Joe's Step

The step with hinges in place. They hold the step and keep it from slamming down unexpectedly

The hinges and directions

Before the hinges went in

Joe's step

When we were building the step down from the main bedroom on the second floor to the guest room, Joe came up with the idea of making the step an openable storage space and it seemed like a great idea.

Ever since it was built I've cringed when kids are playing around up there because the step is a very long and heavy piece of wood and I've been worried that fingers could easily be hurt if the step were flipped down while a hand was underneath.

I recently solved this issue by installing a couple of resistive hinges that keep the step from swinging freely. You need to actively swing the step down to close it and it cannot close unexpectedly.

Meanwhile I'm in the midst of building the desk project I wrote about recently. Hopefully I'll have phase one (the desk cabinets) done soon and can start to put it all together.

Office Desk

Nancy at work. I was concerned the L would impede the passageway to the basement stairs, but its fine

The view outside is important and this arrangement works really well. Our bird feeder is outside the window on the right allowing for an easy glance over the computer

Sketches of the desk. We'll store the printer under the desk in a faux cabinet

We've been working on making the office space functional. For many months the computer has been set up on a little 3' x 3' table and we decided we needed to design a desk that would work well in the room.

This is Nancy's primary work space and she has a few priorities that we've been considering for a long time but never really figured out satisfactorily. Going way back to our original house plans we knew we didn't really know how we were going to make the space work, but we just figured we'd figure it out.

Nancy's priorities:

-View: In the yurt, she could glance just to her right and see the birds on the quince bush.

-Not having the desk run in front of the window(s)

-Proper storage and being able to spread out her work as needed

Beyond these requirements we want the room to still be useable as a secondary guest room when needed.

I spent some time playing with different arrangements and didn't really come up with anything satisfactory. As we looked at my sketches, Nancy suggested having the desk extend in an L out into the middle of the room. For me this seemed like putting a big hook in the way of the flow walking from the upstairs to the basement (something I do multiple times a day), but we decided to mock it up and to our satisfaction found that it met all our requirements. Nancy's been working on the mock-up since. Meanwhile I've been planing out the real thing and am just starting on building the desk now.

Our plan is for the wing of the desk that extends out into the room to be easily removeable. This will open up the floor space for a futon should we need to set up the room for sleeping.

Wood Use

Later on January 14, 2012...our second 1/4 cord stacked

January 14, 2012...the last of our first 1/4 cord

January 1, 2011...roughly an 1/8 cord

September 24, 2011...our first 1/4 cord

Its been fascinating to monitor our wood consumption this fall and winter.

By New Years Day we'd used just over an 1/8th of a cord which you can see in the middle photo above. Now, two weeks later we've used most of what was left. This means it's taken about three and half month's to go through a 1/4 of a cord to heat a 17oo sq. ft house.

Of course it has been a mild fall, so this may not be indicative of future use, but it starts to lay out a pattern for us to plan around. January and February are the coldest months of the year and it will be interesting to see how much wood these months require. It seems like a reasonable guess that we won't go through more than a cord total for the year, but we'll see when all's said and done.

(I've spent some time trying to figure out a way to present energy use in comparable terms and I'm not there yet, but I want to work it out so it can be presented in a way that would allow comparisons with other forms of fuel, house size, and energy efficiency.)

In dollar terms we paid $200/cord in July for the wood we have on hand now. Roughly this translates to about $50 to heat our home so far this heating season.

The quarter cord we are just finishing burning is a couple years old, so its delivering more btus/kwhs then the woodstack we are about to start using which has not had time to fully season. The new wood was (presumably) cut and split in the middle of the summer since we had it delivered at the end of July. After this season it will be easy for us to maintain a seasoned wood supply by having one dry cord to burn and stocking up a green cord each summer.

Second Coat

Before...

... and after

Over the last couple of months I've been slowly working away at giving the house a second and final coat of paint (technically stain, but seems like paint in practical terms) and I'm rounding the corner literally and figuratively on the project.

In September I decided to start at the porch and then work around the back of the house, figuring that I'd cover the cooler parts of the house while it was still warm and then be painting the sunnier sides as the fall progresses. This has turned out to be a wise tactic as we are now in late November and all that's left is part of the south-facing wall.

Progress has been in fits and starts. Hurricane Irene was the first unexpected event that redirected much of our time and attention to helping others over the course of a couple of weeks. Then came teaching an intense two-week course at Yestermorrow, followed last but not least, by a brief stay in the hospital resulting from a cat bite.

Nonetheless, I've been making progress as time and weather have allowed and in this respect, I think we've been quite lucky. The stain requires 40 degrees or above for application, so I've been able to work with very few exceptions right up through the fall.

Our original plan --which we are working to complete-- was to have all the clapboard primed by the factory, then apply a first coat of primer before the clapboard was installed, and then finishing up with a final coat when the siding was in place. Although the house has generally looked finished for a good while now, much of the rafter tails hadn't even been primed, much less painted, and all the nail holes and clapboard butt-joints were rough.

It feels good to know that we're seeing this part of the project through to insure the quality and durability of the siding.

House Number

The house numbers are something I made years ago to go on the old garage that we've managed to hang onto through all the transitions of building the house and taking down the old structure. For a while I thought it'd be fun to have one of those blue enameled french street numbers, but I think I like our home made edition.

You can see the numbers on the gable of garage from four or five years ago. We were extracting honey.

Fuel

A quarter cord of wood stacked on the porch

Our 2-cord supply near the driveway

All our wood is cut to 12" to fit our wood stove

We've been readying our wood supply the last few weeks in anticipation of heating for the winter.

Amongst the issues we've weighed is where to store the wood. The seemingly easiest solution would be out the garden-end of the house since it's close to the door thats close to the stove, but the issue there is that this part of the house perimeter is heavily impacted by roof snow build-up. In the end we decided to store our wood out near the driveway and plan to load up portions of wood on the porch a few times over the winter.

We had some firewood leftover from the yurt wood supply and last week I cut all these formerly 16" pieces down to 12" so they'll fit into the wood stove with some ease. Since this is also the driest wood we have we stored it for first use on the porch. As it happens, it is almost exactly 1/4 of a cord. We've been joking between us that maybe this is all we'll need for the winter. Its going to be fascinating to see what we actually do use. Our take away from last winter was something like 2-3 pieces of cordwood per day when it was pretty cold in February.

Since we are unsure of how much wood we will actually need, we purchased two cords with the expectation that we'll get through with one cord and have a second cord dried and ready for next year.

Although the cold has yet to really start there was a few days a week or so ago and we noticed lots of chimneys with smoke coming out. With good management of the windows, we've been completely comfortable.

Cookin' in the Kitchen

Canning on the kitchen stove

Our scale

The end product

"Now I'll get to see if the kitchen works for canning."

So said Nancy as she began a long day of canning sour cherries and pickled zucchini. With our garden starting to produce, the annual canning and preserving ritual begins. This work is highly reliant on the stove and the kitchen work space. We managed in the yurt for years with a tiny little gas stove and a 3 1/2' wide counter, so clearly our new kitchen would be adequate, but would it all feel like it works well?

I'm glad to say after a few hours of sterilizing, boiling, warming and more boiling the verdict was yes, it works well. Our stove is obviously a good bit larger then our old one and the front-right burner is specifically a large-ring high-BTU unit intended for powerful output. When we are canning we are continually replenishing and reheating the large canning pot with water and it takes a lot of umph from the stove to keep it at a boil. Often in the past we'd be waiting some portion of the time just for the canning pot to get up to a boil again.