We're in!

It's been a crazy couple of months, and we enjoyed a few weeks living at my mom's house after moving out of the apartment, with all of our boxes and furniture stashed in the shop at the farm. As of Sunday though, we're officially living in the house!




There are a few projects still waiting outside (goat fencing, finish rock on the path to the door and the basement window wells, etc), but we have only a couple of days of work left in the house! The kitchen tile will get grouted Friday night and the sink will go in, and then I will have a fully functional kitchen! Having used a Utilitub in the laundry room though for the last few days, I don't know how people live without one...

Despite all of our boxes, and our ability to fill the kids' rooms with outdoor gear, the house looks nicely sparse. We will slowly pick up more furniture but it is the busy season outside that calls first. We have plans to plant more than 20 fruit and nut trees, some other landscaping projects, get the garden prepped, and the goat barn totally finished. I have a couple of 2 month old La Mancha does waiting for pickup in Shelton, and hope to have a milking doe here in the next month or two! We're also safely (and healthfully) into the second trimester with little Schweglet, so the action should keep on rolling into August (and beyond)...

I hope you're all enjoying seeing the first signs of spring!

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...