Building Gypsy Rose

September 18th. Only a few days remain in the summer of 2007. The first frosts have begun to threaten vegetables in Vermont gardens and we have begun receiving questions from those following this blog as to whatever happened to the progress on Gypsy Rose. “Are you finished?” some have asked. “When will we get an update?”

After a busy summer of work (we earn much of our living from a sea kayak touring and charter sailing business), we’re back at work on Gypsy. With the exterior essentially complete, we now begin on the interior.

First, the interior walls were framed. Finally, we had a sense for how the room layout would feel. In the above photo, you can see the doorway from living room to kitchen to the right of center. The bathroom is to the left and will be accessed from the kitchen through a sliding pocket door.

The composting toilet takes up more room than a conventional flush toilet, but that is the nature of a self-contained system. The model we chose is a non-electric version that will vent through the roof.

We will begin finishing the interior from the top down. I opted to go with a non-ventilated “cathedral” ceiling. In order to prevent condensation (and keep the heating requirements to a minimum), the roof is insulated with closed-cell foam to R30. It was quite a process to cut and fit the foam panels to the necessary tolerances. In the end, though, we have much more than just a highly insulated roof. The tightly fit foam panels add greatly to the structural rigidity of the roof.

The entire interior will be paneled with six inch tongue and groove eastern white pine. Through a lot of internet research, I found a source for some very nice wood in Wheelwright, Massachusetts. We decided to pick up the first load on our way back from Vermont last weekend. The only problem was that all my tools were in Connecticut and we needed to supplement the roof-top rack with another full-width support back at the tailgate. No problem. After a Sunday afternoon at the Tunbridge Fair, we planned to camp at the orchard on the Frye Road land. Marion’s brother, Toad, and his wife Cat were there when we got there, continuing the work to clear the slash piles leftover from logging years ago. We picked out a couple of poles from the pile, cut them to length, used a leftover plank from the outhouse, found some leftover nails, and, voila, the materials for a rack were in hand. We hammered it together once we got to W.R. Robinson Lumber and loaded 470 board feet of eastern white pine on top. Through Springfield, MA, and Hartford, CT at rush hour, our lumber made it back to Newtown without a hitch.

Today, we spent most of our time putting coats of polyurethane on all the boards. Tomorrow we’ll begin installing the loft floor.