Friday the concrete was poured for the main floor of Underhill House. Doug and I set the alarm for 5, but when we got to the house site at 7:15, the pour was already underway. They needed a pumper truck to get the concrete high enough and far enough out […]
This Friday May, May 25, we’ll be having the first open house at the Underhill construction site for anyone who is curious about this project. Underhill House is a fusion of conventional, green and natural building techniques and materials with the goal of making a house that has a small […]
How often do we think about where the water comes from when we open the tap, fill a glass and gulp it down? In a week or two, we will be drinking water from our fresh, new well. Until now, we have watered the trees and other plants with sloshing […]
Most of our basement walls are poured concrete buried up against the hill, but part of the south and west walls are exposed with a walkout, and we are making them out of slip-form stone masonry. Underhill House is a being built as a kind of laboratory to try and […]
I have had good friends become dumbstruck because of something we are doing as we build our unmilled, timber frame house. Everyone forms an image when you say timber frame. They see massive posts and beams stained to a golden glow, criss-crossing and defining a space. And what you’ll see […]
My last post showed how our PEX tubing was installed. That happened on Monday. On Tuesday Mike Flynn arrived with his crew to bury it in 4 inches of reinforced concrete and create our basement floor. Doug wanted me to get one more photo of the bracket that held all […]
We have been working for months with Full Spectrum Solar, to plan the heating system for our house, and Monday it started coming together. Underhill House will be heated by three mechanisms: Passive solar a wood burning stove infloor radiant heat from solar panels with propane backup. The PEX tubing […]
Much of the inspiration for the home we are building has its roots in the 300-year-old farmhouse we lived in while Doug was doing his postdoc in the Netherlands about 25 years ago. We were particularly open to the idea of building a whole-tree, unmilled timber frame house because we’ve […]
Foundations are not for the faint of heart. They are a commitment. We hope ours will last for 500 years. That becomes doubly difficult when you have a walk-out basement, and you need to frost protect the footing in multiple ways. In our case, we have three different components to […]
Underhill House is going to be the site of a number of natural building workshops during its construction, and the first four are now scheduled. I’m happy that workshops will be part of our house. Doug and I have participated in workshops in the past on cob building, straw bale […]
Digging in the Driftless 