FirstDay Cottage under way
Last summer we had planned to start building a new FirstDay Cottage kit on a rural piece of land in central Vermont. The plans were halted by hurricane Irene, which blew in the day after we were supposed to start digging the foundation. The foundation never happened, and by the time the roads in our part of Vermont were fixed, it was too late to start digging or building. So we had to put off the building until this year, after mud season.
Our cottage is going to be a variant on a T-shaped model that you can see at the FirstDay web site (linked above). We wanted it to have a long window-filled section that faced south, for maximum solar gain in winter. You can see the architect’s rendition of the south side of the house in this drawing:
.The construction finally started a couple of weeks ago with the foundation digging. The foundation is now half done. I’ll post pictures soon. To save bandwidth for users with slow internet access (much of Vermont is still on dial-up and miles and years away from broadband), I won’t insert images directly in these postings, but will provide links to the images.
When people find out we are building a house ourselves, they often want to impress their opinions and ideas on us with great forcefulness. Needless to say, everybody’s opinions differ greatly, and often have very little experience backing them up. This is the great danger with building a kit like this, which does not use conventional stud framing, which means that conventional thinking and techniques often do not apply. So we take the advice with grain of salt, and do lots of research and talking before considering any ideas.
Then there are the areas not related directly to the kit, and which have accumulated some quasi-religious beliefs. For example, the subject of waterproofing the basement (our is a full basement with a walkout at the downhill, east end) has gotten us some confusing and contradictory advice. Sorting through the bewildering array of information is pretty stressful when you’re dealing with the pressure of hired help. Once the foundation is out of the way, this will be less of a problem because we’ll be doing the work ourselves: building the house, which comes with detailed instructions.