lifestyle shift

The frequent questions we're getting these days are about our indoor camping lifestyle. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, I thought I'd share how we currently feed and clean ourselves with a short photo essay.

The Pantry

The Cooktop

The Appliances

The "Sink"

the state of the house address

The last few weeks have been a whirlwind. The Boy Builder's Iron Chef birthday party (post to come) was October 29, we passed our 4-way inspection on November 2, we moved out of the condo we were renting and into our house on November 8, and the Boy Builder and I left for a trip to Mexico on November 9 and Troy started sleeping at our new house (post about our trip to come). All this was mixed in with work, which did not seem to let up in the meantime.

So, what I figure is in order is a brief update on the "state of the house," if you will. Because someday I hope to get all the details written up in blog posts, but it might be a while.

~ All the windows are installed (but not the glass in the greenhouse, although 3/4 of it is here at the house awaiting installation)
~ 99.5% of the exterior foam insulation is installed
~ One exterior door is filled in with a temporary operable door (thank you James!) and the remainder are blocked off with wood and/or foam
~ We have a very fancy, very engineered "panel" to control all the water and heat in our house that is fully installed and functional
~ The heat is turned on in our house!
~ All our plumbing is in the walls and has pressure tested appropriately
~ We have running water!
~ All our electrical circuits are installed, including fancy stuff like speaker wire for future speakers and ethernet cable for future ethernet connections
~ We have a functional photovoltaic solar system that is producing most of the power for our home
~ We have several light and outlet circuits functional, so that we have power and light!
~ All our kitchen appliances are in the house, although none are installed
~ We have one sink in the house, but it's not installed, so we're temporarily using a bucket that we periodically empty down a floor drain
~ We have a functional septic system
~ We have 4/5 of the corrugated steel roof installed
~ We have all the netting for the blown fiberglass insulation installed and 1/3 of the fiberglass blown in the walls
~ We have piles of drywall stacked all over the inside of the house waiting to get installed once the rest of that insulation is blown in
~ We've got a pile of lumber outside ready to be transformed into our deck, as well as some very custom steel support brackets for the catwalk leading out to the deck
~ We have a "good bit" of our rock work done on the outside of our basement
~ We have a huge pile of wood chips in our front yard

Home, 28 November 2010

Oh, and we've also got a few feet of snow in the front yard, because, theoretically, that's why we live here. :)

karma?

We've been clearing out the old to make room for the inspector to do his work (and for us to move in!). In the process, I've got piles of useable stuff that I don't need anymore, but someone else might be able to use.

So, I've been embracing the concept of freecycling, a practice that fits my personality and my values perfectly. In Salt Lake City, as in many other places in the country, we have an official freecycling chapter, but I actually find it to be a bit of a hassle, so I instead use a free classified ad service through a local media outlet (KSL) for all my freecycling needs.

Tonight I posted an ad for a bunch of surplus and it was picked up and in someone else's truck within 45 minutes of my posting the ad! Yowza!

It makes me happy. I get to rid myself of excess junk. Someone else will (hopefully) get to use it. I usually make a temporary friend. And, maybe, if the Hindus are right, I get some good karma coming my way, which I can always use. And, even if the Hindus are wrong, I still get to feel like I'm "spreading the love" of all the fab deals I've had come my way in this building process. I feels good all the way around.

To my way of thinking, this type of freecycling is critical to keep our landfills leaner and make self-build projects attainable. So, we're doing our part.

happy transformation

For the last few months at our building site, we've had a big pile out front that looks like this:

Scrap un-burnable lumber 4-and-a-half feet tall. We had a dilemma because we didn't want to put it in the dump, recycling it was proving to be super challenging, and our main solution of getting it chipped up into mulch for our yard was not working out because the truck we were planning to use got repossessed by the bank! Ugh!

On Friday, my knight in shining armor showed up at the house across the street in the form of this truck:

They were willing to head over to our house and throw that gigantic pile of scrap lumber into their chipper and turn it into this!

You can't possibly imagine how happy this pile makes me. It means 3 things:

1. I don't have to send a huge pile of useable material to the landfill.
2. I don't have a huge pile of unsightly garbage in my front yard anymore.
3. I will have lots of luscious compost in the near future after we add nitrogen and mix it up.

For those who are likely to be curious, we did a lot of research about the glues in OSB and plywood and their potential for compost. The glues used quickly biodegrade into non-toxic compost once the wood is chipped up, as they are based on formaldehydes, naturally occurring organic compounds that are involved in metabolic chain reactions. We left out the pressure-treated lumber scraps, as the chemicals they are treated with are toxic and are designed to prevent biodegradation.

Yay for compost!

plumbing

I've been spending the morning tracking down remaining parts for moving water around my house and realized I haven't posted about plumbing.

We have water moving around our house for lots of different reasons.

:: There is the radiant tubing in the floors

:: Radiant tubing in the walls

:: Tubing taking water to and from our solar thermal panels under the photovoltaic panels on our main roof

:: Tubing taking water to and from the solar wall behind our metal siding on the south side of the tower

:: Stainless steel tubing taking water to and from the large solar thermal panel that will be installed on our deck roof

:: Tubing connecting all our fire sprinklers

:: Hot and cold tubing going to all our appliances like sinks, toilets, bathtub, shower, laundry, kitchen, etc.

:: And of course the drain plumbing away from all those appliances

:: There's also some hot water drain return to make sure we have on-demand hot water whenever we need it and drain heat recovery lines somewhere mixed in there as well.

All this plumbing is connected at some point with the riser bringing fresh water into the house from our neighborhood spring.

Hot water is stored and distributed through the 2 stratified solar tanks and 1 regular hot water heater in the mechanical room

And all the water moving around between all these different components comes through the radiant panel in the mechanical room

The picture doesn't quite do it justice, but it's a beautiful art installation piece, this radiant panel.

All this has been going on with help from numerous hands over the last couple of months. I can't wait until we can flush the toilet and wash our hands in the sink!

&hearts &hearts &hearts

fire

Sometimes our version of homeschooling takes unconventional turns. The last few months, the Boy Builder has been learning about fire. Learning how to make it, what the components are that keep it going, how to be safe around it. It's all part of the process.

He's putting his new masonry skills (learning from the Girl Who Rocks Utah) to work and building fire rings and then practicing his fire building skills. He's getting it down.

Today, Eden brought ingredients up to the building site for cooking on his fire. Pre-cooked sausages for roasting on sticks and marshmallows for s'mores.

Yum!