Uncle Dan's

Uncle Dan turned 70 this year. Dad wanted to surprise him by showing up at his door on his birthday, so he did. And he was able to bring the rest of the boys with him: Craig, Athens, and I went, too.

Dan lives in Ohio, and we spent most of our traveling time trying to figure out exactly how we were going to surprise him at the door. And, actually, we never came up with anything...

So we just pulled into the long drive, stopped part way to the house, and walked (semi-quietly) to the door and knocked.

Boy, I really wish I had a picture of Dan's face when he opened the door and saw his big brother, his two nephews, and his grand-nephew(??) standing there singing Happy Birthday to him. He stared at us, turned and looked at Jane (sitting over on the couch), looked at us, looked at Jane, and looked back at us, and finally said, "Well, come on in!" Fantastic. Worked out perfectly.

He said later that he kept staring at us and knew that he should know who we were, but we were so out of context that the brain just couldn't put it all together... Again: perfect!

Here's a picture of all of us:


Dan built the house by hand. Really, almost no power tools at all. Pretty much all of the materials used came from an old barn that used to be on the premises. Oak, walnut and cherry (I think). Here's a few pictures of the house...

Overview:

The wobbliness(?!) in the roof-line and in the garage lines in this picture are due to stitching together several photos to show it all as one. Um... that's the garage on the left, and the house on the right. You can just see the top of the atrium above the house. The atrium is in the very back of the house, and allows daylight into the back rooms (as well as giving a way out in an emergency!).

Here's a photo of the roof (with a foot-and-a-half of soil on top), and the part of the atrium that sticks out (and faces south!):



Here's a few pics of the inside of the house...

Here's the center beam (11" x 11" oak) of the ceiling:


And really, this just doesn't do it justice. Big. Solid. Heavy.

Here's the root cellar with... (I think) raspberry juice, green beans, tomato juice, some jams, tomato sauce... there was more stuff in there, too, but I didn't get any other pictures.



Here's a picture of the only heat source in the house. No... behind Athens. Yeah, the wood-burning stove.