Fall colors at the site

This weekend we took in the dock. The water had gotten a bit cold, so we donned our wetsuits. It was a beautiful sunny day, so here are a few misc pictures of the site.

Wells and geothermal

We decided to put in geothermal heating/cooling, which requires a source of ground temperature water to pump through a geothermal heat pump and return to the ground. In rocky NE, this normally requires a very deep well to pump from and back in to, so the water temperature can equilibrate before it is pumped back in. At any rate, we had our well drilled and by 150 feet they hit 50-80 gallons per minute of water, so much they had to stop drilling to avoid a flood! This is good, but today they had to drill a second well, and fortunately also hit plenty of water at 130' so they can pump out of one well and back into the other, an optimal geothermal arrangement. Shown below is the large drilling rig. If you don't quite get the geothermal concepts above, don't worry, it took Jack many hours of study.

Siding, windows and interior drywall

Lots happening the past 2 weeks, inside and out. All the insulation is in, sprayed foam covered by blown in batts. Wall board is starting to go up, shown below is Jack's sutdy in loft. On outside, windows are mostly in and siding is going up. Clapboards in places and cedar shakes in others. Notice in the picture below how they weave the outside corners of the clapboards. Very fine carpentry in my opinion.

Standing seam roof

We had a long search to find a roof color that matched siding, trim and windows, but we finally found it and are very happy to see it going up. They pre-paint large rolls of the steel, and form it on site in the truck shown below, while others are on roof installing each piece. A few roof shots follow.

Stone work, fireplace and chimney

The masons have been busy this month putting up stone veneer around the base of the house, building the fireplace and chimney, and putting stone around the surface of fireplace and chimney. We selected a natural Vermont stone called Old Chester from a quarry about one hour from our house. Below are various stages of the work.

<

Second garage

It's hard to down size the amount of garage space (given future potential for boats or tractor), so we decided to add a 2 car freestanding garage next to the house. Shown below is the site after the concrete floor and retaining walls were poured, that shows the lumber delivery for the garage. Next views are different stages of progress, right up through steel roofing that is now also going onto the house. This also required more machine laid stone walls, which we think are quite a work of art, given the size of the machine used to make them!