Merry Christmas!

We wish you all a Merry Christmas and hope you enjoyed a cozy day with family and friends! We enjoyed a relaxing afternoon with Jon's family, followed by a large dinner with friends at my parent's.

We are getting close on the house, with an official move-in date by January 22nd! Things are really coming together, with a working kitchen, carpets installed, and hundreds of feet of trim going up each week!

Our first bathroom is operational, between the toilet upstairs and the shower downstairs ;-) The master bath is getting tile this week and the countertop for the kitchen and bathroom should come soon, with the kitchen tile backsplash one of the last arrivals in January. Once all the tile and trim are in, our painters and hardwood floor guys will come back to do the last coat!

 And the siding is almost done, with just a few tricky spots left for last. We have a few other things to troubleshoot, such as a leaky freezer and an exorbitant electricity bill which we think means the wiring is screwed up somewhere...

We hope you have a wonderful start to the new year, filled with new hopes, friends and family! We are looking forward to a new year of enjoying the project that has consumed our lives for the last nine months, especially because we'll have it to ourselves until August when we'll be blessed with a third member of the family, if all goes well ;-) We got our Christmas wish!

Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope you all had a good weekend with family and friends! Jon took his first day off since Labor Day weekend and we enjoyed our usual double Thanksgiving, and then I got to cap off the weekend with a blustery marathon in Seattle, it's pretty great to have a lane on I-90 closed just for you ;-)

Anyway, things have been racing along in the last month, with continuous work on the exterior siding and the roof, and the finishes on the floor getting started inside, the lights are all in, the heat is on, and the first coat of paint is on the walls!

 

And here are our neighbor's favorite solar panels... They are bigger than I pictured somehow but they finally got hooked up today and have already produced 12KW, although of course we have used more electricity than that today ;-) 

Projects inside and outside...

The good weather lasted through my birthday so we could have a BBQ and bonfire at the farm and now the drizzle seems to have set in, but we have plenty of action at the farm! The metal roof is getting assembled on the weekends by a friend, the septic and electicity are getting hooked up in the next week or two, and the root cellar has shelves! It's a little treat everyday for the first person to open the door to the root cellar and breath in the fresh cedar smell.

 I finally got to plant the 'living roof' over the garage a couple of weeks ago, so now 100 heather plants of 20 varieties should take root and bloom at different times of the year with fun splotches of color. We interspersed a bunch of pavers for some color for the first couple of years while the heather is small, and then I mulched with pine needles around each plant.

The big excitement this week has been the insulation going in, a mix of mostly sheep's wool blown into the wall cavities behind netting (a non-toxic though not hassle-free material), some 'eco-batt' under the radiant floors, and lots of semi-toxic 'Great Stuff' spray foam that will hopefully off-gas before we move in. The wool has been a bit of an experiment because of the metal stud framing and many little spaces in the walls but we're hoping it expands to fill the nitches and live up to it's supposed R-value. It's experimental enough for the owner of the insulation company to take video footage for his blog ;-)

Also, a cool shot here of the track of a large cat we crossed on our first snowy hike of the season, in the hills out of Cle Elum last Saturday. It was opening day of deer hunting with firearms and we saw 9+ hunters as well as a pair who shot a 180 lb. buck at 8am and were almost done dragging it to the trailhead when we passed them again at 4:30pm. It was a nice wrap-up to a fun climbing summer. I didn't lead as many trips for students as I'd hoped but got to climb some great more challenging routes on mountains like Hood, Logan, West McMillan Spire and Rainier with friends.

Windows!

Well, summer seems to have ended, but not before Jon worked an 18 hour day to get a water barrier painted on the plywood, making the house look much more complete somehow. Yesterday was another long, hectic day of concrete pours (the footing here for our south-facing deck outside of the living room)

and putting in most of the windows, yay!

A little update...

It's been a busy end of summer (though we have sun again today and maybe 75 tomorrow which is welcome, I wasn't ready for rain and low 60s to set in yet!). The plumber, electricians and framers have been busy running wires, window framing and piping all over the place. From the outside you'd never know anything is happening but trust me, as the one who cleans up in the evenings, things are progressing! ;-)

The excavators were back to do the septic, run the electric lines including the line out to the pasture for the solar panels, water lines etc... Here is a picture taken by our friend Doug who flies a special ultra-light plane and likes to do fly-bys in the evening when the winds are dying down.

It's fun to see basically the entire property down to the stream on the far left. The gravel lines are the septic drain area and then the silt fence. We worked madly last Monday to get the root barrier and then special soil on top of the garage roof, and then realized we put the root barrier on upside down so I spent a couple days last week shoveling the soil around and flipping it ;-)

While we wait for the windows and doors to come, I'm working on staining the cedar shingles that will cover about a third of the house, and getting organized to plant the green roof, reseed the trench areas, plant some fruit and nut trees if I can get around to it, and do some garden prep before the rains really set in. Wish me luck!

Time to reseed again

The last couple of weeks have been a hectic jumble of plumbers, excavators, radiant heat guys, interior framing, and window/door orders. As a result, our place looks a little like a whirlwind came with trenches everywhere.

Things are really starting to come together though! Here is our warmboard radiant flooring with the pipe newly laid this morning after I put some elbow grease into cleaning it yesterday...

It's officially a house... Now where is the rain?!

Yes, after a record cool and wet summer, we finally got the roof waterproofing material on and the boards on the walls before what was supposed to be another rainy few days and now it refuses to rain! Which is too bad, we wanted to test the roofing and see if we missed spots, plus the grass could really use a drenching. Oh well, we had fun rolling this stuff out with our harnesses and ropes keeping us on the slope, though our neighbor seemed to think she should sit in view of us and make sure nothing too exciting happened ;-) We've also ordered the windows, the metal roof will go on in the next few weeks, the interior framing starts this week...

Swingin' from the rafters!

Well, not really but they look pretty solid!

The roof trusses are up, as well as all of the framing of the upstairs and downstairs. It's so fun to see the blocking of the windows; our architect did a great job of window placement on the house to optimize the different views and connect with other parts of the property.

 For instance, from the almighty kitchen I'll be able to see the deck, garden, goat shed, street-side of the house and have a view of the mountains! And Jon thinks I spend a lot of time in the kitchen now! Anyway, there's Jim, heading up the framing of the house...

Here is a shot from last week, the view of the house from the main road, definitely the more imposing face. The master bedroom will be on the bottom floor of this corner, with a covered deck above...

'Bout done with the bedrooms!

It's been a busy last week, and since the clouds have decided to rain out my climbing plans, I've been around to take pictures of the progress. Here are a couple of the framing of the bedroom floor and stairs leading down to it.










And then here is a view from the corner of the master bedroom, looking back through towards the stairs up to the front door.

Also, the bees are going like gangbusters with the blackberries blooming, moving into the 4th and last box of the Warre hive soon and attaching some comb to the window here in the top bar hive.

And then I've been having fun (sweating... a lot) digging sand and gravel out of the goat barn. After reading Joel Salatin's latest book on farming I decided deep straw bedding that can compost would be better, and after not talking to me for an hour after I suggested some changes to the barn, Jon said alright, but you get to dig out the sand ;-)

Summer strikes!

Sorry it's been a while again, July just began and I feel like it's almost over! Anyway, the garage is framed and getting some plywood while the guys waited for the concrete slab in the downstairs of the house to be poured last Friday. Here is a shot from outside our bedroom, looking into the bedroom level and the garage.

The framing on the house should start on Thursday! In the meantime (besides climbing and enjoying fireworks with my neice and nephew on Guemes Island) I've been enjoying (mostly) being a grass farmer. I think I'm successful, though we'll see if it can weather the next week of 70+ degree sunny days while we're gone climbing and visiting friends. The goat shed is waiting for me to shovel sand out of the foundation because I had a Joel Salatin epiphany and begged Jon to redesign it a little a few weeks ago, to which he looked sick and begged me not to do this with the house ;-)

Things are starting to look real!

And somehow the goat barn got framed first!

Jon has been busy learning how to weld so that the 1200 lb steel beam that will hold up the living roof on the garage is ready to get installed, and I have spent the last week at the farm all day preparing all of our new soil for seeding and then watering as summer weather seems to have finally struck Seattle.

Here is a view down into the bedroom level of the house. Concrete slab will be poured on top of the sand, with radiant heating embedded as well as rebar, and then the framing will start.

No more vistas of plastic!

It's been a busy week here but we finally got the concrete walls coated in the waterproofing tar and then the drain mat up so the excavators can fill the dirt in around the buildings to bring everything thing up to elevation. The concrete walls that you see will all be at about floor level, of the garage, the goat shed, and then the downstairs bedrooms.

It's pretty great to finally get to walk around the house without being stuck in muddy trenches, and great fun to visualize the actual elevations of things. Here are some pics of the goat shed concrete footings, the garage and shop, and the downstairs elevations of the house.

Also, here is a before shot of the guys pouring the concrete slab floors of the garage, basement and root cellar.

Marathon #1 done... and boy am I glad it is...

 Well, it was the first over 70 degree weekend we've had in Washington, with the coldest March - May period since the 50's, what better time to go run for five hours? I've been doing some training though mostly on trail, and wanted to try a marathon. My friend Becca and I spent the night at my dad's house on Lopez and then raced to the ferry this morning for the San Juan Island marathon.

In all I feel pretty good now but made all of the rookie mistakes of running too fast the first half, not eating enough, and then dying in the sun, heat and hills for the second half. I did a lot of walking and averaged an 11 minute mile but in all nothing hurts and now that I am rehydrated and fed, am feeling more like myself.

The recovery took a while though, I almost fainted a couple of times waiting for the ferry home and ate too soon, it's amazing that a half-day run can be harder than multi-day climbs. I don't do very well in the heat though, so I'm looking forward to fine tuning some things and running in normal Seattle weather if there is a 'next time'.

The walls are up...

It's been a busy week, but the walls are up (goat barn soon to come), the boards are down, the scaffolds have both been moved for the third time, and we've only had one day of pouring rain ;-) Seriously though, it's really cool to see the concrete walls somehow, and to walk around down in the basement under where the garage will be. The shiny metal in the picture is sitting on top of huge 400 lb I-beams, and will be part of the floor of the garage but we can walk on it now. Next steps are filling in the dirt and drain rock around the outside of the concrete walls, then the metal framing going up and concrete slabs for floors and the concrete lower walls of the goat barn (just enough to get them above ground level). It's been fun lately, lots of activity and trucks, joking around, and bees buzzing around our pasture of buttercups...

Also, here is Jon using tractor's forklifts to unload insulation for under the concrete slab floors from a semi, those forklifts have paid for themselves so many times over!