Pigs, solar panels, vegetables and a ceiling

The pigs arriving by trailer with Teri and Everett waiting in excitement

    As some of you readers may have figured out already (from some photos leaked to facebook… those paparazzi!), everything that I said in my last post about “the pigs not working out” has turned out to be false. The pigs actually “worked out” the day after I wrote my last post. Our not-so-excited-about-more-responsibilities neighbor Brian and I were just breathing a sigh of relief that we had one less thing to worry about this year, just as our pig-enthusiast partners, Mike and Teri, were doubling down on their plot to bring pigs into our homesteading lives. A little ad buried in our local buy/sell newspaper “The Nemo Trader” announced piglets for sale for a buck a pound of body weight and before you know it, they were backing down our driveway: one pig for their family and one for us, as well as one for Mike’s father. For years I have been putting off Mike’s fantasy of raising pigs, telling him, “next year, next year…” so I didn’t feel I could fairly put up a fight against them. But sigh, gone are the pig-free days when I could walk through the meadow without wafts of pig aroma hitting my nose or I could hear birdsong without squeals and grunts in the background. 

The pigs have been working on this synchronized rooting routine...

     Now we are beholden to the pigs, or I should say Mike is since this is his dream. We have opted to let them root freely, which they love and is usually kept in check by ringing their noses. That means however that we have to move their pen and hutch around every few days as they transform their turf into mud in no time (which they also love, but best to have some of both). Mike dutifully feeds them our table scraps and overgrown cucumbers twice a day as well as some grain mixed sometimes with weigh left over from cheese/butter making if we can get it. Pigs are pretty ideal in that their will eat almost anything and require very little in terms of fencing/housing requirements. Brian and Teri and the kids come down to feed them too, and we have pen-moving sessions as well. It all seems quite manageable, but slaughter-day is still looming, which I have my doubts about. If all goes according to plan we will be “harvesting” these pigs around Thanksgiving, once they are very large, and Mike and Brian hope to do some much of the butchering themselves. If we were sensible, we could opt to pay a professional to come and do it, but once again we are testing the limits of DIY culture and planning on the extra mile. Updates to come on how all that goes down, but for now I am determinedly not getting attached… no cute names like “Wilber” or anything.

The demolition post-pig, hopefully a future garden site!

    What else have we been working on? Well, progress has been chugging along on the house. We buckled down to business, making a list of all that needs to be done with highest priority going to those must-haves to get through winter, like “install stove” and “plaster behind the stove so house doesn’t catch on fire”.  The fuzzy area seems to be our water system. We have agreed we need to at least have a functioning drain pipes attached to sinks and tub, but we aren’t sure that we can feasibly get a functioning cistern ready by winter. It keeps raining, our giant hole keeps filling up, we keep draining it, but at no point has it seemed like, “ah, this is good weather to cure concrete!” For two winters now Brian and Teri have figured out a system of hauling buckets of water from the pond and then warming it on their stove for bathing and dish washing or filtering it for drinking and cooking. This is not their ideal, but they have managed it for now, until they too construct a cistern.  We figure if it has worked for them, it should be able to work for us too if need be. Still, water on demand would be nice.

     Some big steps have been crossed off of our house list this past month, and it feels good to have made some progress. Since our insulation was all blown in, we were able to put up boards and a bit of sheetrock on our ceiling, which is now all covered. We procured the tongue and groove pine boards last year (another Nemo Trader score) from someone’s tear-out job. We simply flipped them over to the unfinished plain pine side and we hope to eventually give them a lime wash to lighten up the space. Other parts of the ceiling got sheetrock, where we framed in an attic storage area. After all that, we were done teetering around on ladders and so we started in on our first floor framing and finishing notching in joists to finish the second floor framing. All of this has probably taken as much time scratching our heads as it has swinging hammers, trying to figure out the subtleties of space allocation in a small house: an inch in one direction or another could make all the difference. The big question mark to come this week will be the stairs, a tricky bit of carpentry in ordinary circumstances for sure, but combined with round logs soaring through the house and a rotation mid-stair…. Well, let’s just say this may take awhile. After the stairs however, and our second floor’s sub-flooring, we should be clear into plastering work for another month or more. It is slowly coming together and I think by the time the weather gets nippy again, we should be comfortable and snug inside a relatively finished space.

The second floor joists all finished and awaiting flooring

Recognize a bathroom? Well, maybe not yet...

     The last thing I wanted to mention in this post is how truly wonderful it has been to have a garden this year! I am only frustrated we didn’t take the time to create one sooner! The majority of the work of a garden is on the front-end, prepping and planting beds, and then in the fall, doing a second planting, and cleaning out beds and adding in compost. The summer is mostly a time of harvest and no maintenance as long as you don’t mind a few weeds here and there. The rain has been doing water duty for us, leaving harvesting and keeping up with eating the produce as our only chores. July seems to be the month when everything is ripe and ready. We have virtually stopped shopping, designing meals around what is pouring forth. Last night it was a delicious eggplant parmesan with fresh tomato sauce with a kale-cucumber salad. The night before I was dreaming of a Japanese-style beef stew. When I realized we were out of carrots and potatoes, Mike pointed out that we might have some ready in the garden and sure enough, he brought back fistfuls of rainbow colored carrots and some muddy but huge purple potatoes and some Thai yard-long beans, asking, “can you work these in?” Maybe it is because I have never grown such a range of things before, but I am just amazed by how easy it is to provide for almost all of our food needs with a relatively small space. We end up purchasing meat once or twice a week, eggs from our neighbors, dairy products that keep well (cheese and yogurt), and chips (because, um, fresh salsa? Need I say more?) I can just imagine the grocery bills if we were still buying all of this organic produce from our fancy Philadelphia food co-operative… So all of this is to say that I am feeling ambitiously up for trying to plant a fall-winter garden so that we might continue the harvest into the colder months. It will involve some row covers to keep things warm and a different set of veggies, things like cabbage, parsnips and broccoli that love cooler weather. But the fall/winter garden experiment is underway already as seedlings get started in little cups. It is hard, even with one garden already full planted, not to dream of the next garden to come.

     Last but not least, we have an exciting new addition.... more exciting than pigs you may be asking? Why yes, in my opinion at least. We have a solar panel! This was a gift from some wonderful family members of mine who were possibly concerned for our off-the-grid sanity. And I can truly say that now that we have electricity enough to recharge batteries of all kinds and power a radio, I don't know how we were doing it without one before. It has definitely made life easier. In fact, I am writing this in my house instead of at the library thanks to our solar panel! The hook-up for one panel was very simple and took us only a half hour. It consists of a battery to store power, a charge controller and an inverter. They all hook up in a line and then you can plug in anything that can run on a certain amount of voltage (for example, to run a fridge we would need more panels, more batteries and a larger size inverter). The great thing is we can add more panels/batteries into our system as we feel the need in the future. So we are still off the grid, but with a little more power now. Three cheers for the sun!

Insulation... check!

    

     Finally, the first progress report on the house… drumroll please… our house is fully insulated! Yay! Getting insulation in the roof and the floors was a huge step for us, and we could not have done it this quickly without an infusion of help from friends and family. That seems to be our constant refrain in this process! 

 

     First Mike’s uncle and cousin came for a day on their cross-country trip, a very hot day I might add. They assisted us in our first step—stapling “Insulweb,” on our rafters which is very much like it sounds, a sort of webbing material for the cellulose fiber to get blown in behind. Once we had all the necessary insulweb stapled up on the underside of the cathedral ceiling, we framed out the gable end walls to make an adequate depth of insulation, and then stapled up insulweb there too. 

     A word about cellulose—as far as insulation goes, it is the most green material (being recycled newspaper bits mixed with relatively nontoxic borax) for the most affordable price, perhaps with the exception of straw, but we had used straw as far up the walls as we could go and we now needed something that could easily fit in between rafters, etc. Hence, cellulose. However, the downside to cellulose is that it is extremely messy, dusty, and an all around pain-in-the-butt compared to batting-type insulation. I vaguely remembered thinking this when we helped our neighbors with their cellulose years ago, but memory tends to soften the edges of such experiences, so I went into our cellulose job with great optimism that it would be painless and quick....

     

        Not so. Thanks be to Susan (Mike’s mom), Chris (a good family friend), and Taylor (Mike’s brother) for helping us for 3 grueling days of stapling webbing, feeding the ever-malfunctioning hopper (sort of a reverse vacuum blower for cellulose) and hand stuffing and packing floor and ceiling cavities. Every day they left our house semi-coated in grey fiber dust (and a few hitch-hiking pests) to retreat back to their hotel in town. Their help was a huge push to me and Mike, and we were feeling confident when they left that 90% of the work was done! Haha. Well the days dragged on as we further packed down the bays of fluffy cellulose and refilled with the long-hosed hopper… compressed and filled, compressed and filled, each time convinced it was the last time. The true last time involved hand-filling plastic shopping bags and prying them into the last little open space at the top of the roof. As you can imagine, our house was a mess with stray cellulose and it took a whole day just to thoroughly sweep it all up. Whew! Glad we only have to do that once!

Before...

and after!

     Perhaps sensing we were now ready for a heat source, our cook stove magically appeared the next day after finishing the insulation. “How?” You might be wondering, “would such a random thing suddenly appear?” Such is the way of all things in Missouri. Well, actually it was at our Amish neighbor Jake’s retirement auction that we met our lil’ Ashland cookstove. We offered to help the very stressed Jake in his days, really, weeks, of preparation for the big event (half the Amish men in east La Plata were swarming around his place, setting up things) and sure enough, Jake had a task with us in mind: ice cream. He asked Mike to drive him into town to buy 20 gallons of ice cream and dry ice. It is auction tradition round these parts to have “food prepared by Amish ladies” including 7 kinds of pie and ice cream. (In case you were wondering, the other choices are almost invariably—fish sandwich, cheese sandwich, coffee, fresh made donuts or popcorn.) Ice cream is our kind of helping out! On the way, Jake mentioned to Mike that another feller was selling a cookstove and we should have a look. We did and rapidly researched everything we could about Ashland stoves in need of firebox repair. We gave it a careful once-twice-three times over at Jake’s and wracked our brains for what a fair price might be. $200 was one friend’s suggestion. $1,200 was Jake’s guess. Ack! The stress and exhileration of an auction! You never know what is going to to go hot and high or what the auctioneer will be begging folks to take for $1. Finally it was time for the stove—we decided I would bid since sometimes the competition will drop out in a gentlemanly way, deferring to a lady (little do they know!) But since almost no one was bidding against me, it was easy. We got it for $500 even. The cherry on top of the stove was that we also won the bid on Jake’s old slate chalkboard collection, so for $50 more we have enough slate to tile a stove threshold, back heat shield, and some other areas of the house too!  Funny how exactly what you need falls into your lap when you need it.

Stove and bathtub in waiting

Tomato ally

      In other news, here is the brief garden update: everything save the melons is growing quite nicely! Our first peppers and potatoes are ready for eating (radishes already came and went!) There are green tomatoes hanging on the vines and cucumber and bean vines going nuts climbing. Maybe we lucked out with our soil, or perhaps it is beginners luck, but things are doing way better than I thought they might! Still, things have a mind of their own… our largest happiest squash plants are growing out of the compost pile. We’ll still count it as a success. (Photos to come very soon.)

Sweet potatoes, asparagus, and sunflowers

Kale, peppers, and climbing beans

Potatoes and cucumbers growing up a trellis

    So what about that pig I mentioned in the last blog post? I guess some things aren't meant to be this year and our pig is one of them. The day we were expecting a pig delivery (and we were fully prepped with pen and hutch ready), we got a call that our "weaner" (yes, that is what a piglet is called in farm-speak) and its brethern weren't doing so well, perhaps having a hard time separating from their sow mama. Anyhow, we still haven't found a good alternative source and perhaps it is for the best that we take on one less thing this year. In fact, there are quite a few things on our to-do list that probably won't happen this year, but I won't totally give up until the snow flakes fly, signalling end of season surrender. And this year, it will be a sweet retreat to our warm house to sit by our stove!

By the shovelful

    This past month we have done a lot of digging and planting. This seems to be a theme of spring for us as every other year here we have planted a lot of trees and this year is no different! Well, I suppose the difference is that this year we also planted our first garden here, thus making this our most digging-est year yet. Yes, our backs are sore but with all of our earth moving behind us, I have to say I am glad that we did it. Our home is feeling more home-like surrounded by cultivated green spaces and not just overgrown fields. And this year will hopefully be the first of many logging hours puttering in the soil around the house.

     First things first, we borrowed a friend's rototiller to loosen up the soil in our plowed garden area, and Mike spent one hot and frustrating day pushing it around the garden patch. Once that was done, we set the posts for our perimeter fence (thanks to a work party of folks who helped us dig holes for it!) and stapled up wire fencing, leaving a few openings for gates to go in. Then came the work of actually shaping beds, which we had determined should be "raised" because we are working with such a wet, water-logged site. The advantage to putting in a garden lower down in our creek valley is that the soil in our garden seems really decent: it tends toward clay consistency, but a very dark brown-almost black color and full of earthworms (and now a few half earthworms... sorry guys).

     Anyhow, that "raising" of beds took some muscle, for sure, and I especially got rather absorbed in the process of prepping beds and starting seeds in them. Gardening is a whole new frontier for me, despite almost a decade of fumbling attempts at trying to coax life out of containers and occasional small plots. There is such a lot to learn about soil fertility, plant timing, spacing, companion planting, diseases and pests and so on. I have spent much of my spare time in the past month with my nose to my large stack of library gardening books and I can tell this is going to take some time to get the hang of. What is most exciting is knowing that finally we are at a place where we can really invest time in improving our soil and that each year it will get better. That being said--low expectations for this year since this is the no-amendments-made starting point and what we have mostly planted this year are hand-me-down seedlings and starts from our neighbors (on the runty side, the seedlings not the neighbors). On the bright side, we have plenty of mulch material thanks to last year's extra straw, so hopefully that will give us a leg up on the weeds!

 

      I spent probably too much time building our garden gates and learned one valuable lesson in the process-- it helps to have square straight fence posts where your gate is going to go. For some reason we put our most curvy posts there, making for one tricky carpentry project. Hopefully the rabbits won't notice the gaps around the sides and stay politely outside. Also, we are finally appreciating the virtues of having unlimited gravity-fed water from our pond! It is nice to be able to easily water in small plants and seeds. Okay, more garden reports to come, for sure!

     Vegetables are not the only thing we have been planting... As per our usual, we ambitiously ordered quite a few trees this year. I don't think we quite realized how many until boxes started showing up in the post and we were pressed with getting everything in the ground. Mike headed up this endeavor for the most part, and all in all we planted something like 75 trees and shrubs. You might be thinking if you regularly follow this blog, "didn't you already plant everything you possibly could plant last year and the year before that?" But that is the rabbithole of horticulture for you-- the more you get into it, the more excited you are to expand into the new things you are learning about! There are so many interesting fruit varieties out there, such as honeyberry (the first blueberry-like fruit to bear in spring), quince (a lemon-tasting apple? Yum!), high-bush cranberry, sea buckthorn, asian pears and plums, currants and gooseberries, oh, and chestnuts! We organized a community chestnut tree order and planted 20 ourselves.

     Many of these tree additions were made to our hugel-swales (scroll back to a year one post for more on building these). Now that we are in year four of our swales, our "food forest" concept is much further along! We have been mixing plantings of upper-story things like edible trees with shrub layer and herbaceous understory layers. Each swale has an edible perenial groundcover developing and several special plants called "dynamic accumulators" (in the permaculture world) as they bring up extra nutrients and make it available in the soil once they are trimmed back. In the photo to the left you can see bushy comfrey plants thriving in the foreground. This is another project we are glad we started year one, because now we can just keep popping in more plants as we get the whim, knowing their root systems will be well nourished by the mycelium-rich logs underneath.

    Okay, take a breath, because we are not done planting yet! The last frontier here has been the pond. We finally got around to ordering some aquatic plants for the edges of our pond, which will be critical to establishing a pond ecosystem. Our pond is full of water and has been for about a year, so we felt comfortable plugging in things like "sago pond weed" and "sweet flag" around the perimeter, to their preferred depths. They will be able to adjust up or down in the pond as they need with the slowly rising and lowering water level. In another year, once the plants are further established, we can add in small fish that will thrive in the reedy shallows and build up the food chain from there to the fish that hopefully one day we can catch and eat, like large-mouth bass! Until then, the frogs have the reign of the pond, and they are singing its praises every night.

     Last but not least, our latest endeavor involved renting a mini-excavator for the day to dig a large pit for our house's water cistern. Mike did an amazing job maneuvering the awkward beast around to dig a cubic hole roughly 15 ft. long, 7 ft. deep and 10 ft. wide (maybe "cubic" is a bit generous for the final shape, but with a little honing, it will get there!) He then used the excavator to spread out and compact the soil to the east of the house, where we have always had a sloped hillside. Now we have something more like a level patio next to the house. He was also able to level out an access route to the house on the hillside behind it, effectively terracing it. With a little filling in of low spots by hand, it should all be ready to get wood chips and a small retaining wall built. Yes, it probably sounds like a lot of work that we are taking on, but with the help of the right machine for the day and a few gallons of gas investment, most of the work is done in short order. Building a cistern out of cinderblocks and concrete is going to be its own project for another day, but a very necessary one for us to have year-round water in our house.

 

      In case you have gotten this far in the post and are wondering what is going on with the actual construction end of things, fear not, we are transitioning to that end of things as I write. I have our orders in for a front door, porch decking wood, and oh, about a thousand bags of cellulose insulation. If all goes well, the coming week will bring all the prep needed for insulation to happen, and then I am hoping that Mike's family and friends who will be visiting in a week will feel up for helping us get fluffy with the cellulose. Oh, and this coming week our piglet is arriving! Lots to stay tune for!

Back in the land of milk and honey

Welcome back to this blog and happy spring!

     Mike and I have had a very busy and full winter working out east, squirreling away resources for this final season building our house in Missouri. And now, after one long and harrowing journey back west with our modern-day covered wagon (Subaru station wagon with attached U-Haul trailer), we are once again in the land of milk and honey, NE Missouri.

     The other day as I was greeting some neighbors here, an industrious swarm of bees looping around their hive caught my eye and it suddenly occurred to me what a perfect description "the land of milk and honey" is for this place because it is quite literally abounding in milk and honey of all sorts. Our neighbor's cow just gave birth to a lovely calf, Mayapple, and her udder is so full of milk that her teets won't stop dripping, even spraying milk! We are being gifted everyone's farm abundance left and right: jars of cow and goat milk, last year's extra sorghum honey, jams and jellies, last year's sweet potatoes and cans of tomatoes, and of course, legions of fresh eggs as nobody seems to be able to keep up with their chicken's bumper spring production. Since we have no food production of our own yet, I feel extra grateful to be the recipient of the overflow. Our only abundance to share at the moment are wild spring greens, which Mike forages and whips up into tasty dishes like, "wood nettles sauteed with wild ramps pesto".

Baby chicks getting their daily dose of adoration from the neighborhood kids

Wild greens salad

Setting up camp.... again!

     On top of all the beautiful and miraculous signs of life unfolding once again around us, we have been enjoying sweet reunions with many friends, with our stray cats who survived the winter, and with our home, still standing and in very nearly the same condition we left it in! In fact, our unfinished house is where we first moved back into when we arrived two weeks ago, as our arrival coincided with a weekend of rain and storms. We put our mattress on some of last year's left over straw bales and set-up a make-shift table and chairs for dining. Our first few nights back were spent dry, safe, and unwoken by the clashes of thunder and lightening and howling wind as is the usual in our tent. Funny how something I have taken for granted my entire life--shelter--now feels like such a miraculous blessing to have. What a difference from camping in the elements! Still, we decided to move back out into our old tent platform for one more summer after we made a few improvements to it, since living inside the house we hope to be soon working in would definitely slow us down.

     In all seriousness, the beginning of this year feels different. Our goals are shifting as one major project will be coming to an end and our focus is expanding to other parts of Giving Tree Homestead. Am I getting ahead of myself? Probably. Would it be prudent to put all of our energy into finishing the house alone? Yes, definitely. But instead we are throwing a few more balls into the air at the same time-- starting a large vegetable garden, ordering dozens of sapling fruit and nut trees, planting and stocking our pond, adding a new driveway to the house, perhaps starting work on our outdoor summer kitchen, and even thinking about getting some poultry, pigs, and bees going on our land! (Okay, I said thinking...) Although it is a lot, I think we can accomplish all this AND be moved in to a mostly finished house by the time it gets cold this year, with a wing and a prayer! Having my aunt Jane visit briefly this past week, I was reminded of her first visit here where she and my parents spent several days helping us fill foundation holes with gravel (see blog post #1), and it really hit me how far we've come.

Our friend Sarah singing opera music at a campfire get-together.
 Her future house in the background is almost complete!

     As we embark on our homesteading projects this year, I am cognizant that for the first time we are finally fully living here, year round. To anyone who has ever lived a split life, with half of one's possessions, friends and livelihood in two separate places, it feels really good to unify those halves into a whole life, somewhere. And that somewhere is HERE, in this magical world where red tail hawks shoot by like rockets soaring into the sky, where we are woken by the gobble of wild turkeys nearby, where turtles and tadpoles swim in our pond, and coyotes yip in our woods, and our neighbor's children can tell us where every new songbird nest is hidden in the trees and grasses near their house. It is truly an amazing world we live in, and for the moment I am blessed to have eyes that still see it. Pretty soon as construction gets under way, I may just be seeing my to-do list as I look around, but for now, spring is abounding!

My favorite spring neighbors have returned-- tree frogs! 

Siding and Winter Wrap-up

      Another year of work in Missouri has drawn to a close. Mike and I just packed our car up yesterday, said our goodbyes, and drove into the sunrise on our annual migration east. This is a gross over-simplification of the process of wrapping up however. I have come to finally admit to myself that ever year October and November are going to be extremely busy, full months, this year being no different. A sense of urgency and impending deadline sets in mid October, with the certain knowledge of the drop in temperature to come and much to wrap up.

     This year, our biggest concern was finishing the exterior plaster before temperatures plunged below freezing and both the process of making plaster (involving bare feet for stomp-mixing up batches of sand-clay-straw plaster) and the process of it drying adequately would both become near impossible. We truly have our friend Tyler to thank for the fact that we made that deadline with several weeks of warm weather afterward to spare. Tyler ended up staying and helping us for over a month, and was instrumental to getting our second coat of plastering done. We also had a second plastering work party, which greatly helped us get a good jump start on the process amidst good conversation and company. For the entire day before Mike and our friend Fran mixed batches of plaster until we had quite a reserve built up, while I finished up trim detailing around doors and windows(the trim and assorted detailing actually took us a good week before the second coat could go on). Needless to say, many batches of clay plaster were made and applied onto bales between the first and second coats. In some places, it seems like it is almost four inches thick! 

      This brings me to one of the lessons learned from our strawbale building process this year. Somewhere in the process of stacking up our bale walls, we stopped tracking the levelness of the walls with quite the same fastidiousness that we had started with. Despite reading warnings in natural building books about this tendency, we just got off, with several corners and spots along the wall flaring out quite a bit. I think we just got so frustrated with the tedious process of notching bales around our timberframe that we started saying “good enough” and assuming we could whack the bales into levelness later. Problem was that our bale pinning system (staking and screwing wooden stakes to framing) worked really, really well. We were throwing ourselves with force against the wall and it just would not budge. We tried chain-saw trimming parts and reshaping protrusions, and still, the big bulges would not go away. We built out plaster in low spots, and put in on thin in high spots, but the waviness persisted. So ultimately, we just made our peace with an undulating wall that does not hide the fact that it is composed of bales and not your average stud frame construction. Oh well!

 

     The next big hurdle in the building process was getting doors in and siding up to further protect the walls. We decided on half-wall siding to protect the lower part of the walls that would be receiving the most weather—splash back rain and snow drifts, etc. The earthen plaster does a great job of letting the strawbales “breath” so that moisture doesn’t buildup excessively to the point where mold can flourish (this has been a problem in many cement-stuccoed SB buildings simply because cement does not breath well. The same is true with many well-intentioned world heritage site restoration projects of old adobe and cob buildings which have nearly disintegrated under a protective coating of cement stucco! The restorations have all had to be redone using earthen stucco!) The only downside to clay-based plaster is that it isn’t permanent, it has to be reapplied periodically as it weathers. 

Ben Law's Woodland House in England

      As for siding, we decided for siding to go with something readily available locally, which is white oak cut by our Amish friend Ivan who has a mill five miles away. We love the look of the live-edge siding on Ben Law’s house (the English roundwood timberframer who inspired the frame of our house as well). So we asked Ivan to keep one edge of our siding unmilled, just the raw bark or the logs. What resulted is kind of an organic unpredictable edge that one visitor hilariously named “the smurf house look”! My parents came down to help us again and together we cut and hung the lower boards. This is an understatement as this took us all about a week of hustle and bustle in the last of the warmish fall weather and the first of the can't-feel-fingers winter weather that blasted in. A huge thank you to them for helping us to the finish line! Mike mostly did the trickier high gable ends with help from Brian and I, again no small feat. Note the purple flashing sticking out from the bottom, which will be where we tie in a porch roof next year.

 

     Another tedious step for us this past month was closing in the underside of the soffiting, connecting the roof to the walls. We need our roof to be vented, to let in cool air flow from the bottom of the roof to the vent built into the ridge cap, so that ice dams don't happen (the idea is to keep the roof surface cool, to counteract heat escaping the roof from melting snow and creating ice that forces its way under the roof and into the walls causing water damage). This seems excessively detailed, I know, but it is a big issue for a lot of houses so most builders vent roofs in cold climates now if they don't have cold attic space to serve the same function. For this venting/closing in we went into mouse-paranoia mode, constantly scanning for where mice could infiltrate, as they surely will. We used plywood (stained darker with linseed oil and natural pigments) and a prefabricated metal flashing piece with little perforations to let air in. Oh the detailing! Every little crack and seam now filled in, we get to cross a seriously inglorious "to do" off of our list. It is satisfying to think that our exterior is pretty much done and no more high ladder work will be necessary next year.

 

 

     One of the more satisfying things we did in our last week was to clean out the straw mountain that had formed over the course of baling. I have been itching to do this for some time, but finally! My parents helped, loading up huge tarps full of straw and dragging them over to our soon-to-be garden site for mulch next year (yes, you read it correctly! We are taking the garden plunge next year! Woo hoo!) 

     On our second to last day, our neighbor Jake came down with three horses and his plow and we took a look at the soil together, deciding it was not too frosty to be plowed up for next year's garden site. The frost will help break up the compacted ribbons of sod that were smoothly flipped over as Jake passed back and forth with the animals. The nice thing about horses is that their small hoof size does not compact the soil as they work, unlike tractors that can create a compacted subsoil horizon, just below what is plowed. Next spring we will add compost and manure and straw and form raised beds. It is a huge sized plot (Jake really went for it), and we figure we will plant cover crops on a good bit of it to help feed the soil until we are ready to use it all. I am just so excited about it though, nothing like a waiting garden bed to plant the seed of upcoming spring in one's mind.

 

      Getting doors in has been a challenge as well, complete with its own learning curve. We bought nice second hand doors for probably a quarter of the price of new ones. Trouble was, they didn't come with frames and I optimistically decided to build some to fit. Doors are one of the trickiest things to get to fit well. If hung off-level, you will have a door that constantly swings out or in. If fit too snugly in its frame, swelling wood with seasonal humidity can make it not shut properly. And so on. Suffice to say, there are adjustments that need to be made to both doors in the spring (one too snug, one too gappy), but the are both shut for now. We hunted and hunted for a front door that would do justice to the character of the house and would still be in our miserly price range, but we just didn't find it this year. We opted for the very affordable "plywood and screws" door option instead, for now.

 

      As you can see in the above interior shots, we have quite a bit of plastering yet to go on the inside, another layer of finish flooring upstairs and down, rafter and floor cavities to stuff with cellulose insulation and a stack of ceiling boards to tack up. There are partition walls between upstairs bedrooms and downstairs bathroom to put on as well. Plumbing, a set of stairs and a stove instalation, oh, and a wrap around porch with several roofs, an attached pantry and sunroom yet to attach... BUT it feels like we are so close to being finished! (I can hear you laughing.) I suppose it is all relative, we have come such a long, marathonish way that the last five miles seem like nothing. But honestly, I am glad for a break from it all for a few months. And it has come right in time for the icicles to start forming and NW winds to start blasting. Goodbye house, may you withstand the winter onslaught!