When outdoors becomes indoors
Somewhere in the middle
of the morning Thursday, the homemade
storage
building began to
feel like inside
rather than outside.
I could tell because Mark went outside, leaving the door ajar, and I
came along behind him and closed the door to keep the room warm.
And it was warm inside. Despite
being snowy and barely above freezing outside, once Mark fired up the
wood stove, the building heated up surprisingly fast. We don't
even have the insulation up in the ceiling yet, but within an hour we
were shedding our coats and working in our indoors clothes. I
guess we've been losing a lot
of heat from our exterior wood
stove to the outside!
I wonder if,
rather than saving up for an efficient
wood stove, we
should instead
make another small building and install two small wood stoves,
relegating the trailer to summer use. Not this year,
though! The garden is already starting to pull at my brain,
begging me to finish up winter chores and start the pruning.
(The photos above show
what I've been up to while Mark
was putting in the door --- covering the walls with a nice, smooth
plywood. I find myself getting lost in the swirls of the wood
grain.)
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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It's looking great. I like the idea of "pod" housing whereby you have different buildings to suit each need. I think heating a small area only during winter is a good plan too and probably a lot less work. Isn't it amazing how insulating a space makes such a difference. Thanks for sharing all of your adventures with us.
I like the clover idea from the other post as well. I'm definitely dreaming of spring too. Have you tried "winter sowing"? I haven't but have read about it on the "Garden Web Forums" and it sounds interesting. It may be more for flowers and such but who knows. Happy planning.
If I were ever to build my own house (and the plans from countryplans.com surely look appealing) I'd be tempted to leave the plywood interior as is. It looks very nice.