This isn’t the first time. During the process, I don’t recommend it, but upon completion, ‘life is good’. The fruits of your labor are particularly sweet - and you get to live within them, enjoying them each day.
All this ecstasy may be coming from just knowing we survived it, again. But whatever that ecstasy comes from, we’re getting close. We can almost taste that fruit!
We’ve done a few things along the way that particularly make 'life good', and we wanted to spread the word…
For maximum solar gain, we designed our home, studio and gallery long and narrow with a southern orientation. From our property, Yellowstone National Park and the Yellowstone River are due south. Great for solar design - AND awesome views and wildlife watching, too.
We use solar water panels to heat our hot water and tied that system into our radiant floor heating, to heat the house. (We unplugged our on-demand water heater in May and have all the hot water we could use, thanks to the sun.)
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| Our new heater from the kitchen/dining room side. The top door is for the brick oven. |
In our last house, we had a masonry heater – an efficient , comfortable and attractive way to heat your home with wood. The inner core was built by Albie Barden of Maine Wood Heat....click to be swept away to their web site - HIGHLY RECOMMENDED! And just like the last time around, we did the exterior stone work ourselves. After enjoying our last one for many years, that was something we knew we could not live without. So we did it again.
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| View from the living room side. |
Our heater has a see through fire box, so the fire can be enjoyed from both the dining room / kitchen and living room sides. On the living room side, there is a heated bench. The lintel stone on this side, we hand picked - the depressions have fossils in them!
Mass being a key to comfortable passive solar living, (retaining the heat AND the coolness), the heater fit into the plan perfectly. We faced it up with local Montana stone - and while we were at it, used some on the interior walls and some countertops too. Another ‘bonus feature’ of the heater is the hot water coils within it – also feeding into our solar hot water tank. And if that’s not enough accolades for our masonry heater, there’s also a heated bench and brick pizza oven in there, too!
So, yes, we’re getting a little ‘heady’ around here, as we finish up and live within our creation – enjoying our Yellowstone views and eating our homemade brick oven pizza – while the sun keeps life cozy inside.
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