Our new home in Kentucky, very unlike our other homes
Last fall, we traveled back to our former home in Missouri to bring our straw bale & timber frame house to completion. It was six weeks of non-stop work, including finishing the interior clay plaster and exterior lime plaster, wiring the house for electric, loading the living roof with more topsoil to fill in some bare spots, shoring up our custom wood spiral staircase… all for the purposes of making the home more sellable.
This fall, we’re working on something a little bit different. We’re right in the middle of remodeling our new house here in Kentucky, a very different home from the one we had built from the ground up in Missouri. It’s a very conventional stick frame structure, with vinyl siding, an asphalt shingle roof, fiberglass insulation, and very thin walls…
It’s an odd feeling to own such a conventional home after living in my own natural homes for the past seven years. However, we’re taking a lot of time to personalize the space and give it a big boost in the aesthetics and functionality department. Things are shaping up nicely…
Here’s the living room, before any remodeling… it’s going to look very different in the next couple weeks
Our New Kentucky Home (and Remodeling as Naturally as Possible…)
This new house of ours was not the reason we bought the property that we did, but I have to admit it’s definitely advantageous to have a home we can move into very quickly. I think of this house as (yet another) transitional living space, but it’s also a building that will continue to be useful for as long as it exists. While we don’t plan on living in this home for the next several decades, the house will be valuable infrastructure for whatever building needs we have as we develop the land, host more natural building workshops and interns, etc.
Tearing out the wall between kitchen and living room… this will be a timber frame wall soon!
And of course, realistically… we’ll likely be living in this house for at least five years (though I hate to admit it, hah). It’s worth the time and expense for us to jazz up the interior and make it more beautiful and suit our living needs. We’re attempting to incorporate as many good materials as we can, too. Within reason, of course. For example, we’re not going to tear off the asphalt on the roof right away, since there’s still life in the shingles.
A newly installed east-facing window in the kitchen for increased light and ventilation
Things we are remodeling include — replacing all the flooring (formerly carpet and vinyl stuff) with oak flooring and tile, completing redoing the bathroom and replacing the fiberglass shower, repainting the walls with milk paint, tearing out the wall between the kitchen and living room and replacing it with a timber frame, installing a wood cook stove in the kitchen, installing several new windows for light and ventilation, blowing cellulose in the interior walls for soundproofing (good lord, these stick frame houses are LOUD inside)…
It’s a long list, but we’re making steady progress. The interior is going to feel very, very different once we’re done, and definitely for the better.
The bathroom gets a new window (it had none), and damaged subfloor gets replaced