The Quince Bush

Some of the first flowers on the quince in its new and final home

We are seeing the first flowers on our durable and patient quince bush outside the house. Those flowers are a promising indicator that despite some rough conditions and two relocations, the bush is still alive and healthy. I am very glad because this bush forms an important link to the longer history of the property, and it feels important to have some elements of where we now live that have carried through all the changes we've made.

When Nancy and I first started living in the yurt on the land where the house now sits there was the old garage and breezeway still standing from the original property that burned in the mid-nineteen-nineties. Along with those structures, there was this great old quince bush that had been planted and cared for by the original owners, and over the years it had continued to flourish. The quince has been a steady presence on this property for years and we've enjoyed it since we first moved here.

The yurt, the quince and the corner of the garage from the old days

When the foundation was dug for the house we asked the excavators to relocate the bush outside of the work zone, which they did. It was sort of plopped down out of the way and given a modicum of fill around it to keep the roots covered -which seemed adequate- and it managed to flower of the summer of 2010. The plan was to have it sit there until such time that we could place it back in the landscape around the completed house. Last fall Mac, our excavating contractor, moved the quince from its temporary location back into the center of things outside the south-facing kitchen window. It has since served as a nice screen between the house and the driveway and gives us a head start on our eventual landscaping.

Lights and a Cape Cod Sink

New-old sink in the first floor bath

Another view

Building a lamp fixture

A light hanging over the dining room table from track. We have a vision of a series of small lights hanging here at different heights

Disassembled exterior fixture about to be painted black. This was mounted on the the old garage and will now serve as the fixture that lights the walk route into the house

I've been working on installing track where we'll have track lighting in the kitchen and dining area. This required a little sheetrock work again; cutting strategic points to wire or re-wire to make what we need to have happen. In the case of the kitchen track lighting we decided to make the track tw0-circuit so that we could have some or all of the lights on depending on which circuit they are fixed in. This allows, say, the light over the sink to be on it's own circuit and switch from the rest of the lights that light the counters. I'm always a little hesitant to cut into the sheetrock, but usually it goes pretty smoothly and I'm mudding it back up in short order.

I've built up a couple of lamps and they look just fine. One is hanging over the kitchen table, the other is over the kitchen sink. More to come.

Remember that big old sink we had in the downstairs bathroom? Well, it has moved down closer to it's final home in the basement. In it's place we've finally installed the sink that Nancy's parents Lee and Lou brought to us last fall. It's a great old marble sink that used to be in the bathroom at their house on the Cape. Its kinda battered and stained, but it's got a good measure of beausage (pronounced like "sausage", as in beauty-through-useage) and looks quite handsome in out bathroom. We're planning on replacing the faucet controls because they are kinda beat up and sorta unattractive. Eventually we'll build a cabinet that the will replace the brackets that the marble sits on right now.

One more piece of the puzzle in place.

Drawing brought to life

I've been waiting for this for a long time. You spend a long time working on plans and coming up with something you think is good, but your plans are only an abstraction of a complex reality. Even so, its cool to have the opportunity to "see" the view you've drawn and referred to many many times. Making this pairing is encouraging and sparks my desire to now get on to doing the trim and siding!

Mac was here again today and finished up with the grading. Things are looking very nice around here in a landscape-y way after months of rough shapelessness. We'll be taking a little break for a week and when we get back I'll pick up where I left off with the plumbing and Mac will be back to do some final touches on the grading and landscape work.

Its been an intense couple of weeks leading up to taking down the garage, so much so that I wasn't able to keep up with the blog quite as much as I like to. Here's a calendar I drew up that, despite many adjustments, proved to be a pretty close map of what happened. Task for tomorrow: fly to Florida.


It might be worth noting that as of today this blog is coming to you via a phone line that runs down the pole, through it's new conduit leading to the basement and into the house. Bit by bit the house is starting to wake from its incubative state.

The House: Unwrapped

Today we finally we got to experience the land and the house without the garage. Its amazing. The house now has space to breath and stand alone without the uncomfortable contrast offered by the garage. It allows the house to stand as a whole where you get to see the various elements as a unit, rather hints of the whole from constrained vantage point.

There is also a sense of space and view and distance around the house that I love. Things feel simpler and more elemental now. Notwithstanding that there is still the yurt, the large dumpster and the excavator, there is a sense of breathing room around the house. You can see the whole and you can see around and beyond it.

Its a bit of a surprise to look out from the inside. I'd gotten used to the visual shelter provided by the garage/breezeway building. Our challenge now is to start thinking about coming up with a landscape plan that provides a sense of privacy while still having a sense of openness on the south side of the house facing our neighbor and the road.

This was one of the most dramatic days of this whole house building process and one that we've been anticipating for a long time. It feels great to have reached it.

Going, going, gone halfway

Going

going

gone

Today Mac showed up and went to work with his excavator. He dug a trench to run the power and phone to the house and then set to work taking down the breezeway section of the garage. As someone once said about woodworking "Its the set-up that takes time, not the cut" seems to apply to this project. We've been working steadily for the last couple of weeks to be ready to bring the building down and then today it happened and took all of about half an hour to bring the structure down.

Tomorrow Mac comes back to complete the building demolition.

1969-2010

Sunset for the garage, now with windows, doors, power supply and stuff all removed

A photo from the days when we were living in the garage. Dana and Nancy we're making dinner

The same space today. Astute observers will notice the larger window at the end of the building which I switched out for the smaller one seen in the photo above

Another shot from today

After 41 years of service, the stalwart garage right next to the house is due to come down tomorrow or the next day.

This building has served many purposes over the years. When we moved onto the property in 2003 my brother-in-law Randy was storing his Volvo 122 sedan in the garage, and the breezeway space was filled with lots of relics and junk. At first we were living in a tent outside the building, and then after a short while we moved into the garage. For a while we had a refrigerator, stove, two computers, a futon and a dinning table all happening in the midst of the space. We moved on to live in the yurt shortly afterwords but have remained grateful to for the shelter.

Later I used it as a workshop and we used the breezeway as a general purpose storage unit, housing extra clothes, books, garden stuff, art supplies etc...

As the house has taken form most "shop" type work seems to just happen in the house so in the last few months the building has been useful primarily as building-related storage. In emptying out the space we've had to move large amounts of stuff to the basement of the house and are already feeling the need to have some sort of utility space besides the garage that would serve to house bikes, garden tools, bee equipment, woodworking projects and the like. We'll see what shape this takes over time.

A couple of friends have written asking why we are not taking the time to take the building down and salvage the materials. The answer in short is that this project was not something we even anticipated doing until August, but in order to meet the certain permit requirements in a timely manner we've had to move this project to the fast track. We leave for vacation this Friday, so we needed to have the project complete before we left. If time were not pressing, I think we'd be fairly inclined to take the building apart.

Although I am glad that the building is coming down, I feel slightly wistful about the passing of this building. Its not pretty or heroic, but it is a tie to the property from before we were here and when the building is gone there will be very little evidence of that past. Sort of feels like passing the last island out as you set sail for the wide ocean.

Switched out windows

Joe looking out the original window opening

The new window in place

A sense of the view

The stair window being re-framed to lower it

The stair window in its new home, about a foot lower

Today Joe and I switched out the small triple-set second floor window for the larger pair. It went smoothly and we are quite happy with the result. Joe commented that if ever we want to sell the house, bring the potential buyer up to look out the window at the view and it'll seal the deal. I think he's right.

The new window not only opens up the upstairs room to the light and the view, it also helps to balance the exterior shapes a little. The window feels in proportion to the first floor windows.

We also pulled out, reframed and lowered the window you look out at the landing on the stairs. Now its about right for gazing out of as you pass by. It was about a foot too high.

Meanwhile, work on the garage is keeping us very busy. We continue to line up the pieces in order to bring the building down next week. This includes relocation of the power supply to the buildings, moving all our stuff out of the garage, moving the firewood stack next to the building, etc... there's a lot too it.

Hi Mary...

Garage in the foreground, with numbered days

Our to-do plan and schedule for the next 2 1/2 weeks

Among the many items we need to move on, a Easy Spindryer vintage washing machine. I had fantasies of running of powering this by bicycle. Never happened, but we did actually do a couple of loads of laundry in it

I re-framed the opening for the window coming up the stairs, and soon we'll relocate the window to match the new height. The original location was a bit high.

Recent events have prompted us to refocus our energy on taking down the garage sooner then we had originally planned. It means some scurrying now, but we're both excited at the prospect that the house will be able to stand on its own without the dubious presence of the garage right in front of it.

Given this new challenge, Nance and I have been working through the logistics of everything that needs to happen to actually have this thing torn down. Currently (no pun intended) the electric line from the pole goes to the meter and panel housed in the garage, as does the phone line. Relocating these requires timing, coordination, digging, and materials all be lined up and carefully ordered so that we are able to maintain service and make the switch safely, allowing for a large excavator to come in, knock down the building and then load it into dumpsters. Never mind that we have tons of stuff in there we need to sort through and then relocate to the basement. Its a big project, and it will delay focused progress on the house a bit, but it is ultimately part of getting the whole project done, so it really is just a reordering towards that end.

Orientation

Our Aunt Mary wanted to get a little more clarity about where the house sits on the property. I did up a Sketch-Up drawing that hopefully will clarify things a bit more; the relationship of the buildings can be a bit hard to discern from photos since everything is so close together.

The garage/breezeway will be coming down as soon as is feasible, so when looking at this site sketch, imagine the long blue structure in front of the house gone. Also picture the circles (current and former locations of the yurt) gone and things start to look a little calmer and less crowded.

The challenge we haven't really solved is what to do with the driveway. We don't really want to look at our car(s) right out in our front yard, so we'll need to play with our options once the space is opened up.

(For a large scale version of the drawing, click on the image and you'll get the big view.)

Views

North
South
East
West
After we finished up on Friday, I hauled an Adirondack chair, a beer, and a pair of binoculars up to the second floor to enjoy the view and watch the sun set. We've been a bit surprised and pleased at the view's we'll have from up there. We knew it'd be good, but seeing it is really satisfying.

The roof you see at the bottom of the south view is the existing garage and breezeway, which we will be taking down as soon as makes sense, maybe late winter. We'll then have to re-grade and work out the landscaping on this side of the house.

(Remember you can click on the photos for a larger view!)