So today is our last full day in the house on Kips Creek. If you haven’t heard, we’ve found that the commute in and back from Williamsburg every day (or, even, several times a day), has gotten to be too much. We’re going to rent a place in town, bike-able (but not walkable) to the College, walkable to at least one grocery store, walkable to a neighborhood pool, and within ten minutes of driving to just about anything in Williamsburg that we go to on a regular basis. We aren’t selling this house, and we’re only renting a place in town, but it still feels momentous; this was the house we built — perhaps naïvely, perhaps not — to be the house we’d live in forever.
We pack up the truck tonight, and drive away in the morning.
There are aspects of being in town that I’m really looking forward to, but I’m really sad about leaving this place. And we might be moving back here in a year or two … it just depends on how things go with the kids’ schooling, our income, etc. In the meantime, I’m going to miss this place. Anyway, I thought I’d jot down a few notes about things I’m going to miss.
I love being surrounded by nature as I work in the mornings, and that we have a nature walk as soon as you step out the front door.
In the mornings, I’ll get up somewhere between 5:30 and 6 (or, on a late morning, closer to 6:30), and I’ll come downstairs, make a half-pot of coffee, and work at the kitchen table. As day begins to break, more and more of the land outside is revealed, until I’m looking past my computer to a wall of woods surrounding us on every side. Trees are wonderful things, and we’ve got a ton of them. So many, you can’t see more than about 20 feet into the woods. After that, it’s just dark green shadows.
One of my favorite things to do is to go marauding through the woods, working on a path — cutting down saplings that are growing up in the way, carrying logs so they define the path’s edges, clipping vines so they don’t grow larger and choke the good trees. And it’s nice, once I’ve hacked a bit, to use that path to walk through the woods. We have a path that now leads around the perimeter of the property, and another one that mostly cuts across the center of it to join up with the path at the halfway mark. I’m sad I didn’t finish that cut-through, but it was hard to find time to “waste” tromping through the woods.
I LOVE the Bookhouse.
So, if you haven’t been to our property, we have a building called “the Bookhouse.” It’s … oh … 750 square feet or so? And it’s packed with books. Books on bookcases. Books in boxes. Books in stacks on the floor. Some grouped together in rough collections of topics — psychology, ethics, bioethics, Civil War history, comic books, family / marriage, Communist theory, science fiction, art instruction books, mysteries, gay studies, “quote” books, sociology, cook books, religion, constitutional law — and a whole lot of random, unclassified books that have yet to find enough friends to be a collection.
It can get a little hot in the summer, or cold in the winter, but it’s a lovely place to go and sit and read. I’ve been going out there more often this spring, now that I have a laptop with a battery that works, and it’s been wonderful. One of the nice things is that it’s out of range of the wi-fi, so I’m able to better focus on my tasks. (If you know what I’m up to with Monotask, you’ll recognize the value of working offline, except for the few resources you need at the moment.)
The Bookhouse is also a connection to my father. Almost all of the books in there are Papa’s, and the Bookhouse serves as a four-dimensional, interactive memoir of his life. Being out there with him is a neat exercise in immediate family history, as he’ll pick up books and talk about where he was when he first read them, or he’ll talk about college professors he had who had them read one book or another. I think he and I both wish we had more time to just hang out together at the Bookhouse, flipping through books, gathering duplicate copies (anybody want a copy of “3 by Flannery O’Connor” or “1984” or Irving Goffman’s “Asylums” or Ivan Turgenev’s “Fathers and Sons”? The Bookhouse could supply a whole classroom with copies of any of them.). I’m going to miss you, Bookhouse.
I love these floors!
So, when we were building the house, Jay Wise offered us some wood for the floor. About six years before that, there had been a huge storm in Williamsburg. Hurricane, ice storm, something. Someone in Williamsburg had a Black Walnut and a Red Oak fall in their yard. They got in touch with Jay, as they heard Jay had a sawmill (he was milling lumber to build the church with Pops Wise and Pete Bauer and the other members of Peace Hill). They offered to give him the Red Oak if he milled the Black Walnut for them. He agreed, and so he cut the Red Oak up into flooring to use for the church. They had two problems, though. First, there wasn’t quite enough of the wood for the floor of the main room at the church, and they would have had to supplement it with a second kind of wood (which would have been strange, honestly). Second, Jay’s sawmill didn’t do flooring-grade lumber. So while the boards were generally the right size and shape to be used as wide floorboards, they weren’t uniform, and they weren’t finished enough, and they weren’t tongue-and-grooved. So the church ended up using some pre-milled floorboards, and the Red Oak boards sat under a tarp on a beat-up old trailer.
As we were building the house, Jay offered the boards to Peter Buffington (who decided to get pre-milled flooring as well), and then to me, noting that we’d need to find a sawmill in the area who could turn them into actual, uniform floorboards. I made a few calls to different mills I found online, and on the 14th or 15th call, I found Lail Millwork in Richmond. I spoke to the owner (I think his name was Ernie?), and he said they were up for it. So, along with Tim Carroll, I loaded up the wood from the old trailer to a new trailer that Jay let me borrow, and hauled it behind Jay’s massive white pickup in to Richmond. A perilous journey, to be sure, as this was a ton (figurative, but possibly literal as well) of wood, and I wasn’t used to hauling things on trailers. Anyway, we got the wood to Lail Millwork, and unloaded it. On the way back, we stopped by 84 Lumber and got a couple of 8x8s that I thought we’d need for something. (I have no idea what I thought we’d need 8x8s for … especially 12-foot-long 8x8s, but we got them. Maybe a deck? Not sure. They’re still in the yard, actually.)
A week or two later, Lail Millwork was done with the milling, so I went back. My dad came down from Arlington and met me at the millyard, and we loaded the wood back up onto the trailer, and then brought it back out to Charles City. This time, although the wood was a little less heavy (I didn’t notice), the adventure was enhanced by rain. So I got to drive it all back to Kips Creek Drive in what I guess must have been a cold November rain. We loaded it into the house, in stacks, where it sat until mid-January.
When we started laying the floor in January, I realized that carting the wood to Richmond and back was the easy part of the job. Although the boards are larger than conventional flooring — all are 4¾″ wide, of varying lengths, but almost all are longer than 4′, and many are close to 8′ — since they aren’t “factory flooring,” they take a little more encouragement than normal pre-finished boards. So we start laying the boards. Each row (28 feet long in one room, 17+ feet in another) took about an hour and a half of work, and that only advanced us 4¾″ across the floor. There are 68 rows of flooring across the first floor. So just laying the wood down took about 100 hours. Halfway through the first room, we discovered the floor jack, which is a tool that helps compress the boards together. It added time to the process, but I think it helped give the boards a tighter fit.
And then I had to sand it. Many times. (In fact, with the total cost of renting the floor sander from Home Depot, I would have done better to buy a sander off eBay, use it, and then sell it again on eBay. But, knowing me, I would have bought it, used it, and then stuck it in the basement “just in case,” so it’s probably better that I just rented it.) So after the rough sanding, and the mid-grade sanding, and the fine sanding (with vacuuming throughout to help pick up stray sawdust), I had to vacuum it again, then clean the whole thing with a kind of oil cloth. I have no idea how long the sanding took … maybe three hours per pass? Probably more than that, actually.
Then, it was time to polyurethane the floor. We wanted to really highlight the Red Oak-iness of the wood, so we didn’t stain it. We just used Minwax clear semi-gloss polyurethane. I can’t remember how many coats we did of it (five, I think?), but each one was a long, slow process of spreading the gloss on with a lambswool mop-thing, then letting it dry, then sanding the “peaks” off the polyurethane, then cleaning it up (with that oilcloth), then starting again. Each of those coats (poly, sanding, cleaning) took … man … probably six hours? Eight hours? Somewhere in there. And that’s not including the drying time, and there were five different coats.
So, after all that, we now have these gorgeous Red Oak floors, and I’m going to miss them. They have their gaps and cracks in places, as any good country house floor does. I would have preferred to lay them without any gaps, but it was a challenging enough process as it was.
Two final notes on the floor. First, it was only by the help of our neighbors and fellow Peace Hill members that we were able to do the floors. From Jay’s initial gift of the wood, to Tim’s helping me move it to the mill and back, to the countless hours invested by Peter, Pete, Vince, Ray, Raleigh, John, Richie, Tom, and Justin. The whole house-building process — but the floor-laying in particular — highlights how much we love and depend on the members of the church (and, as it works out, the neighborhood). Second final note: My diet during the floor laying was lots of honey-roasted peanuts and lots of Coca-Cola, and I had just gotten Belle and Sebastian’s album “The Life Pursuit” and The Mountain Goats’ album “The Sunset Tree,” and the two albums were pretty much on repeat the entire time. The chorus from TMG’s song This Year — “I am gonna make it / through this year / if it kills me” — became my anthem. To this day, I can’t drink Coke and eat peanuts or hear music from either of those albums without thinking back to the laying of the floor.
I love the flow of the house.
Sarah and I, when we were planning the house, were very into the philosophies laid out in A Pattern Language — things like “outside light on two sides of every room.” We were using a builder’s architectural plan, but we were able to make modifications and changes to the layout, really opening it up from the default template. We got rid of the “formal dining room” and turned it into a mudroom (we do, after all, live in the country), and we took out a large part of the wall that separated the living room from the “library.” So from where I normally sit to do my work, I can see out eight different windows (six, if you count the two side-by-side windows as a single window each). The house has a very open feel, and it’s been perfect for our family. You know how, in houses, you often have those “I wish this thing was like this” feelings? We don’t have those here. We’d like for it to be a little more finished (we never stuccoed the cement blocks that make up the foundation, our yard isn’t as grassy as we’d like, we never built the deck out the side of the house), but the structure of the house itself is really pleasing. And, apart from the bathrooms and Kate and Frances’s bedroom, every single room in the house has light coming in from at least two sides — with our main living / dining room having light coming in from all four sides. It’s really the perfect layout for us.
I love the basement.
After Peace Hill Press, I had to crunch on PearBudget. We had been working on the interface for two years, but the backend hadn’t been begun yet. As we got closer and closer to launch, it took more and more time. It became a “marathon sprint,” where I was in the basement, working for almost 12 hours a day, almost seven days a week, for six months. We launched in the middle of that time, but it wasn’t any less work once we launched. I spent a lot of time in the apartment suite in the basement, working on code. We didn’t have an internet connection in the house at the time — only an EVDO card. So I would be offline, jamming on code. When I was ready to save it to the server, I’d get the “cellphone modem” from Sarah, and I’d upload the code. Then, I’d give it back to Sarah, and get back to work. It was a very productive time, and was a lot of fun — I was taking this idea, and actually making it happen. I have fond, if fuzzy, memories of being in the basement, for long hours, refining the interface, cross-browser testing, and making long lists of the things we needed to fix to make PearBudget better.
A neat quirk about the basement is that when we had the masons laying the concrete block foundation, we accidentally had them lay an extra course of block at the top. Technically, I think we thought our floor (a poured concrete pad) would be a little higher than it actually is. But the end result is that the basement’s ceiling feels amazingly high and spacious. It really makes the basement more comfortable.
I’ve loved gathering here with family and friends.
We’ve two family Christmasses in the house here, with both families traveling down here to celebrate with us. We’ve had two Easters here, and several birthdays, and countless cookouts and prayer groups and game nights and fun times with loved ones. We had a wonderful time just three weeks back, when my mom and dad came down for the weekend, and Melissa came over from Charlottesville. Papa and Melissa and I hung out in the Bookhouse, drinking beer and just being together. It was lovely.
It’ll be hard to be further from so many members of Peace Hill that we love dearly. It’s been so nice living on the same road as Tom and Achsa and Ginny, and John, and Vince and Shirley, and Justin and Mel, and super-close to Peter and Susan and Jay and Jessie and Christopher and Ben and Dan and Emily, and to Charlie and Teri and Justin and Bob and Jeremy and Nathan. We’re looking forward to being closer to another cluster of Peace Hill’s members, but we’ve been living out here for almost six years now. These people helped us build our house. They took care of the kids when we needed help. They cooked meal after meal after meal for us when we were still in shock after Kate and Frances were born. They’re like family, and it’s going to be sad being even just 30 minutes further away from them than we are now.
We’ve been able to host friends here a few times, like when Matt Couch stayed with us when he was visiting Williamsburg, or when Jacob Buurma came down to stay last summer, and the Pendergrafts and the Sahs came over for the day and we had a great time chatting in the basement, or when students camped out in the field by the Bookhouse, or when Jarber and some other FOCUS friends came down for a wedding (was it Chappy’s?) and stayed overnight, or when Saya and Laurie Schroeder stayed with us for the weekend, and we talked late into the night, just like in college, or when Ellen came down and got us pumped up about PearBudget and life (and, another time, when her mom was in town and came out for dinner and did the same thing).
Over the last year and a half or so, we’ve had a near-weekly double-date with Justin and Mel, where we play Settlers of Catan. Sarah makes a big batch of coconut popcorn, we have some wine, occasionally some chocolate. It’s been a lot of fun, and I’m hoping we’ll be able to still have frequent game nights with them. It’ll be tougher, of course, as we’ll be a full half-hour away. But those evenings have been one of the highlights of the last year for us, and we’re sad that we won’t have that time with them as often, or as easily, as we have for the last 18 months.
One of my regrets is that I didn’t more explicitly invite individual friends to come stay with us, as the house here is perfectly suited to those types of visits, and we would have loved to host even more people than we did. We’re grateful for the friends who did stay with us, and are sorry we didn’t ask more to come hang out. Perhaps when we’re in Williamsburg we’ll have more opportunities to see college friends when they come to town. I hope so. But it’s impossible to be here and not think fondly of fun times with family and friends. I’ll miss that.
I love the wildlife that we see out here.
So there’s a bald eagle that flies over our house, daily. Let me say that again: There’s a BALD EAGLE that flies over our house, DAILY. We also see all kinds of deer, snakes, owls, hawks, lizards, and other creatures in the yard and woodpile near our house. Plus, we can see paddocks of alpacas and goats our our kitchen window. And at the bottom edge of our property is a creek with a beaver dam. A real beaver dam! And just yesterday, as Sarah drove down the driveway, past the barley field, a family of five wild turkeys scuttled across the driveway out of the barley and into the woods. All kinds of crazy animals. I wonder if Lucy will even remember them. I hope so. It’s been really special to be out here.
I know there’s a lot to look forward to in town. I know it’ll be more convenient, and, in fact, we’re looking forward to being in a slightly smaller house, with less to take care of. But there’s a lot about this place that we’re going to miss.
Love you, house! See you soon!
