The house & the homestead

The place

This is where the rest of the site actually happens. The garden is here — thirty-seven crops, orchard fruit, berries, and eight Rhode Island Reds who went into a coop I put up over a winter and have been earning their keep since. So is the tractor, which mows it in June, moves material in October, and throws snow off it in January.

I am not going to tell you where it is, and there are no photographs of the outside of the house on this website. That is a deliberate line and it isn't moving.

The house

A house is a machine with a very long service interval, and it fails the same way a tractor does: quietly, on a schedule nobody wrote down. There is a wood stove that wants sweeping every fall. There is the ordinary procession of infrastructure — water, heat, the envelope, the things behind the walls — each with a real interval and none of them interested in whether I remembered.

So the house is documented the same way the machines are. What is in it, when it was last done, what is due, and — the part that matters most — an honest flag on anything I can't date. Work I inherited carries a permanent verify rather than a plausible invented year. The record refuses to pretend it knows what it doesn't, which is a rule I took from my working life and have never once regretted applying at home.

There is also a full set of blueprints — four sheets at true quarter-inch scale, regenerated from a single structured model, with an interactive 3D version alongside. That project is still in progress and lives over here. Its first real job is sketching a west addition before an architect gets paid to do it.

What it's for

Provision, mostly. We grow food and we hunt and fish as a family, and I know how that reads to some people, so let me say plainly what it is for us: filling the freezer ourselves instead of not knowing where dinner came from.

The other half is teaching. When something breaks here the default is that we look at it first. Sometimes the fix is beyond us and we call someone who knows better — that is its own lesson. But most of the time a careful person with patience and a manual gets further than they expected, and what my sons are actually learning is not plumbing or small-engine repair. It's the posture: this is knowable, and I'm allowed to try.

The thread

None of this is glamorous. All of it compounds. The ground, the house and the machines run on one rule, which is the same rule the second brain runs on and the same one I spent a career arguing for inside institutions: know the real state of the thing, write it down where it can be checked, and let the system tell you what needs doing.

The return is not efficiency. It's that the weekend hours go into building rather than into remembering.

My ‘Deere’ tractor → ·The garden → ·What isn't finished →