The largest of the three is dropping what seems like an excessive amount of sap onto the ivy surrounding its trunk.  Hardened drips of sap cover the Southeastern branches as far up the tree as I can see. Does the tree have some damage that’s causing such a big flow of sap?

Hardened white sap on ivy below an Eastern White Pine

I climbed up my ladder hoping to get a better view of the upper reaches of the tree, but only surprised what may have been a White Breasted Nuthatch. This bird may be nesting in the tree or using it to store or crack acorns. Maybe there’s a connection due to drilling done by this bird and a wound in the tree? The trees drop needles that acidify the soil below their crowns, which stunts the back lawn grass growing below that needle-drop.

Here are my calculations:

First, I measured our roof area, ignoring the slant.  The main roof and first floor roof lengths and widths yields approximately 31 feet wide by 50 feet long, which totals 1,550 square feet.  That’s 372 x 600 inches, or 223,200 square inches.

The roof covers a rectangle 31 feet wide and 50 feet long.

In our region, the average rainfall is 45.45 inches.  If that much rain falls on a 223,200 square inch area, the volume of water running off will be 223,200 x 45.45 = 10,144,440 cubic inches.  There are 0.004329 gallons per cubic inch, so that’s 43,915 gallons per average year of rainfall hitting our roof.  (And, suppose it’s a very wet year — with 20% more rain, the volume could rise to 52,698 gallons.)

So, that’s how much water we could harvest, but how much are we likely to use? According to The Integral Urban House, typical indoor water use per US person is 67 gallons per day.  The book also estimates a conservationist’s indoor water use to be as low as 20 gallons per person per day.  So, for a family of four, indoor water use falls within a range of 97,820 to 29,200 gallons per year (e.g. for typical: 67 x 4 x 365 = 97,820).

That means there’s more than enough rain in the average year to cover all of our indoor water needs if we conserve, but not enough if our usage is “typical” of the patterns cited in The Integral Urban House.

How big would our cistern need to be to hold all the rain that falls in an above-average year?  Suppose we figure that some years there will be more water than we can use, and we want to store that leftover water for a future year (or just to water the garden)…  A cylindrical cistern 10 feet deep with a 15 foot radius would hold 7,068 cubic feet (radius2 * pi * depth).  There are 7.4805 gallons per cubic feet, so this tank holds 7,068 x 7.4805 = 52,875 gallons.

In the context of the house, that’s an enormous tank, as shown here:

A 15-foot radius cistern in the back yard looks pretty big!

Maybe a series of smaller cisterns located around the house would be better than one?  But then would we need multiple pumps?  Need to think about it some more!

A seldom-utilized but highly important roof element is color, the lighter the better.  With a white or silvered roof reflecting away the sun’s heat and destructive ultraviolet rays, the building will be far more comfortable and energy-efficient, and the life of the roof material will be doubled.

Representing some 70 percent of a building’s exposure, the roof has to take extreme punishment – from rain, snow, and ice, from freezing and frying (and the contracting and expanding that go with them), from wind, from chemicals in the air, and from constant molecular breakdown by the sun’s ultraviolet rays. The side of a pitched roof facing the weather (sun or wind, whichever’s worse locally) will need new roofing in half the time of the protected side.  If ever you want to do a building a favor, buy it a new hat.

A hat made of what?  The choices are:  wood shingle, asphalt composition shingle, built-up roof, single-ply membrane, lead, tile, slate, and metal.  Wood shingle looks nicely weathered in just a year, but it only lasts about fifteen years, if fire doesn’t get it first.  George Washington had to replace Mount Vernon’s shingles six times.  Composition shingle is cheap and comes in colors, but it lasts only fifteen to twenty years.  The single-ply membranes are still too new to gauge their longevity, and built-up roofs are known for short lifespans of ten to twenty years.

The 100-year-plus materials are lead, tile, slate, and metal.  When lead finally crystallizes after a century or so, it needs to be completely replaced.  Tile and slate are heavy, expensive, and sometimes breakable, but they are fireproof and beautiful and they will last the life of most buildings (often much longer, since they can be recycled).  New concrete tiles are not as attractive as traditional clay tiles – a 12,000-year-old technology—but they cost less.  Slates are soulful.  However they don’t hold up in sunny climates quite as well as tile (ultraviolet rots them), they need steeper pitches to reduce moisture damage, and they require stainless steel or copper nails if you want the fasteners to last as long as the slates.

Metal roofs have become tremendously popular since architects began getting sued for leaks.  The best of all is standing-seam terne-coated stainless steel or copper.  It is light, nonflammable, moderately  priced, good looking, nearly maintenance-free, and waterproof (it also sheds snow, branches, and prowlers).  In The Low-Maintenance House, Gene Logsdon reports, “Every roofer I ask says that metal roofs today are the best buy for the money of any kind of roofing.”  Len Lewandowski concludes in Preventive Maintenance of Buildings, “The standing seam roof offers the lightest weight, lowest maintenance, and most cost-effective roofing solution available today.”  Survivors of hurricanes in the American southeast say that metal roofs should be fastened with screws rather than nails – stainless steel of course.

After the roof, the most vulnerable part of a building’s exterior is the windows.  Like people, buildings would have far fewer upkeep problems if they had no orifices.  Water dampens and sun toasts the horizontal surfaces, and decay blooms in the cavities and crevices.  Condensation collects on the inside of the glass.  The moving parts undergo wear and tear.  And even more than the rest of the building’s skin, windows obsolesce quickly from fashion swerve and technology advance.  Most won’t last twenty years.

When it comes to walls, one of the great cautionary tales of maintenance is the siding question.  Exasperated home owners are offered a shortcut:  Just put up aluminum or vinyl siding and quit worrying forever about peeling paint and decayed wood and all the rest of it.  Aluminum eventually dents, and its paint can scratch off, but vinyl (available since 1963) has neither disadvantage.  At the cost of three paint jobs, put it up and your problems go away, right?  Wrong.  Where your problems go is out of sight.  Vinyl siding is a vapor barrier chilled by outside cold.  Any moisture behind it, whether from leaks or condensed house humidity, is trapped to do its damage invisibly for years.  The damage can be structural.

The question is this:  do you want a material that looks bad before it acts bad, like shingles or clapboard, or one that acts bad long before it looks bad, like vinyl siding?  A whole philosophy of maintenance falls one way or the other with the answer.  What you want in materials is a quality of forgiveness.  Shingles and clapboard expand and contract comfortably with temperature extremes, they let water vapor through, they show you when they’re getting worn, and they’re easy to replace piecemeal.  The same is true of British tile-hanging on exterior walls, a weatherproofing practice worth importing to the US.  Remodelers love shingled and tile-hung walls because changes are so easy to make and then hide.

The attraction of traditional materials such as shingles and clapboard is more than just aesthetic.  Their whole use cycle is a highly evolved system of trade skills, reliable supply sources and routes, generations-deep familiarity, and even a market for reuse of durable materials such as slates, tiles, bricks, and timbers.  The problems of traditional materials are thoroughly understood, and the solutions are equally well known.  Maintenance is no mystery.  In some cases maintenance can be a matter of steady improvement, as with the now unfashionable use of whitewash on masonry or stucco walls.  In the days when medieval castle walls were routinely brightened in side with fresh whitewash, it was said that the whitewash “fed the stonework”.  It did, and it does so to this day on the dazzling rubble-and-stucco buildings of the Greek islands which are required by local law to get a new coat of whitewash annually.  The lime or chalk in the whitewash fills hairline cracks before they expand and helps keep water out.

This in turn has confirmed how much sunshine falls on different parts of the property over the course of the Summer.  On that basis, we’ve planted a small garden along the fence, near where our driveway enters the backyard.  The vegetables are growing fast — we can hardly keep up with all the salad greens and Arugula!

Bittersweet Nightshade has a striking yell0w-purple flower that looks almost man-made due to the brightness of both colors (maybe because they are complements).  However, this plant also is problematic in that its red berries are poisonous to people.  To make matters worse, the only one found thus far on our property is beside the brambles we think (or hope) are edible blackberries or raspberries.  Also one to watch and either remove or educate the family about.

Chelidonium majus

The other plant is Garlic Mustard or Alliaria petiolata, a member of the Mustard Family.

Garlic Mustard

Wikipedia describes both as aggressive invaders (and both are non-native to the US).  Garlic Mustard, though edible, prevents other plants for using the same soil by releasing chemicals that prevent the growth of fungus needed by most other plants.  Chelidonium can be used to remove warts, but isn’t edible.

We decided to remove both species from the grounds.

In so doing, I discovered a third species of plant living there:  Poison Ivy!

Next, I’ll finish modelling the attic and the front porch.  With the house structure then complete, I can begin modelling the systems (electrical, water, heating, etc.).

In addition to the pine cones cached by chipmunks or squirrels and the ancient spiderwebs long ago abandoned by spiders, I noticed a very dusty pile of paper.  It turned out to be a newspaper…the Boston Post published on August 1st, 1910.

This fragile piece of history supports the assertion from the real estate agency that our house was built in 1910.  Builders of houses with hollow Newell posts sometimes left rolled up construction plans inside the Newell posts — maybe because ours is solid rather than hollow, they instead left a newspaper underneath the Newell post!

To capture these elements of our house, I started in a corner and measured outward using a tape measure. Each time I had a few dimensions, I modelled them in Sketchup, starting from that same corner, and then, as I added walls or other elements, using those as new reference points for more measurements.

The framing is mostly hidden by the plaster interior, but in a few places, such as from within the cellar or where a pipe cuts into the wall in the cellar stair area, the framing is exposed. It looks like balloon framing, which means the studs that rest on the foundation (or a sill on the foundation) extend all the way up to the rafters in the roof. At this point, the model shows some of the studs going up that high, as  an initial reference. Once I have measurements for the windows on the second floor, I’ll know how to complete the framing on that level, and will extend all the studs as appropriate.

Once the floor, framing and interior walls were done, it was time for the “skin” that covers the framing — in our house, that’s lathe and plaster on the inside and an unknown on the outside, covered with a plastic siding exterior. I also added doors and windows, copied from Google’s 3-D Warehouse, and sized them to fit within the framing exactly.

I also modelled the main staircase in a separate Sketchup project using two photographs taken at different angles. When it was done, I moved it into the main project. The Newell post has some nice detailing that I included in the model, just for fun (shown below). Newell posts are sometimes hollow (ours is not) and builders would sometimes leave a rolled up set of construction drawings inside these hollow posts.

The next step will be to capture the second floor in the model.

My home computing systems all run various flavors of Linux, and SketchUp runs on Linux thanks to “Wine”, the Microsoft Windows emulator. Using the Wine forums, I was eventually able to get SketchUp running on my Fedora Core 11 desktop. Aside from a small square mask surrounding the cursor, it seems to run very well. The square mask hasn’t been enough of an annoyance to prevent me from using SketchUp effectively.

To model our house, I began from the ground up, measuring our cellar’s dimensions down to one eighth of an inch precision using a 30′ tape measure. Once I had the dimensions, I drew simulated the concrete pad with a 3″ deep shape, then built up the fieldstone foundation walls, leaving openings for windows and doors. Next, I added the topography at the level where it touches the foundation. Finally, I modelled the stairs going up to the first floor and the stairs exiting through the storm doors. The resulting model appears below.

Next, I added windows from Google’s 3-D Warehouse and adjusted them to fit the foundation openings exactly.  Next came the chimney.  And then, by measuring the joists and girders that are all visible from within the cellar, I added the wood framing, as shown in the below image:

The ducts from the furnace will have to wait until the first floor is built, because I’ll use the measurements of the vent openings to properly model the ducts feeding them.  The laundry machines can also wait until the rest of the structure is modelled.