We did it!

After five long years, we moved into our beautiful home on July 7.  In some ways I cannot believe we are finally living, sleeping and eating here, but in other ways it seems like we were always here.  It must be the tremendous number of hours we devoted to hand building this place.

There are so many people to thank for helping us accomplish this project:

• My sister, Laura, for designing such a sweet, not-so-big, but perfectly delightful house;
• Benjamin and Company Timber Frames for designing our frame and providing us with excellent plans.
• All of the folks on the island who allowed us to come onto their property and cut down trees to turn into lumber; 
• Bill McGuinness and Cory Duggan for helping to pour the footing;
• The whole crew who showed up to help us pour the foundation walls;
• Bentley Howard for helping us with our sawmill and teaching Jason the basics to get us started;
• To the whole entire town for showing up to raise the frame; 
• Cory Duggan and Jacob Bach Jensen for helping to cut the frame; 
• Jim Amuso, Cory Duggan, Gary Gould and Bruce Fernald for heroically lifting those roof truces into place(!);
• Jim Amuso and Steve Krasnow for helping to roof the place; 
• To the countless people who showed up over the course of two summers to stuff the walls with straw-clay infill insulation and plaster the walls with clay plaster; 
• Jim Amuso for helping in the final days to get it ready to move in; 
• To my mother-in-law, Joan, for always being here when we needed her help, no matter what it was we needed help with; 
• To my parents, Jeff and Lucy, for the moral support, the extra hands cleaning up and (of course) the plumbing; 
• To Eric Dyer for our chimney;
• And to the dozen or so people who showed up to help us move.

We are so fortunate to have been blessed with this downpour of support, love and belief over the last five years.  We truly could not have done this without you all.  Thank you.

Closer, bit by bit...

What's New?

So much is new!  Since that last time I posted in October (October?!--Yikes!) many new things have happened.  Biggest and best of all, we welcomed a new little person to our family. 

She is keeping us busy!

And on the house front, so much has happened, too. 

This is what the house is looking like from the outside right now:

On the inside, a couple of big things are new: we now have base cabinets and plumbing. Yes!  Running water and everything!  We could even take a very cold shower at the new house!  It is beginning to look more and more like a house!

What is next?  Jason is working on installing the radiant heat in the kitchen, master bedroom and bathroom.

Chimney

Today our house is one step closer to being oh so toasty warm this winter.  After a marathon of work Saturday, Sunday and today, we have a chimney! 

We are so blessed to have great friends.  Throughout this entire four-year process our friends have shown up to help us out over and over again.  This weekend was no exception.  This time our friend Eric came all the way from Portland to lead the way in building the chimney. 

Eric and Jason worked their guts out building the chimney for two and a half days, well into the night both Saturday and Sunday nights.

Now, just a few days after beginning, we have a complete chimney!  Here it is on the first floor. 

This is looking in through the thimble to the flue.  

Here it is coming up through the second floor. 

And here is what it looks like outside. 

What do you think?  Pretty nice, huh?

 Eric, thank you so much for coming all this way to help us with this project.  We definitely could not have done it without you. 

Plastering on the Inside

Plaster, plaster, plaster!

Plaster

After weeks and weeks of prep work, we are finally plastering.  The good news is this process is a whole lot faster than the straw-clay work, so we should make great progress over the next couple of weeks!