In Praise of Overhangs

08/29/2006

 I was working today at Granite Lake Pottery, installing some storm windows on the studio. It was raining off and on, more on than off truth to tell. But I managed to stay pretty dry because of the generous overhangs on the building. I am a big fan of overhangs and was extremely happy when "First Day" decided to offer them as an extra. They make sense in so many ways. If nothing else, they give a poor dubber like myself a little shelter from the storm.

The forms went up today—it looks striking, almost alien, or maybe Mad Maxian. What it really serves to do is to give one a sense of how the house will sit on the land. The grade is not as bad as I had once thought. Of course, it is not fully graded yet, we have a ways to go. 

The pour happens tomorrow, weather permitting. In the meantime, if anyone needs a bit of mud, drop us a line.

4/12/2012

Those overhangs have really been a blessing. Besides keeping rain away from the foundation they play a huge role in keeping the house cool in the summer. By blocking the high summer sun our southern wall of windows doesn't fry us in the dog days of August. The overhangs also gave me the chance to design and build some cool brackets to support the wide soffits. Pictures of those come much later so stay tuned.

The House Has to Move HOW Much?

They never let me drive the big yellow machines.

 08/21/2006

This morning, a knock on our door. It is our excavator. He didn't look like he had the best of news. In his classic New Englandesque style of understatement, he informed me that there was some problem with the house site due to tricky elevations. Actually, before he said any of this, he just asked if I could come down to the site. Of course I could, but why? Then he got into elevations, and foundation heights and such.

Needless to say I sped down there, and after a lot of moving of stakes, phone calls to Anne and shooting of lasers (not in a 'Hey look at me I am Han Solo,' type of way but more like a 'Hey, where the hell are we going to put this house' type of way, which is not nearly as exciting),  the house site moved abut twenty-four feet back from where we originally planned to build it. It all happened so fast, but so easily. I always pictured that when one builds a house, the decision as to where the house is actually going to sit would be a major one, accompanied by a fanfare of trumpets and a silver shovel. Instead, it was just me, still rubbing the sleep from my eyes, and two guys with big yellow machines, and my wife on the phone trying to accept my poor explanations of what was going on.That is how it really is, I guess.

I returned home, blew a lusty fanfare on my Honer kazoo, and had a cup of tea.

3/14/2012

Yeah, it was a weird way to start things off. But sort of typical for how the whole build went. There were a lot of small things that seemed huge at the time but in the end, didn't matter much at all. Moving our house further north actually worked very much in our favor, allowing us much more solar gain than we would have had in the original position.

A Musical Prelude

08/20/2006

Here is a bit of back-story. Actually, it’s more than a bit. It’s a bunch, stretching back to March 2005. And I have told it to so many people in so many ways, that I have decided to set it to music, to make it more interesting. So call to mind the tune of  “The Star Spangled Banner,” and apply the following words:

In March of last year

We heard of some land

Nice acreage on a hill

With southern exposure

It was right in our town

But we did have to fight

Oh the battles we lost

As we struggled for closure

The sale was so hard

Our psyches were scarred

Bluffed and bamboozled

But we pressed on for-ward

Delays and disasters, but our hearts stayed strong

After all we have been through---

What else--could go—wrong.

(note: As I was writing this, the excavator called to inform us that we will have to blast away some ledge to pour our foundation. So the moral of the story is, don’t write smart-alecky songs that tempt fate because fate generally isn’t known for having a healthy sense of humor).

2/26/12
This was a celebratory time after a summer of pure frustration. We expected to start building in April or May, but due to a difficult landowner and her weasel of a real estate agent, the build didn't begin until the end of August. Thus I was roofing in January as opposed to October. At any rate, we spent the summer hitting every salvage yard, antique shop and tag sale we could find and collected a bunch of stuff for the house in the process, so it wasn't a complete waste of time. But man I was fit to be tied all summer long. However, we finally did get started, and the day after the above was posted, the excavator started digging, and the ball finally got rolling.