BUILDING THE HOUSE - Start to Recent Past
I did this in B/W because it all seems but a dream now.
.Our house is constructed with SIPS Panels. The walls are almost continuous 5.5 inches of foam insulation, and 9.5 inches in the roof system. We heated with the totally enclosed (inside the house) “Rumford fireplace” for three years. Finally installed a central system so we could travel during the colder months. A five man crew “dried in” the house from a bare sub floor in 10 working days. The labor savings paid the cost of the SIPS above standard stick construction.
Our House in 2015
Kitty and I used antique doors (bedroom, kitchen and both bathrooms), wormy chestnut timber for mantle, salvaged windows (some leaded) INSIDE the house for air circulation (a must with SIPS panels), and bricks from a Civil War era foundry in Wythe County for the bedroom side, back, of the fireplace. Most of the stone for the fireplace was gathered by us from next to the creek on our property. The wood for the walls is from trees cut for the driveway; milled, dried and shaped locally. The bookcases are wormy chestnut from a neighbor, and the doorway to the hall is sassafras cut from a downed tree and shaped by hand with drawing knives. The stairs were built by our sawmilling neighbors from excess timbers used in the house. The kitchen and dining area walls are the remnants of our oak flooring, tongue and grooved, mounted vertically.