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

600 Bales

We’ve got the straw. 600 bales to be precise. We bought it from a farmer in Millbrook and hired a local fellow with a float to help us transport the straw from Millbrook to our place. With the help of my parents and some very very good friends we got the straw stacked and covered by late Sunday afternoon. Much thanks to my parents, Ron and Donna, Ian (the only stacker who knew what he was doing), Tiff (our resident nurse), Jay (who wished he’d gone to the Baptism), Neil and Jen (who both had to chase Evan around to boot).

Posted by: Glen: August, 19, 2002

Put a Stake in It

Staked out the four corners Saturday. Foundations get dug next Monday. The house looks small to us, but the builders assure us that it’ll look pretty big once the walls go up. Hopefully we’re taking delivery of our straw bales next weekend.

Congatulations to Simon Boone, our renewable energy contractor, who got married this weekend.

Posted by: Glen: August, 11, 2002

Setbacks

So this Saturday, after the excitement of actually breaking ground, we found out that the guys who were going to do the footings went bust, the plumber and radiant floor guy quit (too busy), and the window company isn’t returning phone calls. Paul says I have to document these things so that I can look back and laugh…

On a plus, I have already replaced the radiant floor guy.

Posted by: Glen: August, 07, 2002

Laying out the foundation

Looks like we’re laying out the foundation this weekend, in anticipation of putting in the footings third week of August. Things are moving along.

Posted by: Glen: August, 07, 2002

Construction has started!

We broke ground on Friday, and work has officially started. It turns out that unlike every other hill on the land the building site isn’t gravel, but a mixture of soil and large rocks. Here are two pictures of the building site after the bulldozer had started work. If you’ve been to the land, you probably remember the hay stacker that had been abandoned for so long that a tree had grown up through it. Well it had to go, here’s a picture of it’s final journey.

Posted by: Glen: August, 05, 2002

We’re Bloggin’ Baby!

After a bunch of work, a fair amount of fiddling, and a reasonable amount of cursing the house blog is up and running. Look for updates on a weekly basis, or whenever I get up to the land.

For the geeky among you, this page is fully XHTML compliant (it validates) with CSS 2.0 providing the styling. Hopefully within the week the whole site will be 100% standards compliant. Why should I care?

Posted by: Glen: August, 05, 2002