The house – Page 4 – Into the Woods

Digital Kinkade?

A friend sent me this altered photograph today. He took a copy of a photo on this blog, then applied digital effects to the photo using tools at BeFunky.com. I guess I’m getting ever closer to making Acorn Abbey look like a Thomas Kinkade painting, as long as some digital effects are applied.

The wildflower patches and day lilies will be blooming soon. Then I can take photos with much more color.

Yes, I’m aware that sophisticated artsy types look down on Thomas Kinkade. But I’m not ashamed to say that I like his cottage paintings. They evoke a simpler, more innocent, more rural, more self-reliant time. And what could be wrong with that?

A Thomas Kinkade painting

As though it was here all along…

It’s pretty pretentious to give your house a name. But what the heck. The name suits the place. And I’m guilty of worse than pretense. I’m also guilty of magical thinking. I often have the impression that Acorn Abbey existed in some form before I built it. It wanted to be built. It demanded to be built. I’m just the poor fool who had to do the work, and pay for it all.

Not only that, it’s still in a state of becoming. After the building, there remained backbreaking work to be done to make it lush and covered with exuberant growth. I’m too old for most of that work, so Acorn Abbey ensnared poor Ken to toil and till and plant. This is only year three. Many more years of planting and growth will be needed to make the place look the way it wants to look — so covered with growth and tangle that it seems that the woods are about to take it back, a little spot of human habitat wedged in against the habitat of a thousand other kinds of things: green things, feathered things, furry things.

The sign is new. Ken and I put it up today. The sign was made on a very cool computer-driven machine in Mayodan. You set up the sign in the computer, and a computer-controlled machine does the engraving. The font, by the way, is one of my favorites, among the most monkish of fonts — Goudy Old Style.

…For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.—And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth…

— From Tintern Abbey, by William Wordsworth

Porch lizards, in flagrante delicto

I don’t know what species they are. I just call them porch lizards, because for some reason there are gazillions of them on my deck and porches. This morning I caught two of them in flagrante delicto, making yet more porch lizards for me to catch someday in flagrante delicto, and so on, ad infinitum.

Update: A reader, Randy from Matthews, North Carolina, writes with an identification on the porch lizards: “Your porch lizards are called Five Lined Skinks (Eumeces fasciatus). Sometimes their tails are brilliant, metallic blue.”

Indeed, yes, sometimes their tails are an astonishing metallic blue.

The garden path

Ken finished a project yesterday that had been needed for a long time. He made a garden path from the side porch to the garden gate, using stones from a local quarry and granite sand as the base.

Ken kept an eye on the baby chickens while he worked.

Not that they had any interest in running away.

The hens, always nosy, want to know what this highway is that’s appeared at their back door.

Can you espy the baby chicken?

Microsoft Hohm and energy consumption

In June 2009, using analytics software licensed from Lawrence Berkeley National Labs and statistical data from the Department of Energy, Microsoft launched a web site permitting homeowners to enter data about their homes and energy use and compare their energy use to that of other homes. The web site is www.microsoft-hohm.com.

Microsoft launched this web site the very month I first turned on the lights at Acorn Abbey, so each month since June 2009 I’ve entered data from my electric bill. The web site stores this data, graphs it, and analyzes it in interesting ways.

Acorn Abbey, I’m happy to report, is energy efficient. It rates a 91 on energy efficiency, on a scale of 100. The national average for energy efficiency is 61. In my Zip Code, the average is 57. The average in the wastrel, free-market utopia of Texas is 51!

In dollars, here is how it looks. Acorn Abbey has an electric heat pump for both heating and cooling. All appliances including the water heater are electric. (In densely populated areas where piped gas is available, some gas appliances are more efficient, but that’s not an option here in the sticks.) The overhead insulation exceeds the building code requirements. My annual electric bill comes to $979, compared with $2,228 in my Zip Code for houses of the same size built around the same time.

So my electric costs are 43 percent of what others in this area spend for similar houses. Or, to express it another way, people around here with similar houses use two and a quarter times more electricity than Acorn Abbey does.

I stay warm in the winter and cool in the summer. I use the heck out of the kitchen. I take showers with pure hot water (my water heater is set pretty low). My Macintosh stays on all the time. In other words, I live comfortably. How in the world do others manage to use so much electricity? I don’t see how it can be anything other than waste.

After 17 years in California, where the cost of electricity is much higher than it is here in North Carolina, I became accustomed to being frugal with electricity. When I returned to North Carolina in 2008, I was stunned at how promiscuous local people are in their use of electricity. When something is too cheap, people waste it. And I’d better not even get started about the horrors of the McMansions and new suburbs that are going to be with us for a long time, squandering energy, ugly in every way.

The nuclear catastrophes in Japan have renewed the national conversation about the wisdom of building new nuclear power plants. But the thing that is almost never discussed is that we wouldn’t need so many power plants if people didn’t waste so much electricity. Most Americans still blindly live as though they’re entitled to endless consumption and endless waste.

Microsoft Hohm makes two suggestions for making Acorn Abbey more energy efficient. Its data includes the percentage of my light bulbs that are compact fluorescent vs. incandescent. It wants me to install all fluorescent lighting. I will, eventually. All my frequently used lights are compact fluorescent, but I’ve not yet spent the money to change out my seldom-used lights. I’m also hoping that the cost of LED lighting will come down.

The other step Microsoft Hohm suggests is caulking around my windows and doors to control air leaks. They’re exactly right about that. Last fall, I had a plague of lady bugs and stink bugs getting into the house looking for a warm place to spend the winter. They could have come in only around the windows and doors. Before next winter, I must do some serious caulking. In retrospect, caulking would have been a much better investment than the heavy curtains I bought for the windows. And it would have kept the stink bugs out.

Some winter angles on the abbey

While I was out with the camera today, I took some photos of the abbey from angles from which the abbey is visible only in winter, when the leaves are down.

It’s not an easy job to build a photogenic house, but it sure is fun to live in one.

The pile of debris is left from the pine-clearing almost three years ago. Ken is putting it into piles to make rabbit habitat. We call this area the rabbit patch. If you startle a rabbit eating clover in the yard, the rabbit patch is where it runs to. It’s also near here where we’ve seen baby rabbits in early summer.

Black and white

Antiqued duotone

Darkened and spookified

Solar gain

The front door and hallway around 8:30 a.m.

Building a house will make you crazy. But one of the advantages of new construction is the greater energy efficiency of current building codes. Stokes County’s insulation requirements, for whatever reasons, are stricter than surrounding counties. For example, the amount of ceiling insulation required will not fit between the joists, so 2×4’s must be nailed on top of each ceiling joist to create a deeper channel for insulation. Building codes and inspections are a source of anxiety during construction, but after a house is finished and you get that coveted certificate of occupancy, building codes are a source of security.

I confess that the plan for the house at Acorn Abbey was selected more for its style and features than any practical considerations such as heatability. Still, at only 1,250 square feet, I’m not heating a barn. The house’s south-facing orientation, by pure luck, turned out to be perfect to get maximum solar gain in the winter and minimum solar gain in the summer. In the winter, when the sun is low in the south, the sunlight pours into the south-facing, east-facing, and west-facing windows. In the summer, when the sun is overhead, very little direct sunlight comes in those windows (except the west-facing windows, where I installed shades), and the sun heats mostly the attic.

Last winter, I did not have any draperies downstairs. Even though my windows exceed the building code requirements for efficiency, still any window is going to lose more heat than a wall. In particular, I could feel cold air around the north-facing double doors leading to the rear deck. I made a point of investing in heavy draperies before another winter. The four big windows in the living room now have heavy velvet drapes. Two of those windows face north. I bought thermal curtains to cover the double door to the deck. Curtains for the upstairs gothic windows are going to have to wait another year. The ceiling is high in that room, and the windows almost reach the ceiling, so heavy 12-foot-long draperies (9 feet wide) will be required — expensive and beyond my budget for now.

I don’t have any way to quantify the increased efficiency of the drapes, but my subjective impression is that they help quite a lot. For the past four or five days, we’ve had daytime highs in the upper 60s and nighttime lows of around 39. During weather like this, the heating system never runs, day or night. Daytime solar gain brings the upstairs temperature to about 73, downstairs to about 72. At night, with the draperies all closed, the upstairs temperature drops to about 66, and the downstairs temperature drops to about 65. Cooking breakfast raises the downstairs temperature to 66 or 67. The house then warms gradually during the day as the sun pours in. A ceiling fan in the upstairs bedroom, the room which receives the biggest dose of sunlight through the gothic windows, helps to push some of the warm air downstairs.

If I ever built another house (and I won’t), I think that, as part of the planning, I’d study the solar potential of each window and its orientation. There are online tools (which know the elevation of the sun above the horizon at any time of year) that will help you do this. Acorn Abbey is not a solar home, but every little bit helps. I like to ask people what their heating costs are, and so far no one I’ve asked has had lower heating costs than I have. Every time the heat pump comes on, I cringe a bit not only because energy is being used, but also because I’m adding to the wear and tear on my heat pump, which I want to last for a long, long time.

The eastern side of the living room

The downstairs bedroom, through the bay window

The lower stairs

The upper stairs. The spot of sunlight on the right is coming through the front dormer, which faces south and is not visible in this photo.

The upstairs bedroom. All the photos were taken about 8:30 a.m. on Nov. 11.

Carolina morning

From the road

Recently a reader asked for more pictures of the grounds of Acorn Abbey. I admit that I’m stingy with such photos. This is because it will be years before the abbey looks the way I want it to look — overgrown and blooming. Ken and I have planted a lot of stuff this summer, but it’s never enough. And, once planted, a few years of patience is required to see the result. But seeing as how the abbey grounds are pretty green right now with the generous amount of rain we’ve had in the past week, I went out and took some pictures this morning.

You can see the tops of the garden fence uphill from the abbey.

The downhill side

From the top of the garden, looking down

From behind the house looking toward the opposite ridge

From across the road

The chickens’ view

Looking into the garden fence, toward what I hope to call an orchard someday

Baby figs on a baby fig tree. You also can see a newly planted peach tree and newly planted grapevines.

Mornin’, girls…

Abelia under the bay window. Can you espy the bug? Abelia is a member of the honeysuckle family.

Hydrangea under the back porch

Grass grows under Ken Ilgunas’ famous van, parked for the summer.

From the upstairs abbey window

Bat houses

I finally got my bat houses put up yesterday. There were carpenters here to work on making Acorn Abbey more waterproof, and while they were here I asked them to use their ladder to put up the bat houses. I bought the bat houses from the Organization for Bat Conservation. The bat houses are at the edge of the woods behind the house, above the new fire pit.

I do have bats here. They can be seen any evening at dusk, dive-bombing for insects. I’ve learned that I don’t even have to go outdoors to watch them. If at dusk I stand upstairs in front of the gothic windows and turn on the outdoor floodlights, soon the bats will come, chasing the bugs drawn by the lights (there are two big floodlights mounted under the eaves on each corner of the house). Sometimes the bats will dive-bomb straight for the windows. This gives an effect that is both gothic and a bit techie. It reminds me of the scenes in Star Wars in which the evil emperor sits in his big chair facing a big window looking out on a space battle, with the fighter craft swarming. The bats’ dives sometimes come quite close to the gothic windows, then they make steep turns to avoid the windows. You can see the underbellies of the bats.

The carpenters, actually, were my nephew, Russ, and his helper. They caulked around all the windows, installed metal flashing at the bottom of each window to deflect the water that runs down to the window sill, installed metal flashing around all the eaves to keep runoff from the roof from hitting the wood facia, and installed a large attic vent so that when I turn on my attic fan there’s enough vent space for the exhaust to escape. Though I do use air conditioning at Acorn Abbey, I also tried to build the house so that it’s livable without air conditioning. If I open north-facing downstairs windows and turn on the attic fan, strong breezes from the cool side of the house pour in. The fan is huge and has the capacity to change all the air in the house every few minutes. The fan is mounted in the living room ceiling, 21 feet up from the floor.

This summer at Acorn Abbey…

David and Ken use a rented machine to drill post-holes for the garden fence. The trailer is gone now, by the way. I sold it the same afternoon this photo was taken. The trailer was my home while Acorn Abbey was under construction.

Now that the house is built, much outdoor work remains to be done. The first priority is a deer fence. There is an overpopulation of white-tail deer here, and they can destroy a garden overnight. There also is a great deal of planting and landscaping work to be done. I was despairing of how all this work would get done, so that my vision for Acorn Abbey can continue to unfold. Much of this work — especially the fence-building — requires two people. It’s hard work, and I am not a young’un anymore. It would be possible to pay someone to do this work, but that wouldn’t be frugal, would it, if alternatives can be found?

The alternative turns out to be Ken Ilgunas. Ken, you may recall, visited Acorn Abbey during the winter. Part scholar and part adventurer, Ken was looking for a frugal summer situation that combined peace and quiet for reading with old-fashioned outdoor physical labor. Am I lucky or what? As I mentioned when Ken first visited Acorn Abbey, he has become quite a celebrity after he wrote a piece in Salon Magazine about how he lives in his van while attending graduate school at Duke University. Here’s a link to the Salon article. Many media outlets picked up Ken’s story and interviewed him. Here’s a link to an ABC News video. A literary agent recruited Ken, and they’re working on a book proposal about Ken’s experience living in the van while going to Duke. Ken brought 50 books for summer reading from the Duke library.

On Monday, we picked three gallons of strawberries at Mabe’s Berry Farm and put up 17 pints of strawberry preserves. Photos of the preserve-making will follow soon. We also started building the garden fence. It’s an ambitious fence project. The fence is to be 365 feet long and almost 8 feet high. It will surround the garden area, the chicken house, and my small orchard of 11 trees. After several dawn-to-dusk workdays, the fence posts are all planted. Next week we’ll work on the wire. I’m planning to save the fence-building photos and post them all at once, hoping that our fence-building experience and methods may be useful to someone else who needs to build a deer fence.

I’m exhausted from a week of hard work (though Ken doesn’t seem to be). I’ve declared that we’re going to take the weekend off from hard labor outdoors.

Ken caps strawberries.