April 2016 Newsletter

Company News: The Festive Month of April

April is one of the most beautiful months, with flowers everywhere and mild temperatures. From April Fool’s Day to Earth Day, it’s a month of low-key celebrations. We hope you are enjoying this sweet time of year.

As always, we depend on our customers to help inspire each other. Are you doing something fabulous to your home in the way of a new mantel or range hood? Please send us photos and details of how you went from before to after. Nothing inspires others like success. This year we want to feature many real-life projects from customers’ homes.

Make Every Day Earth Day

Earth Day was April 22, so now it’s over. Or is it? With 7.4 billion people in the world, we all need to do our part to conserve precious resources. So at Old World Stoneworks, we encourage you to remember the ideals of Earth Day every day.

This American-grown holiday started in Wisconsin. Senator Gaylord Nelson founded the environmental holiday in 1970, after a tragic blowout on a Union Oil Company platform stationed off the California coast dumped hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil into the sea. Images of tar-covered seabirds and dolphins with clogged blowholes horrified the nation.

Nowadays, nearly 200 countries around the world celebrate Earth Day on April 22 – and hopefully other days as well.

Here are a few ways you can bring the Earth Day spirit into your everyday life, be it April, November, or anywhere in between.

• Leave your car parked for an entire day. Walk. Ride your bike. If you need to go farther, take public transportation or carpool with a friend.

• Be mindful of the thermostat. Try setting it at 75 on summer days instead of 65. Smart thermostats can help you cut energy usage.

• Grow your own food – at least a little bit. You don’t have to be a farmer to grow a small herb garden or plant a few tomato bushes.

• Practice light awareness. Turn off lights when you leave a room. Replace your five most-used lights with energy-efficient compact fluorescents.

• Wash your laundry in cold water, and line dry outside when possible.

• Fireplaces usually get a break in the spring and summer. So take this time to make yours as efficient as possible. Make sure the seal on your flue damper fits snugly to keep that valuable a/c cooled air inside your home where it belongs. Since this is off-season, you might even get a good deal on your annual visit from the chimney sweep.

Have you been thinking about installing a new fireplace? Consider a gas fireplace box, which is up to 70% more efficient than wood-burning fireplaces and still looks gorgeous surrounded by a cast stone mantel from Old World Stoneworks.

We’d love to give you more energy-saving tips, or talk about that new mantel project. Give us a call today!