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Our award winning net-plus home.
The photographs in the following gallery were taken by our friend Beth Reynolds. She has an amazing photography business called Base Camp Photo. Click on any image to view the gallery.
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- From The Vernon St. Entrance
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- From the Southeast Corner. You can see the heat pump head above the window.
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- Looking up the stairs. Note the extra opening in the floor for air movement.
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- From the southwest corner
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- Looking from the kitchen into the mudroom
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- The kitchen
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- Granite counter top scrap floor in the kitchen
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- From the top of the stairs. Indoor laundry drying rack.
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- Looking east from the bathroom
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- Hannah’s music studio
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- Hannah’s music studio
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- A couple more photos that I took:
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Last summer I built the coat rack using live edge cherry from one of our trees and hooks from our local black smith Pierce Street Ironworks. The door to the cold storage room still needs to be constructed.
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Discarded slate samples from a show-room, salvaged door, Home Depot seconds cabinet (repaired), and salvaged sink and marble top. The light fixture above the sink (not pictured) is also salvaged.
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Design & Construction of Spartan & Hannah's Home 
Great clothes line!
Love the house!
I’m working on an addition to our house, can you tell me what treatment/ stain/ oil, you used on your siding?
Hi Bruce, Thank you for the compliments. We used Penofin blue label on the siding. Don’t expect it to last forever though. The North side of the house, particularly near the ground is already turning black from mildew. To my knowledge, no clear stain will stay true for longer than a half a dozen years. We dipped our siding in a trough while a friend brushed on Penofin and her’s is turning significantly faster than ours. Check out the dipping process at: https://spartanandhannah.wordpress.com/2011/07/31/siding/
Hi there! I came across your website while looking for ideas for our own house design, and I’ve been inspired by your example to build a cold pantry/above-ground root cellar. I have several questions about how you did it and how it’s functioning (insulation, ventilation, temperature, etc.), and was wondering if you’d be willing to share information about it with me. I’d love to hear from you and pick your brain a little! Thanks for considering it 🙂 Nessa
Hi Nessa, thank you for reaching out. Unfortunately I still have yet to build the door to the root “cellar”, so I don’t have any performance data to share. I can only share the design as built. We have 4″ of foam board all around except for 2″ on the floor. There is a bathroom fan installed to exhaust air and essentially a duct for air supply that can be manually closed from the inside. Once in operation we will need to run a humidifier to keep it above 50%rh. In a future design, I would consider making space to air dry laundry in the root cellar in order to get free humidification. Our current air drying setup over humidifies the house sitting the winter and risks condensing too much moisture in our wall system. Combining the two might solve two problems. Let me know if there is any way I can help.
Thank you for your reply! A couple more questions – Is the idea that the bathroom fan runs continuously, or only sometimes? Is the 2″ of foam on the floor over an insulated (or uninsulated) concrete slab, or on dirt? If you have any more resources you could point me to for how to effectively build an above-ground root cellar (or cold dry pantry, as is our intention), I’d love to see them. And my email address is nester79 at yahoo.com if that’s preferable to having this conversation in your comments section 🙂