All has been quiet on my blog and what a shame because it has been anything but quiet around here! Since I last posted, I have moved into a new house. So, the apartment studio that you got to peek at during Apartment Therapy’s Small, Cool contest had to be dismantled and reinstalled in pieces inside my partner’s existing home. Since there isn’t really a dedicated space for me to work, he set to designing me a superinsulated hut in the backyard.
It still has a long way to go, but slowly, we are creating a space that will be the new home of Adorn Jewelry. From here on out, I will be posting regularly to keep you up to date. But first, let me catch you up on what we have done (with a lot of help) so far…
Preparing the site was the first task at hand. We decided the building should be set back away from the house behind a large existing concrete slab. The ground there sloped from the slab to the fence and so needed to be graded. Since the hut will rely heavily on passive solar heat gain, we also had to cut down a large tree that would have obstructed most of the sunlight. Someone we knew came and took the tree down and we were left with tons of branches, which took the better part of a couple weekends to bundle and clear out.
Once the ground was mostly graded to the level we desired, the digging for the concrete footers began. Our plan was to pour six concrete footers to hold two huge beams which would form the foundation. If you have ever seen the huge drills that can create holes for footers in 10 seconds flat, you will realize that machine really does win over man. Two people plus a manual post-hole digger does not a quick hole make. We had to dig six holes 4 feet deep and 10 inches across in earth that is made up of old fill from days gone by. What that means is that it can be going pretty easy when suddenly you hit a brick on it’s edge. Now you need to dig sideways 7 inches to get around the brick to get it out. One photo I won’t post is of me upside down with my body 3 feet into a hole trying to saw through a 4 inch wide tree root. Though there was mostly junk to be found in the fill we did hit upon some treasures as well. Jon and I pulled out a couple of intact glass bottles, one which read “Lydia Pinkham’s Medicine.” Now if you ever never heard of Lydia Pinkham, and I had not, her story is a fascinating read. Lydia and her medicine are even memorialized in folk songs “The Ballad of Lydia Pinkham” and “Lily the Pink”.
Once the holes were dug, we rented a concrete mixer to help us with the pour. Just getting the dang thing picked up and into the back was a hassle, but the machine itself was a life saver. Too bad we picked the only 102 degree weekend to pour them. One thing you need to remember is even though Jon has done a lot of reading on building superinsulated buildings and he did a lot of work on his own home, most of this business is new ground for us. So many mistakes are bound to happen. Sometimes they are easy to fix and sometimes they aren’t. One thing we didn’t count on happening was the concrete curing in a couple of hours. So the brackets to hold the beams on didn’t get set into place on time. Now we had ten inch screws we needed to drive into the concrete! So, a big shout out to Jesse Peterson and the use of his hammer drill.