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 […]
MOVING IN AND PARING DOWN Last Friday we packed up the furniture and other belongings with which we have been camping in our temporary Mineral Point apartment and moved them to Underhill House, where we are continuing to camp for the present. This period of camping with a few of […]
Here’s an interesting press release I just got from the University of Wisconsin-Madison MADISON – Using the meticulous phenological records of two iconic American naturalists, Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold, scientists have demonstrated that native plants in the eastern United States are flowering as much as a month […]
As Underhill House nears completion, we are holding our final open house Sunday January 13. This will be a chance for those of you in the area to have a walk-through and check out some of the materials and methods we have employed, some new and some ancient, to build […]
When you build a house, you find yourself in the market for a lot of light bulbs. Prepare to be blinded by the light, because the range of bulbs on the market is both dazzling and disappointing. According to the U.S. Lighting Energy Policy website, incandescent bulbs still account for […]
On Friday, the shortest day of the year, our solar hot water panels began to pass sun-soaked heat to the floors of Underhill House for the first time. The system awoke to a sunny, cold morning and began to circulate a steadily-warming glycol solution between the panels and our basement […]
Digging in the Driftless 