Garages are hard to hide

I'm not even sure what Olive is petting in this picture...I just right clicked on the picture and "blog" came up as an option, so I'm adding it to our home construction blog. I guess this is as good a time as any to do an update...

Anne's holding steady with the pregnancy. We're at almost 7 months, and Anne is feeling tired and sore and all those great things. We've been a little lax on the house planning as a result.

We went up to Kohler and checked out faucets and stuff about a month ago, but more importantly we took a carriage ride through the town after a great dinner. On that ride, we saw a house with a huge garage that obscured the rest of the house, and it immediately occurred to both of us that our plans were of a house that was going to look like that. We promptly did a pretty big revision of the first floor layout, moving the garage farther from the center of the house, which is also going to squash our dream of having a unified formal (front door) and informal (garage) entrance. Boo, compromises.

So we're still working through lots of paper.

The old house is no more...

Colin Cheever and Craig Pope started tearing down the existing house on Tuesday morning. They started pulling it apart around 10 AM and the last corner of the house went down a few hours later (this picture is the house before the first whack). I didn't see the chimney go down, but according to several reports it took some extra oomph before it would fall over. Some bats flew out of the house as it was coming down. We didn't see anything else come out, although there were probably mice etc. Sadly no pots of gold or bags of money fell out of the walls.

Craig and Colin have been crunching up the bits and moving it all off-site. Here's a picture of it mid-process. They suggested burning it in the foundation instead of hauling, and I told them we prefer not to have it all burned. I don't know how they're disposing of it, but they know how we feel so I guess we've done the best we can. Anyway, when it's all over we're going to start landscaping the area. There will be a big flat area that will be nicely graded (and seeded, or so they think.) There's no way we're going to mow all that, so I think we're going to go with something else. Probably some beds including a wildflower area, and some more trees to start closing off the front area. There's also a big bunch of extra dirt that we might use to make berms.

There's not much more to say. I'll edit the post when I get a picture of the house all gone

Big Backhoe!

Colin delivered the destructo backhoe to the land today. Teardown
will begin on Tuesday, August 26!

Slumlords!

The owner of the house next door to our building lot, an upstairs/downstairs duplex that is being rented to college students, put the house up for sale last fall. Anne and I discussed our options, and we decided it would save a lot of headaches long term to actually be able to control who rents the house next door to our home...and as a big bonus (particularly for Anne), we can nestle the new house near the nice big trees on the lot. So we bought the property last Friday. The address is 513 S. Franklin St., and it's just south of our lot.


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We quickly realized the joys of owning a rental house. The tenants called on Tuesday (yes, 4 days after close) complaining of a leaky shower. The previous owner, a state rep named Steve Nass who, despite being kind of a hardcore Republican is also an incredibly nice, honest guy (I know--how can that be!?!) told us there was something going on that he hadn't been able to figure out, so it wasn't a surprise. Anyway, we've already had the plumber over to fix that, and the electricians over to make some improvements...we still have to bring in our tree trimmer guy and somebody to install a new water heater. This is all stuff that we knew about when we bought the house, but still stuff to deal with. I think we're just less comfortable with maintenance than Steve was, so we're just getting it fixed so we won't have to deal with it on a regular basis...this stuff will be much less of an issue long-term.

In other news:

...Colin claims he's going to start demo of Lou's house next week. The gas got shut off yesterday (Thursday the 24th) so he's clear to smash. In addition to the bulldozer, he also delivered a skidster on a big flatbed earlier this weel.

...Anne wants to build a boardwalk down by the lake, so I'm meeting with a friend next week who will do that work.

...I need to put some gutters on the barn to catch rainwater. Anybody know how to hang gutters on a wavy roofline?

Teardown is gonna happen!

Our demo guy Colin says he's going to start tearing down Lou's house the week of July 21. He has already parked a small bulldozer in the back yard, and Olive has been learning how to drive it so she should be ready to roll by next Monday. WE Energies has disconnected the electrical (the worker drove right over a bed of evergreens with his huge truck, but he somehow managed to miss every plant so no harm, no foul) but they still need to disconnect the gas line. After that's done, Colin will knock the house down in a couple days. I'll be hanging around the job to see if anything interesting, valuable or re-usable comes bubbling to the surface.

Not a lot to report on the plans right now. Gary, our architect, has had some serious problems with all the recent flooding in our area, so his mind has generally been elsewhere. Still, I think we've made some breakthroughs on our floorplan lately so I think we're regaining our momentum. Hopefully more to come soon!

More Thoughts on Our Green Home

In response to some questions about our green plans for our home, here goes:

We're doing rainwater harvesting and geothermal, and possibly solar water heating, from the start (geothermal should work particularly well for us because, the more contact the coils have with groundwater, the more effective the installation, and the groundwater is just below the surface on our lot). PV electrical will have to wait until later, but we'll put the necessary conduit and brackets in place so it's not a radical renovation if and when we do add them. It looks like wind power is not a viable option in our area right now, but we'll be ready for it if that should change in the future. And should we put the juice into batteries, or have it grid-tied? How about hydrogen fuel cells! I'm actually most interested in doing something with that in the future.

We will make the envelope of the house as tight as possible and incorporate passive solar principles, including thermal mass. We hope to use structural insulated panels, which make a really tight wall, not to mention it moves a lot of the construction into a factory and minimizes waste. The foundation will be insulated concrete forms. We hope to install heat exchangers to keep the heat energy from hot air and water leaving the house.

Finally, we're planning on using as many reclaimed supplies as we can find. We're also planning on low VOC-paint (actually, tinted clay plaster), reclaimed wood and tiles etc., whenever we can. We'll start looking for that stuff when the floor plan is finished.

WI has good rebate and incentive programs available for homeowners using renewable energy, but we don't know a ton about it so we're going to hire a consultant to help with all that.

New Plans from Gary

Anne was sick on Wednesday night, so I went to yoga alone and called our architect afterward to ask if I could come over and bother him while he was working on our plans. He had these drawings ready for us when I got there.

The drawing up to the right is the main floor, and the one below to the left is the upstairs. In addition to a lot of little changes, the big revisions over the last plans include 1) the pantry off the kitchen, which also creates a better space in the living room; 2) the large closet and small office between the master bedroom and the staircase and 3) a staircase going up from the bedroom floor which will lead to the "tower."

Gary also showed me his arrowhead collection--he farms a ton of land and all of his employees know that he'll trade a 12-pack of beer for any arrowheads they dig up. He's got some specimens that might be up to 12,000 years old, according to an archaeologist he's consulted with. Interestingly, a lot of the arrowheads around here are made from chert that's only found in Missouri. The theory is that the material was brought up here by young traders, but nobody knows what they would have traded for since it would have to be something easy to carry back to Missouri.