Leaks

Several weeks back Ben and I went up on a stormy weekend. Friday night rained hard and steady all night long, and we had a nasty shock when, in the middle of the night, we woke up to find water seeping in through the window and the door on the east side. There were a couple of puddles forming inside our house, and we barely slept the rest of the night listening to the insistent rain and the wind which was driving the rain through the sieve that was that side of the house. Lesson number one: Try not to put your front door on the side that gets the worst weather beating of all! Granted, it's a good door and it shouldn't be leaking no matter how hard the rain is pelting. The Greys guys are fast and we think they rushed it, with serious consequences.

The next morning we covered that whole side of the house with plastic. The Grey's guy came later in the week and did some fiddling. Ben then siliconed around all the door and window jambs, and used this crazy expansion foam inside all interior spaces (below). You squirt it in and it expands to several times it's size, filling every nook and cranny as it goes.

Once windows are nailed in, you tape the outside lip to seal it before you add the siding and the trim. Our house doesn't have siding, and it seems that the tape wouldn't work because the grooves cut into the exterior plywood would undermine the sealing effect of the tape: the water could still get in. So we filled the cracks with silicone and now must wait and see what happens.


This illustrates the perilous nature of the DIY approach when you don't really know what the heck you're doing. There are so many details, as much as you think about it there will always be things that slip by. This of course just adds to the challenge of making it work as a whole, and we'll just pray these types of surprises are few and far between as we forge ahead.

Winter Coming...

A couple weeks ago Ben went up solo while I stayed home studying. It was a cold weekend, and I was hoping Ben would take up the offer of our neighbor to sleep in her extra bedroom, but he was determined to stick it out. My genius husband found a clever way to be warm. His first attempt was to create a plastic bubble (yes, yes, "The Boy In the Plastic Bubble")... He built a wooden frame within the house and covered it in plastic. Since we now have electricity at the shed, he snaked a long extension cord through the hole in the door (where the lock will go) and plugged in our electric portable radiator.

We had moved the tent inside the house the weekend before and he consolidated all our living quarters into a compact space within the bubble .


Ben tells me during the day the bubble was warmer than the outside temperature, though not WARM warm. That night, however, the temperature dropped dramatically and he ended COLD for most of the night.

The next night he pulled the big air mattress out of the tent and deflated it (it takes up the whole tent and it's hard to zip up with it in there). He covered the tent with 2 blankets to insulate, put the radiator inside the tent with him, put one sleeping bag inside the other, and zipped up the tent and himself. He created an igloo which was as warm as a sauna. He slept warm as a bug in a rug.

How cute is that?

That weekend he taped the floor to indicate the walls that will be our next project. Below are the ghosts of the walls to be. Looks lilliputian.

Above is the bathroom on the far left, the laundry "nook" on the near left, and part of the bedroom/shelf space on the right.

This is the bedroom. Just enough for a bed. And a little closet in the far corner.



...Just in case you forgot what the house looks like. The ladder in front of door on the right is our present mode of entry. The hay is insulating the grass seed which we scattered, hoping there would be time for some germination before winter really sets in.