So, last weekend my husband, two grown daughters and I settled comfortably into our daughter’s Toyota Corolla (the greenest car among us as present) and motored down to Chicago to refill our spiritual cisterns from the wealth of cultural treasure only a city can amass and to check out some […]
GUEST POST BY DELLA HANSMANN If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ve seen the term “whole trees” a number of times. Doug and Denise have decided that they want their new home to be a whole tree house. They won’t be living in the air, however. Here’s […]
GUEST POST BY DELLA HANSMANN Whole Trees Architecture and Construction Before you even start thinking about the specific design of your building, you can have a huge impact on its comfort and cost by choosing the site wisely. Issues of solar gain, prevailing winds, and drainage are key, as well […]
There is a long and continuing saga to the barn you see in my blog title up there. Our farm needed a barn — someplace to store the equipment we were accumulating to take care of the land. A place we could camp in comfort, and a staging area to […]
Building a house is a big frigging deal! The Real Estate Blog says that 2.1 million houses were built in the U.S. last year, and that half of them are now sitting empty. I don’t even want to think about the cost to the environment and the boost in our […]
A Rough Site Plan for 2012 When we set out to find land in the Driftless Area of Wisconsin, we imagined moving into an old farm house. What we fell for was 44 acres with a south-facing slope that looked to be a promising house site where we would become […]
Digging in the Driftless 