When you decide to build a new house, you are committing to move out of your old house, but getting these two activities to align is almost impossible. Putting a house on the market is a very uncertain process these days. Will it sell tomorrow? Will it sell a year […]
Underhill House is being built with a combination of natural building and high-tech green techniques and materials. Our exterior stucco lime plaster wall surface is one such convergence old and new. The prep work was state- of- the-art steel mesh and highly adhesive sealing tape (see Underhill House Gets Plastered: […]
Underhill House is a hybrid of natural and high-tech green building techniques. Most of the walls will be made of straw bales, but much of the south and east walls have so many windows in them to collect solar heat gain in winter that it made no sense to try […]
Every tree follows its own path toward the sun. Because the beams of Underhill House are round timbers, purposefully chosen because of their graceful arcing lines, our roof swells and rolls down from east to west and from south to north. That makes for a swooping, organic roof line, but […]
“Throwing yourself into worthwhile, fruitful hard work that you believe in – as much as you can handle and more– is a kind of luxury not everyone gets to experience. It’s also exhausting.” That’s what Benjamin Mee says in his book We Bought a Zoo (a very good read and […]
This summer’s heat and drought are reaching record proportions in southern Wisconsin and across much of the United States. The disturbed soil around our building site has gradually turned into powder about 4 inches deep so that every step raised clouds of dust around our ankles. Every plant that we […]
Wow! Building a hybrid home, combining natural building materials and practices with green, high-tech materials and practices can make for some very full days on the building site. The pace seems to be picking up, which is a challenge when the temperature tops out above 100 degrees, as it has […]
When we begin building our straw bale walls next week, they will go on a strong and beautiful foundation – the second round of slip-form stone wall in Underhill House. This wall has something that the first one didn’t. As Doug and I have worked on the slip-form stone walls […]
It was a fascinating process to watch the branching timbers that form the structure of Underhill House sprout a few new branches last week. If you would like to learn more about why we believe building with branching timbers is one of the most ultimately environmentally friendly ways to form […]
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 […]
Digging in the Driftless 