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.