Today was a wonderful day for Underhill House. Marcia Nelson arrived with the stained glass windows for the bathroom wall. It’s been a long journey. Following our Small is Beautiful motif, the bathroom is small, and its wall is small. We wanted some high, narrow windows in the wall to […]
Now that we are living in Underhill House, we love watching the ducks, geese and other migrating birds that take a break in our little pond, but it’s obvious that the feeling is not mutual. That’s why we are planting a hedge between the house and the pond. The plants […]
Underhill House is built on a site that was wooded when we first saw it. The southern-facing slope was covered with oaks on the upper part and a little patch of planted pine trees below them down to the pond. The oaks have fallen victim to oak wilt, which is […]
Last Sunday we woke to a clearing sky. We drank our morning tea in the sunshine while rechecking the weather report. We had expected Sunday to be the first of a string of rainy days, but the rain was postponed. This was a chance we had not expected to get. […]
The past few weeks, Doug and I have been working on clearing a lane from our barn to the south-facing slope where we plan to establish a vineyard for seedless grapes. The lane travels from the relatively high ground around the barn and house to the bottom of a small […]
Living in Underhill House is a many-faceted experience. Moving about among its unmilled, branching timbers never seems to lose its charm, and gradually working my way through all the finishing projects is very satisfying. But what we are loving best is that now we are living on our land and […]
Now that most of the work is done to build Underhill House, I am starting to get back to my writing career. I contacted my editor at Isthmus to tell her I was ready to take an assignment. She asked me to write an article about trapping in Wisconsin because […]
Three days ago, Doug and I were coming home from errands in Madison in near white-out conditions. The flakes were tiny, but so thick they filled the air, and they were being driven almost horizontally through the headlight beams obliterating any sight of the stripes on the road. The same […]
Our first-choice heat source at Underhill House is a combination of passive solar and the solar hot water panels that warm our floors and thermal mass interior wall. This dual-solar supply is comfortably providing all the heat we could want during even the coldest days that this not-particularly-cold winter has […]
The timbers that hold up Underhill House were cut from trees on our 44 acres. We were looking for trees that had the right dimensions, interesting forking patterns and were too close to their neighbors or not doing well for other reasons. These “weed” trees made great timbers, but the […]
Digging in the Driftless 