Living Large In Our Little House

I'm really excited today to present a guest post by one of our loyal read­ers, Alexandra Grabbe, an innkeeper of Chez Sven, a green B&B on Cape Cod. If you have ever had the desire to visit the Cape and can do so in April, Alexandra is offer­ing 10% off the room rate for Living Large read­ers. Just men­tion us when you make your reservations!

Chez Sven B&B

I’m thrilled to address the read­ers of Living Large in Our Little House, one of my favorite blogs.  My house is not as small as Dale and Kerri’s, but it isn’t big either, and I’m proud of that fact.

My hus­band Sven and I live in a tra­di­tional three-quarters Cape, in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, an old house that once belonged to my par­ents. We actu­ally have too much space for my taste.   I wanted to keep this mar­velous house in the fam­ily, so five years ago I started a green bed & break­fast called Chez Sven.

Alexandra uses her Sanyo recharge­able bat­ter­ies for her camera

Around 1750, the build­ing was moved to its present loca­tion on Old King’s Highway, a scenic dirt road used by George III’s tax col­lec­tors.  I like to imag­ine what the area looked like before the American Revolution.  The house dates to a sim­i­lar period as the Atwood-Higgins house, a top attrac­tion in the Cape Cod National Seashore nearby. Our house was moved here on rollers.  Sven found a 1798 Liberty Coin under the floor.

In ren­o­vat­ing the north­ern wing we paid par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to detail, mak­ing the new space as authen­tic as pos­si­ble, and as green as pos­si­ble.  Old 12-inch wide yel­low pine boards were recy­cled in the “keep­ing room,” as were most of the doors and hard­ware.  One excep­tion is the lovely pri­vate bath, hard to imag­ine back in the 1700s when the own­ers used a two-seater out­house!  I was delighted to find some sal­vaged tile for free on Craigslist, enough for the whole bath­room.  And, it’s GREEN, too!

Guests at Chez Sven can count on eco-friendly tow­els and 100% organic cot­ton sheets, washed in a low-energy front-loader and air-dried in spring, sum­mer and fall.  We offer nat­ural ameni­ties and use only non-toxic clean­ing prod­ucts.  We serve as much organic food as pos­si­ble, includ­ing home­made gra­nola and yogurt, and pro­vide water that has passed through 3-stage PUR fil­ters.  No plas­tic bot­tles here, although we recy­cle any that turn up in the trash.

We have a won­der­ful swap shop at the local trans­fer sta­tion.  One fel­low in town claims he fur­nished his whole house with objects dis­carded from other people’s lives.  With that state­ment, he earned my total admiration.

I used to worry about tak­ing used bat­ter­ies to the dump.  Were they being recy­cled the way they should?  No longer, now that I have my own recharge­able Eneloop bat­ter­ies and charger, thanks to the draw­ing spon­sored by Sanyo on Living Large a month or so ago.

I use the bat­ter­ies for my Canon Powershot cam­era, with which I pho­to­graph the local scenery for my blog, Wellfleet Today.  My read­ers, who live all over the world, share both my love for Cape Cod and for an eco-friendly lifestyle. The Eneloop ready-to-use recharge­able bat­ter­ies and com­pact bat­tery charger fit in per­fectly at Chez Sven.  I like the way I can sim­ply plug the charger into the wall and get on with my B&B chores.