Monday, August 25, 2008

Done Planning (for now)





Here are the house plans I have been working on for the past few years. I think I'm pleased. It's too close to me right now to be objective at all, but I intend to take them to the county tomorrow morning to apply for permits.

This design process has been great and arg. There might be couple of days spent over a table fussing about inches here and there and then some major question like "do we really want to live here?" or "what do I want to do with my life?" comes along and when we come back to planning we have to start all over again.

That has really been the beauty of it, though. Conscious of the 30-years of debt we are entering into, decisions about our favorite kind of kitchen floor became less significant than the bigger picture.
Where do we want to be buried? Where will I sit and play fiddle when I finally learn to play fiddle?

If you double-click on any of these they'll get much bigger for you if you want to take a closer look. I think the only way to get them small again is to use the back button of your browser. The "great" room is really a dance room. I just put that on it so the permit people could relate it to other houses. The "office" is Bird Jane's room. That's another permit-type adjustment. We have been debating for a long time whether to apply for permits at all. Out where we are you can still usually get away without them. But this year the fines (if you get caught) just went up to a minimum of $5,000. That and the peace of mind of not having to sneak around with truckloads of lumber are leading me to the county courthouse tomorrow. I'm 90% for sure going.

The next step is to set the corners and call to order gravel, sand and concrete and set up forms. I'll need extra hands on the day the concrete trucks come if you're nearby. I can't say exactly when because I have a lot to do to prepare for that and then it all has to be inspected. Hopefully within a couple weeks though. Thanks for your intentions. It really is meaningful.

Here is a poem by Robinson Jeffers which has been sliding around in the folder where I put house plans:

The polar ice-caps are melting, the mountain glaciers
Drip into rivers; all feed the ocean;
Tides ebb and flow, but every year a little bit higher.
They will drown New York, they will drown London.
And this place, where I have planted trees and built a stone house,
Will be under sea. The poor trees will perish,
And little fish will flicker in and out of the windows. I built it well,
Thick walls of Portland cement and gray granite,
The tower at least will hold against the sea's buffetting; it will become
Geological, fossil and permanent.
What a pleasure it is to mix one's own mind with geological
Time, or with astronomical relax it.
There is nothing like astronomy to pull the stuff out of man.
His stupid dreams and red-rooster importance: let him count the star-swirls.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Nearly done getting ready to begin


On the right is the site as it looked at the beginning of this year. SeƱor Savu from the other side of 550 came over on his tractor last week to make it bigger and more level (next one down).

Below is an action photo of him milling a log into boards for us (in 2007). This particular log comes from a white pine I grew up knowing. I remember my brother Greg once climbed to the top and said he could see Lake Superior. We plan to make a beefy table out of it.
The rest of this year so far has been spent making plans. There are so many facets to this project. It's taken a long time to develop these plans while learning how best to do things. The little house we built 6 years ago was very design-as-you-go style, but this one Erica and I have been planning intensely for. I have spent so many hours looking at books and houses and drawing and re-drawing it's insane. But I think this stage is almost complete. I'm ready.

Old news, August 2007



Hello from down in the hole. This is a picture from last summer of a test hole that ended up being the hole for our septic tank. I'll put a couple more pictures from last summer in this posting from last summer. Above is our neighbor Rick digging out the house hole. The clearing and excavation proved to be enough work for one year.
Thank goodness we had help.


By the end of August we had other projects which needed our time so we called the building off for the year. We also needed to clarify our vision of what exactly we wanted in this house and how we intended to pay for it.
Winter was difficult in our one-room cabin, and knowing how much town-type work we had to do, it turned out to be best to rent an apartment in town until we can move into our new place.

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