PreservationNation

Decked for the Holidays: The National Trust for Historic Preservation Headquarters Building in Washington, D.C.

This is not your normal Window Wednesday.

While weatherizing the right way is no less important (check out our must-read winter tips), today is all about you – our faithful blog readers, Facebook fans, YouTube watchers, Flickr addicts, and Twitter followers. The National Trust for Historic Preservation would like to wish you all – regardless of where and how you’re seeing us – a very happy holiday season.

To all of our members in the blogosphere and beyond, thank you for making this a year full of thoughtful comments, engaging wall posts, plentiful re-tweets, great photos, and lots of “likes” here and there.

And to all of you non-members out there, please consider taking your relationship with us to the next level. By spending 2010 with us as members, you’ll get a front row seat for all the exciting preservation victories and challenges that the coming year will bring to our growing movement.

You can be signed up and ready to go almost as fast as you can update your Facebook status. For real.

Happy holidays!

Photo by Ledges

Original windows matter. From dramatic Gothic masterpieces to the colorful details of stained glass, these gems are instrumental in telling the special stories of our older and historic homes and buildings. For this reason (and so many more), we’ve launched a Weatherization Guide to show homeowners how they can hang on to their unique windows and still meet their goals for going green and achieving greater energy efficiency. Each Wednesday, we’ll take that a step further and inject a little TLC into the blogosphere by spotlighting a user-submitted photo of an older or historic window for the world to see.

Bookmark our Weatherization Guide as a resource for making your older or historic home more eco-friendly without compromising its character. Want to give your favorite window a moment in the limelight? Grab your digital camera and join our Love Your Historic Windows photo group on Flickr for a chance to be next week’s spotlight.

It’s official – weatherization is sexy. 

In a press event held yesterday, President Barack Obama again promoted energy efficiency retrofits as a way to stimulate job growth. Appearing at a suburban Virginia Home Depot before a backdrop of insulation packages emblazoned with phrases like “Save Energy” and “Cut Costs,” Obama stated that weatherizing homes is “one of the fastest, easiest, and cheapest things we can do to put Americans back to work while saving families money and reducing harmful emissions.” In fact, he even dubbed insulation “sexy.”

Read it for yourself:

I know the idea may not be very glamorous – although I get really excited about it. We were at the roundtable and somebody said insulation is not sexy. I disagree. Frank, don’t you think insulation is sexy stuff? Here’s what’s sexy about it – saving money.  Think about it this way:  If you haven’t upgraded your home yet, it’s not just heat or cool air that’s escaping; it’s energy and money that you are wasting.  If you saw $20 bills just sort of floating through the window up into the atmosphere, you’d try to figure out how you were going to keep that. But that’s exactly what’s happening because of the lack of efficiency in our buildings.

While we agree that having more cash in our wallets is “sexy,” we think there are other ways to sell the American people – and Congress – on the sex appeal of energy retrofits.

What about job training for workers who can then practice valuable skills in their local communities? What about promoting a “whole-house” approach to energy efficiency through audits and performance-based incentives? What about promoting local businesses and building suppliers? What about repairing rather than replacing windows and doors? What about education for homeowners so they can make informed choices when it comes to weatherization?

President Obama’s Home Depot junket is another event in a string of recent appearances aimed at making the connection between jobs and weatherization — a fascinating conversation that the National Trust for Historic Preservation is at the table for. In addition to growing our weatherization guide (did you see our special tips for winter yet?), we released this week our own recommendations for a energy efficiency retrofit program.

Give them a read and let us know what you think – hot, or not?