Planning for planting

Today our landscape designer (and my friend) Rachel joined us during our site meeting, and we discussed her ideas for the various areas around the house. There is a lot of land to cover! We're going for mostly native, deer-resistant plants. What I learned from her this morning is that deer usually don't like fuzzy plants, such as fluffy grasses and puffy flowers -- so we'll be putting lots of those in.

Our special triple-paned windows from Poland will arrive in 3-4 weeks, so somewhere around that time our house will be warmed up to start drying out. I'm looking forward to not freezing!

The house from the "soccer field" -- which is a flattened area on the south side.

The ceiling is going in.

We'll have a big slider door here leading out to the deck that's being framed this week.

The back side of the mudroom and garage, with the future skylights on top.

This is Agepan, our exterior sheathing. According to Skylar (our Passive House Consultant at H+H), it's "a vapor permeable T&G wax impregnated fiberboard that could be left in a puddle of water for years without any adverse impacts to performance. This sheathing also promotes aggressive drying of the wall assembly to prevent potentially damaging moisture accumulation."