Fun Floorz

The vacationers arrived home yesterday afternoon exhausted from travel and happy to be home. Chloe and Hazel knew that I was busy transforming the second floor into a more livable space while they were running around on the beach and submerging themselves in the hot tub. What they didn't know was that their room now had a pink and green polka dot floor. They were floored when they saw it, pardon the pun.

I had mixed feelings about the floor as it was going down. It's visual impact was hard to predict. The girl's room is kind of like stepping into a scene in Alice In Wonderland. The rest of the floor is less jarring but is distracting nonetheless. It's durable, easy-to-clean stuff though. Good for as long as we can tolerate it. That may turn out to be a long, long time given the list of higher priority projects. The drywall is no longer shedding dust, and the windows in our bedroom and Michelle's office turned out beautifully. Another marathon of work is over. I spent a good chunk of today reading to Hazel and falling asleep in the process.


Our barn now has chickens. Twenty-eight laying hens busy laying eggs. I have never been close to chickens before, and I'm slowly becoming a chicken guy. A friend lent me a couple of chicken books and I'm learning the in's and out's of chickens. Not much to it really.

Michelle will post pictures of the second floor.

Two Weeks

Michelle, Chloe and Hazel are off to Florida for a couple weeks. In their absence I'm going to try to finish one bedroom (0urs) and paint, or at least prime, the entire second floor. The only unknown in this equation is trimming the windows. It should be perfect joint compound drying weather so at least I've got that going for me. I'm going to leave the flooring as a complete surprise. I was struggling with the options in terms of wood flooring that would fit our budget and produce satisfying results. So I found something that...well, let's just say that the kids will love it.

Today, before they leave we're going to work on a space in the barn for some laying hens in need of a home. I don't know exactly how many yet. Something around twenty. Their owners are off to New Haven for a while, and we, along with a our neighbors, are taking over.

Home Again

We've been back from the holidays for a few days now. Our house was just as it should have been upon our return. If we had a programmable thermostat, we would have been able to see how cold or how warm it had gotten when we were gone. I did note that there was water in the overflow tray of the solar storage tank meaning that the water in the tank had gotten so warm that a pressure relief valve had let a little out. If there is a flaw in the system, it is that the two parts, the solar and the propane back-up, work well together when heating our hot water but not when heating the space. To most efficiently heat the space I have to be here to manipulate the system. If I'm not here to press buttons, the benefit of solar heat going into the slab is lost. One problem is that the heat is controlled by thermostat. Since the house is passive solar, on any day that there's solar heat for the slab it's already warmer inside than the temperature set on the thermostat. So at the time when it would be free (no propane use) to add heat to the slab, nothing happens. When I'm home at a time like this, I turn up the thermostat for a few hours and the excess solar heat flows through the concrete. The result is impossible to measure, but imagine, for example, that the 1000 square feet of concrete goes from 65F to 67F in the few hours I'm able to dump heat in. At 3am when it's in the single digits outside, those two degrees are slowly seeping from the slab, keeping the house just a little warmer. As the day lengthens throughout the course of winter, on sunny days there'll be more and more of this excess heat for the slab. By March the days we'll need supplemental heat from the wood stove will be few.

Michelle and the girls are off to Florida soon. My job is to transform as much of the upstairs space as possible when they're gone. Painting, trimming windows, painting the plywood floors. I should be able to put a large dent in it in ten days.

A nor'easter dumped a foot of snow yesterday and last night. Today might be good for building snow forts.

The Case for Manual Labor

I like getting books for Christmas. This year I forgot my book at home and ended up wandering around in circles or reading the Times on the computer. It wasn't until the 27th that I finally opened something to read. My brother-in-law, Brian, gave me a copy of a little book of philosophy I hadn't heard of called Shop Class as Soulcraft. The author, a PhD in philosophy who owns a motorcycle repair shop, makes the case for the value of working with your hands. Engaging your mind in the creation of something. When I graduated from college twenty years ago, the joke was that I was fit to split firewood and tend sheep. My roommates found this amusing. Graduates of Holy Cross do not become shepherds. Since 1990 I have been a cook, reporter, English tutor, package store clerk, carpenter and laborer, teacher of EFL, substitute teacher, artisan baker, sail maker and carpenter again. The one omission from this list, a print estimator for my father's printing company, was my only real attempt to join the white collar workforce, and it failed. Square peg, round hole. I have spent about thirteen of the last twenty years acquiring various trade skills. Now the joke is that I have an advanced degree in Home Economics. I cut and split my own firewood. I am poised to tend a flock of sheep. Had I known myself a little better twenty years ago perhaps it wouldn't have taken me so long to get here.

The Holiday Test

When you're committed to heating with wood, there's only one issue to address: What do you do when you're not there to light the fire? Initially we had a very conventional solution. A wall mounted direct-vent propane heater could easily keep our house from freezing even in the coldest mid-winter weather. Then it occurred to me that running heat through the slab wasn't all that expensive. If we weren't there to light the fire, then we wouldn't be there to use hot water either, and the domestic hot water system could double as a source for in-floor heating. When we leave for the holidays tomorrow afternoon, the solar hot water system will heat our house or at least keep it from freezing. (I doubt it would freeze anyway, but I'm not willing to put my suspicions to the test.) I'll set the thermostat to 60F and close the door. Neighbors will check on it and Ox, the cat, who more or less takes care of himself.

The Shortest Days

With Winter Solstice right around the corner, the sun hangs low on the horizon and disappears to the west shortly before 4 in the afternoon. Yesterday was a good day (sunny, cold and short) to check the performance of a well insulated passive solar house. During the day, obviously, there's no need for supplemental heat from the woodstove. At noon in mid-December sunlight penetrates deeply into the house, lighting up the back wall of the first floor. The temperature inside is just below 70F. A couple days ago I made an adjustment to a setting on the solar hot water system allowing more solar heat to be pumped through the slab, and yesterday was the first day to give it a try. Around mid-day I turned up the thermostat and pumped heat through the floor for a couple hours. Our domestic hot water usage is predominantly later in the day so a little loss of heat to the floor in the middle of the day leaves enough time for the tank to recover temperature before the sun goes down. At 10pm with the temperature outside approaching the single digits, inside it was still a pleasant 66F. I could have lighted a fire in the woodstove before retiring for the night, but I thought it would be a good night to see just how cold it would get inside without the benefit of extra heat. The heat for the night would come from what was stored in the concrete floor. A 4:30am it was a little on the chilly side at 54F so I started up the woodstove to give us a little boost before the sun starts working again. Not bad though. When your average house would have been burning something all day and night to keep from freezing, I used nothing but solar gain. It will take some time to tweak the system to achieve maximum efficiency, but we're off to a good start.

The East Side

The East side is finally done.