Been Building

I started early in the season with the usual piers, beams, leveling, subfloor combination. Now I get to frame which is immensely more satisfying. Tearing the shingles was heartbreaking, I will never do shingles again. This poor early choice is likely why our house isn’t fully sided yet. I estimate it’s about 20 times the amount of work as doing boards. And I really don’t have time to side 20 houses. They’re also impossible to remove or replace. Bleh all around.

I’ve involved Robin more in the construction, he’s eager to learn for his own house. Music to my ears. We built a small covered thingy to hold all the things that might blow up. I didn’t like having them closer to buildings. This project had him use all the tools and techniques on a small scale, but he’s helped me on the subfloors since.

2024 Construction

The house is reaching its final footprint. I still haven’t modeled the deck which didn’t really need much forethought, but I’d like to have a complete model of the house. It’s very useful on top of being fun.

This year we’re looking at a kitchen alcove/bay window.

And a “basement” with a small quirky room on top. We could really use a space to store a bunch of stuff in the absence of an actual basement.

Irrigation

It’s not much but for us it’s huge, we finally have enough water and ways to move it that we can give the gardens a good soak. For the past 9 years we’ve been reliant on the weather, which usually does its job in Vermont. Although when it didn’t, we’d be reactive and move a lot of water by hand only to keep plants alive. Now we’re able to soak several hundred square feet of soil whenever they could use it, and it’s less manual labor. Double win!

We want to build a rain capture system to diversify strategies, but that’s dependent on other projects. We’ll get there.