It has been a cool and wet spring here but we have had a few hot days in the last several weeks and as soon as it gets in the 70s and sunny the house becomes an oven. (The south facing Passive House doesn’t do us any favors when it is hot.)
So Bob recently put up our external solar screens. This activity has become fairly routine and simple for him except for putting the highest ones up on the guest bedroom windows.
There is a lot less light in particularly our living room area but the trade off is worth it for the reduced temperature.
One of my hopes for the window seat area is that it would be a cozy spot for grandchildren to read and play. Especially for the little ones it has a nice proximity to the kitchen area as a secondary playroom/family room. Someday we will have more games and puzzles in the shelves too.
As soon as Naia arrived she started on her own to use the big cushion as a play area. Nile too had fun up there - since he wasn’t quite rolling yet he was safe with close supervision.
The first project for Bob after we returned from Santa Barbara last year was to create the built in window seat in the den area off the dining room, with shelves underneath. As with many things the fundamental design comes from the orange house. However in our case the window seat area is even deeper as that wall was framed in slightly the wrong place, and we firred out the interior wall to match the edge of the dining area.
My contribution was to get a big cushion and pillows or the window seat itself.
We have a family of foxes living somewhere close to our lower yard area right now. There are five kits and an adult who we presume is the mom. They are a pretty small - the adult is maybe a little larger than a cat and the kits look like bunny size.
We love seeing them, often in the late afternoon. They are pretty much camouflaged when they are on the rocky area, but we see them better when they venture out on the leach field as in this video.
I’d love to get a closer video but don’t want to scare them off.
I was astonished to look back at this blog just now and to see that I last posted almost exactly one year ago and that the was the ONLY post for the last eighteen months! We are hoping to embark soon-ish on actual hardscaping and landscaping so this seems like a good time to do a quick catch up before documenting the landscaping.
Fortunately before we left for California at the end of 2015 I took some photos of all the areas indoors which needed work to complete the inside of the house.
At this point almost all of those projects are done (thank you Bob!) and I can do a series of before and after posts in those areas, and add in a few highlights of the last year, to get us to where we are now
As an appetizer, here is a photo of the exterior taken several months ago. The snow hides the still rubble and rock strewn yard so it looks really great :-)
Bob is putting in the jamb/threshold for the window/door going out to the deck from the office. He is using bamboo to match the floors and also because we need a sturdy threshold as we will use that one a lot.
Note our soul-filling view of Kelly Cove this time of year.
Lat spring we got an invitation from Sandra Ruch and Jim Wolfe, our friends, neighbors and renters, to attend to opening reception for an art exhibit at the MDI Biological Laboratory. The annual exhibit, called ART MEETS SCIENCE, showcases art works related in some way to science or natural forms, and several of Jim’s works were to be on display.
We accepted with alacrity as it sounded interesting and fun, and since the labs are located on Mount Desert Island, one of our favorite places anywhere, we also planned to camp one night at the Blackwoods campground in Acadia Park.
LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT
There was a great deal of interesting art, both inside and outside the exhibit building which housed a library and some working labs, but we were both exceptionally drawn to one installation. Called Cell Split, it comprised about four dozen paper sculptures each of which was delicate and three dimensional. They were attached directly to several walls and the overall impression was very organic and beautiful. There was complexity in each piece but a different scale of complexity in the overall arrangement. Fascinating.
Many people were as taken as we were and there was some discussion in the halls about whether the pieces were for sale and what they might cost. I decided it was worth at least finding out the cost and spoke briefly to the curator who said that she wasn’t sure and would have to contact the artist. She also asked if we had a place to display such an artwork and I replied modestly "I have a perfect place!”
I did not think to take a photo when we were at the exhibit but these show a small part of the installation.
THE CHASE
When we returned from MDI I did some research on the artist of the piece. His name is Rogan Brown and he is British but lives in France. All his work is exquisite, though I think I like Cell Split the best fortunately.
After some email dancing involving me, Jim, the show’s curator and finally, Rogan I was able to find out how much the total installation cost. The price was not at all unreasonable especially when you consider the time which had to have gone into conceiving and creating the pieces so we decided to buy it. Getting the money from here to France was not as easy as I thought it would be. That’s not quite true - it’s easy to wire money - but the costs on both sides are ridiculous and I didn’t want to enrich the banks that way. I found another way and we became the owners of Cell Split at the beginning of September.
GESTATION
The exhibit was up until the end of September so we had at least a month before we could acquire the art work. In the meantime I was at work trying to mock up how to arrange it on our wall. I verified with Rogan that he does not specify that as he likes to collaborate with the installation’s owner. I definitely wanted that to be the case.
I found a photo on Rogan’s Facebook page of all the pieces packed and ready to send to Maine. From that I was able to isolate the main shapes and to use a graphics program to arrange and rearrange pieces on my computer. My final arrangement looked as below. We did not use exactly what is shown here, but this map was indispensable during installation.
While I was moving little pictures around, Bob got ready for the installation. We knew it was going to be a pain as we had decided to put the pieces on the wall above our living room which is visible from below and equally from the family room above. (This was the perfect place I had mentioned before.) The issue is that it takes a really big ladder to reach the whole area and bringing that ladder in and out is kind of a big deal.
In any case, Bob built a ‘pusher’ to use to press the individual pieces in place. We used double sided ‘glue dots’ as the adhesive. These are not permanent which is good if we want to move things, but bad if they don’t hold well.
INSTALLATION
We drove up to MDI to pick up the pieces in mid-October and we finally had Cell Split here. It was very very exciting.
First try - Bob was able to put up about half the pieces in his first session. We were stoked. However after staring at them I decided (and Bob agreed) that they were a bit too high so we needed to take them all down and put them back up. Second try - we did that. Third try - we had mostly followed my map, but there was a lot of individual placement as we went along. Even when we were all done with the second try I felt that there were a few pieces that simply had to move. It has basically been like hanging a picture, only hanging fifty little pictures, and each one needs to feel just right. *sigh* Bob has been really a good sport about this as he agrees we need to get it right.
Eventually we were done and we are totally thrilled with the outcome. It is hard to imagine what this wall looked like when it was bare.
CODA
Sadly the individual pieces have not all stayed up. The good news is that when they flutter down like snowflakes they always seem to land on a flat side, so they aren’t damaged. The bad news is that we have to go through the whole ladder routine to put them back up. We decided to wait until we thought they were stable before replacing those that had fallen. After a week we were feeling good and were getting ready to replace the fallers when last night another one fell. Damn. They are now all back in place.
There are four doors on the south side of our house. Two are off the front porch, one goes into the mudroom, the other is a slider off the so-called sunroom. There are also two door/windows (which do not have exterior handles). One of these enters into the living room area, the other into our master bedroom. The most frequent question about the house is about our ‘front door’ and it is one with no particularly good answer, especially given our orientation on our lot, which was almost totally dictated by requirements for solar access.
Someday I hope to have a nice way to walk down to the house from a parking area on Bluff Road. In good weather this could be used to access the front porch and potentially the living room ‘door’. But this is out of the question until next year. So we are left with how to get into the house from below at the end of our driveway.
The orange house (remember the orange house?) has a metal staircase which comes up from the carport, to the mudroom door and which continues to the upper deck for entry to the office space. This stair, however, do not access the slider off the sunroom. We didn’t need a separate entry to the office/family room, so we build a bigger upper deck, and a bigger front porch which accesses both the slider and the mudroom.
[NOTE: that picture of our house is from a previous winter.]
We had been accessing the porch and its doors from a ramp from the ‘front yard’ until Bob had to dismantle the ramp to build the retaining wall. It was also awkward to get to the ramp which was always intended to be temporary. At some point we decided that we could have a stairway come up into the front porch from the new slab below. This gives us a way to get from the driveway to the mudroom with some cover from the weather.
Hence, after the slabs were poured next to the garage, Bob’s exterior stairbuilding project commenced. Fortunately we have had really great weather for most of the time while this was going on.
First, he checked out out his stringer mock-up. Note the orientation. You have to walk back to the retaining wall to get to the bottom of the stairs, but at the top you are right at the mudroom door.
Then Bob cut out the porch where the stairs will come up, and put in the real stringers and treads. The stringers will be black - someday :-)
After Bob built temporary handrails and guardrails he and I put FlexDeck tiles on the porch to match what we have on the second story deck.
For some reason it was much more difficult to snap together the tiles than it was when we did the upstairs deck so this involved a lot more getting up and down and hammering them together. But it is done and we are very happy.
This is all functional now and my MahJongg peeps like it much better than coming up through the garage, cellar and ‘secret tunnel’ to get inside. Next year Bob will do the design details, namely slats to match what we have on the end of the porch and real handrails, plus painting stringers and posts black. It is going to be wonderful.
Bob’'s birthday was last week, his first in the new house. We were reminiscing about his last birthday in the Faux, on which our power came on after three days’ outage during freezing weather. At the time it was a great birthday gift, but not one we ever hope to repeat. In this house at least we have a wood stove which would be a godsend in that situation.
This year it has been very mild, in 50s or sometimes low 60s, a huge contrast. It is breezy and the leaves are fluttering down like snow. I will miss the beautiful leaves but we are seeing more and more ocean view which is a major compensation. This house is a joy in every season. (Well, one of us thinks so.)
It has been past time for us to do something with the exterior of the house, both for general esthetics and to eventually provide reasonable ingress to our front door, whatever that turns out to be.
We didn’t and don’t know exactly what the total plan will be, but we had decided that there were two things we know we want, and these both require some concrete. One is to level out the front yard in front of our living room area, which requires a more formal retaining wall than we had. The second thing is to put a slab under the bump out to make a carport and a space for some stairs to come up to the front porch (door access!)
We engaged a concrete person, Brandon Simmons, and started the process at the end of August. First Brandon’s friend TJ dug out our original retaining wall behind the carport area - this was basically a lot of huge boulders from the blasting process.
When TJ was done we had room for the retaining wall footings to be framed up.
After Brandon did the footing framing the concrete truck came for the first pour.
Here’s Bob helping out with the concrete - not one of his most favorite things.
Footings!
Then Brandon and Mike framed up the retaining wall, and we got the concrete truck again, and Rodney (who had done our original foundation and floors) was also involved with the second pour.
At this point we waited, and waited and waited for TJ to come back and prep for the slab pouring. He is incredibly busy. (The woes of us being a very small job.)
But after a several week hiatus TJ returned and got the carport ready for the slab.
TJ also smoothed out the dirt in the front yard back to the new retaining wall, though we do need more dirt there at some point.
Brandon formed up for the slabs(s) and they were done in two separate pours. The whole project was finished in mid-October.
I don’t have a photo of the carport in its finished pristine state, as it already has a lot of construction material in it for our next project. But that is another story, for a later blog post.
Chateau is totally all over Halloween this year! Sadly we don't get any trick-or-treaters at this house. I'd like to say that is because no-one knows where the front door is (including us) but really it's because all the local kids seem to go to one street in Belfast for Halloween.
I am beginning to feel stressed at how little I have written in the last several months. It is not that nothing is going on with the house - there has been near constant progress - mostly from Bob’s work. I realize that what happens when there is a somewhat longer project going on is that I decide to wait until it is finished before posting, and that is a mistake as it can takes weeks, or more. The final, final finish can really stretch it out, for instance our interior stairs hove been done for a while, but still need the treads sealed, and some touch up painting.
So I will be writing some longish posts, with photos, to catch up on our recent projects. After that I think I better just post progress photos instead of waiting for endings.
Speaking of endings I have reached a point where sometimes I wish we were done with the house, even though I enjoy the process of working on it. I’m not sure if Bob feels the same. Of course we have done enough major construction to know that by the time you do get done, it’s time to start maintenance work. It’s always something :-)
I realized when looking through photos today that I never posted a photo of the pantry door which Bob put in place over a month ago. It looks wonderful and it is a treat not to be seeing stored food all the time. At some point there will be open walnut shelves next to this slider to the left. These will have our dishes and should free up a lot of space in the pantry. The slider will slide behing the shelves when the door is open.
Fall is my favorite time of year, particularly in Maine. It has been slow in coming this year but the leaves are changing and the temperatures are dropping (though it IS 65 today.) This is our first fall in this house - we could see the spectacular views last year but of course we were not in the mostly finished space which is now our home. We are loving being here.
We still have a way to go before peak color.
Our favorite fall trees are the maples. There is one that is right over the property line that we can glimpse through a number of windows.
From the office:
From the kitchen:
It has been somewhat cool most nights, usually in the 40s, sometimes in the 30s. It seemed like the right time for Bob to remove the solar shades from the south facing windows.
I had gotten quite used to how dim the living room area was with the solar shades on, as they provide an essential function to keep it cool in the summer. Now it is really lovely with all the natural light, especially in the morning.
So far, even on cooler days we had not had to heat the house in any way. At most we have needed sweaters/layers. However we can tell that as the temperature drops more, and if the skies are cloudy, and certainly at night we will need to turn on the heat pump and eventually fire up the wood stove. One nice thing is that the media room, where we spend a lot of our evenings, seems to heat up just from two incandescent lights, and the TV. Very cozy.
(But, no, it is still not true that you can heat a whole passive house with a light bulb.)
Bob: It feels so nice in here, maybe we won't even need to have any wood fires this year.
Me: It is not always going to be in the 40's outside with the sun streaming in to keep us cozy. We will definitely need heat and fires before we leave in mid-December.
The daybed is finally done. It is such a relief - I will never try to make round bolster covers again. There is only one slight flaw, namely the fabric on one bolster is upside down relative to the other. Very subtle and no, I didn’t plan it that way. The little bolsters on the sides do look great however. (I got those on ETSY.)
