Check out this great video produced by Yestermorrow instructor and board member Ben Falk and his team at Whole Systems Design in Moretown, VT.Vacant land along Americas interstate highway system is renewed through the growing of quick-cycling biomass crops and the installation of wind turbines and solar photovoltaics. This represents an...
Check out the great article and photos of stonemason Thea Alvin in the current issue of Vermont Magazine! Thea will be offering two Yestermorrow courses this summer as part of her busy schedule-- The Art of Stone, July 5-10th and Art in the English Garden, July 19-27 (a travel study trip to England building stone walls and arches).Quite the...
A quick update on new initiatives available through the 2009 Economic Recovery Bill recently signed by President Obama (thanks to Enterprise Community Partners for sharing this summary). "The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 provides unprecedented funding for building energy retrofits...The bill extends the current law tax...
"I quit my job and moved to the Yestermorrow School as an intern in the fall of 2006. Unsure of where I wanted to put my engineering degree to use, I started hitting things with a hammer and drawing without a straight edge. Somewhere in between studying the tools of the past and the technological possibilities of the future I began to find...
In my last post, I wrote about using the square rule to make my timber a uniform dimension at the joint locations. This week, I'll show briefly how to lay out and cut one tenon on a specific post using the square rule. The tenon is made to fit into a mortise in the plate which will eventually support the rafters and roof of the shed, so...
Yestermorrow instructor Moneca Kaiser was recently profiled in the Ottawa Citizen (2/7/09)."When Moneca Kaiser talks about smart home storage ideas, she has the voice of authority. Hardly surprising. The owner of Moneca Kaiser Design Build (www.mkdesignbuild.ca) lives in a 325-square foot apartment. What’s more, she works from her east-end...
Check out this fantastic blog post about Yestermorrow on casaCARA, a great blogger from Brooklyn who writes about finding and renovating old houses:Hey, old-house renovators from Brooklyn to the Hudson Valley: wouldn’t it be great if there was, like, a school you could go to for anywhere from 2 to 12 days to get some hands-on, experiential...
Last week, we interns trekked down the road a piece to Carol Thompson's house: a fantastically high-tech, site-specific, super-efficient creation of Robert Riversong. Her house is a model of elegant design that smartly stacks functions and utilizes innovative technologies, materials and building methods to slash both energy and cost inputs...
In the morning, instead of shooting straight over to the main building, I often take what I like to call "the scenic route" to breakfast. This entails a walk up an old logging road behind the intern chalet, across the top of the hill near the old Bundy Center for the Arts and back down next to a stream and the wickedest sledding hill on...
I am so excited about what I learned in my timberframing course that I thought I'd offer a newbie's overview of timberframing for anyone out there who has ever seen a beautiful frame and wondered a little bit about how it's done. I had no idea before I took this amazing class. Even raw beginners can be making tight-fitting (usually too...
Have you been planning energy efficiency upgrades on your home for the coming year? You should know that on October 3, 2008, President Bush signed into law the “Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008.” This bill extended tax credits for energy efficient home improvements (windows, doors, roofs, insulation, HVAC, and non-solar water...
We’re looking for stories and testimonials from students, instructors, staff and interns on how the Yestermorrow experience has changed your life—examples of projects you’ve gone on to design or build, career transformations you’ve undergone, or changes you’ve made in your personal life as a result of your time here.We hope to profile...
It's barely February and already plans are hatching for Yestermorrow's garden this season. Our new kitchen/garden intern, Stephanie Pierce, has hit the ground running, making plans, seed lists, and more. There's even talk about getting laying chickens and building a mobile coop! We're thrilled to be making progress towards our goal of...
