So this is Spring, and this is how things have grown since the first photo in our previous entry. Over the winter we spent most of our time planning what our house would be. This has taken many, many hours. I (Eric) started with a program called Instant Architect which which has been fancied up a bit since I bought it a couple of years ago. Pretty easy to use (hope it stayed that way), but this only gave us 8-1/2 x 11" sketches. We employed a consulting architect, Mary Caufield, who advised us to start by thinking about floor space and what we wanted in a house.
Having lived in the north side of a townhouse in the city for 18 years, light and a sense of bringing the outside in were foremost. The view in the picture above is how we're orienting the long axis of the house, so the living room and Julie's music studio face this direction. The "front" of the house--the side facing the lane--actually has the kitchen and a laundry/storage room with connection to the garage. One of the things to think about is how will you use the house. We have found that when we entertain, people tend to gather in the kitchen anyway. In addition, it's recommended that the colder side of the house, northwest through northeast, have the heat-generating stuff, like the stove, and that glass area be minimized to make good use of the local environment and climate. So this works for us. The "glassy sides" will face southeast through southwest.
So we marked off this orientation with stakes in March, and that allowed us to make further changes to the plan. This photo was taken in April, and as you can see, the little seedling center-shot beyond the wild mustard, is almost overtaken by the hay growing around it. The stakes were swallowed up, and so we wondered what to do.
Fortunately, a local farmer wanted the hay for his cows, so we pulled the stakes, marked the seedlings with flags, and we're back in business, but it was May until the hay was worth mowing and the weather stayed dry enough for the cutting and gathering. Even then, owing to our enthusiastic (and apparently premature) planting of numerous white pines and Norway spruce to someday screen the northwest winds in winter, we had to rope off some areas which didn't get cut. Tried a swingblade. Hard work on tough 4' grass! Then a gas powered string-type weed whacker. Slow going and not done yet. Now a neighbor with a bush hog is going to come in and finish the job in the tight areas. But we have been learning: plan for what's going to happen in nature while you're drawing plans.
We'll either have to pay people to mow, or somehow borrow or buy a tractor, as the hay is already coming back. All this is necessary because it is impossible to do anything in the thick grass. So it will add a bit to our costs. Everything is so much smaller and more manageable in the city!
Next: The Plans
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