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I'm gonna take a big step over this threshold to avoid any evil spirits getting in the house.
I'll tell you all about it. They say an eco-friendly house can't be built in 150 days for $150,000,
and I say it can. I'm Allen Smith. Join me as I push the limits with time, budget and
creativity with the Garden Home Challenge, exclusively on eHow Home. What I'm doing here
is I'm just messing around, actually, with this threshold of the door. You know, the
threshold of a door has a lot of significance. In fact, it goes all the back to ancient times.
You know the custom of the groom carrying the bride over the threshold–well, it's
rooted in the lore that it was the last chance for evil spirits to take the opportunity to
enter into the feet of the new occupants, particularly the woman. So if the man carried
her over, there was no chance of them entering her or entering into the house. So that's
where all that came from. What we're doing here is we're being very practical about making
sure this house is energy efficient. What I'm placing here is a piece of oak threshold,
and the one below is just a piece of fir. And we've just mocked this up, so you can
see it. But what Tony would like to do is place a piece of oak this wide here, and then
we'll attach this piece of oak that fits beautifully from here to here, which is the exact dimension
of this interior door inside–the inside, which is 3 feet. Now, if you look just under
here, you can see that this idea of weather stripping–we had the weather stripping up
here. He took it off, because we're still we're still messing around with the door.
But this is a form of weather stripping here underneath. So it just attaches to the bottom
of the door. So let me close this, and you can see how airtight it makes it–this is
so important for our Energy Star rating. What do you think of that–sounds pretty solid
doesn't it? So, we're gonna have that blower door test here at some point, and we're gonna
have Andrea back–our Energy Star rating official coming around, and I wanna make sure
that this house is as tight as it can possibly be. And it looks like we're off to a good
start with that. Hey, the doors looking pretty good, isn't it? If you're enjoying following
these updates, check in with us regularly. And make sure you subscribe to eHow Home.