Last updated: 12/14/24

Credits

The Veatch House

House Name

The Veatch House is named to honor Erin’s mother’s family. Erin’s mother and her twin brother were the last of the Veatches in their family. Sadly, both of them passed away before we purchased our home. The house stands as a tribute to their memory and to the values and traditions they instilled in us—family, resilience, creativity, and love for the places that shape us. Erin’s mother was deeply connected to her heritage, and in her retirement, she spent years tracing her family line back to its origins in Scotland. Naming our house The Veatch House honors both the past and the future and brings some of that Scottish heritage to Iowa. This home is a symbol of both remembrance and renewal where our family's story will continue to be written.

Site Name

The name “The Great House Project” is a nod to Erin’s favorite books, the In Death series by J.D. Robb. In an ongoing side plot starting in Faithless in Death (book 52), characters Mavis and her husband Leonardo purchase a home that needs some remodeling—much like us in real life. It’s too much house for them, so they decide to rent part of it to two other characters, Peabody and McNab. In Desperation in Death (book 55), a character says to Peabody, “…I want some pictures of the Great Mavis and Peabody House Project progress” (p. 43). In Encore in Death (book 56), Peabody shortens it to “the Great House Project” as she describes progress on the remodeling (p. 122).

Software

This is a non-exhaustive list of the software we use to produce this website:

Open Source

Trilby Media

Grav The Great House Project is built using the flat file CMS Grav. Christopher wanted an "out of the box" solution for The Great House Project. He's pretty much CMS agnostic, having built many database driven sites (ExpressionEngine, Wordpress, Drupal), but he wanted to experiment with a flat file CMS for the creation of this website.

Flying Meat Inc

Acorn
Retrobatch 2
Note: *The above are not affiliate links. Christopher just loves Gus Mueller's software. He prefers Acorn to Photoshop. It's more intuitive, easier to use, and feels like a Mac app. Acorn does 85% of what Photoshop does without trying to be a photoshop replacement. Retrobatch 2 takes the drudgery out of image manipulation. Drop 40 images into a watch folder and pick them up in your designated output folder. The trip between folders can have as many nodes as you like, doing whatever you want done, and you can even create a node that moves your original file and tucks it safely away. Resize, strip meta data, and optimize. If you find yourself doing the same image task over and over again, why not automate it?

Panic Software

Nova
Transmit
Note: I don't use Transmit much, since many of the functions are built into Nova, but it's always so straight forward and simple when I do. I can't think of a better FTP app.

Apple

Bare Bones Software

BBEdit
Note: BBedit is probably the oldest piece of software I still use regularly. It's always one of the first products I install on a new Mac and I update without fear and as close to day one as possible. It's everything you could want a text editor to be. If I had one piece of criticism it's that it does too much. I'm sure I could customize BBedit to take out the stuff I don't use, since nearly everything is customizable. There is also a robust plugin community.

Affinity

Hardware

MacMini

iPhone 16

iPhone 10?

Macbook Air

DJI Neo

Synology DS423+ NAS