Touches of Whimsy

Ah yes, "what is life without whimsy". A quote from Sheldon on "Big Bang Theory" who ironically is one of the most un-whimsical characters ever created for television!  I love Sheldon nevertheless even if he can be frustrating and a tad scary.

" Sheldon" and me

Someone I would entirely imagine as being lighthearted and whimsical was George Harrison.  His historic home "Friar Park" was loaded with touches of whimsy. So I decided to follow his lead albeit on a much smaller scale.

My nod to Roswell

Fairy hole

Norm the Gnome

Poor Norm the Gnome, he and his little home had the crap beat out of them every night thanks to "Matt Dillo" and his eternal search for grubs.   So Jim made a staircase for him and permanently attached him to the tree!  He hasn't moved since.

Wizard with hat

Western cart and waterpump

 
 Jim had also cut a wizard hat but the rotting tree stump wouldn't cooperate and it ended up looking like a man's body part which was pointed out gleefully by my sister Roberta. I can't have that, this is a family yard! So I bought a cardboard wizard hat from Dollar Tree and stuck clear contact paper over it assuming that it would last maybe through one rain storm. A year and several storms later the hat still looks perfect!  I thought about changing his hat with the seasons as I had such good luck with this one. He can be Uncle Sam all summer and maybe a too thin, violent looking Santa. Yeah, maybe not.

Everyone who is real close to me knows I love Steampunk!  I dressed my oldest grandchild in Steampunk for last years Halloween. Only one uninformed person didn't know who/what she was portraying.  Everyone else thought she was very cool. Even her dolls couldn't escape my new interest.

Bri in the Steampunk outfit I made for her

First Steampunk Barbie with gear driven skirt and guns she stole from GI Joe.

Western Steampunk with corset top, gun belt and skull head walking stick

So I definitely needed a new Steampunk outlet. Then came a show "Steampunked" where artisans proficient in that trend build Steampunk rooms to add to a home. What a great idea!  The bathroom episode was awesome, they made a bathroom look like a Victorian era Nautilus inspired submarine!  I wanted to recreate what they built but knew it would never happen with my capabilities. Okay so my bathroom doesn't look like the Nautilus but there are Steampunk touches here and there.   The first picture shows the gears shower curtain, and a little steampunk display with my Victorian adventurer lady. The second shows a propeller clock, industrial lighting, vintage apothecary bottles and an octopus with top hat soap dispenser. The last two pictures are of brass fish that were already in the bathroom.  They wouldn't do at all so I Steampunked them, and now they fit in and look bad-ass.

 We plan on adding more lighthearted touches of whimsy, when you own a home that looks like a space station, why be serious?

Dome Improvements

One plus for having such a unique home is the sky's the limit for turning our domes and yard into giant art projects!  There were a few eye sores when we first saw it but tried to picture our ideas.  My three favorite types of architecture are domes, old barns, and cord wood homes.  And we were lucky enough to encompass all three on our property.

The worse major eyesore was the little area the previous owners built to hold the water pump.  By the time we saw it with years of neglect, it was covered in mold and had animal eaten plywood sides.  The before picture I have I had already "cleaned" it so imagine it 10 times worse and you have a good idea.

Pump house before

Cord wood pump house

And here we have the finished cord-wood pump-house.  It took Jim and my son-in-law Kevin months to complete but it's awesome!  The roof is called a "French skirt", that was Kevin's idea and yes he is French.  The top on the roof is a flying squirrel home but Rocky still prefers the barn.  There is probably a lizard living in it. The numerous lizards around here are under the mistaken impression we do everything for "them".

The second eyesore to be tackled was the barn. Which was such a mess we at one time thought of tearing it down.  But with tons of elbow grease, sweat equity and a little innovation we turned it into something much more acceptable.  To make it more barn-like I picked a smoky blue/gray paint and hung my primitives on the outside wall. I had been dragging those primitives around with me for decades and never had a place to put them. They finally found a good home.  The triangle next to the barn/shed was from our house, must have been an extra. So I placed it foam down, painted it and now it's my moment of Zen.

Barn/shed before

Barn after

The third eyesore was the "pond".  The Realtor described it as a fully stocked fish pond.  Realtors-LOL

 It turned out to be a tiny mud hole, stocked with overgrown pond lilies. If there were ever "fish" in it

 they became Raccoon fodder long ago.      

                                                                                               
Again we over looked the issues, yes it's a mess but it is wired and has a working waterfall, that's a start.  Over a year later with the addition of tons of North Carolina river rock, two more ponds, a working handmade waterwheel, handmade walking bridge, creek bed, and moved waterfall it now looks like this.

Mudhole before

Back of pond 

view from pool

pebble walk

It is teeming with life, mud minnows, goldfish, and our resident Frog-Kermit. Several types of snails were tried including the baseball sized Florida Apple Snail but unfortunately they all ended up being the Raccoon version of escargot.  We were completely satisfied with our finished pond until we saw our neighbor Ray's pond! OMG!!   It is life sized with a bridge spanning it 10 times the size of ours, filled with carp and other exotics and even features a full sized pirate ship! Oh and dare I forget to mention loads of rock and mountain formations that looks like it came from the hands of the finest Disney Imagineers!  Wow, truly impressive.  You have no idea what is going on behind the electric gates of these rural homes!!                                                                                                               

Dome, home on the range

Jim and I looked at sooo many areas of Florida. We were at the Panhandle at least a few times, Venice beach was in the running for a while, and we both absolutely fell in love with St. Augustine! If you've never been there you should go, if you've been you know what I'm talking about. So many things to do and to see. The oldest continually inhabited city in the U.S, loaded with history.  It's right on the water, great fishing, easy access to Georgia and the Carolinas.  Plus A one school districts if you have children.

So if it's so perfect why didn't we buy there? Because our dome on 4 plus acres in St. John's county would have cost us an easy half a million dollars and the taxes would be close to 5 figures. For some I'm sure that's not a lot of money, but it is to us. There are hardly any concrete block homes in glorious St. A, mostly wood frame and the few homes in our price range are on postage stamp sized lots and still have insane taxes. So begrudgingly we decided to look elsewhere. It was after a disastrous and depressing house hunting trip to Palm Coast when Jim typed in Domes for sale in Florida and this one popped up.  It was in our price range, had many amenities, acres of woods and in an area that wasn't our first choice but a nice area nonetheless. Plus my sister would be living a few miles away. So it wasn't our first choice but our best choice.

Our Dome home

main dome common area

One of the guest bedrooms

Jim was a hippie in the 60s, well actually I don't think you ever retire from being a hippie, and tried to build his dream dome in upstate New York.  He never got the chance to finish it and always wanted closure.  This project was completely finished but not exactly the way Jim would have finished it.  He complained that it "should" have a cupola with vents to expel cooking fumes and heat.  It does have ceiling vents in the 18 foot high center dome but obviously some corners were cut with it's building. Also some of the fixtures are not even remotely considered high end.  Yet, the whole driveway which is the size of some city streets is paved and the entire property is fenced! So they spent money on some things and others got left off the list. I certainly don't want to beat the original owners up over details as I know domes are very expensive to build and what we paid for it was probably equal to what he spent assembling it 20 years prior!  So I do feel his pain and can certainly overlook a few things that "could be " better.

Hippie Jim building his dome

Jim's dome in upstate New York

Domes were popular in the 60s and every hippie wanted one.  Buckminster Fuller the original designer /architect thought everybody should have one. They were supposed to be the perfect home and are very energy efficient. There are two types of domes, monolithic and geodesic, ours is the later. It is composed of triangles linked together in a geometric pattern.  Each triangle is concrete over steel mesh and re-bar with 7 inches of Styrofoam for insulation. We actually have 4 domes linked together. The center dome (common area) is 30 ft, and there are three 25 foot domes (master suite, guest bedrooms, and garage) attached to the main dome.   Our domes were built with no mode of heating.  If it is 25 degrees outside it will be 62 inside. Yeah 62 is still a little chilly but I think that's pretty damn efficient! It does have AC of course, this is Florida after all. And domes are supposed to withstand everything Mother Nature can throw at it, high winds, tornadoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, even sinkholes. There was a well known concrete dome that withstood Hurricane Andrew a Cat5 storm which is sometimes know as the "hand of God".  As all his neighbors homes fell into rubble the dome owner simply went outside when it was over and swept off the driveway.  Is it an impenetrable fortress of solitude,  it's supposed to be but lets face it nothing is infallible and I would never doom it by saying it is.  There were problems with Buckminster's dream home. They were very expensive to build, and you had banks looking at it and saying hell no!  "If they default on the mortgage we are stuck with a "weird home".  So in order to own one a person has to fork out at least half, a price banks are confident you won't walk away from.

our woods

first section of driveway

driveway to the fence

One issue that came up was whether we would be able to care for such a large place with so much land.  We are both in our 60s and not in the best of health and these domes require some maintenance. The good news is we will never have to replace the roof. The worse case scenario there is we patch it with concrete and paint with paint sealer. It's the easiest fastest roof-job ever!  Every year the domes need to be cleaned, screens need cleaning and thanks to a screen dome in back some of those screen are 15 feet high! In order to paint the domes there are circle hooks built into the tops of them. You are supposed to shimmy up the dome, latch onto the hook and rappel down painting. Okay, I cringe thinking about my 68 year old husband doing that. And he's not one to hire someone to do something "he" can do Even if his wife is inside freaking out!

Cleaning the domes

Cleaning the screen dome

Jim on his hand made platform to fix the screens

Tigers, Bigfoot and bears, oh my!

We bought this unique place September of 2014. I've wanted to start a blog about it all this time but just kept putting it off.

Originally I was going to title it a Real Housewife of Weeki Wachee, but was afraid of trademark infringement.  Plus I didn't want Andy Cohen to be mad at me, I like him.

So here it finally is, ta-da.  So many cool things have happened I don't know where to begin.  Our dome is actually 4 domes hooked together with tunnels. Sort of like a habitrail only for people. It is on over 4 wooded acres, and even has a built in pool.  Our "neighbors" are woodland critters like owls, raccoons, armadillos, and flying squirrels, etc! I didn't even know flying squirrels were living around here until Rocket J. Squirrel moved his little family in our barn!  We went in there to get something and all of a sudden 7 little furballs with coal black eyes were staring at us! Too cute!

They move back in the barn every winter and are there now and we love it!

Rocket J. Squirrel

I understand that many folks, especially ranchers, hate armadillos but we were so excited to see ours!  He was the size of a dollar bill and we thought he was a hoot and a half.  He would burrow deep for bugs or worms and sometimes all that would be sticking out would be his feet.  Jim and I argued a little on the name. He wanted "Matt Dillo" and I wanted "Armand Dillo". He won and I'm sure Matt Dillon would be honored. Yeah, probably not.

We having been running a Queen Butterfly breeding program. They look similar to the Monarchs, with slight differences.  Even their cocoons are similar but the Queens have tiny beads of silver around the tops of theirs.  They are big fans of Milk Weed as are the Monarchs.  My mother has only Monarchs come to her Milk Weeds and she is but a few miles away. In order to protect them she has been taking in the fattened caterpillars, set them up in an aquarium with loads of Milk weed and let them cocoon in safety. Then when they are fully hatched and their wings are dry she releases them. We found out the hard way that the numerous lizards love fat caterpillars and unprotected cocoons!   I don't know how many she's raised but we are way into double digits. I would like to think that she has been partly responsible for the slight comeback in the Monarch populations!

Queen cocoon 

Almost ready to hatch

Letting wings dry

First stop to freedom

Kermet the pond frog

Last spring Jim had two tiny baby squirrels try to adopt him.  They came walking slowly up to him as if to say "are you my mommie"? They were precious but didn't really want the responsibility of taking care of orphaned infants and took they to a wild animal rescue center where they got lots of loving care and were eventually released into a protected area.  Now here it is spring once again and we are on the lookout.  

The bird species around here are varied and awesome!  We have had everything from hummingbirds to huge Barred Owls and a Bald Eagle.  The bald eagle's wings were so big that when it took off it broke branches as it sailed through the forest.

  Yeah, birds of prey know they're cool!

We are in bear country, there are signs everywhere. I have yet to see one but may have heard one as I have no other explanation.  I was awake with one of my many nights of insomnia when I heard a frightening noise! At the same time neighbor Ray's dogs were going bat crap crazy barking!  Obviously they knew something was up.  Frozen in panic I was afraid to look, or grab my phone and tape the LOUD whoop noises! I did find a similar noise in a web site:    http://bfro.net/avevid/sierrasounds/Whoop.mp3
With the caption congratulations it's a Bigfoot! Although that would be exciting, I'm sure there is a logical explanation.  First of all down south here they are called "Skunk apes" and are supposed to smell to high heaven!  I didn't smell anything and since it was walking outside my bedroom door and the whoops sounded incredibly loud and close I think I would have noticed an odor. And no it wasn't a Whip-or-will, unless there are two hundred pound angry Whip-or-wills roaming around at 3 am.   There is a rumor that a family on this street owns tigers, that may be so, and many have exotic animals that sometimes escape.  Another explanation perhaps?

The second time ( and hopefully last) I heard the loud whoop was when I was relaxing at night in the screen dome anxious to catch the sight of shooting stars that we frequently see. My daughter's cat, Mr. Fluffy, was peacefully sleeping on my lap. Then the loud WHOOP!  With that poor Mr. Fluffy shot straight up off my lap and  hightailed it into the house!  I was afraid to follow, afraid to move. It sounded like what ever it was was two feet away yet I didn't see anything.  So I don't know what's going on out here in the wilds of Weeki Wachee, your guess is as good as mine!