The Straw House Blog - Home of Glen, Gil and Declan Hunter

Sorry it’s been so long.

As often happens around here it’s been quite a while since my last post, so I figured I’d upload some pictures to give a sense of some recent events around here.

We finished of the deck on the east side of the house with some steel grating we acquired a year or so ago. Near the back part of the house we built a sandbox for the kids. When they’re grown we’ll make a nice zen garden or something back there.

Joanne has been busy finishing the ash boards that will be going up on the ceiling. We figure that we have enough for the whole front half of the house. The scaffolding is out on loan right now, but comes back in a week or so, this will be a late summer job for us, but it will be fantastic to have a ceiling up.

Most blog readers beyond friends and family won’t know this but we lost both of our dogs in the last 12 months. Ceara had a stroke and had to be put down last May, she was 14 1/2. Gator had a tumour on his spine, we had to put him down in February. Gator made it to 11, which if you were familiar with his tendency to eat foreign objects was a miracle. We were devastated. The picture above is Cash. He’s our new boy, a 3 year-old Chesapeake Bay Retriever. The boys are head over heals in love with him. Fortunately he has shown no inclination to eat rocks.

Sometimes I can’t believe how lucky I am to have ended up here with such a fantastic family and place to live. Sometimes the universe concurs.

Posted by: Glen: July, 16, 2009

Happiness defined

Gil and Declan tobogganing.

Posted by: Glen: January, 01, 2009

Washout

We’ve had quite a bit of rain here in southern Ontario this year. In fact we’ve already had more rain than we had all of last summer and we’ve shattered all previous records. I don’t mind rain at all, but I’m not a fan of massive downpours that wash out my driveway. So far we’ve had three such storms this summer, and since we’ve never been washed out before that’s pretty serious rain.

We’ve had Eric in with the backhoe twice now to fix the driveway, and the township has been working on the road pretty much continually all summer.

We think there used to be a culvert here. If there was, it’s gone now.

If you look behind Declan you can see most of road, back there in the forest where it doesn’t belong.

Fortunately this new gully is the township’s problem, not mine.

Joanne makes me drive the truck over the washout, neither of our cars could make it.

Here’s the road. There’s a brand new ditch, the old ditch is full of the washout from the previous storms.

Posted by: Glen: July, 31, 2008

Tobogganing

The tobogganing conditions the last couple of weeks have been stellar. We have 2’ of hard pack snow than runs smooth down the back hills and almost right to the house. Conditions are best in the morning after a good cold night when the crust is still frozen. By mid-afternoon this crust is slushy and the hills are slower.

This is the view from the top.

Of course to get there you have quite a walk ahead of you.

Savour the view for a few minutes, catch your breath and then it’s time to come down.

The run from the top is too long and steep for the kids to do themselves but there is a nice hill about half way that Gil can handle on his own. The longest runs are around 300m. We toboggan from the back property line almost all the way to the house for our final run.

Though sometimes speed gets the better of you and you and the GT part company.

Declan thinks that a soother counts as protective headgear.

Posted by: Glen: March, 29, 2008

March Update - Snow, Photoshoots and the Return of Sun

We had a huge dump of snow in the last 24 hours. It’s the biggest snowfall in the time that we have lived here. There’s at least three feet of snow in most places and more in the drifts. It took Joanne and I a couple of hours to shovel down to the cars and clear around them. Even so we’re not going anywhere until the driveway gets plowed out.

I love the snow so for me this is great, I’ll be heading off into the bush with my snowshoes following animal tracks and watching for the birds. I love trekking through the parts of the land that are normally too wet and inaccessible in the warmer months.

The week before last we had a camera crew here from an Australian magazine taking pictures of the house. So we had Gil take some pictures of them while they took pictures of us.

Now that we’ve left the grey grey grey months of November, December, January and February we’re producing lots of power again. Those months are what we usually refer to as the “100 Days of Grey” because the sun rarely makes any substantial appearance. We make a fair bit of power off the wind generator at this time of the year, but we still have to run the gas generator far too often for my tastes. Through the worst parts of December and January we have to run the generator about once per week. By that I mean that we run one full tank of gas through the genset, which lasts for about 7 hours.

Around mid-February the sun starts to make more regular appearances and especially in those brutally cold -20C and -30C days we can do quite well. As we move into March we tend to get both sun and wind - today we’ve been generating about 25A from the solar panels and between 10A and 15A all day from the wind generator. As a result we’ve run the dishwasher, and done five loads of laundry and we’re still making tons of power. We haven’t run the generator in about four weeks.

Posted by: Glen: March, 09, 2008

The Driveway

Most people when they come to visit remark upon the length of our driveway. Because the front 30 acres of our land is part of the Oak Ridges Moraine we couldn’t build the house anywhere near the road. As a result the house is near the centre of the land and our driveway is nearly a kilometre long. The quality of the road varies seasonally: muddy and wet during the spring, dry and dusty during the summer, rough in the fall and not surprisingly, slippery in the winter.

Our driveway is plowed in the winter rather than blown. Now here in the country the snowblower vs. plow debate can be nearly religious in its tone and fervour but I personally prefer plowing because it builds up big drifts at the side of the fields which can act like crude snow fences. Our neighbour has a driveway nearly as long as ours and a snowblower and he has constant problems with the snow blowing right back over his lane within days of blowing it clear. The drawback to plowing is that in years with heavy snowfalls the driveway can get progressively narrower as you run out of room to put the snow. We’ve already had problems up where we park the cars where the piles are encroaching on our parking spaces. We pay about $300 a year for plowing for an average of twelve visits. This year we’re already at six so I’m expecting the bill will be higher.

The big problem this year is the ice. We’ve had ice storms before but the ice usually only lasts a day or two and melts or is covered by snow. Our driveway has been covered by ice for it’s whole length for several weeks now. The ice is so thick and so complete that I’ve been tempted to strap on my skates and try and skate the whole thing. The ice is causing us big problems with cars as you can well imagine. We park on a slope and on several occassions we haven’t been able to negotiate the hill. Backing down the hill is… exciting. Joanne has stuck her car in snowbanks twice - once so bad that I had to winch it out - I buried the truck so thoroughly that it looked like I had parallel parked it into a snowbank and my parents spent the better part of an hour trapped in the driveway on Christmas day. We can’t leave the cars at the bottom of the hill because there isn’t enough room to turn them around down there. So every day I go out with the ash tray and spread out the meagre ashes from the wood stove. We can’t get back to the pit and I’m loathe to spend the money on sanding (and I can’t get back to my pit) so we’ll just wait and hope that we get some snow soon.

Posted by: Glen: December, 30, 2007

Update - December 2007

I’ve gone back to Movable Type. The WordPress experiment was a disaster. Not only did I not like WordPress but it had been so long since I last posted that I had forgotten all of my login information. At least with MT you don’t have to be a programmer to modify the templates.

There’s no navigation yet so until I get that built here are links to the house page and the lights page. On the house page you’ll find information about the house and passive solar design as well as a list of books that we recommend. The lights page includes information about the line of LED lights that I build, including most importantly where you can buy them.

Posted by: Glen: December, 09, 2007

An update in pictures and numbers

Ceara’s 13. She just got groomed. The groomer went a bit nuts with the sheers. Ceara is not impressed.

Gil’s nearly two and a half. He likes to help me build things. He helps by moving all the tools around.

Declan is 6 months old. This is his first meal of “solid” food. Not bad for flavourless mush.

We installed four more solar panels this winter. They doubled our production to 1.3KW. Life is good.

The first two of possibly five decks to be built this year.

Posted by: Glen: April, 02, 2006

More Pictures of Declan

As requested:

Posted by: Glen: October, 24, 2005

Introducing Declan Hunter

Born: Oct 2, 2005
Weight: 7 lbs 3 oz.
Length: 22 inches

Posted by: Glen: October, 06, 2005