Archiving Sunnywood blog—and announcing "The Maine Smallholder"

As I sit here early on a January afternoon, the winter sun is streaming through our south-facing windows, just as we intended. The high louver windows above the sliders work just as we'd planned: they catch the low winter sun from late October into early February, but exclude direct light the rest of the season, and vent heat in the summer. The NON-low-e sliding glass door has proven to be the perfect place for winter seedlings. And our cedar ceilings do something we hadn't expected: they reflect a golden glow, making the name "Sunnywood" as appropriate to the inside of the house as the outside.

Sunnywood inside and out!

Since finishing the cordwood exterior of Sunnywood in September, we have been working on the interior (and building farm outbuildings), and have come to realize that something we have often heard from owner-builders is true: the inside of the house is never finished. And while in our case we have still been constructing fairly integral elements, such as walls and ceilings, it is clear that installation of flooring, behind-stove masonry, a hot water system, bookshelves, trim, etc., etc. could go on for many years. In which case this blog would start to become a kind of home remodeler's blog. So I've decided to keep this site as pretty much an archive for other would-be mortar stuffers searching the Web for cordwood building information, and start a new site about our mixed farming enterprise at Sunnywood farm: The Maine Smallholder.

So thanks for following our cordwood building journey, for rooting for us, and especially for helping us when we needed it. Please come join us for the next stage!

A little bit of cordwood; a lot of farm

We are finally laying up cordwood for the first time this summer. We still need to fill in the four panels that surround the fifth "bay" of the house's timber frame structure. However our decision to create a farm where there was none---when Sunnywood the cordwood house project became Sunnywood the fully diversified farmstead project---means that the demands of the farm keep getting in the way.