All Buttoned Up

Johnny has been a busy little bee in the past few weeks, and I-- the trusty lackey-- assisted in a project or two. Major tasks completed:

House Wrap: I helped him install it and it is NOT as easy as wrapping a present. No matter what we did it seemed to drip and drop and we kept ending up with wrinkles. Thank goodness it lives under the siding.

Windows! Beautiful new Marvin windows. Marvin is a fantastic family-run company in Minnesota that not only makes a superb quality product, but does so with a no-layoff, no-healthcare-cuts policy even during difficult economic times (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/business/economy/housing-slump-forces-cuts-at-a-small-town-company.html). We respect a company that puts people before profits... and I'm in love with my windows!

A beautiful view from our workshop

Window and Doors installed

Garage Door: Due to budget constraints we couldn't go with the contemporary-look glass panel door I was hoping for, so we opted for a clean-looking flat panel. I don't know what I was thinking when I ordered obscure glass -- all the other glass is clear, clear, clear so I'm not actually going to be able to keep the paparazzi out. Foiled again!

ROOF!  I hefted approximately sixty 16-foot roof panels over my head up to John on the roof (though they are not heavy we had gusty wind so they were occasionally a bit unwieldy -- there was a time or two when I was spinning like a horizontal windmill!). In five short hours we were fully topped off. John spent the next couple of days doing all the detail work, and now we think it looks quite grand. It's a metal roof that is supposed to last something like 50 years so we should be able to make it through our golden years without attempting a similar project.

This guy dropped by to help for a day. I hope he was praying for us!!!!

Praying Mantis

Lone Oak No More!

Thanks to the incredible generosity of our friends Windsor and Sal, the Lone Oak now has a baby brother. May we introduce Sycamore Sam! Sal tended to Sam for many years in their San Francisco yard, but he just grew too big for the pot and they kindly thought of us when it came time for adoption.

He is going to be a big boy -- he could be well over 80 feet tall -- and with such a wide eventually root spread even on our 2+ acres it took a bit of time to find the best location for him (the septic mound kept getting in the way of several of our initial choices since you can't have roots any where near it). He found his forever home in the southwest quadrant, and will shade what we hope will someday be our guesthouse. We'll be able to see him from the main rooms of both the little house and the not-so-big house when they are built as well.

Right now it looks like he's living in maximum security -- his roots are surrounded by a gopher cage,  his trunk wrapped by a wire fence to protect him from the deer, and four strong poles with stretchy chords to keep him upright in the wind --  but in a year or two he should be standing all on his own. Long live Sam!

Fun with Time Lapse!

Our friend DoubleA not only spent his free time volunteering for the Truss Team, he also created this super time lapse video of the event. You can see their hours of sweat and toil in less than 60 seconds. Way cool. Thank you AA!

Truss Raising Party

If you invite enough friends, in four short hours you can have the framing for your roof!

The Faster You Run the Behinder You Get

The foreman has been harassing me about how long it's been between posts, and he is correct. Waaaay too long. I apologize. So here is what we've been up to for the past three weeks. Hold on to your hats... it's going to be a long ride!

Since John is doing the vast majority of the work himself without any assistance, he's invented his patented "Don't-Fall-Off-the-Slab Slab"

 And his patented "Too-Far Bar"

You can see that he had to make some adjustments to the Too-Far-Bar...
this early prototype wouldn't let him go far enough!

 You can see them in action in this video of the raising of the first wall!



After a few short days, he had all the walls framed. Pretty!

The crane arrived with the roof trusses. The crane operator, Mario, was a true artist... just a little tap here and there and voila... it all fell into place.


We then preyed on the goodness of some of our easy-going friends who had said "if you ever need anything" and "invited" them to a Truss Raising Party! Stay tuned for the fun, including a time lapse showing the progress of the trusses.

Fun with Pickup Sticks

Our first delivery of framing lumber arrived yesterday. Dumping the wood off of the truck reminded me a bit of a horse trying to shrug away a fly... just twitch a bit, then twitch some more. I somehow thought it would be a more high-tech operation, but I guess all the bits and pieces withstood the impact of the drop so why change the tried and true.


Johnny spent today prepping - building headers and laying out the puzzle. He developed a patented technique that he told me all about, but is too shy to re-state it for a video. I think if you heard it you would agree with me that it's pretty snazzy.

 And tomorrow we pound the golden stake!!!!!

Home Sweet Home... Now with Trailer Flavoring!

After a four-day marathon we have managed to (mostly) squeeze ourselves into our 300 square-foot travel trailer and have spent the last two night on our land! A gorgeous pink sundown christened our fist night and the crickets lulled us to sleep. New address: 123 Heaven.

Actually, we'll send our new contact info out shortly via email. Ping us if you don't get it in the next few days.

Big kudos to our friend Dan Riha who spent his day off helping us with all the heavy and awkward stuff (note to everyone else: don't ever say "I'm happy to help..." because Dan's aching muscles indicate that we WILL take you up on it... ;)

Being on the cutting edge of the Tiny House movement is going to be a challenge, especially since I work from home and we have an 80 pound dog. We're still dragging stuff out of our Santa Rosa apartment, and the trailer looks like the Clampetts have moved in with our detritus flowing out of the trailer and into the yard. Time will tell if the neighbors who have been so kind to us are still feeling friendly after they get an eyeful of our treasures.

Johnny's second building project... our sturdy new deck. The first project was a "supervisor shack" for Andy. I guess we know who rates around here.

Last Week on the "Lone Oak Project"...

Ok, so it was actually two weeks ago that we poured the concrete, but at least it hasn't been six months between blog posts. Small victory!

Here's a short video in which you can see them pouring the concrete, which requires at least one giant man to lug that hose around. For the concrete pour novice, you'll also notice a guy tapping the sides of the forms to reduce air pockets and holes, another guy using a stick to lift the metal frame/radiant tubing to place it in the middle of the slab, and yet another guy beginning to "screed" -- using a 2x4 to flatten the surface -- and smooth it out with a trowel.


We designed the house to make use of passive solar gain -- using the warmth of the sun to heat the house -- and the concrete is part of that plan. Not only is it the foundation, but it will also be the actual floor of the house, and the dark color will help to soak up that sun during the day and then release the heat into the house at night. I think in the end it will be worth the extra cost to have the integrated color added, though I have to say it looked much better wet than it does dry. We'll polish it up a bit and let you know what the final verdict is.


In addition to the heat of the sun, we are using in-floor radiant heat. And yes, the pex tubing survived the pour! Did you ever wonder what a radiant heat manifold looks like? No? Me either. But here is ours. It's pretty simple since the space we are heating is so small (840 sf), so it has only three segments. Hot water goes out through one port, flows through the tubing in the  floor and warming the concrete, and then the cold water returns back to the manifold to go back to the hot water tank and be warmed again.





Here's a video of the finished slab, which also shows the garage which is standard concrete color, so you can really see the difference. Since I was alone there is no family interpretive dance to christen the slab. Yes, I know how disappointed you are.

Rip Van Blogger back in action

Our Pool...er... eventual building pad for the Little House

Did you notice... things have been on hold here for a while...

The two short deluges from February stopped our building process in it's tracks. The first two feet of our top soil is sandy loam, but then there is a significant layer of clay, so the water just sat there. And sat there. And sat there. On the bright side, I temporarily had that pool I want!

The rain made the flora on the land pop, and that was about all the action we saw for a couple of months. Cue crickets chirping... literally....






Then last month things finally dried up and the fun began again! John brought water to the land with a well/pump/water tank, and we also have electricity, and a phone. 20th Century, Baby! 21st Century TBD.

Fast forward to June, and we now also have two foundations! We first poured the garage for the future Not-So-Big House. Everyone knows that you christen a new slab with an interpretive family dance. What? That's not a "thing?" Yeah, I'm pretty sure it is a thing. Even Andy got into the action.

Slab Dance on the Garage from Kerstin Sjoquist on Vimeo.


Next we worked on the foundation for the Little House. Though we had contractors do the forms and the actual concrete pour, John did all the rough-in for plumbing and electrical, and also laid the Pex tubing for the in-floor radiant heat. He had heard it was quite a chore to accomplish, but said it actually was a fairly straight-forward endeavor.

Tune in next time for a video of the foundation pour of the Little House. Will the Pex retain it's pressure, or will we have to dig up many tons of concrete and start again? Will the pricey integrated concrete color be worth the cost? Will we have yet another graceful slab dance? Stay tuned...

Week 1: Already over budget by 25%!

For some reason they won't give me the keys...

The title of this post is a wee bit facetious, but only a bit. Though we did our best to research costs prior to starting this project, there are just a lot of things we could only guess at. We knew we were in an expensive part of the country, but most of the bids we've gotten have been in the range of 100-400% more than we guessed they might be. Queue "belt-tightening."

Our grading contractor has been FANTASTIC and is willing to work with us on an hourly basis, which means we carry the risk if something crops up. Cropping began on day one when the soils engineer requested a much pricier building pad technique than had been anticipated. FUN! The good news is that the two days of work the grading crew has done so far on the driveway, basic scraping, and swale has clipped along at quite a good pace, so maybe we've made up for some of the extra cost of the pad work.

John digs in

Well, there is no turning back now! We're still planning to do as much of the work ourselves as possible, and thought it may be rice-and-beans for many dinners to come, if we're eating on our little plot of paradise, that is OK by us.

Permits R Us... let the deluge begin!

We finally received clearance for our grading permit, which ironically is one of the first permits you need to start a project, but the last we we were able to lock up (we were OK'd for subsequent permits, like the actual building permit months ago). YAY!

Thanks to us, the worst drought in recorded history and many months without a drop of rain were brought to an immediate halt. Within two days the storms began, and the prediction for this next bout is 10 inches of rain, flooding, etc. OK, so the drought is not even remotely over, but at least we played our part!

In between raindrops the engineers staked the lot so the graders will know where to put the driveway and building pads, and how much to "cut" and how much to "fill." I'm kind of amazed at how much variation in elevation there is in what to me seems like a big old flat field.

Today, in between storms, John and I hope to put some of the storm water mitigation into place. The county doesn't want our construction goo to run into our neighbor's plots or into the roadways so we have to do a bunch of things to contain the dirt and water. Today: Straw Waddles! Unfortunately, since I picked such a convenient time for my reconstructive surgery and can't lift more than 10lbs for the next month, John will have to do all the actual labor. Luckily, I am well versed in pointing, barking directions, and sounding like I know what I'm talking about so I'll be able to support John in this endeavor in the way only a wife can.

We hope to find ourselves in a beautiful house... how did we get here?

(with apologies to the Talking Heads for the hacked title)

You might be wondering what would possess us to A) build our own home, and B) build it from STRAW. Well, gather closely children... it all began many years ago in a land far away....

John and I were wandering through the desert outside of Taos, not quite lost, when we saw an apparition in the distance that literally had the brakes screeching and the car u-turning. There were several structures that looked something like this. What the heck????

At the edge of a driveway was a tiny sign: Earthship Biotechture Visitors Center.

Double whattheheck?

We stumbled into the compound, took a tour and were completely SMITTEN. We probably spent three hours there, ending with a video binge in their library.

First of all, they look like something Dr. Seuss would design in collaboration with Anoni Guadi while they were dreaming of Hobbits. Just Google "earthship images" and you'll see the amazing organic shapes -- swoops, curves, and vaults -- and the stunning play of light, especially when the builders use cast-off bottles in the walls.

Additionally, it was the first time we had heard of a completely self-sufficient building, off-the-grid building -- they often have a water collection system that makes use of grey and black water, and they use the thermal mass of the walls and the passive solar energy of the sun for heat; in fact they can be designed in such a way that you can even grow bananas in them! One of the most interesting aspects was that they are primarily built with a cast-off material that has no other use and is literally polluting the planet -- used care tires -- and they are intended to be built by the occupant. Being cheapy-cheap-cheapsters who prefer the DIY approach to paying someone else, our ears instantly pricked up. We bought all four "how to" books they had at the time.

For several years we toyed with the idea of buying some land a few hours from San Francisco and building a little get-away for ourselves, but we eventually lost our interest in the Eathship concept. With every year we got a little older, and the idea of literally spending years of our lives manually pounding dirt into the tires to create walls was more work than even our cheap (um, "frugal") selves wanted to tackle. But we continued to investigate green building technologies, especially those that were sympathetic to the owner-builder process, and eventually stumbled upon the strawbale concept.

Once again we were struck by the uniqueness of the architecture -- 2-foot thick walls, deep window seats, and "truth" windows -- as well as the warmth and camaraderie of the community of strawbuilding enthusiasts who approach it much like a neighborhood barn raising. John and I tentatively attended our first strawbuilding conference about 4 years ago, and though I know it will shock many of you, we are indeed a bit shy and not really "joiners." We were ready to bolt if they looked at us for two-seconds too long. Instead, they handed us a glass of wine and before the night was out we realized we had me our people. Visit http://www.strawbuilding.org to see more!

And now we own a pasture in Petaluma. Better get growing that straw...

Name option #2

So the search continues for the perfect name for our little slice o' heaven, and our friend Dennis suggests "Andy's Acres." John, who I think may be Andy's twin separated-at-birth, LOVES that name and has been lobbying heavily for its confirmation, but I'm holding out. I'm afraid that someday, 42 years from now, when Andy leaves us it will be too sad to see "Andy's Acres" on a sign when we pull up to our driveway. Meantime, Andy is leaving his mark (literally) all over the plot, so methinks they are "his" acres whether I like it or not!