Lovely Nelson, NH

8/23/06

Here is the town we are building in, Nelson, NH. This is a composite picture of the town center, featuring the church, library and town hall.

3/31/12

I still love this view, it never gets old. The little structure on the left at the end of the green is a bunch of mailboxes, including ours, a definite landmark that people use when giving directions.

Things have been spruced up a bit since this pic was taken.

I feel pretty lucky that this spot is just a 5 minute walk (albeit a steep one) from my house, and I walk here often with my daughter, either in a pack or a jogging stroller that can handle the dirt roads. From here it is either a nice stroll to Center Pond and the horses and sheep at the French's farm, or I get ambitious and make it all the way down to Child's Bog, which has an incredible view of Mt. Monadnock. Or sometimes I walk to the town cemetery, and look at the old graves of civil war soldiers, 19th century homesteaders, and poets.

May Sarton's grave. (photo: hoarded ordinaries)

Who Turned Up the Heat

8/23/06

Controls for a submarine or modern heating system? You decide.

When I came home from doing some work and getting another quote for our countertops yesterday, on the porch were about nine or ten cardboard boxes, which is the entirety of our radiant floor heating system from Radiant Floor Company. It seemed so small. Having grown up in an old three-story Victorian, a heating system was always a massive and mysterious bunch of copper tubing, temperamental pilot-lights, huge water heaters and even huger oil tanks and furnaces. To see it all so simply laid out on our porch, as something I can pack in its entirety into my Subaru with room to spare, was an odd feeling. But I am cool with it. It is quiet, extremely energy efficient, and relatively inexpensive. Time to dig into those cartons.

 3/31/12 

I read that and see my naivete in thinking I would not have much copper involved in my plumbing system. I also believed I was going to plumb the whole house myself, or at least the heating and hot water system. Wrong on both accounts. Thousands of dollars, hundreds of feet of copper and one professional plumber later my heating system was installed, and I am glad I did not go through with my stupid plan of doing it myself. I never would have gotten the house finished. As far as how well the whole thing is working, an on-demand water heater and radiant floor heating are things you have to sort of get used to, and I think the addition of a solar hot water heater with a small super-insulated storage tank will make the whole thing work even better, but as of right now I use around 300 gallons of propane a year for my radiant heat, hot water needs, gas dryer and range. Not bad. The aforementioned large 3-story victorian uses that much oil over 2 weeks in January. So I feel pretty good about it.

 

Solar Noon

08/22/2006

A busy day with the first order being to give the excavator a check for $10,000. I had never written a check that large and it felt good. Of course, that good feeling was followed by me wondering why I felt good giving away a large sum of money which was followed by me analyzing why I wondered and couldn’t just be in the moment which was followed by me trying to quiet my mind which never really works and which only resulted in a muted buzzing in my head accompanied by a vague feeling of guilty achievement.

In preparing for a delivery of concrete, it occurred to me that not many things are concluded concretely. The vagueness was starting to wear on me, until I had a chance to experience the most true and positive event since this whole building process began: solar noon.

Solar noon is the exact midpoint between sunrise and sunset. An object on the ground which runs straight up and down will cast a shadow which will run exactly north-south. Pretty cool, eh?

It is one of very few sure-fired ways to make sure your house is aligned the direction you wish, in our case the long axis facing due south. With a plumb-bob, a level, some string and a few stakes, at 12:51 this afternoon I created a true north-south line, off of which we aligned the foundation, thus getting our house site perfectly situated to take advantage of the warming sun. Not bad for an English major.

3/19/12

This still amazes me to this day that it worked as easily as it did. I should have taken pictures of my scientific prowess because that was as good as it ever will get.

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.