Welcome to LifeOur House
BUILDING THE HOUSE - Start to Recent Past
Click on the images below to view a larger display.
Our house is constructed with SIPS Panels. The walls are almost continuous 5.5 inches of foam insulation, and 9.5 inches in the roof system. We heated with the totally enclosed (inside the house) “Rumford fireplace” for three years. Finally installed a central system so we could travel during the colder months. A five-man crew “dried in” the house from a bare sub floor in 10 working days. The labor savings paid the cost of the SIPS above standard stick construction.
Our House in 2015
Kitty and I used antique doors (bedroom, kitchen and both bathrooms), wormy chestnut timber for a mantle, salvaged windows (some leaded) INSIDE the house for air circulation (a must with SIPS panels), and bricks from a Civil War era foundry in Wythe County for the bedroom side, back, of the fireplace. Most of the stone for the fireplace was gathered by us from next to the creek on our property. The wood for the walls is from trees cut for the driveway; milled, dried and shaped locally. The bookcases are wormy chestnut from a neighbor, and the doorway to the hall is sassafras cut from a downed tree and shaped by hand with drawing knives. The stairs were built by our sawmilling neighbors from excess timbers used in the house. The kitchen and dining area walls are the remnants of our oak flooring, tongue and grooved, mounted vertically.Click on the images below to view a larger display.
Other than the fireplace, tile in the upstairs bathroom and hallway/entrance foyer, and our hardwood floors, Kitty and I have managed to do the inside of our home the way we want it to be, even when it meant doing some things over and over. We built decks, porches, garage, woodshed and a 16’ X 32’ shop building with local labor to help us. A crew was hired to install the siding and metal roofing. After the house, we started enclosing under the deck with wine bottles and cordwood knee walls and glass and wood siding above; “gabion” style retaining wall, and a rock wall for a flower bed.
“And the beat goes on.”
Here are a few of the projects which makes our house unique (for us , anyway!)
Click on the images below to view a larger display.
Beginning top left, they are: Kitchen island, kitchen island top, light over the island, dining table light, sassafras log door trim, bedroom door, upstairs bathroom door, towel hanger, medicine cabinet, window in the wall from inside the upstairs bathroom, outside view of the same window, ash dump from the fireplace, combustion air for Rumford fireplace (top of ash dump), (2) air circulation windows in the living room.