Winter homecoming

    Mid- January, Mike and I packed up our old conestoga wagon and made the long trek back to Missouri, arriving in the midst of our first Missouri winter! It has been so amazing to be here in this beautiful spare landscape at this time of year, especially because we can enjoy the beauty of it from inside our own home. I know how basic that sounds, but I have been reveling in the fact of it: the snow is falling outside, the wind is howling, rain is pounding, and the elements are performing their messy winter alchemy while we are dry, warm and protected inside this space. Okay, okay, you get my excitement about our home-dwelling reality... So what about the details? Is the stove working out? The cistern?

    Let me say that things did not start out well. When we first drove up to our house, we had no idea what to expect. Our neighbor Brian had kindly offered to light a fire in our stove earlier on our arrival day, and so despite the frigid temperature outside, we had hopes of entering a toasty house. Wrong. It was just above freezing inside, only slightly warmer. Still, bundled under every blanket we had, we slept warmly that first night with high hopes for our stove’s performance the next day. But the next few days of feeding the stove all day didn’t bring up the temperature inside beyond 50F.  I think we both began to despair that we had failed. Maybe we hadn’t insulated well enough, we overestimated our stove’s heating capacity, we designed for passive solar heating all wrong. Mike pointed out one night that he could see his breath. We were sitting mere feet away from our stove. Something was definitely wrong.

      So what is a frustrated, shivering person supposed to do but problem solve the situation? We couldn’t produce more heat, so how could we lose less heat? I thought about the concepts in "Passive House" design: create a super-tightly insulated envelope so that not much heat or cold needs to be generated to condition it with. To determine the weak, leaky points in the structure, a series of blower tests are used, along with thermal scanners to see where air infiltration is happening. Although we didn’t have access to such equipment, we felt through the house for drafts and such. Perhaps not surprisingly, around several hastily installed windows and doors there were some noticeable streams of cooler air coming in. The glass on our double-pane windows was also frigid, and then there was the most glaring opening we hadn’t bothered to close in our haste to leave: the hole for the stovepipe going through our roof. Goodbye heat, hello cold drafts! There was very likely a thermosyphoning effect going on between the two. The last point we considered was that our thick clay-plastered walls were acting as a thermal mass, retaining the cold as we tried to introduce heat. That effect would reverse with time, but it took a good week or two.

      So after some work installing weatherstripping, spraying several cans of “Great Stuff” insulation, making thermal shades we can lower at night, and sealing up the hole around the stove pipe, I am very very relieved to report that we are warm! Which presents its own problem... how to regulate our stove to yield temperatures above 55F (which seems to be the temperature average when not running the stove for a day) but below 85F (a miserable temperature to try to sleep in), all while also meeting our cooking needs for the stove? A programmable thermostat really has its charms, which are hard to replicate the old fashioned way!

      We have had a learning curve cooking on the stove as well. Our stove gets very very hot, which has yielded some burned dishes and skin (yikes!) as we have gotten used to its subtleties. There is a perpetually shifting range of temperatures on the cast iron cook top, depending on where you place a pot or pan, closer or farther from the firebox. The stove box is also somewhat fickle, ranging from 200 to 700 F (!), but we have found most temperatures cook most baked items decently if left in the right amount of time. Finally we have been able to cook pies, roasts, pizza and other baked dishes that we hadn’t been able to cook decently in our outdoor kitchen. Also, thanks to the cold temperatures outside, we have had “refrigeration” via our cooler. For the most part though, food-wise we have been eating lots of our stored root crops from last year’s garden—sweet potatoes, potatoes, squash, pumpkins, apples—as well as canned tomatoes, pickles, beets, etc. And let me not forget pork! We aren’t sick of it yet but I can see the potential… 

     And though winter, of any season, is the obvious candidate for taking some down time away from work—cooking, visiting friends and neighbors, reading by the stove and making things—our main goal the past month has been to get further along on the house before the baby is due to arrive and our time, energy, and focus shift in a new direction. Currently as I write, Mike is pounding away on floor installation (using a loud, hammer-drive floor nailer… this baby has a promising career as a drummer I think!) I have been tackling work on the bathroom, and am determined to see it functional by March. (Let me just say, an outhouse in January does not have the same allure as an outhouse in May…) To start with, I have plastered the sheetrock walls with a finish lime plaster which I then lime-washed with some blue iron-oxide pigment mixed in for color. Lime is a great natural finish for areas where certain hygienic qualities are desired, as well as breathability, as it won’t trap moisture. My friend Sarah pointed out to me that the cheese-aging cellars in France where she lived and worked were lime plastered for that reason—no strange mold strains growing there! So, perfect for a humid area like a bathroom. Next to come are wainscoting and a tile floor and then our tub can finally get installed. Let me just say that bathing in a galvanized wash tub is also losing its farmhousy novelty!

      As the baby grows larger and larger, my range of motion and energy are shrinking, but I am still awkwardly and slowly able to work. I guess this is around the time in their pregnancies that many women go into a frenzy nesting and cleaning their homes. While I might like to be at that point with our home, our reality is much clutter, work mess, and assorted piles/boxes/furniture endlessly being shuffled around. Still, I can’t complain, especially when compared to the birth stories of many of our neighbors and friends in nearby communities who welcomed babies home to tents or walls of unplastered strawbales and the like. The babies don’t seem to notice, go figure. And to see their beautiful children and homes now, I know we will be there too someday soon… all will be well!

     At any rate, we are still making time to relax and have fun in our last child-free months. Our community gets creative in winter. For example, with ice skating tag in a giant snow maze at our neighbor’s pond.  (I cautiously pushed a chair around like a walker so I wouldn’t topple over, which was pretty soon seated by a small girl too young to skate!) Yes, it is hard to imagine what our lives here will soon look like with a little one in tow. But we give thanks for all the community support around us, near and far, helping us figure out the way into parenthood!