Category: The house

The house’s internal systems are coming together fast. The wiring, plumbing, and heating/air conditioning ductwork are in the walls and inspected. Today, the insulation was put in. All of a sudden, the house is snug and warm. I couldn’t resist sitting by the fire for a while tonight.

The insulation inspection should happen tomorrow. On Thursday, the installation of the drywall should begin. The drywall will take five to six working days.

Above, the living room as seen from the radio room on the second floor. The radio room is a balcony and will have a railing.

Above, the radio room as seen from the upstairs bedroom. The upstairs bedroom will have an window open to the living room and will have a railing. That 2×4 is a temporary railing to keep workers from falling off the balcony.

New insulation around the gothic window

I’ve put my nerd instincts into coming up with the best security systems I can afford. Video cameras with infrared night vision, for example, watch all the doors and all sides of the house. I’ll also have motion detectors outdoors that will silently and wirelessly report any outdoor activity up to the radio room. I’ll have a panic button. My amateur radio antennas will be hidden in the attic. I’ll have battery backup for my computers and radios. Emergency communications is too important to be allowed to fail if the power goes out.

The Ditch Witch machine makes a ditch, and a mess.

I’m sure I’ve complained before that the part of the building process that bothers me most is the excavation and the muddy mess it leaves. I plant grass, and it gets trampled, or dug up. On Tuesday the plumbing crew laid the underground pipe and wire to connect the pump house to the house. The house now has water. (The plumbing fixtures aren’t installed yet, just the pipes.) They also connected the house to the septic tank. The good thing is that two important inputs and outputs for the house — water and septic — are now working. The bad thing is that I have a scar from a ditch upon which I need to plant grass and throw straw before the rain starts.

There was major progress today on the inspections front. The county’s chief inspector came out today, and I now have those beautiful green stickers for four required inspections: plumbing rough-in, heating and air conditioning rough-in, electrical rough-in, and final framing. That means I’m clear to start the insulation job. The insulation contractor will start Tuesday. Putting in the insulation may take only one day. Then I’ll move on to drywall, which will take about a week.

I installed a lot of audio wiring today to connect the organ console, which will be on the first floor, to the speakers and amplifiers, which will be on the second floor. The organ’s wiring will be neatly inside the walls. For audio nerds, I installed three types of wire — speaker wire (10 channels, including 2 channels to the stairwell for the choir organ), unbalanced preamplifier audio wire (coax, 4 channels), and balanced preamplifier audio wire (shielded parallel pair, Belden 1800F, 4 channels). Some work remains to install wiring for telephone, television, and the security cameras. The inspector didn’t seem too concerned about that, since that type of wiring doesn’t present safety issues.

If there are no hitches, I’ll be able to move into the house next month!

I’ll try these shots again at dusk with a bit of light inside the windows.

Though it was not part of the original plan, it became clear that it was necessary to shelter the back doors (they’re double doors) with a small porch roof. Water coming off the roof was falling too close to the door.

It’s just a short distance from the deck to the woods on the downhill side and back. On the uphill side the deck faces the orchard-to-be. When the back doors are open, the deck is irresistible. I’ve noticed that people walk into the house from the front door and are drawn straight to the deck. The deck is always visible through the glass doors, so it makes the house seem larger.

The one thing that’s incomplete in this photo is the roof over the small porch. Right now it’s just covered with tar paper. Green metal roofing is on the way.

The fireplace was lit up today. Home is where the fireplace is. It’s been almost 20 years since I’ve had a fireplace, so I find that very exciting, even though it burns gas and not wood. To not have a wood fireplace was a pretty easy decision, though. For one, I could not afford a brick chimney over 30 feet tall. For two, I’m getting too old to mess with firewood. And for three, I wanted a reasonably competent and reliable heat source in case of power failures. This fireplace is vented to the outside. That made it a bit more expensive and pesky to install, but there are advantages to the vented fireplaces, not the least of which is that it puts out a bigger, more wood-like flame. I’m going to love being able to flip a switch and have a fire.

The ductwork for the heating and air conditioning system is almost done.

The plumbing and electrical work also is almost done. If there are no hitches, I may even be able to start the insulation work in a week or so.

The railing and steps for the rear deck were added today. Tomorrow, we’re adding a roof out over the deck door. It will extend a bit more than three feet out over the deck. This is to shelter the deck door, which is a double door, and to keep water from the roof’s rear valley from falling on the deck too close to the house and door.

This work is being done, by the way, by a cousin who I had not seen in many, many years.

The electrician is coming along nicely. I’m still waiting for the plumbers and the heating and air conditioning people to start.

The empty breaker panel, waiting for wires and breakers

Work on the inside of the house has started, though the kind of work that’s happening now doesn’t make great photos. The electrician has started. The plumber and the heating and air conditioning people should start any day. The next stage is all about putting pipes and wires and ducts inside walls.

One of several fixtures for a recessed light

A light switch almost ready to be tested

The attic fan, waiting to be installed. When I picked this up at Lowe’s, the salesman said, “We don’t sell many of those. Most people don’t use them anymore.” That’s a pity, because attic fans can make a house completely comfortable when it’s only moderately hot, using far less energy than the air conditioning. I don’t think I’ll need to resort to air conditioning until the temperature is above 85 degrees, or if the humidity is unbearable. I love good ventilation. Stale, dead air drives me crazy. It’s also good for the house to keep the attic as cool as possible.

It may not be the finest example of rock paving in the history of humanity, but at least it’s possible now to get into the house without walking across mud. This is local stone, which came from a small quarry about eight miles away, just north of Hanging Rock State Park. The stone is set in “screenings,” which is just granite sand, really.

My helper

Granite sand, or “screenings”

The local quarry delivered three tons of rock. This much is left after the front walkway was finished. The remainder of the rock will be used to pave a path to the basement door and to the rear deck.

It’s a fairly large turnaround area, and it’s shaped like an amoeba, but one does have to have a place for visitors to park. I believe that was about 16 tons of gravel, maybe more. The next steps for this area: planting a meandering line of border shrubs along the boundary between the driveway and the grassy area, and laying rock for walkways into the house.

I need to take that wreath down, don’t I.

The gravel is moist inside the pile and is a darker color. It becomes light gray when exposed to the air.

Cold winter days (it was 38 degrees outside today) are perfect for hard labor outdoors. I got three of the four piles of gravel spread out for the parking and turn-around area at the end of the driveway. I used only a shovel, a wheelbarrow, and a rake. I paid off the biscuits and gravy I had for breakfast, I guess.

I’m inspired by the hard work of the first European settlers who came to this area over the old wagon road from Philadelphia. I’m reading a book on this, “The Great Wagon Road,” by Parke Rouse Jr., published in 1973. According to Rouse, the German settlers, particularly the Moravians, were more industrious than, say, the Scotch-Irish. It was Oct. 8, 1753, when the Pennsylvania Moravians sent 15 men down the wagon road to Bethabara to start the settlement there. Bethabara, by the way, is about 15 miles from me. Upon arriving in mid-November at the site chosen for Bethabara, Rouse says:

“In ten days they cleared three acres of densely forested land and cultivated it with a plow built by Brother Henrich Feldhausen. Within five months they were growing wheat, corn, potatoes, flax, cotton, tobacco, barley, rye, oats, millet, buckwheat, turnips, and pumpkins. In a fenced garden, to keep out rabbits and squirrels, they cultivated “salat” greens.

“Winter was confining, but in spring the Brothers visited neighbors to buy apple and peach trees, livestock, and poultry…. Except for a few items — glass, nails, salt, and coffee among them — they supplied all their own wants.”

Before long, Rouse says, settlers were traveling sixty miles to trade with the Moravians at Bethabara.

Hand tools aren’t as inefficient as we modern folk sometimes think they are. Consider the Blue Ridge Parkway. The fact that so much of the work was done with manual human labor prevented over-engineering and preserved an organic effect, with everything on a human scale.

I had imagined that I could build here without resorting to bulldozers, but I was wrong. A bulldozer removed the pine stumps, graded for the driveway, and did the final grading around the house. The man who did this work, though, was very sympathetic to my requests that he not disturb the ground any more than necessary. He’s an artist with a bulldozer.

So far I have two engines — the Jeep, and a weed eater than I haven’t used since I cleared a path through the woods in 2006. I probably will have to get a tiller, and a mower, but other than that I’m hoping hand tools will do.