Since 2010 I have been working toward one idea: that a healthier home and a lighter footprint are the same job.

I had spent ten years at Paychex, helping small companies with payroll and benefits. Then I bought a house in Nutley that was built in 1892, balloon frame, with no insulation at all in the main part of it. I talked with contractor after contractor in those first years. Every one of them wanted to sell me a different mechanical system, and not one of them mentioned insulation. Steve Austin had just bought an older house in Glen Rock and was living through the same thing. So in 2010 we started Ciel Power, to do the work the way we had wanted it done in our own houses.

We were winning awards for saving energy, and I thought that was the whole job. Then we started measuring the air inside the houses we had just tightened up. Some of those results were not what I wanted to see. A house you seal without thinking about ventilation is a more efficient house and a worse place to breathe. That changed how we scope work, and it is why wellness sits next to efficiency in everything we do now.

Carissa and I are raising a family in New Jersey, and most of what I believe about houses I learned in ours. The journal is where I write about the parts that are not insulation: what we buy, what we eat, how a family actually spends a Saturday. I served as board president of CivicStory because local reporting is infrastructure the same way a well-built wall is. Thank you for reading this far.