It's Going to Be a Greenhouse!

Jim and I have had this project in the plans for quite a while now, and it's finally coming together. We're adding on an eight by sixteen foot addition to the south side of the house to be a combination greenhouse, sunroom, solar heat collector. Since we don't have a lot of building experience, there's a lot of time spent just planning, reading and studying options, and talking over what we really want from this space. It has taken several months to actually get something started, but Jim has kept drawing and redrawing plans, and it's finally happening.

Our goal here is to have a place to collect solar heat during the daytime and vent it into the house to help out with winter heating bills. We'd also like to use it as a solar room in the winter time as a place to sit in the light and help fight the winter blues, and also to extend the growing season here in Northern Indiana. If we could harvest some winter veggies, or salad greens, it would be wonderful too, but we're not sure just what to expect. Anyway, it's very much a work in progress, but here are some pictures so far, and it's just wonderful to be able to see this much happening at this point. Hopefully we'll have the roof framed in by the end of the week and be able to at least drape it in plastic this winter for some solar heat gain.

The pictures, in order, show: the footers laid out with Jim fastening the last of the rebar to reenforce the foundation, Cement truck delivering the wet cement, Jim adding bolts to the wet footers to bolt the sill plates onto, fitting sill plate boards into place, side wall framing and door framing up and Jim leveling the door frame out.

Autumn Miscellaney

Boy, does time pass fast! Seems we just got back from Vermont after a marvelous visit and we had to hurry into all those tasks involved in closing down the house for winter. Preserving the last of the goodies from the garden; finding delicious magical pawpaws hanging ripe on the trees along the road; burning the brush pile out back to clean up the summer's prunings and dropped branches, and filling the woodpile for winter's warmth.
And then all of a sudden it's snowing, and Jim and Anna are outside dancing in the snow and catching flakes on their tongues! Holy Cow the time goes fast!

That lounging picture of Anna is how she reacted to her new little chair and the big fluffy warm robe to keep her comfy. What a ham!
I'll just post a lot of pictures without much explaination, and let you sort of catch up with our lives.

As the weather gets colder and snow piles up outside, our lives contract and the center of the house becomes the comfy chairs in front of that glowing warm stove, and each day ends with a glass of wine and some time to just watch the flames.

Of course, that's in between Jim's greenhouse project and carrying in wood, and selling on ebay and......subjects for the next posting.

Life is very good these days.