It dawns on me that if this project is truly one of very few hundred-year-old houses renovated to net zero, we ought to be aiming for LEED as well as Green Star certification. Marc tells me that LEED require that the rehab be total, as in “total gut rehab”, rather than partial. We are a partial, because Marc is hoping that we might save some plaster, and in any case, we are not taking the house down to the studs. Still, he’s going to see if we might qualify as an exception.
In the spirit of reusing what we have, I suggest that we take the 100+ quartzite blocks from the crumbling retaining wall, saw them in half, and ‘pave’ a path from garage to house with the smooth cuts facing upward.

And that we take the foot-square pavers in front and along the other side of the house and reallocate them to the patio Marc is proposing for the backyard. In short order it becomes clear that the quartzite is much too tough to cut, while Sean points out that the (cheap) pavers have reached the end of their useful lives. So we lose another few Green Star points, alas.