Serving Our Seniors Magazine

Twenty years later, people still ask Mark and me about our house. So, I decided to write about it. In 2003, I was 42 years old and Mark was 52. Mark said, “Yeah, but I felt like I was 42.” Natural gas prices had risen to $1.00 per ccf. I recall some people paying heating bills of $1,000 for a single month. Serving Our Seniors was holding public forums to draw attention to the issue and explore solutions. Mark had a lifetime of construction experience. By happenstance, he met and was befriended by Bob Martin, an authority on sustainable building. Bob gave Mark the confidence to design and build a sustainable house for us—one we could afford to live in, heat, cool, and maintain on a retirement income. Mark completed our home in the spring of 2005. The exterior walls were built with styrofoam blocks called ICFs—Insulated Concrete Forms. The blocks were stacked, and their cores were filled with concrete, which gave the walls exceptional strength. These walls are 10” thick. The House on Third Street: An Experiment That Worked By Sue Daugherty 14