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.

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.

Our Final House Design

Yeah, this makes sense to someone out there. To me, it looks like a dragon trapped in a box.

After many months of looking at plans, shuffling room sizes, and grappling with square feet, we finally settled on a simple cape-style house, 33 feet long by 24 feet wide. Even better, it is a do-it-yourself house kit. This design is the brainchild of David Howard, founder of First Day Cottage. I won’t go into many details right now about First Day—you can click on their link to find out about how their ideas can revolutionize your homebuilding experience. Don’t worry, plenty more will be said about them as the building actually gets underway. But I will say we are grateful that our paths have crossed with theirs, for without First Day Cottage, this process would have been improbable, if not impossible.

Why Build a House?

Sunday, January 22, 2006

On days like this I definitely was asking myself  'Why am I doing this again?'

This is sure to be a question that we ask ourselves from time to time as this process unfolds. I guess there are some tangible reasons to consider, the main one being cost. Houses in our price range (well under $200,000) fall into either two categories: glorified trailers or complete wrecks. As we saw more and more listings for existing houses, we slowly came to realize that we were not going to find what we were looking for in the current house market. Heck, we couldn't even find anything to settle for. Glorified seasonal cabins, crooked old buildings with ancient wiring, decrepit windows and insufficient framing, and 700 square foot cubicles were becoming all too common.

Begin at the beginning

Saturday, January 21, 2006

A few things became clear to me as we began this process. One was that it was going to be long. Very long. Excruciatingly long. Mind-numbingly, soul-crushingly long. And we haven't even started building yet.
Another thing was that we needed to record all of the events that are going to make up this grand adventure, for there already have been many happenings worth preserving for the history books (even though, may I remind you, we have yet to lift a hammer).
Thus, this blog. In these early stages, posts may be short and infrequent, once we get you up to speed. As time rolls onward, however, look for stories and photos from the hillside. Thanks for visiting.

And this was how the house building blog started. Three entries later it appeared to take a six-month hiatus, but that may have had a lot to do with the fact that we were dealing with a flaky landowner and a slimy real estate agent and as a result, that summer was the summer of our discontent. We had hoped to start building in April, but didn't start until September if that gives you any idea of the frustration that awaited us.