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...