Knocker

Our friend (and frequent blog commenter) Wendy sent us this great door knocker a few months ago. It took us a while to get the time to install it, but here it is. As beekeepers it's perfect. We are also seeing the bees out with the recent spring days, so the timing seems right. It's also just kinda fun and not too serious. Thanks Wendy!

I've been at work tidying up lingering items such as the rest of the track lighting in the kitchen, repairing a leaky water line to the garden stand pipe, building an integrated shelf and grow-light unit for a spring seedlings in the big living room window.

Behind the scenes

So, we recently had a comment from our friend Wendy who wondered just what Nancy is up to while Joe and I are getting all the attention while building this house. Excellent question, and I'm glad Wendy asked. Its easy to focus on the visible aspects of the project, but there are many important elements that have had to be lined up in order to make this all happen and Nancy is responsible for much of that work.

This project has been a collaboration from day one when we decided that we were going to build a house. We met with others who had built houses, talked about what we wanted together in a house and debated and reviewed the plans as I worked on them. The planning and design process was a team effort with me doing the day-to-day footwork.

Nancy engineered the whole loan process from start to finish. This included visiting various banks and narrowing down the field and finally deciding on which bank to work with. That of course led to the massive amount of financial information that needs to be organized and submitted. She's good with that kind of stuff and if it'd been left to me there'd still be some nice looking grass where the house is now standing. The loan process was quite stressful and required some extended effort to move the pieces along to get to closing.

While I'm responsible for the the execution of the project, Nancy is sort of the organizer overseer, checking in, making lists, asking "Have you thought about what's coming next once the walls are up?" or "Do you have everything you need for tomorrow when Joe gets here?" We check in frequently, both formally and informally about how things are going and what needs to be done.

Lastly, she's paying the bills and keeping track of our budget and expenditures. We make a great team.

In 2003, we built the yurt together and had a great time. It was a small project compared to the house, but it was a harbinger of things to come. Our realities are a little different now; we've structured things so that the house is essentially my "job" while she's out there earning the bucks to keep the engine running.

Last but not least, she is the best come-home-and-check-out-the-day's-progress cheerleader!