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.

Laying the foundations

This is the team. Hillary from Denim Homes, project manager and details whizz. She's keeping all the numbers together, sending us regular updates about what's happening on the job, putting us in touch with the right local people we need to contact, and chasing things up so everything happens in the right order at the right time. Hillary is also an energy efficiency specialist, so she's helped us make many decisions about materials and design to ensure we have the most energy efficient house we can afford.

Next to her, in the plaid shirt is Caleb. He's the chief of Denim Homes. Caleb has had a ready and intelligent answer to every single question we've asked (and we've asked heaps) during this process. He obviously knows what he's doing -- and everyone in town we talked to had good things to say about him and his company.

In the red cap is dc. Client.

And in front of dc, in the red shirt is Kari, the owner of Down to Earth landscaping. Kari is in charge of everything outside the house. She really shares our vision for a natural landscape, home to birds, bees, native plants, humans and a dog.

I took this picture before the bulldozer arrived. We were discussing the orientation of the house. Would it face South or "solar South" which was several degrees more South than regular South. North and South aren't as fixed as you'd think. This needs to be a South-facing house to catch the sun. (In New Zealand, you want a North-facing house, being in the Southern hemisphere.)  But solar South orientation -- the one that would get us the absolute maximum sun available -- put the house on too harsh an angle, and messed with the views from the living room. So we opted for regular South. Still plenty of sun, but views down the whole acre from the living areas, and a better feeling of privacy.

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When we left Wolfville at the end of August, the front of the land had been cleared of scrub and weeds, and the beautiful red soil was piled up into huge mounds around the perimeter of the site. One piece of advice our landscaper, Kari, gave us was "Don't let anything leave the site while the building is happening. We will use it all for the landscaping." Good point. Nothing is leaving the site.

Over September and October, the foundation has been put in. Compared to what we do in New Zealand it's pretty extreme. They dig a trench 4 ft deep -- that's 1.2 metres. This is to get the floor insulation under the frost line. It's staggering to me, but the ground freezes a meter deep there. Yikes!

I think this is the greenhouse, attached to the back of the house.

Then they build a concrete frost wall:

The front door

Then they load up with insulation:

Garage, front door and guest room

And lay all manner of plumbing stuff:

Looking from the master bedroom, across the sitting room into the utilidor (utility corridor)

Put all that soil back in and Bob's your foundation:

View from the street

All that happened over the past couple of months. We watched from afar. This can be a bit of a dangerous thing. We were convinced the orientation of the slab was wrong -- not solar South, or even regular South, but even less South. I was wondering why there seemed to be a toilet in the hallway. A little long-distance knowledge can be a dangerous thing!

August was decision month

We went to Nova Scotia in August for 12 days to make all the decisions that needed to be made in person. We made an awful lot of decisions during that visit.

Taps, sinks, doors, door handles, skirting boards, floors, toilets, tiles, siding, roof colour, position of lights and light switches, wood stove and hearth, kitchen, appliances, tiles, bath tub, vanities, paint colour... what way the windows would open... I'm really proud of us that we got through that without a single scuffle or scrape. We just seemed to know what would work for us, and we each knew when the other had a bit more knowledge or passion about a particular detail, and let them go with it.

We were guided every step of the way by the wonderful team at Denim Homes. Stephanie, their interior designer was a delight to work with. She took the time to get to know our tastes, left us alone to make initial decisions, and steered us straight when she thought it was a decision we'd regret. She kept us sitting at the table until every tap and door knob was nailed down (not literally). She came out to the flooring showroom and helped us get the cork to match the bamboo to match the tiles. She zeroed in on perfect shades of grey for the paint work, and got the roof matching the windows matching the siding.

At this point the house is still just a concept, a drawing. I think I know what it's going to be like when it's built. I think we'll be happy with the decisions we've made, but I don't know for sure. I just take the time to imagine being there, in slow motion. I imagine driving up the driveway, and seeing the front door. I imagine reaching for the door handle, stepping into the airlock (yes, people, this house has an airlock! It's really just an entrance to the entrance, which helps keep the house warm in winter, and gives you somewhere to shake the snow off!). I imagine looking down the hall, looking up at the ceiling, walking down to the kitchen... There's only so much imagining I can do, but I think it's all going to be great when it's done.

It was a holiday of sorts, with a working rhythm to it. We stayed at our favourite Wolfville accommodation, perfectly named The Cottage in Wolfville. We'd wake up, make a breakfast of muesli, yogurt and the gorgeous local blueberres. We'd sip coffee in the sun for an hour, and read the online papers. Then we'd go to work. That might mean a trip to the bathroom showroom in Dartmouth, a meeting with Hillary and Caleb at Denim, an appointment with the bank, a cruise around the appliances at Sears, or a drive in the Valley to the fireplace showroom. We had our list for the day, and we dutifully ticked everything off it. We'd pop out to Fox Hill Cheese House for an ice cream if time allowed, we'd stop in at one of the grocery stores or supermarkets for our dinner supplies... unless it was Wednesday and we'd go to the Wolfville Farmers' Market instead. We'd come home, make dinner, eat outside. We might walk up to the land to check on what it was looking like at that time of day. Was it still sunny? Was there a breeze? We'd walk back to the cottage, go to bed exhausted and wake up and do it again.

It's strange being in a place that's going to be home, but isn't quite home yet. All the time on this trip I was trying to imagine living in Wolfville rather than visiting it. That's actually really hard to do. I've only ever been there in summer, and I know (from the weather web cams mostly) that it's not leafy green and warm all the time. It's going to be snowy and bloody cold a lot of the time. I don't know how to imagine that, as I've never lived anywhere like that before.

But this whole exercise is a bit of a mystery, so really the only option is to go with the flow, make the best decisions we can, and enjoy the ride.

The day before we left Wolfville, we got to see the bulldozer start flattening the building site. That was pretty exciting. Three years since we bought the land, we were finally seeing some action on the site. The best thing for me was to see how gorgeous the soil was under all that scrub and weeds. It was red and rich and crumbly, just like you want soil to be.