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 […]
It’s been cold and rainy in the Driftless Area the past few days, so during a brief hiatus in the building of Underhill House, I ‘d like to pull the camera back, take a big picture view and share a couple of cool blog sites about this amazing area. I […]
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 […]
Full Spectrum Solar is designing and installing the solar domestic hot water and in-floor heating system for Underhill House. They celebrated their Ten Year Anniversary with an open house today that was part of the Commercial Sustainable Showcase – one of the ways Madison WI is whooping it up for […]
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 […]
The Xerces Society has just released the report, Are Neonicotinoids Killing Bees? A Review of Research into the Effects of Neonicotinoid Insecticides on Bees, with Recommendations for Action. According to a report from Penn State, The neonicotinoids are a relatively new class of insecticides that impact the central nervous system […]
This Saturday, anyone living near Madison WI will have a chance to get up close and personal with science. The University of Wisconsin-Madison takes sharing its research with its citizens very seriously. I’ve written about the amazing accessibility of the science on this campus in the past. (see Twinkle, Twinkle, […]
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 […]
Digging in the Driftless 