My house as a completed exterior shell, two months after we finished installing the roofing, siding, windows and doors. This picture was taken at twilight with the construction lights on inside and the moon rising above a fresh snowfall on 1/21/24.

Hello Everyone,

I hope you have all had a lovely Memorial Day Weekend. Thank you, as always, for reading. I appreciate you all so much for following along as I share this journey with you!

May 6th was my 4-year anniversary of the closing on purchasing my property! What an exciting, intense, amazing, exhausting, and rewarding four years it has been. After this backbreaking marathon, we are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and I am so excited to start setting things up for moving in on my side (aka, this is appliance and furniture time! Other than the basement, it is really close to done!) Here is an Instagram Reel I posted to celebrate this journey.

As I reflect on these four years, I am struck by the fact that in addition to all the physical labor, so much of this process is about endless decision-making. There are just so, so, so many decisions to make! Big decisions made well in advance, decisions made and remade over and over again as new information comes to light, and sudden decisions as changes are made at the last minute. There is what you want, what is allowed, what you can afford, and what is even available. There are decisions you make through strategic research and careful planning, and there are decisions made because you opportunistically found some really good deal (you would be surprised by how much of my house is made from leftover materials found of Facebook Marketplace or by the side of the road!). There are decisions made because of super limited options, where you just shrug and say… “well I guess I like this one the best, I don’t really like any of the others at all”. Then, you hope against hope that when it all comes together it looks ok, and more importantly, functions well. There are always these moments where you suddenly realized you didn’t think of something that should have been obvious and thus you have a light or outlet or door or window in a bad place, or you made a lot of extra work for yourself, or simply missed the opportunity to do something really slick. It is really quite overwhelming!

This month I am going to talk about the final outside shell of the house, the siding and trim and the roofing, which took place in fall of 2023. This is exciting because I can finally show you what the finished exterior looks like! In next month’s newsletter I will share about the gorgeous custom doors and windows my dad built (with a little help from me!) that were also part of the exterior shell but could not fit into this newsletter.  

For my Superhero section I am not going to introduce anyone new this time, but share about a little “thank you” party with gifts that I gave our dream-team crew that helped us frame, side, and roof the house.

For my Nature Spotlight, I’ll give you close-ups on my Summer Window Trim with its scarlet tanagers, chanterelles, and tulip poplars!

I hope you all are spending time outside with nature!

Love, 

Elody

P.S. Support Me: I am having a print sale of $20 archival prints! Check out my first print run here of a painting of a sunrise over Penns Creek.

P.P.S. The time to pick black locust blossoms and fry them into fritters is NOW! They are blooming like crazy along the roadsides in PA.

Top image: Summer Daytime Landscape. Bottom Left: Side panels in progress. Bottom Right: Standing above the finished, freshly varnished boards.

Nature Spotlight: Summer Windows

In an early newsletter last year, I jumped ahead and shared about my window and door trim project and showed details of my “Spring” window. I created elaborately painted wide trim boards around the four entry doors and windows on the front face of the guest side. There is a design for Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter. Each one features a seasonally appropriate native bird, plant, and edible mushroom species, as well as a local landscape across the top, and a mammal species across the bottom for the windows. The landscapes also feature times of day, featuring sunrise for spring, midday for summer, sunset for fall, and night (actually twilight, I needed a little light!) for winter.

This is an appropriate time to share about the “Summer” door, not only because we are entering summertime but also because at this point in the building process, I was working on this project furiously. The way that these were installed, the trim actually does not cover the siding but is flush with the siding and has to be installed first. So I had to paint these trim boards before the siding went on. The crew began siding the other side of the house, wrapping around in either direction and saving the front guest side for last as I raced to have my part done in time. This meant I spent more than two months working long hours every day, planning, priming, and painting these.

My summer door features male and female scarlet tanagers on blooming tulip poplar branches, chanterelle mushrooms, and a summertime landscape. The landscapes and mushrooms were designed and painted with help from my best friend Stasya Panova Erickson (a future newsletter Superhero!).

The scarlet tanagers were particularly special because we had a pair nesting on a very visible tree branch near our shady lunch break spot that summer and we got to watch the parents build the nest, lay the eggs, and feed the young. Despite being a vibrant scarlet (the males, the females have excellent camouflage with their pretty yellow-green plumage) they are very hard to see as they flit among dense treetop foliage, so this experience was a rare treat.

Above: Close-ups of the Scarlet Tanagers, Tulip poplars, and Chanterelle Mushrooms

Below: The door trim boards installed in place! Before and after the siding installation.

From left to Right: Henry, Loanne, Tim, Chris, Aldo, Me, Seth, Kenny, Gary, & Rebecca.

Superhero(s) of the Month: Chris, Seth & Kenny

Instead of featuring someone new this month, I want to give another shout-out to Chris, Seth, and Kenny. At the end of 2023 when we finished framing, roofing, and siding the house, I felt that I wanted to do something extra special for our dream-team crew. So, I made them each a custom surprise gift for their families. In the following spring, I had a little potluck party at my place to reunite the crew and gave them their gifts! Videos of the painting reveals here on Facebook and Instagram.

Below: Chris and his partner, Greta and son Aldo got this portrait of Aldo holding an imaginary blue dragon.

Above: Seth and his partner Genny got a “portrait” of the property they recently purchased. The old house on their property is not livable, so they will have to build something else but the painting preserves what it looked like when they started!

Below: Kenny and his wife Rebecca (who also worked on the house! I will be featuring her as a Superhero later!) got a portrait of their daughters Abigail and Hania looking out over Penns Valley at sunset. 

Top left: Some of my color samples on the left against the green zip-board. Top Right: The final color choices for siding and trim , with image showing colors fairly accurately. Bottom row: The siding color looking wildly different in various lighting situations.

Feature Project: The Exterior Siding & Roofing.

The Feature Project this month is the siding and roofing of the house. Remember what I wrote about decision making? I agonized over the color of the house. I got to pick three colors, a siding color, a side trim color, and second slimmer trim color on the outer edges. It had to go with the exterior color of the openable windows we ordered (we built the fixed windows ourselves, more on that later). The windows were Anderson windows, which have just a few color choices. I chose their green, which is a very dark, forest green. I decided that the slim outer trim color should exactly match that green. My other two color choices also had to look good with the metal flashing and gutters (which would be brown) and the roof shingle color (we wanted the roof to be light to reflect heat, and the only light color choices were white and light grey. We chose the light grey. I wanted colors that would feel pretty to me, but also feel natural to the landscape, blending in a little. I thought that a soft blue-green-grey would fill all of my criteria, with a deeper darker version of the same color as the other trim. After making those decisions, I hand mixed about a hundred colors and painted samples using my mural paints until I found a combination I was happy with. Only after we installed it did I realize that the color was more blue-green than grey, as the vivid green “zip board” system had been distracting and made my color look lower saturation than it really was. However, I love how the colors came out.

It was a huge amount of siding that we needed to paint because the design of the house with the two sides has a very high exterior wall to interior square footage ratio, and luckily for us Chris has a paint sprayer. He turned the guest side downstairs into a siding-painting factory, priming and painting the boards in huge batches. We made racks for drying, as well as leaning them up on the porch for additional drying time. (Painting boards and picking colors videos here on Instagram and here on Facebook.) Once painted, the crew worked to install the siding. (Siding videos here on Instagram and here on Facebook.) The roofing was delivered by a truck with a crane arm that could unload the packets of roofing directly onto the roof, which saved a lot of energy hauling them up. (Roofing videos here on Facebook and here on Instagram.)

Above: Chris turning my guest side and porch into a siding priming & painting factory.

Below: The Crew installing the pale grey shingles.

Above: Putting the painted siding on the house!

Below: We finished in Dec 2023, just in time to see the siding color with fresh snow!

Sirona Falls