Solarium Progress Report

Things are cruising right along on the solarium/greenhouse rebuild.  Oh boy!  It is sooo satisfying and exciting to see it finally coming together.

All the old rotted wood and broken glass has been removed.

The framing is all rebuilt and stained.

The ceiling panels of glass are up and in place.

The long wall of glass is up.

Yup.  Progress feels good.

Decisions

OK, the big news....

Steve and I have finally (after more than two years) decided what to do with the solarium!  I know, I know... it takes us forever to do just about anything.  It's our process, our way.  And it works for us.

A little history for those of you who are just becoming acquainted.  On January 6, 2009 (the night before my birthday and 3 days before Cedar was having another major surgery) a windstorm blew down a very large Douglas Fir tree onto our house.  We are very lucky.  The kids and I were in the living room when it came down.  Had the tree fallen even slightly to the left, it would have smashed strait through my bedroom and the living room.  Instead, thank goodness, it went through the solarium.

The blue tarp is covering the worst of the damage.

I'm actually not sure if "solarium" is the right word for what we have (had).  Could maybe also be called an atrium or attached greenhouse.... you get the idea.  I wish that I had a picture from before the tree fell so that you could get the design concept.

For the last two years we have made NO progress on fixing it because we could not decide what to do with the space.  For a while, the plan was to enlarge the footprint and turn it into a family room with a bedroom off to the side.  The extra bedroom would be great since there are the four of us in our little two bedroom house.  It all seemed well and good and like a great idea, but we just could not agree on the layout.  Plus, there was all the hassle of property lines, permits, concrete trucks, blah, blah, blah....

A couple of weeks ago a friend of ours who is an architect/contractor came out to look at the site and give us some feedback.  His suggestion: just fix it and recreate what we had but nicer.  Ding!  A lightbulb went off in both our heads!  It's the first suggestion or idea that immediately felt good to both of us.  Success!  We finally have a plan!

The reason we planned to change the use of space was that the solarium was not very functional, even before the tree smashed it to bits.  There was no heat, uninsulated glass, and it is heavily shaded (keeping it very cool most of the time).  Plus the doors going between the solarium and the kitchen/dining room are interior doors, making it more of a drafty heat sink for the house rather than something useful.  However, that is all about to change....

We are going to replace all of the glass with insulated low-E glass and we're going put our old, tiny Vermont Castings wood stove in the corner so it can finally be kept heated.  We are even considering putting radiant heat in the floor, but we'll see.  We haven't priced that out yet.  Along the stem wall on the exterior side, cold frames will line the building providing a great space for starting seeds in the spring and protecting and further insulating the otherwise crummy concrete stem wall.  All of the trees that currently shade the room are scragly things that are growing far too close to the house anyway, so we are making plans to take them down (plus they are just the right species and size for plugging with mushrooms!).

Once completed, the room will not only function well as a comfy place to be, but will also offer a great space to start and grow plants, and will finally provide heat to both the kitchen/dining area and Sequoia's bedroom (which currently lack any heat source).  I have a vision of setting up a spinning wheel next to the wood stove in the winter and being able to spin away while the fire crackles and the rain patters on the glass above my head.  Dreamy.  Not to mention visions of Solviva dancing through my head.

Oh... I am so excited!  Now that we have a plan and I can see it all in my mind's eye, I feel so impatient.  I can't wait!

The glass arrived today.  It is stacked up against the house just waiting to be put to use, tempting me like an oasis in the desert (a desert of grey skies and rain, that is...).  Now we just need some dry days to be able to start construction.  Unfortunately, the weather forecast is calling for rain as far into the foreseeable future as we can venture.  But, I've waited 28 months.  I can probably wait a few more weeks.

I've been working on many design sketches for the final layout and I plan to post them once completed.  I hope to convey the usefulness and efficiency of the space in the designs.  So, keep your eyes peeled for those to appear soon.  Oh boy!  It's so incredibly exciting!

Wow, that's a lot of stuff...

Anyone who walked into our house right now would think we were moving.  There is stuff everywhere.  We spent all weekend pulling everything out of the attic and beginning the process of sorting through it all.  What a job!

There's stuff all down the stairs, piles across the living room floor, heaps filling my bedroom, and stacks in each of the kids' rooms.  Boy, did we open a can of worms!  While the work is tedious, it's also been fun rediscovering things we haven't seen in a long time.

I found an old knitting book my grandma gave to my mom and me back in 1987.  It was published in 1971!  Tucked inside the jacket, I found the note she sent along with the book and a sheet of bird stamps she thought I might like.  It's funny, I don't remember collecting bird stamps, but apparently I did!  It was a sweet find that I am very happy to now have at my fingertips since I can't stop knitting these days.

The kids discovered a box full of Garbage Pail Kids cards from Steve's childhood.  Those things are so friggen gross, but the kids loved them.  They spent at least two hours looking through and sorting them all, laughing hysterically the whole time.  Listening to them made me chuckle!

Next, they found Steve's old comic books and Mad Magazines.  Even more hours of entertainment!

I also got to dig out and sort through my entire fabric stash.  Our house is rather funny, and while it has a couple of big rooms, those rooms make up most of the house and there aren't a lot of individual little spaces.  Simply put, there are four of us living in a two bedroom house creatively.  Anyway... this has made it so that I don't really have any space to use as a crafting or office area.  My dresser serves as my office and bins in the attic serve as sewing/crafting storage.  Needless to say, this does not lend well to productivity.  But I'm working on it!  Pulling everything out of the attic was a great first step!  It was so fun!  I have so much great fabric that I have collected over the years that I totally forgot about.  I can't wait to start getting productive with it!

Among the exciting, happy finds, there were a few sad ones as well.  As some of you know, one thing I really enjoy is making costumes.  I have made a few really fun ones over the years, my favorite being a dragon I made for Cedar when he was about 3 years old.  It got many years of good use before going into a box in the attic awaiting a new friend.  Unfortunately, mice found it first.  A box of beautiful fabrics that I brought home from my time in Kenya had the same fate.  Most of the fabric was salvageable, but a couple were goners.  Oh well... good lessons in letting go.

Jellyfish - one of the costumes that survived the attic!

And letting go we are!  It feels so good to be getting stuff out of this house!  I love purging.  Just let it go and get it gone....

The weekend's motivation sponsored by Elysian Jasmine IPA and The Clifford Ball - WARNING: impromptu dance parties may ensue.

Spring cleaning

Steve is taking next week off from work so that we can tackle some spring cleaning.  We plan to finally deal with loads and loads of stuff that were never dealt with when we moved into this house in a hurry nearly six years ago.

We bought the house in the heat of the market boom and the sellers were in a rush to close and move on as quickly as possible because they were trying to close on another house that was contingent on the sale of this house.  Anyway... long story short, our home purchase went freakishly fast.  We closed less than a month after we saw it for the first time.  Needless to say, buying a house isn't a cheap thing, so we needed to get out of our rental asap.  And, we moved in even more of a super hurry because Steve was scheduled to leave country for a while.  So... in less than a month's time, we found, inspected, negotiated, bought and closed on a house, packed up everything we owned, moved it to the new house only to discover the former owners left all the stuff they didn't want behind, and unloaded all our stuff anyway because, woosh!, Steve left the next day for China.  To say that it was a whirlwind, would be a massive understatement.  And to say that we have been way too busy to really deal with the fallout ever since would also be putting it mildly.

So, here we find ourselves, back at the point of this post.  Today begins what we hope to be the biggest, deepest, most ruthless and dispelling spring cleaning ever.  Out with all the stuff the previous owners left behind!  Out with all the stuff we never had time to sort through!  Out with all the things we never touch or use!  Yes!  It'll be a whole new world around here.

In the midst of the cleanse, we also hope to get some outside projects worked on.  Haul, split and stack more firewood.  More sheet mulching.  Some spring sowing.  But, when the weather forecast looks like this:

it's rather hard to feel motivated for outside tasks.  Ugh! We got one clear day this past week for the first time in over two weeks.  This, ladies and gentlemen, is why I am always looking at land in other places.

But, hopefully this weather will keep us focused on the task at hand - Spring Cleanse 2011!  So, bring on the music, the coffee, and the satisfaction of a job well done!

Oh, the floor

   Well, the kitchen floor was installed in just one day!  Fantastic!

   However....

   There were some installation flaws that occurred, so the guys are coming back on Monday to rip up about half the floor and re-install it.

   None-the-less, the floor is beautiful!  And it is so much fun to have the room completely empty.  We are fantasizing about how to put it back together, totally differently than it was before.

   Not to mention the sheer joy of sliding as fast as we can across the floor in slippery socks and seeing how many bouncy balls can be kept in motion at once.

   I'll post more photos when it's all put back together (in some wonderful new way!).

Kitchen floor, Baby!

   That's right!  Our kitchen floor is being installed as I type this!  Finally!  The years of ripping my socks and stubbing my toes on broken tiles and sub-flooring are over.  I can't wait to slide my bare feet across a smooth floor.  To be able to mop without shredding the mop-head.  Oh baby, it's going to be pure bliss....
   Part of what took us so long is that we were hoping to be able to install radiant in the kitchen/dining room floor, since there is no heat in that part of the house.  But, that would require an entire kitchen remodel because it would raise the floor ~4", which in turn would lower the counters ~4".  So... if we didn't want the counters down around our knees, we would have needed to install new cabinets/counters.  Needless to say, it was all too expensive.  But, we kept holding out for it.  We finally decided enough is enough!  We instead concluded that when we rebuild the room that was formerly our solarium (before the tree smashed through it!) we will put the woodstove down there which will be lower than the kitchen and, therefore, heat the kitchen.  So, no need for the radiant.  At least not right away.  Maybe someday....
   Rather than the expensive radiant with tile and a whole kitchen remodel, we went with easy, less-expensive marmoleum.  Tile would, of course, be our first choice.  But, with no heat on a slab foundation, it would have been way too cold.  Wood would have been an easy second choice, but since there is already SO much wood in our house, we looked again for alternatives.  Next, we decided on cork.  Then we found that cork fades over time when exposed to sunlight.  Well, only half the room gets sunlight ever, so we would have ended up with a two-toned floor.  Not so appealing.  Then we started playing around with marmoleum.  We brought home lots of different color swatches and laid them all over the place.  We had the dog practice walking on them, dropped all manner of objects on them, spilled things on them, danced on them, put them to the test....  So, marmoleum it is!  We opted for a click-together floating floor.  It is backed on the underside with cork which is nice and insulating, and no adhesives are used to lay the floor, so no off-gassing!
   Like I said, marmoleum would not have been my first choice.  But, I can't tell you how excited I am about it.  I think we'll love it.  I can't wait to post photos of the final product.

Fall Cleaning

   We have spent the last couple of days cleaning up the property.  The inspiration: the last of the leaves have fallen from the big leaf maple that towers over our house and yard.  Now that the leaves are all on the ground (and not still streaming down) we can actually rake 'em all up and not have it look as though we did nothing 20 minutes later!  Gosh, that feels good!  So, what started as simple raking and hauling, turned into a full blown clean-up.

   Ever since the tree fell on our house nearly two years ago, we've not kept up with the patio/yard area so much.  I'm not sure why.  Maybe it's the impending construction on the destroyed part of the house.  Or maybe it's the indecisive feeling that looms over that area since we are still trying to figure out just how we wish to rebuild.  Or maybe it's that we have focused our energy on the gardens instead.  Or maybe it's just that we have been so incredibly busy, it hasn't been a priority....

   Whatever the reason, the neglect finally came to close (or at least a brief interlude) this weekend.  And it felt darn good to give that area a good solid dose of attention and care.  The leaves are all raked and hauled to their winter resting places (mmm, yummy compost for next year's veggies!), the grass is mowed, the garden tools/stakes/trellises/pots/etc put up in the garden shed, the grill accouterments tucked away for the winter, toys sorted and stowed, gardens mulched and put to bed, kindling split and stacked on the porch, and happy chickens with lots of fresh warm bedding.

   I know that likely sounds like a strange mix of things to be covered in one area, but the part of our property that's not forest is not very big and it was one BIG tree that fell.  It covered a lot of ground and affected a lot of things.  For those permies reading this, that tree fell through zones 0-3.  Geeze!

   Another added productivity bonus: Steve finished tearing up the kitchen floor!  YES!!!  Yet another project years in the making.  So, now all the flooring is out and all we have to do is stay on task and get the new floor down!  I cannot wait, I mean really can't wait, to have a finished kitchen floor.  It very well might be the highlight of 2010 - if it actually happens in 2010.  Here's hoping!