House Warming

Look closely at Teri's card...

Yesterday a pile of folks showed up to visit, have a little food and look around. It was a great afternoon and the weather cleared up with a little time to do some mowing and arranging outside. It was a wonderful celebration.

Many friends and family were here. In particular it was great to have Joe and Adam back to celebrate what we all helped create. I wish we could finish building our house more often so we could have an excuse to gather together our friends and neighbors like this more frequently.

Our friends Jeanne and Craig thoughtfully offered a blessing of salt, wine, and bread inspired from a scene in "Its a Wonderful Life":

Bread- that this house may never know hunger

Salt - that life may always have flavor

Wine - that joy and prosperity may reign forever

Among the treats and great food, Nancy tried out a recent discovery called switchel, which used to be served a refreshing drink on farms in the days before gatorade-type drinks. Its super yummy and I'm hooked...

Photo Shoot

above photos: Teri Maher

Today was our big publicity day, such as it is. Our friend Teri came over to take some pictures of the house with the paint colors in place that she consulted with us about way back last fall. When she first came over there wasn't much for her to work with: unpainted sheetrock and only the vaguest of ideas of what we wanted on our part.

With the house fully painted and mostly complete, visitors often remark on the great colors and we have Teri to thank for this. We knew we wanted to be adventurous, but it was her that got us there.

Teri spent the afternoon here today taking pictures for her website and other publicity as she establishes her interior design company. I helped her by supplying furniture and various objet d'art that I thought might be useful. She has a great sense for this kind of thing and Nancy and I kept going "cool" at the various set ups she created.

Teri has a website which is just getting off the ground and can be found here.

Onwards...

Painting the bathroom floor

The boiler at work heating up the house via the radiant system for the first time

Today Joe continued work on the window returns, which is coming along, while I was busy painting in advance of his work. Meanwhile Felton was back to do some finish electrical work. This is very exciting for us as it means we'll have working outlets around the house and a few lights here and there to turn on. Of course this also means we have to make decisions about light fixtures and all that, but its great to see all this stuff coming together.

We also fired up the radiant heat for the first time today. Stuff like that sort of seems like a bit of a miracle; you put all this pipe in, you have a boiler installed and then you do nothing for a couple of months when it starts to get a little chilly in the house and you hook up a thermostat and signal the boiler to start doing its thing. On the one hand its what's supposed to happen and all, but on the other hand it is like "Wow, you just push a button and like that the house starts to heat up. Cool!"

For extracurricular fun I continued painting this evening and gave the second floor bathroom its first coat of blue floor paint. Both Nance and I dig it and are feeling ongoing happiness at having Teri's help working out all the color choices. The house is anything but boring when it comes to color, and that's what we were shooting for.

Tomorrow I go back over the mountain for another load of lumber for window trim and the bead board that will go around the bottom of the bathroom walls. I'll also be looking for a large stone hearth to put the woodstove on.

Color

Teri and Nance working through ideas

Detail of the intersection of the second floor bath and the ceiling

The trim work complete

Designing and building a house may seem like an endless array of complex challenges to figure out, but today our friend Teri came over to help us work out some of the truly hard problems: colors and tile choices. Yes, we can layout a stair case, figure out intersecting roofs, install siding at 28 feet off the ground, but for the really hard stuff you gotta choose what color you are going to paint the place.

Both Nance and I have had this general sense that we're interested in playing it up a bit inside, but neither of us has had a clear vision when it comes to picking paint. Enter Teri. She's been really helpful in making suggestions and sort of conceptualizing the whole thing. There is no one answer but its great to have someone coming up with possibilities and then building on choices as things move along.

We find ourselves continually drawn to green in one shade or another, so at times we've tried to consciously veer away, but sometimes you just have to give in to what draws you, so most of our second floor will be done around a green theme, while the second floor bathroom will be a blue zone with an orange bathtub. I'm psyched about that.

We came up with a plan for the various spaces downstairs centered around more earthy browns, yellows and deep maroon-red. I think it'll all be really cool. We also (finally) nailed down a decision about the mudroom/kitchen floor: purple Vermont slate in a cool varied pattern.

The one area we talked a bunch about but need to do some more work on is the first floor bathroom. There will be tile, but what tile and how much needs to be worked out.

Speaking of color, I finished the second floor bathroom window casing and Nance has given it it's second coat of paint, so next up is the floor. That'll be really exciting.

Joe is working on some last exterior projects, namely stairs and steps to the porch and coming out of the west end doorway. They look really good.