My fancy painted tiny cabin! With a baby paw-paw tree that I planted in the foreground.

Hello Everyone,

I hope you all are hanging in there and enjoying the Spring!

I have promised not to discuss politics, but I want to again briefly acknowledge this moment in time. Typical of many of my millennial friends, I’ve had the brilliant timing to finish my undergraduate degree around the 2008 market collapse and finish graduate school and build myself an artist’s life in NYC just as Covid-19 shut everything down… so why not be in a lot of debt and just about ready to start my dream business in time for an insane administration to send the market into chaos and strip the government of the funding and personnel that actually do good things? Yikes. Like I said last month, I feel like I have no choice but to stubbornly persist and stubbornly hope that next year there will still be an economy that can support people being able to take vacations and make art. I certainly am not the only one with a lot at stake, and many have much, much more at stake.

I count my blessings every day. I am seeing the light at the end of the tunnel with my building project, and that is exciting. All will be well, somehow. Onwards!

This month, all of my features are connected. My Hero of the Month is my sweetheart, Tim. My Featured Project is a painted cabin he helped me build, and my Nature Spotlight is the Starflower (again) which features prominently in its design.

Thanks for following along on my newsletter, I hope you enjoy my pretty pictures and I wish you all the time and space to soak up sunshine, birdsong, and emerging flowers any chance you get.

Love, 

Elody

P.S. Now that it is warming up, anyone wants to visit in person /camp out at my place this summer, the tents and this cabin will be casually available through word-of-mouth this year before anything official next year when there is less construction going on.

Starflower plants usually have just one flower, but sometimes have two or even three!

Nature Spotlight: Starflower (trientalis borealis)

In the very first newsletter, my nature spotlight was this lovely little spring wildflower. Many of you were not with me yet, and it is relevant to my project this month, so I am featuring it again!

The starflower, trientalis borealis, blooms all over my property in early May. They are a tiny star-shaped flower that is such a bright white that they appear to glow in the dark understory of the springtime forest floor, just like a constellation of actual stars. There are many species of flower that have four petals, or five, or eight, or many more, but few flowers that have exactly seven petals. The starflower is in fact made up entirely of sets of seven: they have seven petals, seven stamens, seven sepals, and (usually) seven leaves. Most of the plants have just one flower, but many have no flowers at all, a good number have two flowers, and very rarely you will find three flowers on a single plant.

I love them so much that I created a stylized starflower design that I used to decorate my project of the month, which you will see below. I may integrate the starflower design into other things in the future as well, maybe even my logo or at least some Sirona Falls Merch!?

Learn more about starflowers here!

Starflower to Painted Design: I first drew out the design, and then created a simplified dot template to help me get the spacing right for the seven petals, leaves and stamens.

Superhero of the Month: Tim Yarrington

This month I want to feature my sweetie, Tim, who has helped this project in innumerable ways despite already being very busy balancing two jobs. He is a professional brewer and instructor of a “Brewing and Fermentation Sciences” program, and he grew up working in construction from the age of 14 and had a previous career of directing commercial construction projects, so his skills are astonishingly wide-ranging.

As a brewer, he needs to be able to understand, install, run, diagnose and repair everything in a brewery, with all its tanks and pumps and equipment. This means he can do plumbing and electrical work and understands all kinds of machines. From his commercial construction work he knows all about carpentry and drywall and tile and all surfaces and sub-surfaces involved in buildings. He has both a talent and a stubborn tenacity for understanding how all kinds of physical and mechanical systems work. Once, we had a door that was not latching/locking correctly, and so he removed the handle and lockset from the door. Instead of just buying a new lockset and replacing it, I watched him take it apart… and immediately it fell into a million tiny pieces rolling all over the table, all itty bitty pieces of metal and tiny springs. I couldn’t even handle watching his big fingers struggle with the tiny pieces, so left to do something else. I assumed he would eventually give up, but I came back a few hours later to the lock put back together and working. Is he a locksmith? No. Has he ever done anything like that before? No. He is just freakishly determined, likes to figure things out, and refuses to be “bested” by any challenge he sets himself to.

You have already seen pictures of Tim in this newsletter, doing various things such as taking down trees and leading the demolition of the trailer, and skiing with me on the frozen reservoir. Shortly, you will hear me describe him taking on the next project I am featuring, building a cute little painted cabin that is yet un-named. He also loves the slow and laborious puzzle of building dry-laid stone walls, and has already started building me the most beautiful garden beds edged with stacked stones (all from the property, I collect the nice ones off to the side every time we attempt to dig or move soil and a stone every inch.) Later in my newsletters you will see him helping to hang drywall and spackle drywall (he is very good at all things drywall, but like most sane people he hates it… so after he did a huge amount of spackle work on my side of the house we exempt him from doing the other side.) He also helped us install a lot of my white-washed wooden ceilings, taught me how to lay tile, helped with some of the tiling and all of the grouting, and is doing some of the plumbing and electrical work. We have a lot of fun designing projects together that use a lot of his skills all at once, like the very clever rainwater-catch-sink system for hand-washing that he built for my composting toilet outhouse.

Basically, he helps with every kind of project you can think of, any time he is able to, in-between everything else he is already responsible for doing. By the way, he is also intelligent, generous, and hilarious… and I would say he is “tall dark and handsome” to boot, but he is actually very blonde, so I guess I will have to settle for just the tall and handsome part! Again with the theme of how incredibly lucky I am?!?! This project takes a village, and I have a helluva great village.

Above: Tim laying flagstone, demo-ing the trailer, installing ceiling and laying tile. Below: My in-progress garden beds with the gorgeous stone walls that Tim built. The tall yellow flowers that I am standing next to are a species of native sunflower.

The crazy facade with all its wild hand-painted panels and trim, arches and doorway.

Feature Project: The Painted Cabina, The Screened-In Tiny House, Baba-Yaga’s Hut, The Painted Lady, The Star-Flower House…

Can you tell I have not decided what to call it yet? Suggestions welcome!

While the house was being framed, I was not much help to our competent crew, other than occasionally moving piles of boards or doing some clean-up of wood scraps and sawdust. However, I needed to be around all the time because we were making final decisions and minor adjustments to the design as we built. So I occupied myself with pulling out invasive plants, gardening, and… this project! Tim and I started out thinking we were just building another tent platform, but then we decided to skip the tent and go straight for an actual structure, and Gary got involved with helping to design and build it too.  As we began to design it, we wanted to keep it simple and use very few materials beyond what we already had, so we came up with the idea of having it be almost like a screened-in porch, with open air windows all around.

From the very beginning of the design process, I had this idea to decoratively paint the entire front of it. This was an opportunity for a trial run of my idea to do my my fancy painted window trim idea on the actual house. Even before the structure was built, we determined the dimensions of the painted areas and cut leftover wood from the barn project for me to prime and paint my patterns on. I gave no limitations on myself and just went wild with color and pattern. I used the aforementioned stylized starflower design as the main decorative element for the centers of the panels. The painting occupied me in between the days that I had Tim and/or Gary’s help for the actual building, so by the time we finished the building structure and roof, I already had the facade pieces painted.

We got the structure under roof by the end of the summer, and got the screens and remaining holes closed in by the springtime, at which time we started sleeping in it! On the hottest days of summer, it was the coolest place to be, the evening cool entering immediately and all breezes passing right through. In the morning you wake to a view right out into the forest all the way around. Unfortunately, we also learned quickly that of course the rain comes right in as well, so we created curtain rods and I made custom curtains from shower curtain material. Unfortunately, as the fall arrived, we realized we had built it under a giant oak tree, and acorns falling twenty feet onto a metal roof above your sleeping head sounds like gunshot and could wake the dead! Ah well, live and learn. We may figure out a solution eventually, but for now it is more of a spring and summer sleeping place, to be avoided in autumn!

Here are videos of us building it an me painting it, on Facebook and on Instagram. Let me know if you want to stay over this summer, the tents and this cabin will be casually available through word-of-mouth this year before anything official next year when there is less construction going on.

Above: First we chose and cleared the site, and then we dug the post holes in the impossibly rocky soil. Then, we mixed up bags of concrete for setting the posts in the holes, using braces to keep everything plumb and square.

Below: Framing the structure, building and setting the trusses, adding the metal roof.

Above: My sketch and painting all the pieces. Below: close-ups of my starflower design.

Above: Putting the painted parts in place! Below: night time, fall and winter!

Also there are videos of us building it an me painting it, here on Facebook & Instagram.

How is it possible that I’m still showing you icicles? Fresh sparkling ice formations on the morning of April 9th, after a very cold night. Lovely, but can we be done now please?

Sirona Falls