The day after x-mas I hit the downstairs floor, installing solid bamboo T&G in most of the space and vinyl around the entry-way door. Took 2 days for the bamboo, nailing it down. It really changed the feel of the place. Much more like a finished home now.
This is what the floor looked like before, painted OSB. The black is felt paper to prevent squeaking floors.
Looking SW from the kitchen. Old rocker is from my Great Great Grandparents. I brought it up on my drive from Minnesota in November.
Looking south from the Kitchen.
Looking West from the kitchen table.
Looking West from kitchen at the entry-way door.
The next project is to put the stone around the wood stove and to put in a shower in the corner you see here where the coats are. It will be a real shower stall, a small one, but no running water besides a hoisted 5-gallon bucket with warm water in it (heated over the wood stove or kitchen stove) and a nozzle on the bottom or side to let the water out. The shower will drain thru the floor into a bucket outside.
For now I take showers at work. In the summers i collect rain water off my roof and take bucket showers outside.
The kitchen with the finished shelves.
I don't have running water but I do have gravity fed water. Upstairs there is a 55-gallon drum sitting on its side. I have copper pipe running from it to the sink and into a regular faucet. There is a small RV pump under the sink that I use to pump water up that same copper pipe out of 5-gallon jugs that I fill either at the Univ. or at a natural spring 5 miles from my house. I use about 5-gallons of water a week for drinking and cooking. Another 3-5 gallons a week for dishes. The sink drains into a 5-gallon bucket under the sink. I may plumb the drain to run outside in the summer (it'll freeze in the winter). It works great. When I leave for extended periods (more than a week) of time I just drain the line and let my place freeze, not having to burn any fuel oil while I am gone. It just takes a day or so to warm the place up again when I get back.
Yes, I have an outhouse. But I learned the trick of using a pee bottle inside for those late nite wake-up calls while in Antarctica. My first summer at South Pole Station I was staying in the Quonset hut camp where there was a central bathroom area which meant you had to walk outside to reach it. The walk was not bad, it was the blinding sun(the sun never sets at 90 south/north for 6 months) and hit of cold air that sucked, coming out of your little cave of a room (they were about 8'x10') in the middle of the "nite". I did that drill only once before getting a plastic pee bottle. The air has less than 10% humidity down there and you are at about 9,300 feet in elevation so you have to down alot of water to stay hydrated.
Before the holidays I finally put up my kitchen shelves. They are made out of rough cut lumber I made from logs left over from the building of the house. My brother has a band-saw saw-mill and I used it to make these one inch boards. The house logs still have the round on one side so the boards have this round on one side too. It makes for a nice effect.
I had to sand the wood so I'd have smooth surfaces. The supports are made from little spruce trees from around my place.
