Back to work

Joey just made it back to Alaska. After a few days of shoveling he should be nose back to the grindstone on the house! I will be back in two weeks to join him. Can't wait to move in!

Procrastinating

Awwwww- we are still escaping the harsh Alaska winter. Joey and I are currently in Texas visiting family. We celebrated a terrific New Year's in NYC with my sister.



We depart tomorrow for eastern Idaho where we will live with friends at the base of the Teton mountains and ski and climb for a month before returning home to Alaska.

Happy New Year!

Joey just flew from Alaska down to Wyoming. He has been working on the house solo for the last three weeks. His greatest accomplishment... the stairs. We have been hauling materials and supplies up a ladder for the last 6 months. You can only imagine my excitement about them. We will be taking a break from house building for the next two months to visit friends and family. We have a number of projects waiting for us when we get back, including plumbing. Yikes.

Enjoy a virtual tour by Joey of our new stairs by clicking play.

Compromised

Well... Joey and I caved in.  After a week of temperatures well below zero (read 20-below) we purchased a Toyo oil stove. I hit my limit when at one point I was sleeping in front of our woodstove in two sleeping bags feeding the stove every three hours and I couldn't keep the house much above freezing. The problem is two fold. Since the house is under construction it is not very tight yet- so we have quite a few air leaks. The second, more concerning problem is that our fancy dancey wood stove is broken and it will take us a while to get it fixed.

Solution: we purchased a oil stove and jerry-rigged a fuel system with some old oil drums, which saved us over a $1,000. We had a few fuel leaks as of last night because of some poorly made copper flares but our good friend Danial helped us fix them and showed us some good tricks for making perfect flares. So our ideals feel slightly compromised but it is pretty nice to set a thermostat and be done. Hopefully we will get our wood stove up and running again so we do not have to rely so heavily on oil.

I leave for Jackson, Wyoming today and won't see Joey for a month- so it is nice to know he will be warm while I am gone.

The Fun Stuff

Suprisingly enough Joey and I are staying warm. Winter is finally here. With snow on the ground and several days now with sub-zero temperatures we are now slaves to our woodstove. Because the house isn't entirely sealed up yet we have to take shifts in the middle of the night re-stoking our stove. But believe it or not we are  now at the fun stuff. 

 

We have been hanging drywall and learning how to perfect the art of concealing our screw holes and seams with varying types of plaster and mud. Many of the materials we use are highly sensitive to temperatures as they dry so it has been a real challenge to monitor the drying process. We are holding ourselves to high standards. Ordinarily people texture their walls to cover flaws in the taping process and we have decided to forgo that step for cleaner look.

  

The finishing details of the house have been fun. We just spent the last couple of days completing our bedroom. It is an exciting stage where we get to be creative and the results are immediately very satisfying. We completed the tongue and groove ceiling and I wired in a ceiling fan to control the light from a switch and the fan from a pull chain. I think we are finally getting the hang of wiring. Now we get to choose wall paints and start cutting our trim. I think we are going to whitewash pine trim to match our white vinyl windows.

Tomorrow we dive into the plumbing. Wish us luck, thanks for your support and enjoy our photos.

The Power!

You'll notice in this photo- we have light which means we have power. Joey and I just finished wiring the house and escaped without a single zap or buzz.

Our first anniversary came and went- our gifts to each other- a new house! We celebrated with friends in our home in front of a raging wood stove fire. It was lots of fun and we have so many good memories from our first year as husband and wife.

Since then we have had a busy couple of weeks. Highlights include:
-Insulated our top floor
-Installed our gray water system
-Finished wiring
-Started plumbing (learned to sweat pipe)
-Purchased our bathroom appliances
-Transferred power and phone to our new house while keeping it at our little cabin.

More stories to come- we are tired and heading in for the night.

Still at work

Sorry for the lag in posts- in fact Joey and I have been busy little beavers. We returned from our last trip in the mountains Sept 18th and since then have completely weathered-in our house. All doors, windows and roofs are in. All of our siding, insulation, and sheetrock arrived on Monday so we will continue working on the house for the next three weeks.

Recent successes include installing a waterline from our well to our house, attaching the service panel for electricity, and buying and installing a wood stove.

We had to custom order our doors because we wanted our porch door to swing outwards and our rear door to include a large clear window. Shortly after they arrived I painted them brick red. It is fairly cold right now in Alaska (dropping into the 20's at night) so it has been difficult for the paint to dry. I had to stand above the wet paint with a blow dryer to get it to stick.

Installing our waterline was stressful. Because frost line is 10-feet deep we had to hire an excavator to dig an enormous trench for us so the walls would not cave in on us during installation. We drilled a hole into our well casing and attached a 1" water line that we installed heat tape and insulation around so hopefully there will be no chance of our pipes freezing during the chilly Alaskan winters.

The electric company is going to install the power and phone lines to our new house in just under three weeks so we are a bit under the wire to install all of our wiring- ha ha ha. We used a gift card from John and Marisa to buy most of our electrical tools and wire at Home Depot. Yipee.

We were happy to finally have purchased a wood stove. I can only relate the process to buying a car. The sales staff have similar strategies and the sticker shock is comparable. After comparing efficiencies and aesthetics we reached a comfortable middle ground by purchasing a DutchWest stove. It is technically a non-catalytic stove, but it has a ceramic chamber to re-combust smoke for high efficiency and low emmissions. The stove pipe installation was confusing. We had to calculate distances of our stove pipes from combustibles (like floor and ceiling joists, and walls) while still trying to have our pipe exit our roof near it's peak so that heavy snow loads will not shear the piping off our roof. We also wanted to install our pipe without any bends because every turn is a potential creosote trap and has the potential for chimney fires down the road.

Joey has been busily collecting firewood and squirreling it away. Hopefully we can season it properly for use mid-winter.

So Joey and I will celebrate our first anniversary this Sunday by firelight in our new house!

Enjoy the photos!