Landed

We’re here. It was a long long journey. 15,345 km (thanks Google), four flights, from the 41st parallel in the Southern Hemisphere to the 45th in the Northern. From the end of a gloriously warm dry summer in Wellington to the end of the snowiest winter in years in Nova Scotia. It was a ten-year journey too, all the way home to New Zealand and all the way back to Canada.

We landed in Halifax late Sunday evening, and stayed at the airport hotel. We woke up to this view out the hotel window. It was fascinating for the snow, but even more interesting was the mangled plane at the far end of the runway (doesn't show in the photo, but we could see it). It crash-landed earlier in the day, no casualties. I’m really glad I didn’t know about that until we’d finished all our flying for this trip. The first we heard of it was when we collapsed onto the hotel bed, connected to the wifi and started reading emails titled “OMG, are you OK?” We were OK. The plane at the end of the runway had seen better landings.

Monday we picked up a rental car, beelined for Sears and bought sheets, pillows, a duvet and a toaster, and headed for Wolfville to check out the new house. In my mind I was going through all the home reno reality TV shows I used to be addicted to. This was like having our very own 'reveal', exciting but nerve-wracking. Architectural plans and drawings are all very well, but what’s the place going to actually feel like? Are the rooms going to be big enough? Will the kitchen roast a perfect chicken every time? What about the views out the window? The light? The colours, the flooring and tiles we picked months ago in the middle of a whirlwind summer visit? No wonder I’d been having so many heart palpitations! This is our home, finished, and we’ve never even been inside it yet. 

We drove up the street, and into our driveway. The house was the same size and shape and colour as it had been in the photos, and it still looked lovely. It was surrounded in deep snow, and looked absolutely charming.

There were three things that struck me about the house when we walked in, three qualities that have stayed front of mind as we get into the day-to-day rhythm of living here. This house is warm, open, and calm. (Interesting that those are qualities I work to cultivate in myself, and here they are already built into the house. Marvellous. I hope they rub off.)

Warm 

This place gets a lot of sunshine, being oriented to the South and having lots of big, triple glazed windows. The windows feel like radiant heater panels when the sun has been on them. The house is super insulated and air tight so the heat from the sun gets trapped in the house. When there’s no sunshine, there’s a super quiet heat pump to warm us up. But on a sunny day, even when it's minus something outside, the house heats itself and is very comfortable. 

We knew this in theory, but to experience it first hand is intriguing and almost puzzling. It really does work, exactly they way it's supposed to. 

The mostly unfurnished living area. The floor is cork tile, strangely warm underfoot, even though it's not heated.

Our working, eating, and newspaper reading station. 

Open

This is a pretty small house by neighbourhood standards--167 square meters (1,800 square feet). But it feels big because of the open plan design, the wide central hallway, and the lofted ceilings in the hall and living room. The big windows also add to the sense of space. It also feels big to us because it is the biggest place we've ever lived; we've been mostly apartment and small urban house dwellers until now.

And it probably helps that there is hardly any furniture in here yet. (We've got a truckload arriving mid May.)

Calm

There is a lot that contributes to the sense of calm here. The colour scheme is calm. The materials are mostly natural (cork, bamboo, wood, stone). Being surrounded by trees and snow and dirt is calm. The triple glazed windows and thick insulated walls mute noise from the outside. I'm surprised at all the different bird calls when I go outside; we can only hear the crows from inside.

The best-dressed room in the house, with a cosy ring-side view of the snow.

We've been here almost three weeks now. Springtime has definitely arrived, and the snow is disappearing to reveal just how much soil we have on our hands here.

Out the bedroom window

Out the living room widow

Me on the site of the soon-to-be greenhouse.

We’re really happy with our warm, open, calm home and our giant-sized garden.

Now that we're here, we can appreciate what a big thing it was to have this place built while we were on the other side of the world. It has been nerve-wracking watching from a distance as it got up off the drawing plans and into life-sized 3D. But we needn’t have worried. It’s good as gold.

Lovely fluffy white stuff

How lovely is this? The blue sky, the long low house profile, and all that lovely fluffy snow. All the recent photos of the exterior of the house are snowy. Every time I see one, I get a bit giggly. 

This shot of a corner of the living room really caught my attention. Where did that hill come from? And how gorgeous would it be to have a window seat there, loaded up with soft cushions and blankets, a cup of tea and a good book?

Snow is romantic from a distance. It's really got me under its spell at the moment. I have lived in snow before, just once for a couple of months, in January and February in Pennsylvania. It was very very snowy, and I was in love. The first day there, as we were driving past an open field, I shouted from the back of the car, "Stop! I want to get out!" I got out, stepped onto the glorious white stuff, and immediately slipped in up to my armpits. I had to be dragged out, laughing hysterically of course. That was when I started to understand the immensity of it. 

But back to the snow in Nova Scotia. There have been record snow falls this year, but still work progresses on the house. 

Many days it's too cold for putting up siding, but slowly, surely the house is being clad. The siding is cement board, which we chose for its low maintenance needs--it won't need to be painted until we're underground, if ever. We found out during the design process that the siding material didn't have much impact on the insulation of the house -- that's mostly determined by the foam in the thick walls. I am really pleased with how this colour looks. It's quite weird to choose a house colour from a little square sample in a windowless boardroom... but it worked out. I reckon it looks particularly good against the snow. 

Here's a grey day and dirty driveway, just for a reality check.

Even though it's been slow going on the outside, inside the house things have been charging ahead. During January and February, inside rooms got framed, the lighting and electric wiring got done, the whole place got insulated, and the dry walling got done. 

The kitchen looks incredibly full of promise to me. I'm going to learn how to make amazing ice cream in this kitchen, come summer.

The painters have been through, and the interior doors and trimming is happening. 

The closet and headboard wall is shaping up. That hole is for a recessed over-the-bed shelf. The paintwork is really grey, not beigy... I hope!

This is the hallway, looking straight on to the airlock. Open coat closet on the right, guest room and bathroom on the left. The photos of the doors were all looking a bit beige, but I'm assuming they are wrapped in some kind of protective covering, and will be sparkly white when unwrapped.

The plan is for us to move in to this house in one month and 2 days. I'm half hoping it will be springtime when we arrive. And the other half of me hopes there's still heaps of snow around. 

The gardening issue

The most frequently asked question when I tell people we're moving to Nova Scotia is "Will you be able to garden there? Like in winter?"

You see, in Wellington, I can garden all year round. We have never had a frost in the five years we've been at this house -- unless you count a tiny dusting of it on the car windscreen one morning in June 2010. We grow lettuce, all sorts of herbs, green onions, and all sorts of greens outside, year round. Basically, nothing dies back, it just keeps on growing.

So, I look on the Denim Homes client website most days, and there's a weather app on there that swings madly from -10 to +3, back to -5 and up to zero... all over the map. Right now it says "-4, feels like -9. The worst one I saw recently was -29. I actually didn't believe that one... surely a malfunction in someone's thermometer?

Anyhoo. I am a gardener, and I fully intend to garden year round in Nova Scotia. Those of you who know me know that when I set my mind on something, I'm doing it. Hence the glasshouse extension.

That's the glasshouse, sticking out from back of the house. It's got a frostwall around its foundation, just like the house has, so it will hang on to the heat of the earth from about a meter down. It won't freeze, in other words. The back wall will be insulated just like the house walls. All we need now are some glass walls and a glass roof, and I will be a year-round gardener in Nova Scotia.

I truly hope this isn't a pipe dream. I've got my heart set on it. And it looks like it will be a gorgeous sun trap. The door runs from the Utilidor into the greeenhouse, and that little window is just a peep hole from the kitchen. I will be able to see what's growing from the kitchen sink. Perfect.

The only hitch with all of this, is that my expectations of a glasshouse for Nova Scotia conditions, and what is actually required of a glasshouse in that climate are miles apart. (That's a kind way of saying I haven't got a clue.) I was busy searching online for nice garden glasshouses, that didn't cost much, thinking how perfect they would be for extending the growing season. The quote came in, and frankly I was stunned. The specs on these rooms blew me away. But it has forced me to admit that I just don't get it yet. I don't know what that winter is going to be like.

I've been back and forth with the designer and the suppliers about this glasshouse so many times. But here's where it's standing, still a sketch, waiting for me to sign it off.

It looks exactly the way I imagined it. It costs way more than I imagined. That's because it's made of super winter-proof glass, with super insulated aluminium joints. It's also got bug screens (that's another thing nobody in New Zealand has ever heard of, except in their tents!) I just need to accept this is what I need to be a winter gardener in Nova Scotia. The people who live there know better than I do. Of course they do.

So I'm going sign off on the drawing, and get over myself on the extra cost. The garden is definitely my happy place. It's the place I get inspired, the place I get absorbed and lose track of time (that's being in the zone I guess). Plants and me, we have something ancient and profound going on. We're going to have the best glasshouse ever!

I've just popped out to the Wellington tiny glasshouse. It's +29 out there.

A roof over our heads

Is it a metal roof, or one made of low, clingy clouds? Certainly it's a roof that will fit in with whatever Mother Nature decides on weather-wise.

Seeing the roof sitting so proudly atop our new nest is a lovely sight to see from our distant New Zealand vantage point. Denin Homes takes photos pretty much every week, and posts them to our log-in site. They generally are viewable at our end on Saturday mornings - for the past 16 weeks, that's been another reason to look forward to weekends!

But the batch that arrived this Saturday am only included a glimpse of the roof. We mentioned that during our Skype meeting with Caleb and Hillary that morning. I suspect it was Caleb himself who darted over to the site and snapped off a few more pics, including the handsome one above.

The rest of the windows and doors will be put into place this week, along with the siding. That will then mark the official 'it's now weather tight' milestone for the project. The Denim team can then head indoors for the winter.

We'll be peeking in the windows every so often to see how the interior work is going,

Meanwhile, behind the scenes the team involved in this project includes Shelley at Burchell MacDougall Lawyers in Wolfville and Tammy at the Wolfville branch of Royal Bank of Canada - both play a key role in helping us pay the bills.

Sue is also working closely with Stephanie, who leads interior design work at Denim and is the owner of Mariposa Interiors in Wolfville. I'll leave it for Sue to talk about the invaluable assistance Stephanie is providing us. We'll see a lot more of her impact as the project heads indoors.

Flatland

This is the floor plan for the house. It should have featured in an earlier post, but until today I couldn't work out how to get it from a giant pdf plan file into here. Today I had the old genius screen grab idea. Voila.

This house is designed especially for us. Two bookish home-bodies who like to throw dinner parties. And our dog. I'd call it very practical and slightly quirky, just like us. It's also designed to make the most of natural energy -- sun and the heat in the earth under the house.

The original plan was the work of our friend Thom, who was stuck at our place in Wellington for a few weeks back in 2011, and used the time to observe our habits and design us a house for the way we really live. We've worked with Josh the designer at Denim Homes to simplify and tweak things a bit since that first drawing, but all the elements are still there. In no particular order:

The utilidor
In the practical department, I'd say my favourite feature is the utilidor (utility corridor) running between the garage and the greenhouse, with loads of storage space, a laundry, a loo and wash-up area, and a giant freezer. I judge a room design by my ability to imagine using it, and from the first time I saw it drawn, I was striding through it from the garage with a wheelbarrow full of groceries, hopping in from the garden to dump off a crop of carrots, popping out to the cool storage area to grab a jar of fermented veges, or just hiding out there for the fun of it. I love that it lets us do all the messy things without trapsing through the house. It's a mud room on steroids.

The greenhouse
This was a must-have to extend the growing season (and to allow at least a chance for me to grow lemons and figs in Nova Scotia, which I fully intend to do). We deliberately had the house foundation with its frost wall extended out to the greenhouse. In theory this means plants will never freeze in here, even if it is -20 outside (and it well could be). It's 20 ft x 10 ft. Sorry metric readers. We've had to switch back to imperial measures -- I can't believe how easy it was to regress.

The first shoots of the greenhouse -- the footing for the frost wall.

The media room (aka man cave)
Finally, the chance to banish the TV to its own room. Now you can watch the game or a movie with flaming guns and explosions, and the rest of the house can remain a quiet sanctuary. It will also allow for private viewings of mock-worthy home reno and other reality shows. There are no windows, a lovely dark cork floor, nice subtle lighting. Yum.

Sitting room
This wee spot off the main living room should be cosy or cool, depending on the season. I imagine curling up with a book in there after dark in the winter. Or having a nap there on a really hot day in summer. There's a fireplace in there, small and mostly for ambiance and a backup for the electricity.

Living room
The dining table will be in here, and some other seating which isn't clear in our minds yet, but this will be a serious garden viewing and bird watching spot, with big windows and glass doors. It looks down the length of the back yard, and will get the morning sun.

Flex room
Lots of flex here. A guest room and bathroom, with its own outside door, and enough room for a reading chair and table. I'm hoping to get a Murphy bed in here, so we're not using all the floor space up when we don't have guests... because this is also a tiny yoga studio where I will practice and maybe even teach tiny classes. It's also a sewing room. And those are just my plans for it; who knows what ideas dc might have up his sleeve.

Master closet
The bedroom is pretty standard, but I'm stoked about this walk-through closet (an idea we picked up from our dear friends in Arrowtown). This will be all the storage we need for clothes and linen, we won't need any furniture in the bedroom aside from the bed.

We're also going to pinch this hotel room idea for the shelf over the bed and simple side tables.

Kitchen
All nice and standard, and based roughly on the look and functionality of our kitchen now, which we love. A new build was a chance to get a built-in bookshelf for our cook books, which will be on the end of the pantry cabinets.

Airlock
I have to mention the airlock, just for its novelty factor. Obviously we don't need things like this in New Zealand, but in eastern Canada, we do. It's to stop the frozen air flooding into your house when you open the front door. So you come into the air lock, shut the door, brush all the snow off, kick off your boots... and then open the next door into the house. Weird, I know, but there you go! I'm actually really looking forward to trying it out. I know it's not a toy, but hey...

So that's the run-down of the flat plan. I've imagined walking through this place so many times... waking up early and going outside to the garden, cooking, feeding just us, feeding a crowd, reading, writing... it's all in the imagination, but it's so clear. Not quite in 3D technicolour, but almost.

The great outdoors (aka outdoor dining area)
There's one more 'room' that warrants mention, and sk has handed me the pen to tell this particular tale. The cosy space outside the living/dining area and in front of the greenhouse will - I suspect - become a go-to spot for eating and relaxing for at least three seasons of the year. It won't look like much when we first arrive, but it will eventually grow into an outdoor kitchen and dining area. maybe a fire pit and cosy chairs just out of the frame. A resting spot while pulling weeds and harvesting crops, or simply relaxing with a coffee and the Globe and Mail. We will have propane feeding the house (no natural gas in this part of NS), and have included a line to this space - ready and waiting for when and where we plant the outdoor kitchen.

In the frame

So this is what our house will look like.

After months of staring at one-dimensional renderings, there's nothing like a couple weeks of good weather, skilled people with hammers and a load of lumber to turn those drawings into, well, the framework of our house.

This has been the November activity on Orchard, and it sets the stage for the metal roof (Sue had to remind me what colour we eventually settled on - I won't give it away here) and siding (no, I can't remember the colour of that either). Both tasks should be completed before the Christmas break.

The view from Orchard Avenue

The view from the other end

But let me linger on the framing stage. This is the part that takes me back 50 years or so, to the community just down the road - Kentville. We moved to a brand new house in a brand new sub-division in Kentville in 1960. Ours was the second or third house to be completed on the street, and over the course of the next three years that we lived there, a favourite activity of some of us local kids was visiting - after the builders had departed for the day - various housing projects on our street.

We weren't up to mischief; mostly just nosing around and being curious, while keeping an eye peeled for protruding nails. As kids, we were forbidden by our mothers to be on these sites; I suspect for the very same nail-in-foot fear. We did it anyway, with no safety incidents to report.

We were busted once by my mother. I suspect she simply spotted us from the kitchen window as my brother and I wandered around the building site just up the street and within line-of-sight of our house. My memory of that bust was being sent to bed without supper. It was the first and only time that happened. And I would have eventually had a supper if I hadn't pretended I was asleep when mum checked in on us a couple of times.

I think that ended my building site wanderings. But I still remember the smell of the wood and concrete and freshly turned earth. Those memories are triggered when I look at the photos from our building site. Thanks to Caleb and Jeff at Denim Homes for snapping photos of the project.

The day-to-day of long distance building

If it wasn't for the internet, we'd never be able to pull this off. The internet helps us deal with the long distance relationship thing, and also means the time differences between New Zealand and Nova Scotia don't derail us. Here's how things have been working.

We are up and about around 6am here in New Zealand. Most days there are emails from Hillary or Stephanie waiting for us. The glass shower shield we picked is too small for the space. Would we like this one or that one (links to manufacturers websites) or do we have another preference? Have we set up an account with Nova Scotia Power yet? Have we signed off the kitchen plans? Did we decide on the dark or the light finish on the doors? There's a change order waiting on the project website for us to review and sign off. The foundations are finished, and framing will start as soon as it stops raining.

Every morning we get the feeling there have been busy people in Nova Scotia working on our house. If I fire a reply off immediately, I hear back from Hillary before she goes home for the day. Stephanie must work in the evenings, because well after business hours she's quick with a reply and advice about the finer details of the bathroom finishes. Then they go to bed, dc and I talk, do some internet research, and email our decisions back. Waiting for them when they get to work in the morning, and we're sound asleep again. It works really well.

Denim has a project management website for clients, so we can log in at any time and see what's going on. All our documents are there (plans, change orders etc) and photos of the building site. Jeff is the site manager. He takes photos on his phone, presses a button and we can see them on our client site. I love that.

On Friday morning we get our weekly official project update from Hillary. That's always exciting. She also usually gives me a weather update -- I think to help me get prepared for this new climate experience!

On the home front, we've loosely divvied up jobs, depending on our levels of interest and expertise. dc is managing everything to do with wires, fibres and cables. He's also in charge of large appliances, the bank and the lawyer. I'm handling the interior finishes, the kitchen and lighting. We consult each other, but don't drown each other in details. It works really well.