I was talking to one of the banks on Thursday and they kept thinking I wanted to build a commercial building and they’d be happy to loan me the money at 8.5% variable ! If I wanted to build a house, I would qualify for 6.25% and could get a 15y fixed.
So, I said I’d [...]

The saga continues …
They have now filled in nearly all of my little pond. They needed to make the ramp and add all of the rock to get more equipment in to clear a blockage. What I don’t know is if the rocks get removed. I think they intend to leave them there and [...]

I was on the phone this morning with family down in Virginia. We were all commenting that it’s ben a strange winter and we still see grass here in Northern Massachusetts. Well, the phone conversation wasn’t even over when the snow kicked up and it looked like it could get heavy.

It turned out to [...]

The source for my post’s title is a book by Sarah Susanka. I am in the midst of designing a new home. At the same time, I am watching all of these “dream homes”, “home improvements”, “this old house”, “rezoned”, etc. shows of TV. The TV shows keep showing bigger and bigger homes - [...]

Timing is everything I guess. I am traveling again and this time I booked into a Dolce facility. There is one in Armonk, NY that I absolutely love. The rooms are very European - at least that’s how I describe them. They are not what the Europeans would serve to an American. They are a [...]

The farm construction project has lots of details. Most of them represent unfamiliar territory to me.
From the very start, I intended to employ a heatpump system. I knew a little about them from years ago but knew they were difficulty to complete in the Northeastern USA. They work well for air conditioning but getting heat [...]

5 days and counting …
Two weeks ago I trucked enough of my belongings and furniture to the Eastern Shore to be comfortable for the next year or so.
A week ago I had a dumpster delivered and started to sift through “everything else”.
Monday the movers arrived and packed what was left plus my entire workshop.
Tuesday the [...]

A year ago, nearly exactly, I took a road trip to Chicago to pick up a project. It would be my first real adventure working with metal rather than wood. Well, that turned out to be a lot of fun and a reasonable success. So, I’ve decided to do another project using steel. This [...]

“What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?” was a common retort to any comment that seamed unrelated to the discussion at hand. So, today the topic is “steel” which is definitely not a “steal”. About 18 months ago, I got an estimate on the shell for my building [...]

Zen and I headed down to the farm to mark the building site and to check out the wheat crop. It took the better part of 2 hours to find the right alignment of the building and stake the corners square and true. This is one of the cases where you don’t have [...]

Things are finally moving with my next big project. Today I made a number of the exterior construction decisions. In addition to windows, doors, vents, etc. - aka everything that cuts a whole in the shell, I selected colors.
I made a somewhat bold decision and went with a “light over dark”. The roof [...]

I could not have predicted the near perfect weather that graced the Easter Shore and the Chesapeake Bay. Some family came to visit me as was the case for a lot of people here on the shore. I did have some “work” to do in between the rays of sun, warm breezes, the tide’s [...]

I’ve been trialing a number of 3D architecture visualization tools. I won’t attempt a software review because, to be honest, I dislike all of the packages I’ve used. They are any combination of too buggy, difficult to use, impossible to correct certain mistakes, too slow, too limited, etc. With that said, I will say they [...]

Warning: boring home owner / builder post !
While there are no pictures to show the magnitude of the realization, the fact remains that the magic number is indeed 44. Worse case it might have been 22 and we all hoped for at least 36.
So what does all of this mean ? It means the transient [...]

Building a new home from scratch and not buying in a development means everything is up for discussion. The result is literally thousands of decisions. It is daunting. From room size and wall locations to “what color do you want to paint the bathroom”, “do you want a gas or electric cooktop?” and even [...]

I have been doing a lot of reading about lighting for the farmhouse project. I assumed (i.e. believed) all that I’ve read about LED lights and their efficiency. Based on the general messages you hear on the news and read in articles, an LED light is much better than CFL (compact florescent) which is much [...]

For the farmhouse project, I will be building the kitchen. One of the big tasks will be building the cabinets. I learned my lesson from my last kitchen and will have few if any base cabinet doors and shelves. Instead, I will have drawers - lots of drawers.
There are some very nice high-end hardware for [...]