for the long term, it would probably be worth the cost to enjoy our favorite pasta dishes again.

But there's another, much bigger problem. After three difficult months on this low-carb diet, I just got my blood sugar retested, and it was actually higher than before. Apparently, I was doing a better job of controlling it on my previous diet, which was substantially higher in high-fiber carbohydrates. Remember all those foods I had to give up even though I'd always thought they were good for me, like fruit, whole-grain bread and pasta, beans, potatoes, popcorn, and winter squash? Well, it's starting to look like maybe they really were good for me—or at least better than the much higher-fat, higher-protein diet with more animal products (especially eggs, cheese, and fish) that I've been eating for the past few months.

I'm scheduled to discuss this with my doctor on Monday, and I'm hoping she'll give me permission to go back to my former mostly whole-food, mostly plant-based diet. If she does, then I can take all these tricks I've been using to keep my carb count down and toss them gleefully out the window. But even if she thinks I still need some kind of special diet to control my blood sugar, I'm going to push for one that's different from what I've been doing so far. Seeing as how it's made my life a lot more difficult and less enjoyable without, apparently, doing me any good, I see no reason to continue with it.

Gardeners' Holidays 2023: Festival of Seeds

Although February 2 is the first Gardeners' Holiday of the year, there's usually not much going on in the actual garden at that time. Last year's crops are long gone by then, and it's far too early to start putting any of this year's into the ground. So this Gardeners' Holiday is usually devoted more to planning ahead for the coming season: laying out the garden plot, pruning the plum trees, and starting our first seeds indoors, which generally means the parsley. 

But this year is a little different. This year, the parsley seeds we bought from Botanical Interests (the new seed supplier we chose to replace Fedco) specifically said on the packet that starting them indoors was not recommended. (The preferred procedure is to direct sow them once soil temperatures are over 50 degrees, soaking them in water for 24 hours first to aid germination.) But we do have one crop that's not only already started, but already starting to come up: our new strawberry plants. 

When I bought these, I assumed that we'd simply be sowing them directly outdoors and hoping they would take root in our rich, dense soil. But the instructions on the packet said it's actually preferable to start them indoors, and to do it really early—14 to 16 weeks before the last expected frost. Around here, that means mid-January, when the ground is generally frozen solid. So our usual procedure of starting the seeds in tubes with a layer of seed-starting mix over a layer of garden soil wasn't going to work. 

Fortunately, we happened to have an alternative seed starting system available. One Christmas, we forget exactly when, someone had given us a "cell greenhouse kit": a tray with 36 individual cups, 36 pellets of coir, and a clear plastic lid. The idea is that you just put the pellets in the cups and add water, and they swell up to fill the entire space. You can then push your seeds straight into this growth medium and cover the whole thing up with the lid. It will keep the seeds warm and moist, and when the seedlings start to come up, it will let in light to nourish them.

In real life, this did not work exactly as described. Perhaps the kit had been left sitting for too long and the pellets had dried out too much, but when watered, they did not expand nearly as much as the directions said they would. They absorbed some water, sure, but they only went from being little dry cylinders to slightly bigger wet cylinders. Brian eventually had to break up the coir with a fork and then add a little seed-starting mix on top to fill the receptacles. Then he sprinkled a couple of the tiny little strawberry seeds into each individual nook, misted them thoroughly with water, covered them up, and put them on top of the fridge. (The instructions for the strawberries said it's best to keep the seeds in a warm spot out of direct sunlight initially and only move them into the sunshine when they start to emerge.)

That was roughly two weeks ago, and here's what we have now: tiny little shoots poking up out of the dirt (or dirt substitute). They're much too small at this point to look anything like actual strawberry plants, but they are real, live, green plants growing in our home in the dead of winter. It may be 24 degrees outside with a brisk wind blowing; the outdoor landscape may be entirely dormant, without a trace of green anywhere. But here, in the sunny window in our guest room (which is also our conservatory, or the closest thing we have to one), the gardening season has already begun.