A few weeks ago, our dear friend, Charles Heide flew over our house and photographed it from the air. He kindly sent us a CD with his photos, and I have spent far too much time gazing at them since. A bird’s-eye view of the world. What a wonderful sight. […]
Using clay, sand, straw and sawdust from our land, plus a few fire bricks and some discarded wine bottles, we are building a cob oven a few steps from Underhill House — and we will soon be baking wood-fired crusty breads, sizzling pizza and soft-centered, crunchy veggies for ourselves and […]
We are determined to make a sustainable home for ourselves and those who live there after us, but as much as we have focused on this goal during this intense building year, we need to step back periodically and remind ourselves that this structure is not just a shelter – […]
It was July 4. The crew was taking a well-earned holiday, but Doug and I were out at the land pouring carefully measured out yogurt containers of water onto the parched garden plants from the six 5-gallon buckets we filled from our garden hose in town. Our little pond is […]
We hosted two open houses this past weekend. On Friday, we invited friends and many others interested in alternative building paths to come out and see how Underhill House is progressing. On Sunday our realtor, Tom Tarrolly, held an open house to put our Madison home on the market. The […]
Last spring as we were peeling, sanding and painting the timbers for Underhill House, the question of how we would get the roof rafters up on top of the bents was often on our minds. In previous houses built by Whole Trees Architecture and Structures, rafters have been hoisted up […]
Stone is such a durable and desirable building material. We wanted to incorporate some into Underhill House. Helen and Scott Nearing, pioneering back-to-the-landers, who built their house and farm buildings from stone on their Vermont land, were rich in a flinty sort of igneous rock formed from cooling lava. Unfortunately, […]
guest post by Doug Hansmann We always planned to have a mass wall between the kitchen/dining room and the den. It was designed to soak up sun on sunny days and heat from the wood stove on cold nights and cloudy days. But over time we began to realize that […]
In my first post on our timber framing process (Whole Tree Timber Framing Begins at Underhill House ) I stressed the patience required to start a whole tree timber frame project. A week later, I’m still trying to catch my breath after a whirlwind ride (literally and figuratively) as the […]
Building a whole tree timber frame house is an exercise in patience. We have been working with these timbers for almost a year now — selecting them from our 44 acres last summer, peeling and felling them, then working out a master plan for how their individual branching natures could […]
Digging in the Driftless 