Eco-Home, Indie Budget

The sun makes its way through the open slats of their back porch as Julie Grant and her fiancé, Mike Daugherty, lean against their all-purpose chop saw. When these urban homesteaders bought their 1904 one-story, 900-square-foot, wood-frame house a few months ago, they realized it needed a lot of work. But then, says Julie, with a wry smile, "All the houses we looked at that we could afford needed a lot of work."

Being a graphic artist and a jazz drummer by trade didn't stop them from plunging into a full-scale renovation of their late-Victorian bungalow in Seattle's Rainier Valley, a former lumber-mill town. And instead of a conventional Great American dream house in a new suburb, their more modest choice bought them $40,000 to invest in a remodel. The house was solid for its age, and its worst problems were add-ons, like the 1970s vintage electric baseboard heat, which, says Julie, was "hideously ugly and notoriously inefficient." After ripping out the baseboard, they corrected other funky features too—doorways that were never plumbed and partitions that broke up already smallish rooms. "The hallway into the kitchen was so wavy it looked like a funhouse," she says, laughing.

As if the task wasn't daunting enough, they wanted to make the house eco-friendly too. Unfortunately, Julie's copious research yielded little good advice from shelter magazines and home-supply stores. "All the stuff we found was so laughably out of our price range—and not by, like, a little stretch," says Julie. "I mean, they were all beautiful, but the gorgeous recycled glass cost $6 per four-inch tile!" Julie mentions one article in which a couple spent $30,000 on tile just to surface their bathroom. Such a move would have wiped out most of their budget. For their bathroom they plan to use a small amount of slate tile at $5 per square foot.