Dear Friend,

We have exciting news! Mickey and I have started a company that designs and sell house kits, similar to the one we built here in the summer of 2024. We'll be introducing our company name and website soon, but in the meantime, I thought I'd show the simplified process of building the shell of the house in photos. There is a lot involved with every step (as you know by reading my blog this past year!), but in the interest of giving a broad overview, I'm just giving snapshots of the basic steps. :)

Hi Friends!

It's been a full 5 months since I've shared here!

Quick personal overview: This summer, I was really sick and out of commission for 6 weeks (and doing better now), our 23-year-old was living in France, Italy, and Germany, our 21-year-old started her junior year of college in Santa Fe, the other 6 of us moved out of the new house and into our rental house 20 minutes away, and our 5- and 3-year-old started attending the local Waldorf school that our older kids attended years ago.

Hi Friend,

Have you been looking forward to spring as much as I have? We've had a tough winter this year in New England (good snow for skiers, though!), and I've been determined to slow down and take a break from all the construction and moving craziness. Is the new house we're living in much different from the last photos I posted over two months ago? Not really. But I have had more conversations with friends and more trips to coffee shops and have gotten back to journaling. :)

Hi Friend,

I hope you had a very restful Christmas and New Year's! We did not! But it wasn't without warning ... We knew we'd be renting out our old house to move into the new house at some point this winter. And then in October, we got a booking for our house for the month of January. So that set the deadline; January 3rd we'd be moving into the new house whether we were ready or not!

Hi Friend,

A couple of days ago, my 4-year-old asked, "Mama, do you do your bwog posts anymore?" I guess it's been that long! Six weeks, in fact.

For weeks now, we've been chipping away at the electrical work [we hadn't planned on doing this ourselves, but when bids came back at over double our high-level estimates, this was our only choice]. But it hasn't been nearly as slow as the power company's speed in hooking us up to the grid. Apparently, their wires were crossed with the town, not realizing that we'd already gotten all of our required sign-offs. And without power, we couldn't turn on the boiler to heat the house. And this delayed so many other projects that required some amount of heat to be completed: painting the ceilings and walls, micro-cementing the wet walls, lime washing the floors, installing the plumbing fixtures (no burst pipes, thanks!). We were pulling our hair out!

Hi Friend,

This week was more exciting than the last few, as we had a real life licensed electrician on site to run the wire from the future electric pole location up to the house. He also installed the electrical panel. Yay! We're continuing the rough electrical inside, too.

And then we had some carpenters show up for 1 1/2 days to start some interior window trim. I know that finishes aren't the most important part of a building, but they sure are most exciting to me. :)

Hi Friend,

I"m continuing my theme of "imperfect action" by just posting a photo update for this week ...

Exterior trim in various stages of painting

Here are some of the solid wood doors that have been installed. We'll build closet doors for the closet you see here (to the right) in the master bedroom.

Yesterday, Mickey, baby Anna, and I drove out to Springfield to pick up our 500-pound 3' x 5' terrazzo shower floor that the architect recommended. Yes, we could have had it delivered for $300, but where's the fun in that? The mission in driving this thing home from an hour away was made even dicier when we found out that Fedex had cracked the first two that were delivered to the warehouse. So you can imagine how much we enjoyed every little bump in the road.

Hi Friend!

Long time, no see! Six weeks actually. Has anything progressed? Yes. As fast as I would like? NO! So between frustration and exhaustion and demoralization, the blog was put on the back burner.

But we just got back from our triannual Lifeonaire retreat, where someone said, "Imperfect action trumps perfect inaction." I knew this was my cue to get back on the horse. Someone else said that the last 10% is always the hardest, which makes perfect sense seeing as we're at the 90% done mark, and it does feel so ... much ... harder ... to do. I also got some encouragement to keep posting on here from some kids at St. John's College on our recent visit. So here goes the imperfect action!

Hi Friend,

I finally have a bit of time, so I thought I'd check in. We are still in a state of flux - even more so because I've had to put the brakes on this new house project to take a sharp turn towards giving attention to our rental house, out of which our long-term tenants just moved. I had no idea that this would push me over the edge. My mother-in-law used to joke that her brain was a shrinking iceberg, on which only so many penguins (tasks, ideas, etc.) could fit before jumping off. I have felt that with this new house, my iceberg has been jam-packed with penguins; our rental house's cry for attention forced at least half of them into the water.

Hi Friend,

Wow, do things feel discombobulated here! Everyone's shifting schedules, lack of routines, irregular events ... it's hard to feel settled and to think clearly about what we need to get done and how to do it, amidst all the change.

One of the things that really grounded this project was the weekday schedule that we stuck to for 10 weeks:

7:30 am - breakfast

8:00 am - morning meeting

8:30 am - start work

10:00 am - 15-min snack break

Hi Friend,

It's fitting that the close of this season - our summer building camp - is marked by the installation of exterior doors. The building is now enclosed, this experiment is closed, and another door is opening for all of us: the graduates will move on to jobs, the students start a new school year, and we'll hire out whatever we can't do ourselves. But as I remarked in a prior post, I think we are all moving on as changed people having gone through this experience, and I love that what has been produced should last a long time - both the house and, I'm hoping, the sense of accomplishment. Bravi to Dolan, Isaac, and Tait!

Hi Friend,

We're wrapping things up here with the guys. Tomorrow, two of them will go to the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island, which has been on the schedule since the beginning, so there are just a few more work hours left till they're done. Despite several rainstorms that have blown through, they've gotten the boards painted and are almost done installing them. Wow, what a difference siding makes! The busyness of the insulation and strapping and wiring are now covered with a calming deep green. As with the interior exposed structure, they hammered every nail into every board of siding by hand so that there'd be no visible holes (unlike with a nail gun).

Hi Friend,

I can't believe it's the last week of our summer building camp experiment here! I'm actually a little teary over it. These kids have done such a great job. I think it's been life-changing for all of us. I've seen them grow exponentially in their confidence and abilities; we've grown in our dynamic as a family and as a working unit and small community (I've never realized that "unity" has the word "unit" in it before now - wow!).
To be honest, in the weeks before this project started, I felt a mix of excitement and fear, and sometimes the stronger emotion was fear. We'd never had others living with us before, we'd never tackled a project of this size, and we had no idea how well our concept would work or how far we'd get.

Hi Friend,

We're picking up momentum now that the end of our summer building camp is drawing near - just 6 more work days left!
First, the most exciting development: we have a roof! Well, almost. Judah and Dolan did a great job installing the roofing on the south side of the house. And then Judah and Henrick did a great job installing the roofing on the north side of the house ... until they ran out of panels, and we realized that we used up too much material by overlapping the panels too much. Arg! Only the end panels were supposed to be overlapped by two ridges. The penalty isn't too bad: we should be getting our final 4 panels by next Thursday.

Hi Friend,

We're coming down to the wire here, as the guys' last day of work is next Friday - aaahhhh!!

We have an aggressive schedule, but we also have some fun scheduled, so please just pray that we get it all done. :) Our remaining weekends are all booked up, so on Friday night, we celebrated the incredible progress these kids have made with an appreciation dinner.

Our first sign-off with the building inspector last Friday morning went swimmingly - he approved our insulation - so now we can cover it up with roofing and siding.

Hi Friend,

We're hanging in there! The heat, the humidity, and the insulation were all trying to get us down, but we've pushed through, and we're thanking God that the heat broke today.

We got a visit from the HERS rater to inspect the insulation. He took pictures and asked questions about what had been done for insulation and air sealing ... which leads to his deciding how many energy recovery ventilators (ERVs) we will need. The tighter your house, the more ERVs you will need to ventilate the house, trading indoor air for outdoor air. At $500-750 apiece, these things are not cheap! And he explained that if it's humid outside, then they will bring the humidity inside, so it's best to get a dehumidifier also. As a low-tech-loving girl, I do not appreciate these high-tech, "green" requirements being thrust upon me. I'd much rather just design for good air flow, and crack the windows for fresh air!

Hi Friend,

My girls are back after their week away, and we are picking up momentum again! Last week felt weirdly still - maybe the insulation just put a damper on us all a bit. But the insulation is done - hurray! Now we're springing forward!

Before I happily leave the insulation behind (we have our HERS inspection on it tomorrow), I want to address a comment about its not being a natural product. That's absolutely true! Nothing natural about polyisocyanurate. But here's where the tension lies between affordability and sustainability. We could've gone with mineral wool insulation and, instead of paying $8,800 for the polyiso, it would be about three times more ($25,000+).

Hello dear friend,

This week has been a bit wilder for me with two of my girls gone, so I'll keep it short.

We had several visitors this week!

Monday morning, the septic installers arrived to use their huge excavators to tear out some brush where the leach field will go. Unfortunately, the driest spot for the wastewater to percolate into the soil is at a higher elevation than the house. This means that we couldn't get a standard gravity-fed septic system; instead, it will be pumped uphill from the septic tank to the leach field. It is what it is.

Hi Friend,
Not much has changed here since Thursday, with the holiday and storms and all. The guys are diligently putting up the 3" of foam on the walls (a layer of 2" followed by a layer of 1") and 6" on the roof (3 layers of 2" foam), taking care to lap the seams with the next layer for less air leakage. The wood strapping that is nailed on top of it keeps the foam in place, as well as providing a surface for nailing in the wood siding and metal roof.

Dear Friend,

Happy 4th of July! We'll soon be in a community parade with some friends before listening to a reading of the Declaration of Independence (we should all know this by heart!).

The house is in her awkward stage now. And this week has been the most tedious for this crew. Who knew that cutting insulation could be so annoying and hard-to-manage? The 2" boards of foam are lined with fiberglass (the 1" boards have foil), so it's not nice to touch or cut. The lining is really rigid, so it's hard to get a clean cut. And the inner foam gets everywhere, too - at least a couple of them have found insulation in their beds! As Eden likes to say, it’s pervasive.