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!

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!

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.

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.