Examining our house plans

If you've been following us for long you know some months ago we were advised for a number of reasons to move our site about 100 feet uphill, so the original pictures of the site we staked do not show where we now are planning to build.

I don't want to post something else we will not use, but we are far enough along with our house plans to risk sharing them.

For those who just want a simple picture of the plans, here is a view from the front, southeast corner.This picture was produced with a program called SketchUp which is now a Google product. It is easy to use though it requires a short time to learn its many features.

For those readers who would like to understand the plans better you will want to use SketchUp so you can tilt and rotate the plans to see the house from various perspectives. Here is the link for the free SketchUp download http://sketchup.google.com/download/gsu.html.

Currently I am trying a free service called TeraDepot. To access the latest posted version of our plans, refer to the section in the left column near the top labeled "See our latest house plans". When you get to TeraDepot, select the "Free Download" option, enter the security code that will appear, and the file will download.

So, if you download and install SketchUp, and you download the latest version of the plans, you will be able to tilt and turn the 3D view around, hide parts of it to see other parts better (like hiding the outside walls, or the roof,) and even make changes to the plan for your own amusement.

The SketchUp "Tool" that will be most useful is called "Orbit." It appears in the tool bar at the top of the screen as two arrows sort of wrapped around each other, to the left of the "hand" icon. To turn parts of the plan off or on use the "Layers" feature found under the "Windows" pull-down menu.

I hope you take the time to try this out. SketchUp is a lot of fun, and once you install it you can use it for your own projects.

Send a note if you try and have problems along the way.

UPDATE: This post has been modified with new instructions for downloading the house plans. 9/8/09]

You lookin' at me?

Let's take a short walk or two

Here are my first tries at taking and uploading videos to YouTube. The first video is a short walk onto the property on the new driveway, from the recently repaved county road to the parking area and then up a short way to the house site. I need to learn to walk without bouncing the camera.

The second is one of many trails on the Greene View Springs property. This one runs from one of the parking areas on the driveway back to the start of the driveway. One of the growing piles of stripped trees can be seen along the way. Here's another:

I hope to use most of the trees we've had to remove. The larger ones might show up in the building's structure as posts or even beams. The others will make fences and wattles for gardening and excluding some of our critter friends. A few might even become parts of a carport planned for the end of the driveway.

Before, during and after

Our driveway is finished and we're real happy with it. Here are views before it was started, after it was graded and after the stone was placed.

Some of the smaller trees have been removed.
You can see the area that had to be filled in the sunlight.

The grading is done and a small swale is visible on the right - the uphill side.

The finished driveway.
At the very bottom right one can see the edge of the pond
dug to protect the road from hillside runoff.

Sandy's new kitchen

It doesn't look like much yet, but Sandy is standing approximately next to the future kitchen island. That's a rake in her hand, not a broom.

If you look carefully you can see the driveway that comes up to near the future front door, just to the left of her, and, behind her, another section of the driveway that ends at a parking area.

As soon as the last piece of earth-moving equipment (also visible through the trees behind Sandy) is gone I'll post pictures of the driveway.

The fields are alive

Here are just a few of the flowers on the property these days:

Butterfly Weed (Asclepias tuberosa)

Missouri Ironweed (Vernonia missurica)

There are many ironweed varieties. "Missouri" was selected due to the large number of flowers on the flower head.

Common Marsh-Pink (Sabatia angularis)

Hoary Mountain Mint (Pycnanthemum incanum)

UPDATE: My sister, the hortoculturist, found the name of this plant. The top few leaves on each stem appear to be spray painted white, same color as the flowers.

Baby nibbler

Look closely. This little guy hasn't eaten much, yet, although he might be the one who loves the gazania flowers


Taken from the second floor of the barn apartment.

Apparently we are not alone

I walked down to the house site last evening. Just off the path from the barn to the site I noticed something unusual. Who ever they are, they are very handy with wood.

Remember the frogs?

In late May I wrote about tree frogs but had no evidence then that they were breeding nearby. Last week, while Kira was painting the water trough we noticed the frog eggs were back.

They're not easy to see, but there are many of them floating with some sunflower seeds and a few drowned bugs. We also noticed some large tadpoles in the water so there must have been other eggs laid some time ago.

Speaking of frogs, we've been camping out the last few nights near the large pond. The frogs have been very noisy with at least three types of frogs heard almost all night long.

Two weeks of grandkids - week one

My grandkids who live in Germany visited last week. Kira is recently nine and Lucas will be seven in August. The week flew by quickly and we took them to meet their grandmother on Friday night.

While they were here they painted the side of the large trough. Sandy had primed it with a light blue background and here's Kira working on her design for the art work.

I took Lucas one day to the cave nearby. There was too much water in it for him to get down the hill, but he tried sliding down a fallen tree 'til he realized it was too steep.

I wish I had taken lots more pictures.

How we spent the Fourth

On June 29th, after an early morning meeting in Indianapolis to discuss our passive solar plans, we left for my sister's new home in Milford, Delaware. After approximately 13 hours we pulled into her driveway. She has gotten much of her belongings unpacked and placed in the house, including all the furniture for one of the guest bedrooms which we soon put to use.

On Tuesday and Wednesday Sandy and I helped around the place, I installing curtains and shades, and a few plants we took with us from Greene View Springs and Sandy with more unpacking and organizing.

Thursday morning found us on the road again heading for my son's place in Durham, North Carolina. Also there were his two kids, our grandkids, on a summer visit from Germany.

The next day we all drove to northern South Carolina for a rendezvous with my other son and his family, nine of us altogether. The motel we chose was a compromise to reduce the drive time for son 2. We spent Friday afternoon and evening together, mostly in the motel's pool. On the Fourth we drove to Myrtle Beach for a day in the surf and an evening trying to find the best fire works in the area.

Here's the happy group, except for me and Sandy who was seated across from me, at dinner at the Golden Corral.


Finally, on the fifth, Sandy and I headed home with the grandkids. We got back before midnight and took little time to get to sleep.

The Energy Fair

Leaving on Thursday, June 18, Sandy and I drove to the Midwest Renewable Energy Association's 20th annual Energy Fair. We left on Thursday because it's about a nine-hour trip and the first workshop started at 10 AM on Friday. Along the way, near Baraboo, Wisconsin, we stopped to visit the Aldo Leopold Legacy Center, a Platinum LEED certified building with lots of great ideas we were interested in examining. We got there a full 2 minutes! before the 4:30 closing time, but the staff was generous and allowed us to poke around inside and outside until about 5 PM.

Michael Beczkiewicz, an active member of the Southern Indiana Renewable Energy Network (SIREN) made arrangements for many of us to camp together at the MREA-owned campground near the fair site. In all, about 20 Bloomington-area folks were at the event and about half camped with us.

Each of the three days there were six one-hour workshop slots. And during each time slot there were at least a dozen different workshops from which to choose on topics like passive solar design, solar water heating, wind power, efficient home building, transportation, local food, and many, many more.

Most useful to us were workshops on earth-sheltered homes, window insulation, timber framing, alternative building options and others.

In addition to the 200-plus workshops there were more than a hundred booths with books, products and services where we picked up information on many things we hope to implement in the new home.

Here's a picture of the crowd waiting for the gate to open on Friday morning and a long shot of some of the dozens of tents for workshops and vendors.


This was one of the best run events I have ever attended and well worth the long drive.

Updates coming

Tonight I'm going to try to catch up on over a month of activities.

We have been to Wisconsin for a weekend energy fair and back to the east coast on a long trip to Delaware, North and South Carolina over the Fourth of July weekend. Our grandkids who now live in Germany visited us for nearly a week and the grandkids who live a lot closer are here for this week. Earth work for the driveway for our house was started today. All this and more in the next series of entries.