Heating Up  - April 28, 2013

So...the reason I'm behind on my posts is that things have been picking up speed at a rather alarming rate here. The first load of timbers for the first floor deck and both of the round wood center posts for the timberframe were delivered to Mitchell Estrin's place last week (he's a partner in Montpelier Construction).  Gerg's been over there many days since then, planing and sanding the timbers.  He and Curtis have been using a power planer that weighs 42 pounds.  Glad it's not me.

Our son Geoff came over to our place two weeks ago and helped Greg cut down about a hundred small trees... 

Geoff stands amid the scene of destruction.

...to get ready for the Pathfinder. Which sounds like some sort of New Age prophet, but in fact is a simple gizmo that optically demonstrates, for any point you set it up, the path of the sun by time of day and time of year.  It’s a hemispherical dome; you mount certain charts under it, set it up north/south, and then you can see, by looking at and through the dome, or by taking a pic and doing it later, the path of the sun in relation to shading objects such as the horizon, trees, hills, buildings, etc.  This way, we know which parts of the house walls will get sun when....so we can plan our window placement, performance specifications, and shading.

Indigo using the Pathfinder during his first visit - right after clearing.

Here he sets it up at the proposed placement of a second story window during his second visit - after some excavation work.

The Pathfinder, with Indigo and Gerg and the horizon and trees reflected in it.

Also, John Picard and his helper, Bert, arrived last week with the BIG MACHINE. 

 

"This thing's not afraid of anything,"  he told me with a big grin.  "Is that why you have 'No Fear' stenciled on it?" "Nope, that's my other machine. This is the excavator."  It stood in our yard all week, looking like a dinosaur taking a nap. 

Bailey and I check out the excavator.

He brought over his John Deere 350B 'dozer too, and before we knew it, a whole bunch of our trees were down and buried in a pit, and we were grieving the loss while oohing about the new sunset view that just opened up.  You can't have forested land AND sunsets when you live in a valley.

Newly sculpted!

The new landscape resembles the Moretown landfill, but I'm trying my best to visualize fruit trees and an herb garden. They say the best time to plant a tree is ten years ago, but I'm relieved that we never landscaped that part of the property, which was mostly a young, wild forest.  We did lose a bunch of our blackberry bushes.  But now we're thinking about a live roof on the cottage, planted with strawberries.  As Skip says, "If you're going to plant something and take care of it, you might as well be able to eat it."