Winter Solstice at Sunnywood

It is 5:27 p.m. I have fired up the generator simply to power the modem long enough to upload this post (how much sense does that make?) and a battery-powered LED light clipped to my shirt allows me to see the keyboard on my laptop.

We celebrated Winter Solstice with family and friends---those who could make it on short notice, since the date had completely escaped us. Thanks so much to the intrepid! A skinny, not-quite-Charlie-Brown tree top graced by fat-butt Santa---ritual outdoor fire in the icy-cold wind---dogs!---good cheer and good people.

I am always thankful for the end of the shortening of days and the promise of the return of light, but found myself thankful more than ever this year. Since our necessity now is to make the inside of the house livable, we find ourselves working inside during the time of year when good light is rarest. On cloudy days we can lose good inside working light as early as 3 p.m., even with our southern glazing. Some days we are often working under generator-powered drop lights for four or more hours. I keep thinking about the sensibility of our dogs, who accept seasonal rhythms. Ciara, our big Newf, has begun barking for her evening walk as early as 3:30---something she might not do till 8 p.m. in June. If she had it her way this time of year, she'd come in at 4, eat dinner, and bed down for the night. But we must push to make this house livable so that we can get on with life, and hopefully be in a position to let Sunnywood Farm begin to live up to its name by spring.

We are still without electricity, having prioritized interior walls and closets---and firewood!--- for the time being. And while we were prepared to be without running water for the winter, we'd planned on a fully functonal Bison hand pump, which we don't really have. As far as we can tell, there is a break/leak in our line from the well, so the pump doesn't hold its vacuum, and needs one or two hundred strokes to prime. We have developed workaround systems, filling lots of vessels for washing and bathing while it's primed, but it's another complication we hadn't expected.

Yet nothing can convince me that we don't have so many unexpected things to be thankful for this season, and we are very glad to be where we are and where we're headed. Happy Solstice and happy holidays!

Posting reduced till we have power

(Not that I don't have plenty of places to charge my laptop.) In fact, we have an Internet connection---DSL via our phone line, which is at present running tenuously on top of the ground from the nearest utility pole in to Sunnywood. However the darned DSL modem is useless without electricity. In a pinch we can get service with the generator, but who wants to do that? And since the town library only gives patrons an hour of Internet access at a time, posting may be limited for a couple of weeks until our solar system is in place (we are still awaiting shipping of one part). I will try to post some photos and a more complete update this weekend.

The cordwood was the easy part

We are here to tell all of you intrepid folks who sweated along with us over the summer, mixing mortar by hand a wheelbarrowful at a time, cleaning logs, screening sand, and building cordwood masonry walls . . . that THAT was easy! Physically grueling, yes, but creative and satisfying. Getting the inside of the house livable has been another story.

Every task is a learning curve, and learning curves involve mistakes. Some of which can be rectified/redone, and some of which we will have to live with.

Take the plumbing. Somehow, when we were divvying up tasks, I got the plumbing. (I am still deeply suspicious about how this happened.) We have a simple graywater system, no blackwater or septic---how hard can that be? I guess I imagined that we could replicate camp setups from the old days and run black hose into a hole in the ground. However in organized townships there are plumbing inspectors who require schedule 40 traps and vent pipes and sanitary tees and cleanouts. But, for goodness sake, with a graywater system we're only allowed to have three drains. Two sinks and a bath; count 'em, THREE.

Jerry at the hardware store lent me his plumbing book, complete with plumbing diagrams and color photos of all of the parts. The plumbing inspector reviewed the system I drew out and said it was great. So I bought the parts, cut the pipe, and assembled everything (kind of like tinker toys with really stupid rules). I asked the plumbing inspector to come look at it before I glued the PVC. "This is fine," he said. "But what you could do," he said, looking at the ugly PVC running up, down, and across our walls, "is run those vent pipes under the floor next to the waste pipes."

"We're allowed to do that?," I screeched, wondering why on earth he hadn't mentioned this when he looked at my schematic.

So I dissassembled everything, bought new parts and started over. The under-the-floor parallel vent system was much harder. Everything was so rigid that the gluing was nearly impossible. You've got about ten seconds after applying the glue and joining the parts to get things aligned right. I hit my head on the sink about twenty times and knocked the pipe glue all over our newly oiled floor boards. I am not sure Joe had ever heard such a colorful combination of northern NJ and backwoods Maine. The plumbing inspector arrived to inspect our system just as our test bucket of water was leaking out of the trap connection.

I had also volunteered to build the kitchen counters, even though I had no clue how to do this. Two and a half weeks later, let's just say that that the sink only fits into the hole before you've screwed everything down; not after. And that I probably won't be finding any work as a carpenter.

Even Joe, who is proficient at just about everything, has had his share of issues. Just ask him how long it took, and how many specialized drill bits were consumed, to drill a hole through one of the logs for the propane connection (and why we weren't using the piece of PVC we'd laid into the wall for this purpose)? And what happened when he set the Bison water pump into its carefully prepared platform on the completed countertop (and why we don't have water yet)?

By the way, the plumbing inspector mentioned that when Maine adopts the uniform building code in 2012, a person won't be able to build a house like ours. "The average new home will require 8 to 10 inspections, and all home designs will have to be approved by an engineer," he said. Even without a mortgage, you won't be able to build what you want on your own land with your own money.

More neighbor love

I forgot to mention that our neighbor Richard---who has been very good to us but is clearly having a hard time getting his head around our project---graced us with two more of his neighborisms the other day.
"Startin' to look almost home-like," he smiled, walking in. Then, frowning, "Well, camp-like, maybe." He smiled again, reassuring us. "I've seen worse!"

Countdown to move-in

It has suddenly occurred to us that it is November 13, and we must move out of the trailer we are renting by the end of November. Well, considering that we packed and emptied an entire household/family's worth of stuff in four days when we left our old house at the end of August---and that anything we are keeping is already in the Sunnywood barn---then this move, with associated cleaning, should be a half-day job.

We are doing what we can to make Sunnywood livable as fast as possible, but it's clear that conditions will be rough for a while. The dog run suddenly rose to the top of the list. Do the pictures hint as to the reason? (For once, I am not to blame for bringing an animal into our house!) We have prioritized the bathroom walls over others, for obvious reasons, as well as kitchen counters for food prep and to house the sink and the oh-so-vital Bison pump. Oh, and the greywater plumbing has been completed by yours truly, and is definitely NOT guaranteed not to leak---but that's an entirely separate post.

Bottle ends

Many people have asked us about the pretty splashes of colored light in some of the photos of our cordwood walls. These are bottle ends (as opposed to log ends), created by inserting a colored bottle into a clear glass jar, and laying the unit into the cordwood wall in place of a log end.

Adapting Rob and Jaki Roy's technique somewhat to our available materials, we inserted the neck of a colored bottle into a clear mason- or mayonnaise-type jar, adjusting them until, from end to end, they formed a bottle end slightly longer than the 18-inch width of our cordwood walls (so that it would protrude a bit). To hold this width, we wrapped the bottle/jar unit with aluminum flashing and secured the flashing to the bottles with duct tape. (The flashing is necessary because if you were to push the neck of the colored bottle all the way into the jar and tape them directly together, the resulting bottle end would be too short for our 18-inch thick walls.) We punctured the duct tape in a number of places to enable the bottle end to breath.

Joe had searched diligently last year for unusually colored bottles, and found, in addition to the usual greens and browns, some lovely blue and aqua bottles. While our compressed building schedule prevented us from using a lot of bottle ends or designing elaborate patterns with them, we used them to nice effect in the south and east walls, where the angle of the sun makes them quite magical at certain times of day.

Solar panels from space

So after we had consulted with solar-electric professionals as well as solar-electric DIYers, and realized that hiring the professionals would require three to four times what we have budgeted for a solar electric system, synchronicity prevailed. Thanks to some very fine friends, we were able to buy two brand new 205-watt, 12-volt photo voltaic panels with a 20-year guarantee well below cost, and they are now in our barn. It was nice to see the power of common interest and community at work! And I have to say that the pickup-bed to pickup-bed transfer at Great Maine Apple Day in the pouring rain lent a delightfully wicked blackmarket air to the transaction.
NOTE: This is what cordwood guru Rob Roy would deem the result of "cultivating coincidences," which you do by putting the word out that you need something. As Roy put it in his book, Timber Framing for the Rest of Us, "the more tentacles you send out into the world, the better the chances of latching onto something."

Remaining cordwood walls uncovered; temporary wall complete

How soon will we be able to move in to Sunnywood? That is the question. As the weather gets colder, the furnace in our rented mobile home runs more and more constantly. The structure doesn't breath, so even with all of the hot air from the forced-air furnace, moisture and mold build up and the air quality is really bad. Quite an incentive to move things along!

We removed the remaining tarps covering Sunnywood's cordwood walls, as they had been curing for the requisite month. Here is the north-facing wall. The only windows are the egress windows mandated by fire code.

Here are the east and south walls. The south wall has the most glazing of any wall, but is still insufficiently glazed for signficant solar gain.

Part of the balancing act we are struggling with concerns the small size of our house, and the fact that we need to maximize productive space. This means making use of wall space for things other than windows.

There remains the possibility that when we complete the last "wing" next year and fill in the last four cordwood panels, the remaining south-facing panel could be filled mostly with glass, making that corner of the greatroom a kind of sunspace. Proper placing of light-colored tile could act as thermal mass to moderate temperatures and reflect light and heat into the rest of the greatroom.
The temporary wall to close us in for winter is complete, except for the installation of the door. We were able to reuse the flakeboard that we'd used as a working surface over the floor joists while we built cordwood. When we build permanent interior walls, we will use wood planking instead, and put the flakeboard in service in an outbuilding, perhaps a wood shed.

The insulation that we've put in the temporary wall for winter will come in handy somewhere else when this wall comes down in the spring. You can also see the one-inch foam board insulation in the ceiling, which, in addition to the batting and wood above it, gives us about R-38 in the ceilings. Not quite the R-40 to -50 usually advised for passive solar, but close.

We have heat!

The woodstoves are installed! This is the only work, besides the excavating for the foundation, that we have hired out. The installers from Rocky's (really---would I make that up?) did, in four hours, what would probably have taken us about three days, given our usual learning curve. Plus, their installation meets state fire codes, and if the roof leaks, we have people to blame it on. They were nice guys, even though they chipped our new tile. The markup on parts seemed a tad exhorbitant (but this is from the perspective of people who almost never hire out home improvement/construction work).

Joe had picked up a wood cookstove a year or so ago through an ad in Uncle Henry's. It was manufactured by Magee Furnace Company, which operated in Boston in the late 1800s. We sanded off some rust, applied furnace cement here and there, replaced a few stove bolts, and painted it. We fired it up today. The oven stays warm for a long time after the fire dies out.

Our big purchase, though, was a brand new Jotul woodstove. I have heated with wood for more than 20 years, but never with a new stove. We opted for a Black Bear 118, which looks small, but has an 8-hour burn and is rated for 1800 sq ft: more than double our area. It may well chase us out, but we were reluctant to go with the parlor-sized stove, as this is our only heat source.

So let's see: our windows are in, and we have heat. A temporary wall and a couple of doors are all that's standing in the way of getting out of our rented trailer. And interior walls.

After last night's HARD frost, we decided that it was time to disconnect the Bison hand pump from its outdoor setup and keep it safe and warm till we can install it next to our kitchen sink. Which will require the construction of counters. And plumbing. Pesky details.

Floor and hearth half done

We have more than half of the floor boards installed, and the hearth is complete (half a hearth in the photo below). We ended up using ceramic tile for the hearth, because it provided a lower profile than brick and seemed easier to keep clean. State fire codes mandated the use of cement board under the tile. All of the windows are installed (well, those in the finished cordwood walls, anyway). The wood cookstove and Jotul wood stove get installed tomorrow.

We have done pretty well, doing all of this work together, while living out of boxes in a rented trailer, only getting slightly annoyed with each other now and then. We were warned that cordwood (and other) building projects can take their toll on relationships, but for the most part the process has been surprisingly satisfying. Lately, we have discovered the art of parallel play. That is, projects that require two people, we do together. Projects that can be done by one person, we assign. So we've been laying floor boards together, because they're big and heavy and need one person compressing while another is securing--- but I built the hearth while Joe installed windows. Parallel play. :)

Regarding the photos below: if you remember, we built a rubble-trench foundation. Which means that the three courses of hemlock grade beams you see sit atop a well-tamped crushed-rock berm that fills a drained trench (which sits on ledge). Any water that finds its way to the grade beams (very little because of the site grading and the roof overhangs) drains away. On the outside, the grade beams are surrounded by an insulated apron (rigid foam at about 35 degrees) to keep the ground around the outside of the house warm and dry. Inside the grade beam, we put some foam and bubble-wrap barriers for a bit of extra protection from any drafts that might find their way through 18 inches of hemlock. We covered the ground under the house with gravel, to act as a capillary break for moisture. The floor joists are 16" on center, and we added mid-joist support in the form of bricks with shims, and large blocks where heavy items such as woodstoves and water tanks would be installed.

Passive-Solar, or Sun-Tempered?

One of our goals in building this house was to be able to live in something easy and inexpensive to heat---an important consideration in Maine. This naturally led us to try to incorporate passive-solar features.

The basic features of passive-solar house design include south-facing orientation, overhangs/shading, thermal mass, sufficient insulation, and energy-efficient windows. Now that the house is coming together, we can see that we have been more successful in incorporating some of these features than others.

We sited the house really well. To take advantage of the sun's heat, a house should be longer than wide, with the long axis east-west, and a long south-facing wall, fitted with lots of window glass situated to absorb the heat from the low winter sun.

Now that the windows are in, we think that we have under-glazed. Since the south wall fronts on a contiguous great-room space that is fairly shallow, we were afraid of overheating, so we were cautious about glazing. We also neglected to consider that the installed windows would actually lose a full two inches in each direction to the frame, so that the actual glass area is 4 inches narrower and 4 inches shorter than we had planned on each window.

On the other hand, we paid really close attention to the angle of the sun and where it hit the south wall in the winter and the summer, and put our glazing high enough to catch the winter sun and avoid most of the summer sun. Our 2.5-foot roof overhangs, also a key passive-solar feature, are integral to making this happen.

Regarding thermal mass: our external walls, with 18 inches of mortar and wood, supply a huge amount of ambient thermal mass. What we are missing is thermal mass specifically located to absorb and moderate the sun's rays. We can still add some in the future, but for now we have decided to forgo extra thermal mass in our internal walls and floors. (We had also decided against a concrete pad foundation, which is a feature of many passive-solar designs.)

Insulation: Our 18" walls contain an average of 8 inches of sawdust insulation. However the value of cordwood lies in the combination of insulation and thermal mass, even more so than in log homes. Nevertheless, I would guess that the insulation alone probably meets the standard for walls, even without considering the mass factor. Our ceiling has standard materials (batts and rigid foam) but at R35, is a somewhat lower R-value than the new super-efficient standards.

Energy-efficient windows: here's where we could have used a bit more education. We thought we had done well, and I was excited at the prospect of new, "Low-e" windows that reduce heat loss through the glass. However, we didn't realize that the windows that were sold to us as energy-efficient were actually "LoE-2" (the "2" is superscripted so you don't really notice it). LoE-2 windows, as it turns out, are manufactured and offered as the "standard" by the major window manufacturers as an attempt to meet the energy efficiency needs of all 50 states. In addition to reducing heat loss through the glass, they also limit solar heat gain by blocking passage of infrared and some ultraviolet rays---a feature helpful in hot-weather climates, but detrimental to a passive-solar design.

So, in the end, our house may end up functioning more as what Dan Chiras terms a "sun-tempered" design than a true passive-solar spacing-heating system. Even so, according to Chiras, a sun-tempered design can take care of 20 to 30 percent of the annual heating load. We'll report back after we've lived there for a while.

Cordwood Commentary

It's worth remembering some of the comments people have made about our cordwood house, while helping us build, seeing finished walls, or watching us work:

"This is . . . different . . . "
"This is awesome!"
"Looks awfully tedious." (our neighbor)
"Won't it shift?"
"Won't it heave?"
"How do you keep the bugs out?"
"How long will something like this last?"
"So . . . you're not going to sheetrock inside?"
"You guys are out of your minds!"
"Pretty zen."
"This is really laborious."
"This is crazy!"
"Looks awfully tedious." (our neighbor again)
"This is so cool!"
"I'm happy for you guys, but I'm not really diggin this cordwood thing."
"It's like a fortess!"
"Me, I like to throw up some plywood, some vinyl, and call it good."
"You'll be able to heat it with a candle."
"Looks awfully tedious.' (neighbor---still)
"When I look at that wall, I think of 101 Dalmatians."

And the best one: "I'd say it looks pretty Zombie-proof."

Tarp House starts to become Sunnywood

Because it's important for the lime-putty mortar not to cure too quickly, we had tarped each panel as it was completed, to protect it from sun wind. So as far as the neighbors could tell, despite all of our building efforts, we still had just a tarp house.

Today we removed the tarps from the panels that we had completed 30 or more days ago (time enough for initial curing): a total of 5 panels. Even though these earlier panels, as the "learning walls," incorporate all of everyone's mistakes, they are still awesome. I can't wait to live in this house.

10th panel is done!!!

As of 5:30 yesterday (Sunday, 9/20) eve. This panel took 16 batches and 3 days for Joe and me, with Heidi working with us for about half of that time. We had our first real frost Saturday night, so we'll have to wait and see if and how that affected the fresh mortar. All of the panels are now tarped and curing. Stay tuned for details and photos about mixing lime putty and mortar, setting window frames, using bottles and other decorative features, techniques for top work, comments people have made, and more.

Going for 10!

Okay, due to popular demand (i.e., both Joe and I think it's a good idea), we have completed panel 9 and begun #10! We have been very lucky to have Heidi back to help us. It took 19 batches and 4 and a half days for panel 9, but the big window frame took a lot more preparation and handling than the smaller frames (that will be another post: how 2 people lift and set these massive frames). Our plan is to be done with the 10th panel, if we push it, by the end of the day on Sunday. Or Monday.

We had a light frost in some spots last night, but covered the new work with tarp.

Trapped in cordwood

Our long silence does not mean that we've finally mortared ourselves into our walls! We're just in a building frenzy, trying to complete as much wall area as possible before the calendar puts an end to it. After that we'll update this blog with detail and process notes and photos.

We finished the 8th panel on Saturday the 12th. We could move in for the winter with 8 panels, as that would give us three "bays" closed in, if we install a temporary wall at the west end of the completed panels. But we made so much progress on the 9th panel yesterday (we're getting better at this, and faster*), that we are now considering the possibility of a 10th, which would give us 4 bays---all of our living area except the utility and project rooms.

See the rough floor plan below. The gray exterior border represents the 18" cordwood wall. The small black rectangles are posts; there are a total of 14 cordwood panels between the posts. We have completed the panels bracketed with red: three on the north, three on the south, and the two large east panels. As of yesterday, we had about a third of the cordwood done on the 9th panel (the next south-facing panel). If we complete another north panel, making 10, we can move our temporary wall west by an entire set of posts.

We've extended our "stop" date to the 19th, which is surely pushing it in terms of approaching frosts. What do you think: is it worth taking a chance that frost might affect the set of the lime mortar?



*Joe and I, working alone, mixed and laid up six batches of mortar, in addition to cleaning some logs and sifting some sand.

Working on panel 6!

Heidi, beginning the sixth panel:

Our post and beam, shed-roofed, 43' x 25' design has 14 infilled cordwood panels between the posts. The minimum number of filled panels we need to be able to live there during this winter is eight: this would give us the kitchen, bath, one bedroom, and a bit of living area. But we can only lay cordwood until about mid-September, because lime-putty mortar doesn't set up well in really hard frosts. So our goal has been 8 panels by mid-September. Looks pretty doable at this point (maybe we can fill 10 panels, which would give us more living area and the other bedroom!).
The following pictures show the fifth panel, which is actually the center panel of the three well-glazed south-facing living-room panels. This went fast because the window frame took up so much room.
Here are Isaac and Heather, completing the top of the center panel. Note Joe's homemade scaffolding:


Check out Isaac's under-the-window cordwood pattern!


Laying a bottle end:



Joe is sitting in the window well. 18-inch-thick walls make window frames with a lot of options! (You can see one particularly bright turquoise bottle end as well.)

What a crew of six can accomplish

TWELVE batches of lime-putty mortar. That's what Isaac, Heather, Joe, Ian, Heidi, and Holly mixed and laid up today.




Wha' da ya know? It's raining! Boy, we really needed that!!!



Isaac, Ian, and Joe built and set the front kitchen window frame while waiting inside behind the tarp for the monsoon to end.

Working around (or out of) the rain---and cordwood heros

You can see a bit of how Joe has rigged the tarps that cover the wall openings as awnings to work under in this season's never-ending rain (of course, the sun came out for these photos). Isaac and Heather are our cordwood heros! Before long, they'll be teaching us what to do.
This picture of how neatly the cordwood wall meets the ceiling/roof belies how difficult and time-consuming that piece of the work really is.

Life can sure change all in a moment

So . . . we've lived in our current house for almost exactly a decade: longer than either of us has lived anywhere else in our adult lives. It's where our youngest daughter spent her high school years, and where our youngest son has lived since he was nine. We had planned to try to sell it, when our cordwood house was nearly ready to move into. But life has a funny habit of not working out as planned. Our house has been---unexpectedly---sold, to the satisfaction of both seller and buyer. Now all we need is a place to live!

We had planned to start laying cordwood last spring. We worked on painting and repairs in our current house, so that when we were ready to sell it, it would be ready to sell. We enjoyed the activities of our youngest child's senior year in high school, and concentrated on college preparations for him.

We were ready to start laying cordwood. Then the rains hit. As I write, it has been raining pretty steadily, with few breaks, for about two months. No one around here has ever seen anything like it.

We have 14 panels to fill in with cordwood---although we could probably move in with just eight panels and a temporary wall. But we have to stop laying cordwood no later than mid-September, because the lime-putty mortar won't set up properly in a hard frost.

We have already been blessed by "help from the sky." Isaac and Heather have been awesome!!! Karen and Clive!!! Ian!!! However we are here to say that if any of our readers have the slightest interest in learning how to build with cordwood, NOW IS YOUR TIME!!! We stand ready and waiting to teach you everything you would ever want to know (as well as stuff you wouldn't). Come on out and experience the zen of cordwood . . .

Friends---and first complete panel

Friends Karen and Clive joined us for a day of cordwood, and were initiated into all of the mysteries. We have decided that they are the best new pointers of cordwood mortar EVER---even Jaki Roy of Earthwood would approve, I think! Their section of wall will stand out when the house is done, to be sure.

We also filled in the top of one of the two nearly complete panels, making our first complete panel! Fitting and filling in at the top is very time-consuming, and uses a LOT of mortar.

30 batches of mortar later

We had our two days of summer, and it's raining again. We have managed to make a bit of progress, though.

Laying cordwood at last

Rain be damned---we are laying cordwood! And very glad that we decided to build a timber frame with cordwood infilling, rather than building load-bearing cordwood, because we have a roof to work under. The folks in the Daycreek forum---particularly Bruce and Nancy---have been most helpful and we have achieved very good LPM (lime-putty mortar) mixes, with the help of some bagged dry sand. When the mix is good, you can feel it and hear it while you're mixing.

We are using 18" log ends, and following Rob Roy's suggestion, going with approximate MIM (mortar-insulation-mortar) widths of 5"---7.5"---5" (to leave a half inch for log-end relief when pointing).








The corners around the posts are kind of funky: we use 6" log ends on alternate courses. From the outside there is no difference: we just need to remember to leave room for insulation on the inside.

Splooty mortar, and the cordwood learning curve

You can read all you want about something---and trust me, we have---and you can try to learn from the example of others---we took Rob Roy's cordwood course---but nothing can prepare you for actually doing something, other than . . . DOING it.

We have opted to use lime-putty mortar rather than a Portland cement mix. It is time-tested (the Romans used it) and doesn't have the embodied energy of Portland (cement manufacture produces huge amounts of carbon dioxide). So last week we cracked open some of the 100 bags of Type S builders lime we'd purchased, and hydrated it to make a lime putty, using a recipe from New York cordwood builders extraordinaire Bruce and Nancy: 13.5 gallons of water, 3 50-lb bags of lime, and 1/2 cup of dish soap. This mixture is WORK to mix, even with a paddle mixer attached to a power drill. We covered the putty with a film of water and plastic, and let it sit for a bit more than the required 3 days.

Yesterday we tried our first mortar mix: 2 1/2 parts sand to one part lime putty. However, here in Maine we have had a freakishly wet spring---we had five inches of rain just between June 19 and 21, and it's been raining all month---and our sand, despite our best efforts, is pretty moist.

The resulting mortar was overly moist. Cordwood guru Rob Roy says that a ball of mortar, when tossed three feet in the air, should NOT go "sploot" when it lands. All I can say is that ours was pretty splooty.

We tried laying up our first bit of cordwood with our too-wet mortar, rolling up one of our tarp "walls," but the rain and wind began again as soon as the tarp was up. We were forced to give up after half a batch of mortar, which is probably just as well. We were in a hurry to lay our first cordwood after all of the preparation, and forgot everything we'd read about technique and "mortar, insulation, wood" cadence. Looks like we'll need to wait out the weather, settle down, and try again.

"Pretty splooty"

Everything but cordwood

While we haven't started on the cordwood walls yet, we have been busy getting everything in place so that we can. This has involved going to Houlton to research and buy our Bison hand water pump, taking delivery of and storing fifty 50-pound bags of hydrated lime for our lime putty mortar (once again our son Isaac has provided invaluable help), having a truckload of sand brought in, and trying to locate a supply of dry sawdust, which will be the insulation between the exterior and interior mortar joints in our cordwood wall (see photo of cordwood wall in progress from our Earthwood Building School workshop). How could we know that dry sawdust is dear as gold in this part of the state, prized by dairy farms as bedding?

We have also taken the time to plant some fruit and nut trees, as well as pine trees for wind breaks/privacy, spread hay and wood chips on the bare dirt of our much-loved berm, and lay down loam, cow manure, compost, and wood chips as the foundation for next year's vegetable garden. The truckload of cow manure was a mothers day gift from Molly and Ian: one of the best ever! (The gift that keeps on giving, as I said.) Actually Joe has been doing most of the hard labor, while I sit in my cell---whoops!, office---every day and think up annoying questions to ask and things to remind him of.

I take the liberty of sharing this recent Facebook post of Joe's:

"You work sixteen tons, and whaddaya get? Another day older, and deeper in debt. Saint Peter don't you call me, my life's too hard. I owe my soul to the credit card... Yup, Kyle and I hand shoveled 10 tons of loam, a ton of manure and five tons of mulch. Sixteen tons, and whaddaya get? A garden that's 750 square feet, compared to a house that's going to be only 660 square feet!!"

He's not kidding: we kept expanding our vegetable garden plot, worrying that it wasn't big enough, until we realized that it had exceeded the square footage of the non-shop portion of our house! It's all about priorities . . .

Foundation & drainage design passes winter/spring test!

Swale behind house drains to left/east


Swale designed to catch rain & roof runoff

Berm catches slope runoff on north (back) side

When we were planning the rubble trench foundation and the grading around the house, we were working with good, time-tested ideas (Frank Lloyd Wright and others), but many people were skeptical. One friend was concerned that we weren't tying our grade beams into the bedrock below. Another thought we should insert waterproofing between the grade beams and the crushed stone. Someone else was convinced that since parts of our rubble trench extend only a foot down---where it meets ledge---that our grade beams would heave (below-frost standard is four feet in Maine).

Me, I was concerned that the swale we designed to carry water around and away from the house wasn't deep or wide enough. It looks like a dent---not the ditch I expected. But the ground is graded gently toward the swale, which goes around the side and back of the house and then extends down to the site's natural drainage area.

The snow has melted and we have had our share of spring rains. We took the opportunity presented by the soft spring ground to fine-tune the grading. But it didn't need much: we are pleased to report that the swale scheme, combined with Nick-the-excavator's marvelous berm, worked. The berm, in addition to providing some protection on the north side of the house, stops/diverts water from the north slope before it can reach the house. The swale takes care of water that falls around the house. Our shed-style roof sheds most of the water behind the house, where the gentle swale channels it down the slope to the property's natural drainage.
We are very pleased---okay, pretty damned excited---to see it working so well.

The other design features that are working really well, drainage-wise, are the extended (2.5-foot) roof overhangs and the compacted gravel berm that our grade beams sit on. High and absolutely dry. No water, no frost, no heave, no trapped moisture.

Moving cordwood: don't underestimate the tortoise principle

Joe has been hauling the cordwood from the cutting site to the building site. Via rather small tote sleds, without the help of a snowmobile, horse, or even our Newfie. Why? Here is how our decision process went:

We want to begin the cordwood infilling as soon as possible in the spring. Cool, we thought; we'll order sand and lime and be ready to roll as soon as hard frosts have passed. We'll have to allow time to bring the wood over from the cutting site . . . which will mean driving the truck to the cutting areas where the wood is stacked . . . the access roads to which are not likely to be dry enough to drive over till June . . . aarrrgghhh, another flaw in the plan. Better to get the wood out now, while the ground is frozen and snow-covered.

Our first idea was to get the wood out with a borrowed snowmobile and tote sled. Sounded good, but not a viable option for the landowners, since our snowmobile tracks would very likely have had the effect of quickly incorporating their land into the ITS system and attracting every sled for miles around. We finally decided that we'd try the long slow route of hauling wood out with hand-pulled sleds, one small load at a time. When we made the decision, we figured that we might only get a third of the wood out before spring, but that would still give us a jump on building and Joe had some time this winter.

What we didn't expect was the progress that can be made with slow, steady effort. With a good pair of snowshoes, as well as some much-appreciated help from Isaac, Joe has already moved two-thirds of the cordwood from the cutting site to the building site five miles away---including setting up wood racks inside the Sunnywood frame---with a plastic sled, a homemade wooden sled, and an small pickup. This has been a lesson in the value of incremental but consistent expenditure of energy (and way cheaper than a membership at the gym). We have also learned that low-tech solutions can sometimes be very effective: having done this, Joe doesn't believe that using a snowmobile would have been any faster, or that much easier. It does help that the wood has already been drying for a year, so it is considerably lighter than the first time we handled it.
Loading sleds:


Working against gravity:


Working with gravity!:


To Sunnywood:


Inside to stay good and dry: