the commons

It’s been a while since we’ve posted progress, but we’ve been making it. The kitchen is essentially done and we’ve finished the front stairs, catwalk and engawa (sorry, don’t have a finished photo yet).

Read the rest of this entry »

This week we moved forward on several projects. Dad built the frames for the toilets (they’re custom because they’re essentially pit toilets) – we still need to sheet them, and plumb in the bidet, but we’re getting close to having a working bathroom! We also worked on building more of the sliding doors. We’re getting better at constructing them quicker, however there always seems to be a unique challenge on everything we do. The side tables, drawers and bed in one of the rooms are finished, we took a picture to show them off.

And we have one more project in the works: the engawa that surrounds the courtyard. Dad got it all laid out and tacked up and I spent this weekend welding it up. It’s great to see these projects coming together.

I also had the opportunity to go speak at Oregon State University this week. Todd Jarvis, the instructor of Sustainability for the Common Good was gracious enough to invite me down. I spoke about the project and fielded a bunch of questions – I think the students found the project interesting. Todd also runs a blog on grey water, Rainbow Water Coalition, it’s well worth following and has some great specifics about Oregon’s new grey water laws (there’s a post and video about my visit).

We’ve finally finished a little side project we’ve been working on – a bit of furniture.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve been working on building our interior doors lately. We had two big goals we wanted to achieve with them: sound isolation and light transmission.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve been a bit quite lately and that’s partially because there’s been a changing of the guard. Dustin has headed off to school to get an Architecture degree and is supporting the project from afar. I (Garrett) have been attempting to take over his duties with the help of my Dad.

Read the rest of this entry »

A big thank you to our good friend Skander who returned from his tenure as a mountain man on Denali to put the decking on our front porch, it looks wonderful. Below is a picture part way through the construction process:

Good luck on the rest of your travels, buddy.

We decided (admittedly what some may think an odd decision) to make all the lights in the house be fixtures that are actually plugged into the ceiling through a normal outlet. We wanted the ability, in the future, to change our light fixtures easily. For the light fixtures we decided on a simple and DIY look.

A big thank you to Kelly for helping with the assembly.

Garrett did a number on his thumb with the angle grinder over the weekend while building the front stairs.

Below is an entry in my long-running battle with the angle grinder (angle grinder 4, dustin 0):

This is a question that we’ve often fielded when giving tours of the house or to those passing by. The answer in our mind has always been obvious, but that’s ’cause we designed the place. Well hopefully with the addition of the front stairs the answer will be self-evident. And a big thank you to our Dad who has been integral getting the design from computer to reality; the stairs were conceptually simple, but implementing them took a bit of head scratching.

Special thanks to Mike Lipke and Trillium Pacific Millwork for donating the milling of our FSC wood paneling (pacific albus from The Collins Company) that will be applied to the interior of the house and the lamination of our interior stair treads.