Once in a blue moon I do something unrelated to the Sirona project. Last week I installed this wonderful mural in Middleburg, PA, done with the local middle & high schoolers!

Hello Everyone,

I hope you all are staying cool and sort-of-sane in this wild ride of a summer.

I am in the chaos of being in the middle of moving my stuff, frantically trying to maintain progress on the guest side of the house, get my side ready to live in full-time by the end of August, and trying to keep all the other balls in the air, like large mural installations and other wee projects like that.

So, I will try to keep this newsletter just a tiny bit briefer than the last few!

Our Feature Project is porches and decks. The focus of the house is to be outdoors as much as possible, so in addition to the big central shared porch, there are other decks all around the house, which we built in May, June, & July of 2024.

My SuperHero of the Month is Rebecca Lloyd, who was a lifesaver of a helper to us in 2024 anytime we needed another pair of strong, capable hands. She helped enormously with the deck projects, and has also learned a lot of basic carpentry helping us to install ceiling and other projects along the way. Needless to say, she is a total Badass!

And finally, my Nature Spotlight is wild white strawberries, which I have a big patch of just downhill from my house!

I hope you all can immerse yourselves in cool water this month.

All my love to you all!

Elody

P.S. Support Me: Limited edition archival print sale is ongoing! Each print is $20 or $22 (plus $5 or $6 shipping. If the shipping doesn’t add to your order please let me know and we will settle it separately, my website glitches and skips the shipping options, especially with Apple-Pay). Pics below, plus a link here to the print section of my shop!

The balconies on the back side of the house are shady and cool and bathed in the sounds of the waterfalls. Here they are being used for plein air painting in June 2024!

Feature Project: Porches, Decks & Ramps!

May, June, & July of 2024 my Dad and I were focused on building decks! We already had the big central shared deck, but outdoor hangout space is very important to my property and decks up off of the ground are great for more air movement and fewer bugs in the heat of the summer. We built balcony/decks off of the back of the house towards the waterfalls to enjoy the sounds of the rushing water, the forest, and the cool breezes coming off of the water. That direction is also north-facing so nearly always shady, even in summer. The south facing side is open and sunny, so decks were needed on that side for not only the entries but also for enjoying the warmth of the sunshine in the cooler months. The best place to sit outside shifts with the seasons! Also, we needed even more decking in the front to create the required ADA entry ramp.

As I was reflecting on building the decks, I realized that they are a really great metaphor for the project as a whole. When you think of deck building, you think of the actual surface of the deck, laying all of those deck boards down. That part, while it is hard work with all the bending over and kneeling, is actually rather fast and satisfying. You can lay a whole deck in a single day. The genuinely difficult and time consuming part of the process is everything that has to happen first.

DIGGING: First, you have to dig holes. Three foot deep holes to below the frost line for a concrete footer for each post. This was THE WORST part of literally the entire house building project. The densely packed clay soil is hard enough, but the mountain soil is actually mostly rock. And when I mean densely packed, I mean when we did the front decks and entry ramp, we were digging in the same ground that had just been driven over by heavy delivery trucks pulling up to the house to unload materials for an entire year. Every inch was so hard won, using a digging bar to break up the soil and dislodge the rocks, and clamshell to get the dirt out of the hole once it is too deep for a regular shovel to be any use. In the Superhero section below, you will learn how Rebecca Lloyd and her strength and will-power got us through this part when I was literally almost in tears. WHY did we do this to ourselves?!?!?!? Why couldn’t we magically re-arrange time so that we dug these holes right after the soil had been dug up in the foundation work instead of a year later of intense compacting by trucks? GAHHHH!!

Above: Digging the holes and making sure the concrete footers are set correctly.

FOOTERS: Then, after the hole-digging, it got much easier. Just the hot, dirty, heavy work of mixing concrete by hand in a wheelbarrow and pouring it into the holes. You know the digging is hard when lifting and tearing open heavy bags and mixing concrete is the easy part.

POSTS, FRAMING & JOISTS: Then we set the posts and built the framing for the deck. This part is slow and tricky, you have to get it all plumb and level and square, set the joists with joist hangers. But again, easy compared to digging. All of it was hot work though, since it was the sunny side and summertime.

DECKING: And finally, the decking goes down. So satisfying. One board at a time, my dad doing all the cutting and me drilling holes and setting the million deck screws into the pressure treated wood. Ta Da! Each deck “done” in one day, YAY! Then, of course, back to digging holes for the next one. NOOOOOO! Not more digging!

Above: Setting up for and assembling the railing systems for various decks.

RAILINGS: Once all of them were done, the real final step was creating and installing all the railings for all the decks! We did a really neat system of inexpensive, visually light railing using electrical conduit. My dad drilled lots and lots of holes into boards on the top and bottom that sandwich the conduit vertically. Here is a video of him installing them.

We finished all of this before my little trial-run workshop last year. So below there are some pictures of the finished decks as stations for plein air painting!

We may still need to do just a little more of this, since we may need to extend our ADA ramp. But if we do, we will do it right after having an excavator doing the final grading and I will make sure they loosen up the soil in the places we need to dig so it can just be regular hard work instead of “dissolve-into-tears of frustration” hard work this time. Fingers crossed!

TIMELAPSE: Here is a video compilation of parts of the process from various decks on Instagram and on Facebook.

Above: The finished decks and balconies getting used for my first trial run of a plein air painting workshop at Sirona Falls in June 2024.

Elody & Rebecca attempting to look both cute and badass with our nail-guns (think Charlies Angels) after many grueling hours of installing ceiling. Here we are perched on make-shift scaffolding high above the stairwell to my studio.

Superhero of the Month: Rebecca Lloyd

You have seen pictures of Rebecca in many previous newsletters and I have been promising to feature her soon! I wanted to feature Rebecca on this month because she was absolutely integral to the building of the front entry decks, but in the year after we no longer had our full crew, we called Rebecca for help anytime we really needed another pair of strong, capable hands. As you can see in the picture above, she helped a lot with ceiling installation and about a million other things. But, the deck part particularly featured how insanely badass she was.

As I mentioned, those holes were an enormous pain-in-the-ass to dig. I would have given up and wept about a hundred times if Rebecca was not there to fight for every inch, wresting huge rocks out of the ground and pounding the rock-hard clay into submission with our heavy iron digging bar. It was hot, sweaty, dirty, painful and brutal work. Each hole had to be three feet deep so the decks would not end up tilted and twisted from frost heave. This is a requirement, and boy did I resent it! At some point during each digging battle… I would start to say things like… come on, with climate change it surely would be fine to just go 24 inches, right? But Rebecca never gave up. She really is a superhero.

Rebecca is also a dear friend, generous and kind and beautiful and smart, and mother to two incredible and talented daughters (who I painted for the gift painting to her and her husband, Kenny when I gave the crew gifts).

Above: Rebecca getting down and dirty with me with hole digging. Bottom right pic features Rebecca’s pup, Luna, who loved the digging days but was not much help!

Close-up of a bowl full of my very own, fresh picked, fully ripe, wild white strawberries!

Nature Spotlight: Wild White Strawberries

Usually when I feature something I start with its scientific name. The wild strawberries native to North America are Fragaria Virginiana. My understanding was that my white strawberries were a natural variation of this species, but I cannot find good information to verify this. The internet is cluttered with cultivated species with much larger berries for sale, and I found a lot about wild white strawberries known as Alpine Strawberries, which seem to be a variation from the wild strawberries of Europe, Fragaria vesca. So, I am really not sure if my berries are native and naturally occurring or a European cultivar leftover from a gardener long past. Regardless, I have the loveliest patch of white strawberries just below my house that become ripe in late May through early July. If any of you know more about these lovely berries, let me know! I just know I have found wild white strawberries near a patch of regular wild red strawberries near my parent’s home as well as on my property.

Anyway! My point is, they are lovely. The berries have a gentle, sweet flavor that is only reminiscent of strawberries and to me taste tropical, almost like guava. Unripe they are pure white, and when ripe they deepen to a warm, soft yellow-white and fall easily off the stem. I gave a small plant to my cousin, who said it grew prolifically, and she also cultivated more plants from the seeds from a few berries, so they are easy to propagate. What do you think, should I cultivate a bunch of plants and sell them in a future Sirona Falls gift shop?

Clockwise from top left: Domestic strawberries vs much smaller wild strawberry varieties, Super-close-up of my berries, An all-white strawberry shortcake we made!

Bonus Pic + Hot Tip: When photographing waterfalls on an iPhone, you can hold the camera very still and take the photo with the “live” feature turned on, then change the settings to “long exposure”. You will get a lovely effect on the moving water, like in this picture I took on June 10, 2025. Be aware that you will lose detail on anything else that is moving at all, as you can see in the blurring of the foreground ferns.

Sirona Falls