Faith can move mountains. But passion can move houses, dammit.
Passion is what drove members of the University of Kansas Student Housing Associations (UKSHA) to pluck a house from its foundation and relocate it more than a half-mile away.
In 2003 KU Endowment began demolishing houses on the south side of the 1300 block of Ohio St. The organization chose to clear the area to make room for the soon-to-be Dennis E. Rieger Scholarship Hall. Those planning this new haven for bright young minds saw these buildings as a burden. The UKSHA saw a free house.
The UKSHA bought the house for $1 and moved it to its current location, 1033 Kentucky St. Thus began one of the greatest green-remodels that this town has ever seen.
Five years later, the Ad Astra co-operative is a fine example of sustainable living. And if you ask nicely, one of the tenants might just give you a tour.
The tour
Gretchen Auten greets me at the door. She leans over a banister made out of salvaged machine parts and yells downstairs,“Studie.”
Studie Red Corn emerges from the basement, and the tour, and my lesson in eco-lifestyle, begins.
Red Corn points out that all the main floor walls are painted with milk paint — an environmentally friendly, VOC (volatile organic compound) -free alternative to chemical-based paints. Each room is painted a different color.
My guide leads me into the kitchen. Here, the walls are painted in an orangish-pinkish-salmonish color. “Some people say it makes the kitchen look like a uterus,” Red Corn says.
I am both disgusted and intrigued. My interest is peaked not by the thought of standing in a giant womb, but because I see many great examples of recycled materials. The pot rack is made of a wagon wheel. Plants dangle from hanging, salvaged stair steps. Red Corn points out that the counter tops came from the recently demolished Yellow Sub sandwich shop.
The kitchen floor is covered in marmoleum, a type of linoleum that is made with natural ingredients. A shelf holds three recycle bins and a hazardous waste bin containing a broken CFL light. Free State half-gallon glass jugs rest on top of a refrigerator. The tenants often take these jugs to the brewery where they can fill them with beer for $7.29 (jugs cost $3.00 initially).
Red Corn also shows me large bags of bulk food, saying that buying in bulk is multi-sustainable: Less energy is wasted packaging and distributing the food, and tenants don’t have to drive to grocery stores as often. Group cooking also lessens the Ad Astra environmental impact. Fewer pots are used, less energy is wasted and less food goes to waste.
Grow with the flow
I am ushered out the back door and shown the garden. The tiny plot only has a few spouts, but soon the area will be filled with spinach, lettuce and strawberries. Next to the garden rest two large compost piles. Organic scraps are discarded into these heaps, creating a cheap, eco-friendly mulch. On the other side of the porch, a rain gutter flows into a gray barrel. The collected rainwater is used to water the plants. “You don’t need to water plants with drinking-quality water. Rain water is actually better for them,” Red Corn says.
Red Corn steps back from the garden and looks up at the house. He talks about a recent paint job that took the house from white to an appropriate bright green. The process made him realize how sustainable the house actually is. “The house is over a 100 years old, and we only had to replace one board,” he says. He credits this to the durability of the red cedar wood that was used to build the house more than a century ago.
Now is the day of salvation
From the back yard, Red Corn takes me down to the basement, where he lives. The glass on his door came from a shower. The floor is covered in salvaged square carpet tiles. If one of them is stained, it can easily be replaced.
The rest of the basement floor is covered in tiles that were discarded during other projects. The random assortment of tiles actually creates a nice mix-match effect. Many of the materials that went into remodeling the house came from other buildings. For example, the floor upstairs came from Naismith Hall, a KU private dorm. The tenants buy their materials from the Lawrence Habitat for Humanity ReStore, located at 800 Comet Lane. The ReStore receives and sells used and new materials.
Red Corn leads me upstairs and to the front porch where a porch swing hangs above boards made out of recycled plastic. The swinging chair was once Red Corn’s futon. We have reached the conclusion of the Ad Astra crib tour.
I wonder if my landlord would let me take a saw to our rain gutter, or replace the pipes behind my washer and dryer. Who am I kidding? He won’t let me have a cat.
Maybe I can’t use everything I learned at the Ad Astra House, but I leave with some damn good ideas that will help me knock my carbon footprint down a few sizes.
-Travis Brown
