Plodding Along

I've been chipping away at a number of things over the past few weeks. As the pictures show, I managed to fashion a backsplash in the kitchen using the stone left over from the cutting of the countertop using a 7$ diamond blade in my circular saw. The blade was useless by the time I was making my last cut; what do you expect for 7 bucks? Looks nice though. Wiped it down with the same penetrating oil I used on the concrete floor. The chicken is no longer using my workshop/porch to lay eggs. I had to board up my exit to the outside to keep her out. I've moved to the next bedroom with the finish work. It's ready for another pink and green polka dot floor.

I've been making sketches of greenhouse to attach to the barn. There's a meeting of a greenhouse co-op this Saturday. A group of people have gotten together to order materials to get a bulk rate and save on shipping. This green house will have polycarbonate sheets for walls and roof, not plastic sheeting. The polycarbonate sheets last a lot longer and have a better insulating value. (A cross section looks a bit like corrugated cardboard.) This greenhouse would serve as winter chicken quarters and a hothouse for everything that needs a hothouse in Maine.

Backsplash and wayward chicken

Kid's floor

Lots of pink and green and polka dots.

Groundhog Day

With temperatures at about zero overnight and daytime highs approaching 20F, keeping a house warm isn't easy. This is the time of year when firewood is consumed at an alarming rate, and you hope that you've got enough to last the winter. There's a saying out there and I don't know exactly how it goes, but the gist of it is that you should have gone through half your firewood by Groundhog Day. By that formula I will burn about a cord and a half to heat our house this winter. It's hard to believe that we have to have a conversation about whether or not to light a fire in the stove on a night with a temperature near zero. But after a string of cold sunny days of pumping solar heat into the slab, it's really not worth it to start a fire when the sun goes down. A little fire first thing in the morning will quickly warm the house when the kids are getting ready to go off to school, and then the sun will take over. Yesterday, I spent an enjoyable few hours cutting and splitting red oak for future winter's use, enough to heat our house into January. So not only am I saving trees from going up the chimney, I'm saving time. Less time operating a chain saw, more time on the couch with a book.

Hazel and I took a trip into Ellsworth today to buy everything we need to start seeds inside with lights. Our garden is going to hit the ground running this year. The chickens are laying more consistently now. Average of about 6 a day. One project on my list this summer is to build a greenhouse off the south side of the barn. It would give the chickens a warm place to run around in the coldest months of winter, and chicken manure fortified soil for spring, summer and fall growing. I could even grow a cover crop in there as winter forage.

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.