Good weather!
A fine day to drive up and a) marvel again at the sight of a levitating house; and b) check out the Builder-Guy Progress in TWO areas.
The foundation guy has laid out the footing forms (awaiting inspection before they can pour concrete):
And the septic mound appeared out of nowhere, sometime last week (shown here being inspected by the neighbor’s chickens):
A diversion (while we’re waiting for the inspector)
Of course I’ve been collecting ideas and mental pictures for the re-do that’s going to happen inside the house. Colors, textures, materials, just like they say in the fancy decorating magazines. Here are a few of my inspirations/notions/lucky breaks:
Back in early September, we spent a few days on the North Shore, which has a most agreeable color-scheme at water’s edge. Amazing, complex combinations of blue-green-gold in the water, and the red-brown of the rock, stickered with lichens in an improbable range of pale blue to orange to piney green.
Then, just a couple weeks ago, a lucky find at the ReStore* in south Minneapolis — several boxes of handmade tiles with a beauteous creamy green glaze, enough for a backsplash. Bonus discovery was that it’s made by the North Prairie Tileworks, right here in St Paul.
*I’ve been haunting the ReStore as well as the ReUse Warehouse. Both have an ever-changing array of stuff a person will need when they’re remodeling/renovating/bricolaging a house. Some of it is salvage, some of it’s brand-new remnants from bigger projects (like the tile above). They have cabinets, flooring, plumbing fixtures, millwork, and tons more. I like the affordability and I like reincarnating stuff that is too good to throw away (p.s. as Bucky Fuller said, there is no ‘away’).
Speaking of locally sourced, what about the bur oak trees that had to be cut down to clear the space for my house? I felt guilty about having them taken down, but it turns out two of the three had a lot of decay inside, and didn’t have that much longer to stand. So my neighbor Lenny got a bunch of firewood, and two of the trunks were solid enough to produce huge logs.
By wild coincidence, the guy across the road (Ron) has a sawmill up in Wisconsin and he agreed to haul the logs up there, saw them into nice thick planks, and deliver them back (with help from his nephew). That all happened in summer of ‘22, and the boards have been stacked and drying since then. The bottom pic is what the wood looks like, bare and varnished. My Norwegian ancestors are rising from their graves, eager to fire up the workshop…
And I am pondering the pendulum that swings between bad timing/crummy weather and serendipity/lucky breaks. Learning that there’s a lot of both in a project of this size.
