Bonafide Farm

Daily Commute

October 18th, 2009 § 0

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October 18, 12:38 p.m. Headed to the farm to plant two Hinoki Cypress.
Shot from the car.

One of the reasons I left D.C. was to reintroduce more beauty into my everyday life. Sure, there’s beauty to be found in an urban metropolis, and I did. In the streak of red light as the Metro train disappears down a tunnel and in the one bright umbrella among dozens of black brethren bobbing down a dirty grey street. In how the lit-up Washington Monument shocked me with the wonder of my city situation each time it popped up on the blue-black horizon as I drove east on Route 50, coming home from a grocery run.

Having grown up surrounded by natural beauty, I loved the challenge of finding visual joy in a place so easy to dismiss as ugly. And yet, after five years, I yearned to return to trees and mountains and curved country roads. So the Daily Commute is my tribute to my new home, a valediction of my choice to leave behind the beauty of the city and start again in a very different place. It is, quite simply, how I see my world as I move through it everyday.

4 walls = house?

October 18th, 2009 § 0

Lost a day to rain Thursday, but when I showed up Friday night, I had four exterior walls and the studio and library were framed. Of course, fitting in those walls of imagined bookshelves might be a trick as I chose to riddle my exterior walls with windows!

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That’s the library on the left, above, with an opening for five-foot pocket doors. The room to the right is the studio, with an entry from the new front hall. Both rooms have closets, so I can call them bedrooms when I sell the house. They are connected by a set of glass French doors, the opening for which is shown below to the right of the photo:

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Anybody want to put on a play?

October 14th, 2009 § 1

Because the stage is set!

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Yesterday the floor went on, and today two walls are framed. Check out all those windows. I wanted tons of light, but this could make furniture placement tricky. Good thing I don’t have much!

Windows, from left to right in the photo below, are studio, front hall near staircase, new front door with sidelights, guest bedroom x 2, and laundry. Turning the corner are guest bath and kitchen windows.

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IMG_3070 WebGorgeous new floor joist system. That engineered lumber is quite an improvement over the old main beam, here at the bottom of the stack:

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No where to go but up

October 11th, 2009 § 1

After the disaster of Wednesday, I met my builder out at the site Thursday morning at 7:30 a.m. His crew was already at work picking up the mess. We talked about the plan for the day, and when I returned later in the evening, I found a beautiful site.

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After a couple of weeks of everything crashing down, we’ve turned the corner and gone vertical! We’ve achieved liftoff! Well, at least with the new courses of foundation block, designed to raise the house even more off the ground and create a larger crawlspace. To that end, I also excavated a significant amount of dirt from the crawlspace so now I will be able to put my HVAC unit and water tank under the house.

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Now that’s a hell of a crawlspace! Way better than the 16 inches of really scary slitherspace that came with the original house! I plan to seal and condition the crawl to help with indoor air quality and energy efficiency, and make it easier to run the HVAC ducting and service plumbing. The new access will be right by the fireplace, instead of on the path between the house and the well house.

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Pier pads will be poured in the orange squares, and the whole thing will be covered with a plastic membrane. We stayed about three feet within the existing foundation walls to avoid compromising them. They are already pretty shallow, and I need them to stand strong. My builder also built the grade outside of the house up to cover a course of block–this helps protect against frost heave and also creates a positive grade around the house to help drain water away from the foundation.

I was also very pleased to see the site picked up and looking good. Seems the discussion we had that morning created a good result.

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The past two days were a great example of the emotional extremes one experiences while building a house. Wednesday night was horrible. I was sad that the house was destroyed and angry at the state the site was left in by my builder. But Thursday night brought euphoria when I found communication to be improved with my builder, the site picked up, great progress made on the house, and everything proceeding in a positive direction. It’s a wild ride!

The darkest night

October 11th, 2009 § 0

Note the beam in the pile on the right side of the photo below, the one with the perfect dark circle in the center. I have my termites to thank for that little Andy Goldsworthy-esque piece of work. Now too bad that was the beam that held up my house.

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I felt I had made the right decision to take the house down, but the state I found the house in Wednesday night was a mess. Demo was completed, and all I had left standing were a few courses of dubious-looking block and a very pathetic but remarkably straight chimney. It looked like an old homestead ravaged by fire or hurricane.

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Pieces of my house were stacked in hazardous piles: a few chunks of floorboard here, a termite-ridden section of joist there. Broken glass ground into the dirt. Discolored insulation puffed about the yard. Nails everywhere.

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It was definitely the most stressful site visit I’ve had, as I took in the realization that I’d just destroyed my house and anticipated how to communicate my expectations about site neatness to my contractor. Thankfully there were piles of new building materials lying around, and I just tried to think about how it had to get better from here.

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A moment of silence

October 7th, 2009 § 0

For an old house.

I’ve always wanted an old house. My dream was to someday find a rough old place and fix it up and make it my own, beaten-up floors and out-of-square walls and all. That’s one of the reasons I bought the farm in the first place. Though I recognized it certainly didn’t fit my vision of the old house I wanted to lavish all this attention upon, I believed that I could make it into something I’d like.

In many ways, that I didn’t love the existing house made the decision to take it down much easier, though that wasn’t my original plan. I tried hard to save it, but I realized trying to work with some of the existing beams and joists wasn’t saving anything worth saving. The final house will now be a much better product than any that I could have frankensteined onto the old floor. But part of me feels sad to think that I removed a home that stood for the past 80 years and saw a lot of life pass through its doors.

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How a house comes down…even when you weren’t planning on it

October 6th, 2009 § 1

To get caught up, I bought the farm and spent the summer working with a draftsman to design a renovation. One thing led to another and the project snowballed until I was basically building a new house. I found a contractor, signed a contract, and on Sept. 28, demolition began. The first day it looked like this:

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Day Two:

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And here’s when things got dicey. Turns out that right where I wanted to cut a new front foyer into the house, the floors were uneven on either side of the main beam.

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Further investigation of the beam revealed this:

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If it’s not obvious from the photo, this is not what you want the main, loadbearing beam of your house to look like when you finally get right up under the hoary little floorboards. Termite damage. Lots of it. But it was certainly not unanticipated, and I had prepared myself to expect this. So after not too much headscratching and nary a moment to mourn the old house, which I had made a good faith effortto salvage, I decided to take the existing structure completely down to the foundation and build new. It just didn’t make sense to build essentially a new house on top of a crappy base. And now we could deepen the crawl space, which is about 16″ deep now and scary, condition it to increase energy efficiency, and stash several large systems such as the HVAC and water heater down there, freeing up valuable interior space. And so deconstruction proceeded. I asked the contractors to salvage as much old wood as they could, with the hope that I could make something out of it in the future.

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Day four. The roof starts to come off.
House attains that light and airy feel I was going for:

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Day five. I’ve got a nice mountain view through what was once my house…

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And this is where we are at 7:30 p.m. tonight. My contractor was at the site when I dropped by tonight, and he suspects that the house will be completely down to the foundation by Thursday. Then work begins to add a few courses of block to the foundation and get that set to put up a new house.

Oh, but I jest

September 30th, 2009 § 0

When I bought this property, the only thing wrong with it was the existing house. It was so far from my vision of my dream farmhouse–which is probably the reason I could afford to buy it. I presume many potential buyers took one look at the hot mess planted on an otherwise gorgeous piece of ground and ran away screaming. We’ll start with the interior, which makes it look fairly good, or at least livable.

But when we start examining the exterior, some major problems arise. The house was supposedly built in 1930. It was certainly not the highest quality construction to begin with. I described it to a potential builder as an old shack, and he gently corrected me by saying, “We call those country-built houses.” Country-built it certainly is, of rough-sawn lumber that may have even come from the woods on property. The previous owner hadn’t lived in the home for several years, and the neglect showed. The house originally sported a metal roof, but it was at one point replaced with asphalt shingles, the weight of which caused the 2×4 rafters to sway. Some people who looked at it said the roof had a “pagoda effect.” Door and window sills were rotted out, the aluminum siding that was artlessly tacked onto the original wood siding had gone powdery with age, and the floors dipped and swayed. Where they were low, a trip to the very shallow crawlspace revealed, the floor was held up with piles of field stone.

Taken together, these clues painted the picture of how a house was built, back in the day in mountainous Virginia, for not much money and with what was close at hand. There’s nothing wrong with that and I admire the spirit of the original home. I just didn’t want to live in it.

Breaking out of the box

September 29th, 2009 § 2

So last winter, I was sitting in my urban apartment ready for a change. I had just returned from a few months of living in a log cabin in Alaska, riding in bush planes and firing machine guns, and I’d finally realized that the life I wanted to live couldn’t be contained in the seven hundred square feet of a third-floor walkup apartment.

I was vermicomposting under the dining room table. My rakes and hoes and dirty garden boots permanently lived in the storage unit of my station wagon. I had trays of leaf cuttings rooting on radiators—in my bedroom.

It’s not like this was a great revelation, this figuring out that my interests in messy, often organic projects were overstepping their boundaries. I mean, I was the kid in freshman dorm with the chia pet. From there, my need for space to do things just increased, even as I downsized my living quarters and I tried to fit myself into the box of urban life in a major East-coast city.

That box held me for five years. Five exciting, exhausting years I wouldn’t give back for anything. But after leaving Alaska—where people I met indulged their passions and pastimes without restriction of space or mindset—I knew I was ready to challenge myself with something bigger. Something I’d always dreamed of doing.

And so, in May 2009, I bought Bonafide Farm. And isn’t this just the picture-perfect vintage Blue Ridge foothills farmhouse I’d always dreamed of?

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