Woods and Water

This is the chronicle of building a house on a tidal river on the South Coast of Massachusetts, with digressions for family and friends, books and pictures, fish, boats, birds and decoys, and gardening. Jay MacLaughlin is a writer, editor, marketing strategist, and the author of Woods and Water.

[tidalriverhouse]

Reboot

After an unconscionably long silence, it’s time to start talking about our house again.

This deep winter slowed construction, but lately we’ve had a spate of work and face a flood of decisions.

The whole notion behind this blog was an examination of choices.At a site meeting tomorrow, we have to decide on lighting and electrical outlets in the barn, driven in part by where power tools go in the workshop. We have to approve the layout of the heating and air conditioning systems in the barn. We have to make decisions about interior and exterior plumbing—including sources of water for the garden and greenhouse.

We’ll be choosing among alternate surface finishes on the Alaskan Yellow Cedar that will be the exterior wall of the barn. We’ll be figuring out where to bury a propane tank. And we’ll be reviewing progress on the house framing.

The insistent hammerbangs in the video above mark the installation of a temporary stair smack in the middle of our living room to allow the framers to finish the second floor. (We haven’t made the choices of materials and design for the real stairway, so for now it’s sturdy dimensional lumber.)

Hammerbang is a crisp and vivid coinage that rings through my daughter Nina’s new book, Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter. Published by W. W. Norton last week, it is the record of her journey from journalism to carpentry. The book is a double portrait—of Nina’s boss and teacher and of Nina herself as she learns and grows in an improbable and ultimately astonishingly rewarding and seemingly inevitable career and life change. Nina will be doing readings at WORD in Brooklyn tomorrow and at Housing Works--sponsored by Tumblr!--in the city on Thursday. Come if you can.

More about Hammer Head and more about the choices that banging hammers are creating for us in coming installments, now on a better schedule.

[carpentrix]

My dad carves birds, wooden decoys, ducks and shorebirds. They stand on dowel legs on driftwood bases and their glass eyes look real. The birds he makes are beautiful.

He sent me off to India with a plastic bag with a block of cedar he’d bandsawed into a bird-ish shape, a wooden-handled exacto knife, about a dozen tiny blades, and some print-outs of pictures of sanderlings, those little birds on the beach that skitter up and down at the waves. I’ve never carved a decoy before, have never really watched him carve one.

Yesterday I littered the floor with curls of wood and mangled my way through trying to get this piece of cedar to look like a rounded bird body. So far, I am very bad at this, and was surprised how hard my brain had to work to trick itself into realizing that a lot needs to be cut away to bring out what needs to be brought out. (I can’t even make the words to describe it make sense!) It’s sculpting, not building. You’re not adding things to make a whole; you’re taking parts away. It’s the opposite of what I usually do with wood. And even though it’s a crude and jagged little sanderling I’ve got cooking here, it already feels like a friend.

[tidalriverhouse]

Homebuilding involves, inter alia, thinking about family far from home. Daughter Nina is using some Massachusetts cedar to carve a shorebird decoy in India. And doing it very well indeed. Press on.

[tidalriverhouse]

A Spot of Red by the River

Looking at the pictures I took for yesterday's post  of our well driller and his rig, I was struck by how quickly my eye was drawn to his red shirt in every image.

My late ex-step-sister-in-law (WASP consanguinity involves a lot of hyphens) had a Corot landscape over the dining room fireplace of her ancient sprawling farmhouse north of Boston. A rustic cowherd in the middle distance wore a warm red tunic, a bright inflection point amidst the greens and umbers of Corot's canvas and a hallmark of his style.

The adage from my days working in museums decades ago was that Camille Corot painted some 2,000 canvases in his lifetime, 5,000 of which are in North America. I have reason to believe Josie's was the real thing, something I can't say about the Corot Google grabs above, both of which are sketchy on attribution. The one thing they have, along with many Corot landscapes authentic and otherwise, is that spot of red.

We haven't entirely settled on a color scheme for the exteriors of the house and barn, but just now an accent of warm red would seem to do well in this landscape.

[tidalriverhouse]

Water

Woods and water: blog title and photo subject. At noon today at the edge of the woods west of the house site, our well driller hit a seam of water about 225 feet down. The flow was substantial--five gallons a minute. And based on his quick taste test, not salty. Which is good news in a well 250 feet from a tidal river and two miles from Buzzard's Bay.

It took a day and a half of drilling to hit the seam. From our current house a couple hundred yards away, I could barely hear the drill augering into the rocky sand. In an earlier house I owned, we sited and dug a well based on a dowser's advice. I remember the guy's forked stick doing a visible dip, and sure enough, that well was abundant and economically shallow to dig. This time, our engineer looked at the contours of the land relative to the house and barn and septic field sites and pointed to a spot uphill. "Drill there," he said. Whatever the magic, I'm glad to have our own sweet water supply.

[tidalriverhouse]

The Barn Foundation is Poured

The three barn foundation posts today should probably be read bottom up. Together they mark a week’s dramatic progress on the barn.

At noon, I got an e-mail from our builder saying that he’d handed off the new foundation drawings and that the concrete would be poured this afternoon. With mid-afternoon sun still lighting the tree tops, I walked over to the site to see what was happpening.

Two big cement trucks (concrete trucks, strictly speaking) were edging to and fro around the forms and directing their spouts with insect stinger-like precision right above the channels of the wood forms. The drivers controlled the flow with finesse, tapering off a section with no waste or overflow. A four-man crew shovelled the slurry along the channels to distribute the concrete evenly. In a matter of minutes, the steel rebar reinforcing rods were first floated, then submerged with shovels in the wet concrete. All this was done balletically by burly guys dancing on the parallel 2x4s around the rim, without a thought to their grace or economy of movement.

As I got ready to leave, the crew was going around checking the forms to make sure all was plumb. Their eyes and the right triangle of string in every corner (and evidently decades of experience) made the squaring seem simple, and what is more important to me, reassuring.

[tidalriverhouse]

The Barn Foundation

What a difference a day makes. The top two pictures were taken on Wednesday, October 8th. The woodpile helps orient you. This is the barn and garden site looking south and then east.

I couldn't get to the site last Thursday, when the Pontes Brothers excavation team dug out the trench for the barn foundation. By the time I got to the site on Friday the 10th, the base of the barn foundation had been poured.

Over the weekend, the concrete guys set up the wooden footings to pour the foundation walls. I had a quick final consult with our architect to adjust the placement of some barn doors yesterday, the architects finished the drawings in 90 minutes this morning, and by midday, the foundation walls were filling up.

That extra little rectangle on the south side of the barn is for a greenhouse. When the concrete guys asked me what that space was intended for and I told them a greenhouse, they all smiled and nodded knowingly at each other and back at me. "This is Massachusetts, not Colorado," I said in my most innocent voice.

[tidalriverhouse]

Real Work, Real Progress

On the morning of Tuesday, the 7th of October, this land was still wooded. That day, the trees were cut and chipped, and real work on the barn began.

This pan starts looking just south of east, then crosses the east-west running wall that is our property line, and swings from looking east toward the river over the barn and house site to the north.

The grader is leveling the area that will be given over to vegetable and cutting gardens and the barn. The excavator is shaving a natural ridge that will bound the driveway as it descends down toward the river and the house. We'll run that hillock of loam and gravel through a screener, condition it with lots of mulch and manure from local dairies and use it for the raised beds in the garden.

The speed, confidence, and dexterity with which these guys run this equipment continues to amaze and delight me.

[carpentrix]

Neat news! The American Booksellers Association chose HAMMER HEAD as one of ten books for their “Indies Introduce” list for the winter/spring season.

[tidalriverhouse]

Hammer Head, daughter Nina's first book, coming out next spring, has been picked by the American Booksellers Association as one of "a spectacular, can't-miss" ten debut adult titles that the ABA thinks will flly off independent booksellers' shelves and help readers "fall deeper in love with reading."

I will be busting-my-buttons proud to have the book she has written on my bookshelves and to have the bookshelves and furniture I'm hoping she will make as an important part of our new house.

[tidalriverhouse]

What’s a Barn?

We’re going to build two buildings on our land, a house and a…another building.

In the other building will be a one-car garage, a woodshop, a greenhouse, and work and storage space for gardening and garden tools—all on the first floor, and my office and a guest bedroom and bathroom on the second.

When I showed the head of the town’s conservation commission where the building would go, I pointed to a rectangle of stakes in the ground and said, “That’s where we’re putting the barn.”

“Whoa! A barn? What kind of animals will you have?” He was taken a little aback at what had suddenly become an agricultural enterprise on a home site.

“Animals?” I said. “No animals. Maybe a dog. Maybe a few chickens.”

That relieved him and nothing more was said. But I started questioning what I’d been calling this other building. “Outbuilding” sounds like a word in a zoning document. “Dependency” has a nice twee Jane Austen ring. “Office” and “garage” are insufficient for the other, more rugged uses. “Shop” or “Workshop” conjure up plaid-shirt wearing, pipe-smoking hobbyists—clearly unacceptable.

This place is going to be next to a big garden. It’s going to have rakes and shovels and buckets and axes, chainsaws and spading forks. And seeds and manure and peat moss and trowels. And maybe chickens. I say it’s a barn and I say the hell with it.

[tidalriverhouse]

Why We Live Here Redux

On Tuesday night, I went down to a neighbor's dock to fish. On the dock were  hollowed out shells and discarded legs and claws from a couple of blueclaw crabs--clearly a gull's meal. And proof there are crabs in our waters.

While fishing at mid-tide, I noticed live crabs in the water scuttling around the dock pilings. The next day, I stopped at the local tackle shop and bought a handline and long-handled dip net. The line had a nifty bait loop with a welded weight. I made a little wooden spool out of scrap lumber, cut up a chicken breast, and headed back down to the dock.

My memories of crabbing as a kid on Barnegat Bay involve essentially the same set-up. The only difference was the part of the chicken used for bait. My mom opted for chicken legs.

My mother had the rights of the matter. Hungry--and strong--crabs were able to yank the soft white meat off the hook with some regularity. Legs would have been better. But they were also greedy enough to hang on long enough for me to scoop up half a dozen in the span of half an hour. I'd made the wooden line handle five inches wide, the minimum length to keep a crab in Massachusetts, so as to measure my catch. One short went back, but the rest were legal, and all males based on the shape of the apron, a part of the undershell.

Steamed over a broth of vinegar, beer, and copious lashings of Old Bay, the crabs were the sweetest and freshest I've had since I was nine. No dip of Proust's madeline, but the dip of a crab net brought back a chapter of my boyhood.

[tidalriverhouse]

Passed!

How do you illustrate the vote of a municipal commission? We've learned that the Dartmouth Conservation Commission unanimously voted this week to approve our plan for the siting of our house, well, and septic system.

Our contractor is applying for building permits and tells us that we can begin digging a well, leaching field, and most important, the foundations of our house and barn as early as a week from Monday. 

We took some pains to play by the rules. We moved the house site back on the lot to make sure that not only the building, but also most of the hardscape--terraces and paths--were back of the town's mandated riverfront setbacks. That apparently carried the vote without comment or exception. A big regulatory milestone passed and now work on the actual structures can start. Instead of a gavel, picture hugs, fist pumps, and a raised glass or two.

[tidalriverhouse]

The Start of a Plan

An earlier post on here closed with this: "The question we keep returning to as designs evolve remains: how do you go from a bunch of words to a building, a house, a home?"

Last fall we started going from words to drawings. We'd written down our program. We knew we wanted a lot of river views. We wanted fireplaces. We wanted a cheery, informal, workable kitchen and commons as a gathering place. Guest bedrooms for family and friends. A snug library. Eight pages of wants--a first-world house for sure.

Our next step was a bubble diagram, another architectural term of art that, on reflection, is pretty much self-explanatory. Every big functional area or room is a "bubble." How do they fit together? What, in the words of our architect, are "the adjacencies?"

We were bold enough to take a stab at drawing a bubble diagram ourselves. The first pass up top had lots of rooms facing the river. A one-floor plan. No garage.

Rooms started moving around pretty quickly, and up and down as a second floor entered the discussion.

We quickly cobbled up an over-designed bubble diagram system with rooms color-coded by more public or private uses. And just to confuse you, in the upper picture, the house faces down to the river; in the bottom shot, the river side is up.

It was with a bunch of bubble diagram drawings and photos like these that we started the design process with our architects.

[tidalriverhouse]

Trash and Treasure IV

The near pile, with my fishing cap on it for scale, is oak. The far pile is white pine. This is the nicest wood our land has given us. We want to use it for outdoor benches, for a giant slab of a refectory table on the terrace or screened porch, for panelling in the library and our offices. As I've said before, I'm hoping to enlist the furniture making skills of my daughter, Carpentrix, in this enterprise of furniture from the land's own woods.

The business of using the raw materials from the site in permanent and visible ways in the house isn't just a kind of conservation. It's more a way of marking and celebrating the land's gifts and natural beauty with the rough stone and wood repurposed as a reminder of what we have temporary domain over.

A carved pine bluefish weathervane would be kind of cool too.

[tidalriverhouse]

Trash and Treasure III

Each of those logs is 12 feet long. Most are white oak. There are two lengths of a hickory tree in the pile that I mean to extract and mill up for lumber for some decorative use in the barn or house.

Our contractor tells us that we can use the oak for a modified post-and-beam frame for the barn we want to build. What was once unremarkable--clearing timber on your land and making a house and outbuildings with it--is sufficiently uncommon, at least within an hour of Boston and Providence, to make me want to nudge folks in the ribs, tell them what we're doing with the wood, and ask, "How cool is that?"

[tidalriverhouse]

Trash and Treasure II

South of the stumps are piles of wood and stone. Clearing the house site gave us valuable raw material as well as scrap. Right over the stump in the foreground is a pile of good-sized stone, raw material for the walls around our vegetable garden. The question of the day is whether the garden walls we build will be as good as the ones I carry around in my mind's eye just now.

[tidalriverhouse]

Trash and Treasure I

This orc's nest of tree stumps is 15 feet high. The visible oak stumps are each a couple feet in diameter. This is the dross from clearing our house site. Some of the stone will go for wall building. Some of the loam will be used as fill. The stumps will get carted away, I'm not sure where, and having written that, I'm reminded to find out.

[tidalriverhouse]

Finished and Sold

A week ago I finished painting the whimbrel decoy for the auction at the Dartmouth Natural Resources Trust Barn Dance last Saturday. I let the paint dry overnight and then rubbed it with a burlap sack to soften the paint edges. I stained the dowel a greenish-gray, roughly the color of a whimbrel's legs, and found a fine old piece of driftwood for the base. 

The last step, after this shot was taken, was a very thin wash of raw umber and turpentine slathered over the whole bird, then rubbed off with a rag. That final step has the effect of further softening the paint edges and giving the bird a little patina--a matte finish with the appearance of a bit of age.

By the time we got to the dance, the silent auction had begun and the bird had reached $150--my recommended price. (To get the action going, most items had suggested opening bids at about half the item's value. I'd pegged the decoy at $150: the minimum opening bid was $75.)

We left early, but I'm happy to report that the last bid I saw for the bird was $300, twice what I'd hoped it would fetch for the Trust. I'm delighted that it did so well, money for a good cause. I hope the new owners get as much pleasure out of having it as I did making it. I'll certainly carve another bird of some kind again next year.