Little House in a Nutshell

Other than the outdoor/garden bathtub and shower, the house is pretty much done.   I say 'pretty much' because also on the 'to do' list without a line through it is the water filtration system but that's boring and not nearly as important as an outdoor bathtub.  

A year ago only hay, elk and eagles lived in our field.   When we decided to join them, we promised to be good neighbors.

...and yes I know...

1. we already had a house so building another one wasn't a very 'green' thing to do. 

2. that any structure we would build would be more intrusive than building nothing.

Anyway.  Playing with designs was overwhelming but easy because it was noncommittal.   Deciding on a final design caused more stupidly self-inflicted stress than I could have ever imagined.    Putting a house on a site is such a one-shot-deal.  

Now.  Did we leave a scar?  Since a scar is in the eyes of the beholder, (ask someone that thinks Mt Rushmore is beautiful) you decide.

We now have a perfect little house 

• that has a 2:12 pitched roof to match the slope of the hillside it shares

• where we can go outside from every room

• that is 966 square feet

• where we use every room every day

• made from mostly local materials (stone, concrete, lumber and subs)

• made from natural materials that blend in with the site...

and that's what we wanted.

We did Energy Star whenever we could:

• Summit Stainless Steel Counter Depth Bottom-Mount Refrigerator 

• White Rogers programmable thermostats

• Eagle window and doors double glazed, tempered Low-E 

• Insulation Master high density closed cell spray foam (5" in the walls for r35 and 7" in the ceiling for r49) 

• Emerson ceiling fans 

• Air King range hood - 30" Stainless Steel  

• Asko clothes washer 

• Asko clothes dryer 

pictures top to bottom:

Looking west at the master bedroom (left), entry (center),  and kitchen (right).  I LOVE THIS PHOTO.  Mt Linton is in the background and supposedly houses mountain goats that I've never seen.

Looking northeast at the office (left), bathroom (center), and master bedroom (right under the pergola) Crap, I fogot...the pergola's not done either.

Looking east (with the mountain goats behind me) at the living room and covered deck (left) and office (right). 

Looking north from the office into Britsh Columbia.

Looking at Vin thinking the ladder is right under him.

Where Is The Camera? (part 2)

Are you tired of camera scene pictures yet?

House.
Life is so much easier with a place to hang our coats when we walk in. I think I mentioned that we needed a coat rack, that Max, Vince and I headed down the railroad tracks to find some spikes and that Max didn't find any but Vince and I came back with 17 between the two of us. Today at Ryan's machine shop, Vin sand-blasted and shortened the spikes at a 10 degree angle while Ryan welded them to the metal plate he'd just cut and drilled. My job was to hold off the guy with the broken cultivator emergency for 15 minutes until they were done.

With the front door open, the house is 966 square feet plus 58 acres.

Exciting News.
Energy Star credits for the washer/dryer and the refrigerator just showed up on our electric bill.

Just A Quick Pop In

Almost everyday I promise myself that I'm going to post and entry in my blog so you can see that I'm not very good at keeping promises when they're to myself.

School and Canada.
Six hours of "After Effects" (a complicated (for me) software program) yesterday and now when I make a movie where I'll need to have a car fly through a glass window on the 50th floor of a skyscraper, I'll know how to do it. It's the very same class in which I created a skeleton that danced the Macarena.

I got an 'A!' on my last editing test. You may think I'm punctuating the 'A' in order to emphasize it but I'm not. This is not an 'A' or an 'A-' but an A exclamation point. Just another cute little Canadian quirk.

Every week I look forward to going up to Nelson and look just as forward to coming back down to Metaline Falls. All year Vin and I been whispering in the car while sitting in the customs queue without even realizing it. I guess we both felt like somehow the customs people could hear us in the car if we spoke at a normal volume. Going through customs I'm always a teeny bit nervous. I'm sure I look guilty. I know I always feel guilty.

One easy swipe of my BC Health card and the receptionist sat looking at all of my Canadian medical records. Then, when no one was checking in, she swept the floor until an examination room was free and she could set it up for me. As students we get BC Health for about 100 dollars a month. I wish I was sick so I could use it. Thursday I had a physical. I was 3 minutes late. Two minutes later, the doctor came out to get me and apologized for making me wait.

House and home.
Interior doors. We decided on what we wanted so the hard part is done. You'll think it's weird, but we had some sheets of corrugated metal left from the siding that we're going to transform into doors. How will that look? Beats me but I'll know in about a week.

We now have a cute little Asko washer and dryer, showers, bookcases, dining chairs and wooden steps. The washer and dryer are energy star, the bookshelves and steps are local wood from Steve Kiss..neighbor, logger and talent from Vin's first film. The chairs are from Sundance Catalog (sorry).

Our Saturday movie night ('Benny and Joon'...filmed in Spokane in 1993) had a record 7 movie loving lasagna eaters in attendance. Both the lasagna and the movie were delicious. Must sees: 'Benny and Joon', 'Bart Got A Room' and 'Gilbert Grape', my recent new favorites.

The elk are back. Back from where? They didn't fly south because I know I would have noticed since they travel in groups of 15 to 50. Guess it's their little secret and I'd know if they wanted me to know.

Notice, in the last photo, how the wood from the outside looks like it continues to the inside (where we need some coat hooks*). Very Chic.

Warning. If you think that after 25 years of sleeping in a king sized bed, you can go back to a queen...you'd be wrong.

*Max, Vin and I found 17 railroad spikes, soon to be coat hooks, on a walk from our house yesterday.

Is Plaster Faster?

I should be working on my movie treatment (sounds like a joke doesn't it??) but instead I feel like writing about today....a day in our simple retired life. We're in Metaline Falls. The morning was mostly clean up. A normal retired thing to do. Then, we picked up color boards from the plaster guy***. We met him half way, an hour drive and close by western standards as they say. Gary, the closest (only) plaster guy we could find, showed up with his little dog wearing a football jersey that said QUARTER BARK (the dog, not Gary) with a #! between the QUARTER and the BARK. We could tell that Max was jealous of Quarter Bark #1 because he could be carried around. We treated Max to a walk on the way home at some waterfall...he wasn't impressed...in-fact he vomited.

Back home, 31 degrees and feeling like it was about time for something semi-epic, we convinced ourselves there was enough daylight to ride up Hall Mountain (elev. 6400') We rode to the trailhead and hiked to the treeless peak through meadows with clumps of softwoods and rock outcroppings to a 360 degree view of Washington, Canada and Idaho. The late afternoon angle of the sun tinted everything a rich gold. So far so good albeit a little colder on the way down than the way up. Normally I would have looked forward to the all downhill bike ride but as I suspected my summer weight Yoko gloves weren't even close to warm enough. (UNDERSTATEMENT!) Four hours and a movie later, I can type and feed myself again but that's about as interesting as I can make frozen fingers.

Metaline Falls.
Movie. "Nine". It was neither about an aging Bo Derek nor a musical with Penelope Cruz (not sure where I got that idea) but it was animated...and pretty good. I'm glad we went because then there were six of us in the theater.

House. The tent came down and we moved into a corner of the master bedroom this weekend. The photos make us look cold and uncomfortable but our word for cold and uncomfortable is 'cozy'. Will waking up with a coating of sheet-rock dust in my mouth cause any long term damage?

Back to the movie treatment. I've been struggling with ways to decrease my school work-load and finally got up the nerve to request an audit for Film Studies. I picked up the hot pink 'switch to audit' form at the office one day when there was actually someone in there and filled it out. I started to hand the hot pink sheet to Ian, the professor. "Did you enjoy the assignment?" he asked, all excited. I ended up using the back of the audit form for notes on Nanook of the North.

***plaster.
Plaster is good.
1. We don't have to paint because the plaster is tinted with our colors
2. We don't have to tile because the shower will be waterproof plaster
3. We don't have to trim the windows because our window perimeters will be plaster

Plaster is bad.
1. We have to pick the colors we'll have FOREVER, NOW. Would that make you nervous? It makes me nervous.