Friday, November 25, 2011

Table for 23 (temporary)

Entryway and door trim


Maine Slate from Monson (http://www.monsonslate.com/) for our entryway.


A door with trim!

Friday, September 9, 2011

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Friday, April 1, 2011

Chaos in the Coop

We've been pretty lucky until now with our laying hens. Twice over the last year we've been home when a hawk has swooped down and pinned a hen to the ground. Chloe saved the first one and I the second from certain death. But our luck ran out last week when a raccoon took one hen when we carelessly left the little chicken door open one night. The truth is, though, that the little chicken door wouldn't have kept a raccoon out anyway; they're incredibly resourceful when they're hungry. After a second killing I made a serious effort to keep the raccoon out of the barn. I still don't know how it got in early last Sunday morning. I found it in the coop in the process of devouring another hen while the rest of the hens were making quite a racket.
This raccoon was a special case. During our first meeting I noticed that one of its hind legs was bloody and hanging in a unusual way. Maybe it had been hit by a car. We stared at each other for a while as it clung to the inside of the chicken wire of the coop, and then at my prompting it exited the way it had come in. I watched it slowly make its way across the garden thinking that it wasn't going to live much longer given its condition. I was wrong about that. I would imagine that killing our chickens was the easiest way for it to eat; it certainly wasn't fast enough to catch anything else. So last Sunday morning I forced it out of the coop, and, strangely, it wandered out and directly into the greenhouse. I followed it with a shovel and that was it for the raccoon. It didn't even bother to try to escape.

Friday, February 11, 2011

Office, Blackboard, Shelves



Almost done. Birch plywood is wonderful stuff. Note the chalk tray mounted on the blackboard. Nice touch.

Saturday, February 5, 2011

Step Into My Office


Here are some shelves for all the stuff that seems to pile up on every available surface in our kitchen. It's all part of what I'm going to call my office. A little desk with Michelle's old laptop, shelves, a filing cabinet. The black panel to the right of the shelves is a black board surface for the endless lists of groceries and things to do that in the past have been scribbled on scraps of paper and, more often than not, lost.

Sunday, January 30, 2011

Unpacking


Three years ago we packed up our books and stacked up the boxes into the deepest recesses of our storage space, a 39 foot long room in the eaves on the north side of the house. Cold in the winter, hot in the summer, this space is filled with all the detritus from our lives and, oddly, my sister's life as well. It seems as though Elizabeth has contracted UPS to make monthly deliveries of her kid's unused stuff. There's a large box up there labeled Barbie Stuff. Others with nothing but lonely board games, barely, if at all, used. And boxes upon boxes of clothes. But as of yesterday, there's a little more space; we unpacked enough books to fill a new 64 sq ft book case.

The inspiration to build the bookcase came from a job I've got starting this spring. I'll be building a writer's studio, the interior of which will be floor to ceiling bookcases. The structure of the building itself will serve as the framework of the bookcases. I'll be framing the space with douglas fir 2x12's and notching the shelves, also douglas fir, into the frame. After sheathing with pine boards, I'll insulate to the outside leaving the interior with 11 inch deep framing to receive the shelves. Before I could be confident that I wouldn't be digging my own grave with this technique, I decided to try it for myself. As it turns out, I won't be building the bookcases exactly like I built my own shelves. Chris Doyle, who's working on the design, thought it would look nicer having both the shelves and frame douglas fir and came up with a simpler way to marry the shelves to the framing. It will end up making my job a little easier; the joinery won't be so fancy. I struggled to get my joinery to be tight because it's more or less impossible to correct a 2x12 that's cupped. It would have been time consuming to frame the studio space that way, possible, but difficult. I'm pleased with our bookcases, though. There's another 7' of wall space for more shelves; the plan from the start was to have an entire 15' length of floor to ceiling bookcases. But I don't know when I'll get to it.

It's been a snowy winter thus far with surprisingly little sun. We seem to be relying on our wood stove much more often than last winter. Still, though, we rarely heat our house overnight, relying on a fire first thing in the morning to give us a boost in temperature. We've burned maybe a half cord of fire wood so far this year, and might end up burning a little more than a cord in total. The nice thing about a passive solar house is that from December 21st on we get a little more solar heat every day. By March the wood stove is cold more often than not.

Saturday, January 29, 2011