Permit the Frog

Blue! No—yellow!

2009-10-08T12:56:00.012-05:00

We painted our house!

Suddenly, a few weeks ago, we decided to paint the house this fall. It was less a matter of forming the plan than being seized by it. We realized that, if the weather held, we’d have just enough free days to pull it off before the cold arrives, and there’s nothing we like better than a ridiculous time crunch. So whee! Here we go!

Day 1

Early wake-up and over the mountain to the paint store in Waynesboro, where we picked up a fourth color sample just to satisfy my curiosity about Solaria, even though we were already pretty sure we liked Butter Up better than Midday or Optimistic Yellow. Then to the hardware store to rent a pressure-washer. Once the beast was in the back of our truck, we blasted home and got right to work, hoping to slide in under the four-hour time limit on the rental.

But—but!—a number of problems ensued. One: the soap wouldn’t draw into the sprayer, and we definitely needed soap for our mildewed palace. John called the store, got the helpful suggestion to use a bigger nozzle, and soldiered on. Two: A less helpful suggestion that we could use the Simple Green soap straight, without pre-diluting, turned out to be Simply Wrong. We went through an entire $14 gallon in no time flat, and John had to run out for more.

Three: While standing on the deck to clean the peak of the north side of the house, John changed out the nozzles and then tested the new one, to make sure it was on tight, by pointing the sprayer up over the trees and pulling the trigger. Well, it wasn’t on tight. The yellow nozzle flew over the front of our yard, beyond the hedges, and disappeared. We walked around the front edge of our neighbor’s property a few minutes until I spotted a yellow thing among all the yellow leaves and aha! Back to work.

All in all, though, it went quickly and John was a trooper with that loud, dripping machine that got his feet and head all wet as he worked his way around the house. Meanwhile I cut back vegetation and cleared stuff away from the walls. One exciting moment came when I used a drywall knife to pry a giant hornet’s nest—which I was 99.9% sure was abandoned—off the west side wall. Anybody home? No, but the basketball-sized thing was amazing once it was down and we could see inside it.

We returned the sprayer and went back to the paint store, confident in our final choice of Butter Up. After going through numerous questions with the lone employee, we said “OK, mix us up five gallons of Butter Up in Satin-finish Super Paint” and he said OK and then looked at his computer and announced that the color we’d chosen required a light yellow base, which would tend to fade very quickly when used on an exterior.

It seemed like a threatening moment, but we thought we’d solved it when we all realized that the sample we’d previously bought (and painted onto a piece of drywall) was mixed using a white base, and since we liked that color, we could indeed use a white base (which is less prone to fading) and all would be well.

Off we went with our five gallons of paint.

Day 2

We were making coffee and getting psyched up for a full day of painting when John remembered that we should test out the paint we’d bought and make sure it did, in fact, match the color of our sample. So I painted some onto the drywall and guess what? It wasn’t even close.

We drove back over the mountain.

Walked into the store. Same lone employee. He sees us coming and says “Didn’t match up? I didn’t think it would.”

That was only the beginning of the strange, circular conversations we had: with him, with the people at a different paint store, back to the original guy, on the phone, then more employees at a different location of the same chain. At one point we were contemplating rounding up discontinued paint from three different towns in Central Virginia separated by dozens of miles. My favorite moment was when we asked “But how long would it last before it faded?” and the guy answered, “Depends on the weather. If it’s sunny every day for the next year, it might fade in a year.” When's the last time we had a solid year of sunshine? I looked over at another customer in the store and he was looking back at me with a bemused, “better-you-than-me” expression.

Long story short: After several tense hours and yet another trip over the mountain, we exchanged our five gallons of wrong-color paint for eleven gallons of the right color, in a better-quality paint, for a low low price.

And finally, at 3pm on an uncommonly beautiful (i.e., perfect for painting) day, we were ready to begin.

We put the big ladder against the south side—not quite in the peak—and I climbed up and applied the first bit of cheery sunny yellow to our rainy-day house!

And from there, it was honestly just a lot of painting. We got about two-thirds of that big south side done that day. Then we feasted.

- Erika

Day 3

Day 3 was pretty much like Day 2. We finished painting the south side of the house, then we painted the back wall outside the bathroom, and spent the rest of the day into dusk painting the north side of the house. I started getting over my uneasy feelings of being up on the big ladder.

Day 4

Day 4 was just like Day 3 and Day 2! This time, we painted the front of the house, and then Erika painted the sides of the dormer (using the chicken ladder) and I got to work on getting a second coat of paint onto the south wall. Then Erika joined me in the second coating business and we finished that wall up before dusk.

So what's left? Putting a second coat on the rest of the house and painting the back porch!

- John

In which we shed our burdens, and burden our shed

2009-08-04T14:02:00.005-05:00

Let’s hear it for outbuildings, people! We’ve got a nice one, yes indeedy we do. Last time we posted, we’d just installed a floor. And now we have also fixed up the siding, repaired the front door and built shelves and a loft inside! And moved our stuff in! Yeehaw!

Everything, to our delight, was buildable with wood we already had laying around—right outside the shed, as a matter of fact. The shelves were easy to make using triangles we’d cut out from our front porch stair project lo these many months ago. And sections of old horse fence that someone freecycled to us—those made great shelf surfaces. They’re sturdy and they have wicked patina. We knocked them out quickly and couldn’t resist immediately storing things on them.

And we built the loft from some of the rock-hard actual 2x4s, made of oak, that we’d taken out of the house when removing walls and a ceiling. It’s amazing stuff; one plank weighs, I’m guessing, 500 pounds. It resisted our efforts to get screws and nails into it, but we prevailed. More wedding dance-floor plywood made the “floor” of the loft—just like the shed floor, cut to crazy custom angles to accommodate our little building’s non-squareness. We slid it into place and it fit like a glove.

Most of that stuff happened Saturday, followed by a much-needed session of sitting in the creek with cold beers, then a dinner of pasta with ricotta and local tomatoes, onions, garlic, parsley, basil, a salad of local lettuce and cukes and goat cheese and nasturtiums, local bread, local vinegar…argh! The food around here, at this time of year, is off the chain. Peach/blackberry cobbler for dessert. Check it.

Sunday I vacuumed out the entire shed while John started cleaning up the wood pile outside, and then we moved everything we want to keep from our back porch into the shed. Made some nice little custom hanging systems for stuff and kept the floor pretty clear for moving around. It’s sweet. Now we have to figure out how to be rid all that stuff on the back porch we don’t want, never use, aren’t sure what to do with.

Last step was hanging a horseshoe over the shed door. Hurrah.

- Erika

Our shed has a floor!

2009-07-07T14:39:00.002-05:00

When last we spoke, we had installed four of six floor joists and were a little bit dreading the last two. Well, we broke through and got them in without too much trouble. John repaired the Sawzall so he could cut away this random edge of a plank that was sticking into the space where one of the joists would go, and that made it all possible. We also had to use our mattock to trench out spaces for the joists—otherwise they would have been resting on soil. And though this isn’t what you’d call a super-tight building envelope, untreated wood resting on soil is not up to our own personal code. We’re perfectionists, people.

Anyway, the long and the short of it is that we finished the frame and then whipped up a floor using half-inch plywood from our wedding dance floor. It’s polyurethaned to a high shine and blessed with the boogie of nearly all our family and friends. The funny thing is this: the shed is more of a parallelogram than a rectangle, the joists are on these odd angles for various reasons, the entire floor frame slopes down by design…weird nailers stick up into the floor space…it’s extremely funky, in other words—but nonetheless we lovingly and carefully cut this floor to fit right into the space that’s given. It’s like a nice custom floor for a crazy old shed. For some reason photos straighten it all out and make it look normal, but in person you can see the angles and you expect balls to start rolling uphill, so funhouse-like is the structure.

Anyway, now we’ve got our shiny floor and we’re talking about installing shelves and a little loft, and getting ready to replace siding around the bottom where it had been removed. It’s good stuff. Shedariffic.

- Erika

More progress on the shed

2009-06-22T12:31:00.005-05:00

After a little research, we decided not to use cement to set the locust piers. Instead, we opted for packing the posts in with gravel. Well, we don't actually have a supply of angular pea gravel handy, but we do have a large pile of small rocks and gravel as a result of sifting the first round of garden beds that we dug last year.

It was tough work on this warm, solstice weekend. We would fill the wheel barrow and push it out of the woods and up the hill to the shed a half dozen or more times. Once a pier was in place and relatively level, we'd fill the hole about four inches and then Erika would hold the pier with a level on top and keep it right while I tamped the gravel down all around it with a 2x4.

Then we'd add another four inches or so and tamp again. The tamping was done with all our strength, really packing the heck out of it. By the time the hole was full of packed gravel, the post would not budge. Half of each pier was buried. Nice and sturdy, and if we ever decide we need to remove them or something, we can unpack the gravel with a metal rod.

After setting both piers, we jacked the front of the shed up so we could pull the 6x6 beam out, move it over the piers, and measure it for cutting. Once it was cut, we set it in place on the piers and lowered the shed back down onto its new seat and called it a day.

The next day, we used some large nails to spike the beam to the piers and then the shed to the beam. Then we started figuring out how were were going to frame this floor out.

The floor needs to be on a different angle than the shed. That's just the conditions we're working with. So we've got all sorts of funky nailers in place to make this happen. We ended up adding a 2x6 flat across the beam so that the floor joists would gain another inch and a half lift at the front of the shed. We added our diagonal support in the back corner. And we managed to install four of the six joists. The last two will be the toughest because there is some old framing in the way and we'll need to find a creative (or forceful) way to deal with that.

Also, we harvested garlic on Saturday!

- John

Return of the hammer

2009-06-10T07:43:00.011-05:00

By now, the only people reading this are probably our own future selves, indulging in nostalgia. Hello, future selves! And anyone else who happens to be hanging around.

Though we have not posted in a dog's age, we have been working steadily. Mostly on the garden. Currently it is rocking the free world with very beautiful lettuce, cabbage and our first-ever successful broccoli crop (yeah!), as well as promising pepper, tomato and bean patches. The peas, marigolds, squashes and radishes are a little more marginal as yet, but most still have the potential for greatness. We've expanded the areas we grow in, and without much digging at all. Now we can see that the entire backyard will somebody be producing food, and this vision makes us very happy. Next up: fruit trees!

House-wise, there has been a snail's pace attack on the remaining trim painting, which involves large ladders and the need for dry weather. Ladders suck and it's been rainy all May, hence the creeping progress. It will be done soon, though. We have our eye on some front porch work, but we have to wait until the four baby Eastern Phoebes fledge before we go out there with paint scrapers and belt sanders and circular saw. They are currently occupying a very crowded nest on the top of a porch column. You'll recall that we replaced that column, but we left the top plate and the nest in hopes they'd return. And they have! The parents are always around, hunting for insects and looking watchful.

Which brings me to the shed. It's been a bit of an eyesore since we moved it--propped up on concrete blocks and twisted askew from its taxing journey up the hill. Last week we suddenly got the notion to start making it a usable building once again. And so we are. Basically, it needs to have the bottoms of its walls shored up, the foundation rebuilt, and a floor frame and floor put in. Nothing to it.

We've done the first of those four things and started on the second. Shoring up the walls meant adding various bands, planks, diagonals, nailers and plates to the softly rotted wall studs. We're using whatever lumber we have around, making our miter cuts on the back porch, and taking our time. We've both hit our own hands with the hammer. Construction takes some re-getting used to. Also, there is a nest of bees or wasps living inside on the ceiling, so we sometimes have to wait for them to calm down before proceeding.

But the shed is looking much sturdier, and we've straightened out many of its funkier aspects. The days I spent watching my dad jack this thing up must have sunk in, because we've been able to jack it and nail stuff to it without any big hassles.

Yesterday we finished step one and moved on to step two: the two posts that will support the shed's front corners. We decided to use black locust posts for this, setting them in concrete. We already had one in our wood pile, and the other came from the back of our property, chain-sawed by John out of a downed locust tree. Carried that monster back to the yard on our shoulders. And ended up sawing our post out of it with a handsaw when the chainsaw blade proved too dull. This is living!

Next up: level the posts as best we can, and pour concrete. We're psyched to have this thing ready to hold our stuff. Long live Snoopy.

- Erika

Fresh coats

2009-02-04T15:17:00.004-05:00

On the list it only reads "putty screw holes in the attic hatch" but what it really means is "put a quality paint on all of the window trim, doors, and baseboards in the living room and dining room." And to that I unofficially added "scrape old paint off all the glass" and Erika added "scrape old paint off the floors around the baseboards."

We chose a nice quality semi-gloss paint in "delicate white," all colors gleamin' in the spectrum. Scraping paint off the window panes with a putty knife takes a while. You do the inside, then do the outside which reveals spots you missed inside. You get those, then you see spots you missed outside. And so on. After scraping the dining room windows, I washed them inside and out.

We washed all the white wood, Erika scraped the paint off the floors, and we got down to painting. The old paint is so dingy. It looks gray compared to the fresh coats. We got two coats on the dining room over the weekend.

Holy cow, what a difference! (And now you can actually see that our walls are "onion powder" and not white!

Erika has been working on the living room this week, as well. Check out the difference...new paint on the right, old on the left. Sorry, sorta dark and blurry...

The other improvement/accomplishment was finally making and installing the ceiling plate for the dining room chandelier. We've had this old brass dish serving as a candle holder for well over a year. We actually bought it for the purpose of making a ceiling plate one day. After a couple of false starts (poor design on my part), I figured it out. Just needed to buy a hollow threaded rod and hooped nut thing (sorry, but I hate saying "nipples and nuts"), and a threaded cross plate for the junction box. We also decided to spray paint it a flat brown/lavender which matches the wood grains and other things in the house. The brass as it was clashed with the copper chandelier.

- John

A frivolous invention

2009-01-29T12:01:00.006-05:00

One can live forever with no toilet-paper holder, but we are striving to be a civilized household. Though we deemed “heat system” and “ceilings” more urgent projects, we still gave toilet-paper holder a place on our big list of things to do. (This is notwithstanding John’s claim that the back of the toilet made a fine toilet-paper holder.)

I got an idea a couple weeks ago to use the last of the four wooden drawer pulls to fashion the TPH. (The other three found various spots as part of our trim.) I liked how well the dark wood of the drawer pull matched our sink cabinet, and it seemed that if we cut the pull in half, it would make two arms perfect for holding the plastic springy thing that goes inside the roll.

And it did. The cutting was a death-defying double-operator miter-saw trick, and we made it through sans injury. Then John skillfully drilled depressions (not holes) into the ends of these arms, into which the springy thing would fit. Then we cut a scrap of oak trim to be the “plate,” sanded it, and forstenered two holes in for screws.

We glued the arms onto the plate, and we put two drywall anchor screws into the bathroom wall.

Glue dried, plate went onto wall, roll went onto springy thing, and voila! Civilization.

Working at it

2009-01-26T10:12:00.010-05:00

There will come a time, hopefully in the next couple of months, when we will be "done."

(We will never be done.)

But we must be. At some point, there needs to be a "done." We need to be able to say, "hey, we finished fixing up this house and now let's get on with the next big round of modifications: the converting the attic to a bedroom, the kitchen remodel, the tearing off the back porch and laying down a deck, chickens, an outdoor shower, an earth oven..."

Oh so close now. We've been steadily tying up the loose ends and we're making progress. Each week it seems like we cross another thing off the list. Lately, we've been way into molding. We've finally made, painted, and installed baseboards where they had been missing.

We did all sorts of crazy work around the attic hatch above the staircase: plywood, doorstop, cove, quarter round, small pieces glued perpendicular to long ones, a time capsule hidden behind a square of plywood with an old wooden drawer handle mounted to it...we spared no technique for that area! Oh yeah, then we painted the stairwell and all its new trim.

in progress:

the front portion, completed:

the plans that we dated and tucked away as a time capsule:

Also recently crossed off the list: the screen door. It's an old, dry, wooden thing which has had a nasty sag to it since we bought the house. It wasn't doing much for the overall appearance of the front of the house. We installed a couple of steel brackets and glued a few small wood triangles in support of the cross members and now it sits level (pretty much).

We've been trimming around the oak posts! Ended up using a 1/2"x3 red oak arrangement and we think it looks pretty sharp. This is about the time when we discovered the beauty of wood glue

Did some insulating around the chimney (wow, there were some large gaps where a bunch of our heat was escaping) and finally finished insulating the attic.

Oh yeah, and we made a 3-sided wood box to hide the plumbing under the bathroom sink!

We've even ordered a ceiling lamp for the kitchen!

Basically, in our quest to be "done," here's what's left:

- fabricate an "official" toilet paper holder (we started this last night!)
- Choose and install light fixtures in the living room, kitchen, bathroom, and studio
- Sand and paint the front porch
- Put some sort of newel-items on the porch railings
- Finish painting the eaves
- Paint the house (outside)

And then, then we'll be done.

Really?

- John

Merry Christmas!

2008-12-23T08:35:00.002-05:00

Bonus Season

2008-12-02T09:43:00.003-05:00

Certainly is one of your chillier sub-freezing mornings. A hard frost on everything. Heatmor burning nicely though, still a couple of logs burning in there as we overslept this morning. Whoops.

Lady Luck was on our side at the Habitat Store last night. We found exactly what we were looking for: An old, metal, salvaged magnetic bracket and plate (the kind from old furniture, that holds a swinging wooden door shut) and a neat looking, old brass drawer handle. Measured to the exact spot we wanted to mount that stuff, and did so. Crossed the plumbing access hatch off the list.

The exposed stud was finally finished off, too. I like that 2x4. We left it for a couple of reasons. One, a year and a half ago when we were putting the drywall there we didn't know how we were going to deal with this 2x4 that was sticking out a quarter-inch too far (we now know enough to tell you that this isn't a structural piece, just a partition wall post, and we could have just removed it). The other, and better reason that we left it exposed is because in my mind it's the color of the house, the color of its bones. For about nine months when there were no ceilings or walls, all we had was the old, dark brown wood with all its scars and stains. This is our truth window!

We took a quick break for dinner and then nailed up the trim around the kitchen-side of the posts and beam. The longest piece, which covers the drywall edge along most of the length of the beam, was fabricated on the kitchen floor by gluing a corner piece the length of the trim, forming about a seven-foot L piece. We were impatient and short on clamps to use wood glue, so we used up our fast-drying epoxy. The results weren't as fine as we had hoped; the glued-on piece was slightly warped and didn't always sit flush with the wider piece. So once it dried, I got the block plane on it and evened it out. Erika hit it with another coat of paint. We nailed it up, and then nailed up the final vertical piece.

Looks good! We need to do a little touch-up work to it before we can cross the "trim around the posts and beams" off The List, but we're getting close!

- John

And we feasted

2008-12-01T11:24:00.001-05:00

It was a glorious Thanksgiving, the first big party we've had in our house that wasn't a work party, and a beautiful celebration.

We had, at various times, three and six and nine and twelve people at our house. Lucky numbers? Mary and Paul came over on Wednesday while I was home for Baking Day: we spent a fun two-plus hours slowly touring the house, and it was so awesome because they've been embroiled in their own house project for more than two years—it's way bigger than ours and has involved a lot more rotten luck than ours, so they are the rare guests who truly understand what it means when I pull down some denim insulation in the basement and say grandly, "Here's our tubing." They love our place and asked good questions. Then they left and I made a green-tomato-mincemeat pie, two other pie crusts, tomato sauce and a lovely pumpkin bread.

Wednesday night my family arrived and we ate the sauce over pasta and sang songs 'round the table to Seth's magic strumming and split a chocolate bar. Dad slept in the attic and was reasonably warm—hey, this heat system's really working! Thursday we launched into a frenzy of cooking: I made those pie crusts into sweet potato pie, Mom made peanut soup, John made biscuit batter, Mary and Archie and Paul came over, we made cranberry sauce and stuffing and a chicken and salad from the garden. We ate some pepper jam and brie on crackers and hot cider. John got a fire going outside; Seth split some wood. I picked some things from the yard for a centerpiece. Alex and April and Penny arrived and the kitchen became a freight train: John baking the chicken and the biscuits and making honey turnips, Mary making mashed potatoes and Brussels sprouts, April unveiling her beautiful rolls and a Crown Roast with beet stuffing and a pumpkin cheesecake! We had peach honey for the biscuits! Wine! Vermont specials (equal parts maple syrup and whiskey, hot)! Coffee with Grand Marnier!

We are thankful for good food, our house, our family and our beautiful friends.

Saturday and Sunday, alone again, we rode the wave of the Thanksgiving Challenge right on into the January Challenge, a month early! Bought a few pieces of trim, cut 'em up, painted, and threw in the plumbing-hatch project while we're at it. This is the little door that gives access to the shower/tub plumbing, just in case. We made a nice one from ½-inch plywood and painted it to match the wall, then added cute little fleur-de-lis hinges. Too bad most of it will be hidden behind furniture. Tonight we'll be nailing all these trimmies up and we'll put some pix up soon.

- Erika

To summarize:

2008-11-26T08:56:00.004-05:00

Happy Thanksgiving!

Big day, Sunday. Epic.

2008-11-24T15:48:00.008-05:00

The night before, we had all the pieces of the wooden threshold cut and laid out. After we had quit, I had second thoughts about this one, narrower piece of moulding that we were using on the short side of the kitchen floor. We decided to use a 1x4 in place of it, which matched the rest of the design better. We also decided to cut it on a 45 degree angle (and cut its mate the same way), which would look a lot better. The bevel and mitre cuts went off without a hitch and we were ready to start nailing it down.

We set the 2x4 first, and glued it instead of nailing or screwing it. The reason was simple: we couldn't be 100% sure that we weren't going to nail right into one of our heating tubes under the floor.

(I really like that the above pic shows all the parts of the threshold, including the blocky shims.)

With the 2x4 glued down, we placed our thick shims and then nailed down the 1x4 on the high side, covering the nasty cracked linoleum. Last, we nailed the doorstop trim to the 2x4.

Okay, threshold's in place...what's next!

We nailed down the hardwood floor along the edge of where the second stone threshold goes. Erika cut some plastic for a vapor barrier under the stone. We screwed down the plywood on top of that. Rushed outside, mixed up a batch of thinset, came back in and started spreading.

Erika worked the trowel and cement, I set the stone, we wiped the excess from the edges. It's the prep work that takes most of the time; setting the stone itself went pretty quickly.

We gobbled up some lunch and discussed color options for the wood threshold. We wanted it to match the exposed wood around it, which is mostly dark brown. After lunch, we hit the hardware store and bought some brown paint. Chesapeake.

Back home, we had more domestic tasks to accomplish ahead of the company we're expecting for Thanksgiving. I mowed the lawn at a brisk pace, Erika buzzed about transforming the back porch from recycling/landfill-esque area to a nice and clear back entrance to the house. She also picked up around the yard and elsewhere.

Still a little light left, so we hit the dump with our recycling and all. Back to the house, deep cleaned and rearranged some stuff. I broke out the vinyl collection (finally!!) and set it up. With the house clean, there was one thing left to do: paint the threshold. Masked it off and painted it up. One more coat, tonight.

Finally, dinner at 10. What a day. But, the Thanksgiving Challenge drew to completion, and we met it, victoriously!

- John

Update: Second coat on, masking tape off!

Friday, Saturday, here we go

2008-11-24T15:45:00.002-05:00

I'm gonna keep this short.

Friday: stone-polishing day. John at the file, grinding corners off our three slabs. Me following with corner-cat sander, vibrating my wrists, 80 grit then 120 grit then steel wool then a towel, making it nice and dark. John had sweat on his brow and the basement was a cloud of stone dust. Good times. I polished the first two but by the time John was done grinding the corners off the third piece, it was nearly 10pm. That was a tough job he was doing. So I'd finish up…

Saturday. I woke up already stressed out. We were having dinner with friends, which is a good thing, but limited our work time. The goal: Build the wooden threshold. We had a 2x10 which we meant to carve and cut into a multi-faceted piece to ease the transition between two floors, plus cover chipped linoleum.

We wanted to use the table saw to do this, but it oddly quit after firing up once. Eh, why? Our backup plan to make the rabbet cut: circular saw, many cuts side-by-side, then chisel out the remaining thin fins (are those like spinning pins?) of wood. John made the cuts (we started in the basement, but the light situation down there is ridiculous so we brought it outside and blew sawdust all over the yard) and then I completely screwed up the chiseling. 2x10 ruined. No good.

We gnashed our teeth and came up with another design by playing with scraps of wood we had from other projects. A 2x4, a door stop, a trim piece. John made the big-box run while I polished the third piece of stone. Stress: It was almost 2:30 by the time he returned. He'd forgotten his wallet and had to talk his way into paying with a credit card. We measured, cut and designed on the fly at lightning speed. Many trips up and down the basement steps, many miter and circular-saw cuts and time running out. But we got everything cut and dry-fit before we had to quit.

An against-the-odds day. I wasn't feeling good at the end of it, but Sunday—which John will tell you about next—redeemed it all.

- Erika

talk'n 'bout a jumble

2008-11-21T09:13:00.011-05:00

We took the measurements, we cut the stone. It got off to a, uh, rocky start though. This slab o' soapstone is much harder than the last one we used. And it's a little thicker. The plywood circular blade (many-toothed) that I normally use for this stuff was not cutting it. I switched to a brand new blade of the same type - with the same results. Ooh, a metal cutting blade. It made everything smell funny, but it didn't cut into the stone. Last resort: an old wood ripping blade with big shark teeth. It worked so well I wondered why I hadn't tried it before!

So we cut the three threshold pieces out there in the front yard, drop light, low thirties.

Everything fits perfectly. Except there was a little notion creeping up that this stone looks significantly different than the stone we used for the first threshold. It's got almost no veins or clouds in it. Too impatient to wait until the next night (as we had planned) to sand and polish, I took a piece to the basement and gave it a five-minute sanding to darken it up a bit.

It looks great (or, it will look great once we dress it) but we stood there, disappointed that our conscious attempt to add a structural/design element which would actually match and tie a theme together may have failed. There was concern that our house is "such a jumble" of ideas.

We may have been being hard on ourselves. The threshold is going to look awesome when it's done, and the thresholds together will still have a strong, combined effect. Really, this new stone matches the bathroom stone better, in terms of its lack of clouds, and it's in the line of sight of the bathroom floor. Once polished, the new stone will have the same dark color as the other threshold. And even if we wanted to match the other threshold, we'd have a difficult time doing so; we were at the quarry the day before and looked through everything and this was the only piece that was the correct thickness (actually, it was even a little thicker than we wanted).

We're still on top of the Challenge! Tonight we dress the stone, tomorrow we work on the wood threshold/transition piece (a nine-footer!) and lay the whole area out, and Sunday (if we're still on track!) we cement it all in.

- John

Lookin' Tough

2008-11-20T08:57:00.003-05:00

Last night we accomplished a lot. We made our triumphant return to the crawl space to firm up the floor boards around the gap in the floor. After removing the insulation from that area and taking some measurements, we cut a few 2x4s to length and crawled back in with the wood, drill, and some screws. We screwed the 2x4s into the subfloor on one end, and into the bracing on the other. Everything went smoothly.

Back upstairs, above the work, we pounded in some shims to fill the small gaps between the new 2x4 bracing and the subfloor. Much more rigid now!

Next step was to cut some plywood to fit over the 2x4s and fill the hole. We cut a couple of pieces of 1/2" plywood. The first piece was glued and screwed to the 2x4s, the second (same size) piece was glued and screwed on top of the first piece. Success!

Final task of the evening: cut plywood to fit along the length of the threshold, so that we've got something to spread the mortar on when we set the stone. We measured the width of the threshold area at one end and took some measurements working towards the other end. We had to trim back the "temporary" plywood floor to make that section a little wider; it was about a 1/4" narrower than the kitchen floor area of the threshold. The circular saw made quick work of that.

Working fast, we marked up the plywood and cut it in two lengths. Everything fit right in.

We could have gone one step further by toe-nailing the last row of hardwood floor planks, since they're starting to separate, but I decided to hold off because I was starting to get a little tired and impatient, and that's not the time to try and pull a task like that off...too many things could go wrong. So, we'll get to that tonight or tomorrow.

Next up: cutting the slab!

- John

Stone Cold/Hot

2008-11-19T14:16:00.004-05:00

Feelin' good in the Thanksgiving Challenge! Last night we started preparing the area where we'll install the second stone threshold; this time, under the beam between the dining room and kitchen. We started by chiseling away the what remains of the hardwood floor, against one of the oak posts. If we had a toe-kick saw, we could cut the floor flush with the post in a matter of seconds. But alas, we don't, and so we chiseled. Next, we used the circular saw set to just the right depth and cut along the hardwood, flush with the kitchen floor. We used the pry bar to pry out the flooring. Again with the circular saw, we cut the tongue from the edge of the hardwood running the length of the entire area.

So far, the biggest obstacle is this gap in the floor...the actual subfloor. And on either side of this 16"x6" gap, the subfloor is a bit bouncy. That's two problems for stone: no support underneath that section, and a bounce which would likely crack the stone over time. After some pondering, Erika suggested that we fix a couple of 2x4s running parallel with the the joists, attached to the cross-bracing on one side of the gap and to a more sturdy part of the subfloor itself on the other side of the gap. And you know what this means: crawlspace action! Once we've got these 2x4s screwed into place, we will glue and screw a 1" thick oak piece on top of them, flush with the subfloor. This should do it. Tonight, as the challenge rolls on, we plan to do the bracing, and cut and install the vapor barrier and plywood substrate.

This morning, we took a ride over to the soapstone quarry. Last time we were there, it was May and it was hot. This time, it's November, early morning, and very cold. It felt good to roll in though! We donned hardhats and wound our way through the various stacks of slab in the yard. We even visited the scrap pile, just to say hello. We found a nice-looking slab of proper dimensions and they came over with the forklift to weigh it and load it onto our truck. About 220 pounds. Tomorrow (if we're still on schedule), we'll cut the second threshold from this slab.

Finally, I should mention that last night we fired up the Heatmor for the first time this season. Earlier in the month we got it ready to go by cleaning and oiling the blower motor, wiping away spider webs, and giving it a basic check. We had also bled/pressurized the radiant system and tested the pumps. So all we had to do last night was get a fire going. In less than 45 minutes the water temperature went from 38 degrees to 190 degrees. Switched on the floor heat and heard the familiar creaks of the tubing snugged up against the floor. Less than 12 hours later, there's a very noticeable difference. Welcome to the season!

- John

The Thanksgiving Challenge

2008-11-11T08:24:00.005-05:00

Well peeps, we're picking up the pace 'round the house again. We've still got this pesky list of things that we never really finished, and some of these items would go a long way towards making the place feel a little more, well, done.

I think we're looking at two phases here: the Thanksgiving Challenge, and some sort of Winter Slog.

On the T'day list:

- thresholds (fix gaps in the floor where walls used to be)
- kickplates (under the kitchen cabinets)
- plywood floor/kitchen floor transition

The thresholds are underway. We're using what is leftover of the soapstone slab from which we cut our bathroom sinktop from. As of yesterday, we've cut, sanded, buffed, and carved all the stone required for the space between the living and dining rooms. We figured out the trick (or a trick) to getting a nice dark finish on the stone. We start with 80 grit, move to 120, and keep using it until it's basically not even sandpaper anymore, then we switch to steel wool. Ooh, looks wet even when it's dry!

And here you can see the difference between the finished and unfinished stone:

Since the stone sits about a half inch (or less) above the floor and has 90 edges, I decided to try my hand at a bit of carving, with the goal of getting a nice, rounded edge. I pulled it off using a file, paint scraper, and sandpaper. Lookin' good.

Monday night, while I finished rounding the edges of the inlays that will wrap around the chimney, Erika put a vapor barrier (6 mil plastic) down where the threshold will go and together we screwed the plywood down on top of that. All that's left to do now is lay the stone in a bed of mortar, a small grout job, and figure out how to trim around the posts!

Sunday, we cut the wood for the kickplates. Erika was very diligent about finding and cleaning up some old door trim for this, saving us from buying more lumber. In relatively short order, we measured it up, cut it up, and popped it in for a preview - looks great! It's amazing what not being able to see under the cabinets will do for adding to that "feeling of completion" that we're aiming for. Erika got a coat of primer on there before sundown. Monday night, she hit it with a top coat of paint and we nailed it in place. Touched up the nail holes and we're good to go!

Before:

After:

- John

Announcing

2008-10-03T07:26:00.009-05:00

So we've painted the porch columns and railings and eaves...

We've been growing and eating...

We got some rain...

We built a cold frame...

And we got involved with a herd of goats!

We partnered up with Goat Busters. They do goats, we do blogs! We've been reporting on the progress here!

Our porch is gleamin' in the moonlight at night

2008-09-15T11:09:00.010-05:00

Before we travel to our next galaxy of truly large projects (back porch removal/deck building, kitchen remodel, attic bedroom), we still have to complete a few other large-ish ones. We have progressed slowly on the thresholds project. The other big'n is to finish off the porch/front-of-the-house. A couple of weeks ago, as the weather was cooling off, we thought it a good idea to spend a full weekend getting a chunk of that done. So that's what we did over the weekend - the first really hot and humid weekend in a long, long time.

First thing to do was prep all the surfaces for painting. This includes scraping old paint and scrubbing and washing the surfaces. We put the tall ladder along the south side of the porch, up Erika went, scraper in hand. It was 1 o'clock, it was hot, the sun was beating, and I was having a hard time getting into it. Once she finished scraping the board that runs down along the side of the porch roof, as well as the eaves along that side of the porch, I went up the ladder with a scrub brush and a bucket of soapy water and began scrubbing it all down. Hosed it all off. It was looking better already.

Eventually, we were both scraping and scrubbing. Up on ladders, standing on the railings, stradling ladder and railing, holding on, leaning out, arms overhead scraping and scrubbing. Paint flecks in our hair and sticking to our sweaty skins. While we were at it, we scrubbed the outside of the gutters, which were long overdue for a cleaning.

By the end of the day (well, just after 7), we were thoroughly soaked, filthy, and worn out. But, the porch overhangs, beams, rafters, and columns had all been prepped. We roasted a chicken and mashed some potatoes. Yellow wax beans.

Sunday

We got a much earlier start that day. In the bright light, a few missed spots were visible. Erika took care of those while I started cutting and installing quarter-round trim pieces at the bases of the new columns and cut replacements for the rotted ones of the existing columns.

Then we got to painting and priming. The eaves didn't need to be primed, they already had old coats of paint on them so we felt a couple of top coats on those parts would be fine. Erika got to painting, and I got to priming the bare wood railings and columns that we had built last January. The day went well. We had a nice coffee break. Kept the tunes mostly rockin' and upbeat, and just painted and painted.

You can see some of the difference in the eaves and rafters here:

Bare wood vs. newly primed:

We finally quit around 7, I think. Everything had its first coat of paint or primer on it, though we stopped short of priming the hand rails that run down the steps. It already looks so much better. And it felt good (in a sick way) to have physically pushed ourselves this far - it had been a while. We're sore, but we're glad to know that we've still got it in us to pull out a real weekend like this.

Once we quit and got cleaned up, we fried up some eggplant from the garden, and had pasta with the sauce that Erika had started in the morning (garden tomatoes and basil and neighborhood garlic, shallots, and stuff).

What's left of the porch project? Basically, a second coat of paint on everything (that's another day's work), and then we've got to sand down the porch floor and get a nice thick coat or two of dark red porch paint on there. It's going to look great!

- John

Home podiatry

2008-08-27T11:52:00.005-05:00

Footer repair, that is. Concrete footer. Ours had a big old gap in it, right underneath the threshold between living and dining room where we walk constantly. We've explained before how this semicircular gap in the concrete--put there to accommodate an old heating duct--left two floor joists almost totally unsupported in their 24-foot run. Bad stuff. Before we can lay the soapstone down in our fancy new threshold, we need to shore that up.

A number of proposals were floated as to the best way to accomplish this, and we eventually picked the simplest one. (See, we have learned something!) We'd build primitive forms and fill the gap back in with concrete, then put shims under the joists. Nice and easy. No metal brackets, no jacking.

We went down to the hardware stare and severely overestimated the amount of concrete we'd need--bought 5 bags, which is absurd, but better than not having enough. Our truck struggled back up the hill to the house. I crawled into the crawlspace--hello!--and we rigged up some super-ghetto forms with plywood and 2x4 bracing and large clamps.

Before we knew it we were choreographing a little number I like to call "The Humpty Dance." No, wait, I mean "Cure Me." Yeah, that's it. It involves scooting in and out of the crawlspace, coordinating complex steps between the hose shutoff and the wheelbarrow where your partner is mixing concrete, and climbing up and down a ladder to scoop wet concrete into the form with a garden trowel. It takes less than an hour but it's intense. We had these sweet costumes with respirators, and shovels for props. Big time.

A few scoops of Portland cement later, followed by a nice leveling-off at the top, and we were done! (Note: Blog entry not meant to be used as DIY instructions. Completely useless in terms of actual information.) A half-moon of wet concrete curing against the ol' 1932 footer of the house. The forms only fell apart once, that we know of. We were psyched since we thought this would be an onerous task and it was standing between us and a finished threshold.

Did you know you're not supposed to touch wet concrete? So much for writing your initials with your finger.

And then it was only 2pm on a Sunday so we canned some peaches and pulled out a bunch of dying stuff from the garden and put down bonemeal and greensand and chicken poop and rye seed and felt good about ourselves.

Oh, and look what we did on Saturday:

(steps)

- Erika

Next set of gaps: flooring

2008-08-05T13:48:00.008-05:00

Okay, on to the next project!

Once upon a time, we removed some walls and installed some oak posts and beams. Where there used to be walls, there exists gaps in the hardwood floor. Unsightly. Over the months, we had tossed around the idea of creating a threshold out of red oak to match the beams, but eventually, we settled on the idea of building the threshold from soapstone. After all, we've got a nice slab left over from when we made the sink top, and there's other soapstone in our design and we expect these thresholds to pull that together nicely.

Not all the floor boards are missing from where there used to be a wall between the living room and dining room - the flooring is intact where a door must have been. So, the first step was to remove the existing boards to create a clean and continuous line.

And of course, the job starts with something funky. There was a slab of oak under the post near the stairs which needed to be cut off close to the post (about 3/4" from the post). We couldn't get that close with any of our tools, so I sharpened up a 1" chisel and set to chiseling it out. Went well!

Moving on, there were some floor boards that needed removing. The old tongue-and-groove pine is a great system; the stuff is in there tight. I set the circular saw depth to 3/4" and cut down the seam of two boards, severing the tongue. Some boards were pried up, others had to be knocked out with a wood block and hammer. Most were safely removed without damage, and none of the neighboring boards that we plan to leave in place were marred. Once the boards were out, we chiseled off the tongue. Ah, a very nice shape.

Also, there is some missing flooring around the chimney in the dining room. And there must have been some moulding there at one point or another, because the flooring that is there is discolored. The shape suggests that a wrap-around inlay would look quite nice. So, we decided on a width for the inlay (sticking to existing proportions, we went with the width of a floor board), marked the floor with red china marker, checked the saw depth again, and cut away some more perfectly good old hardwood flooring. Nerve-wracking!

So now we've got the area cut out. There are some leveling issues that we'll have to tackle, but we're optimistic. Off to a good start!

- John

2008-07-29T14:20:00.006-05:00

Ahoy, maties! Or is that mateys? We don't know—we've been much too busy to crack a dictionary.

Last time we shouted at you, we were eating berries and cherries and starting to trim out our living and dining rooms. This time, we're eating tomatoes and basil and looking at fatter and fatter squashes on the vine. And, due to our much slower house pace, we are just now finishing the trim in those two rooms. Well, one of those two rooms. But still, we're feeling good about it.

We've built, painted and installed cove moulding along beams and posts, a thin door-stop moulding along tops of walls, and some one-by pieces around the end of a wall that previously had an exposed stud and some scraggly drywall edges and even some bent nails half-pulled out of the wood. There was a little project involving baseboards, too.

Trim has to be one of the gratifying projects ever. I mean, you've been sitting there at the dinner table for a year, looking at this scraggly drywall edge and a big gap between the ceiling and the wall and another big gap between the wall and another wall and a nasty unpainted stripe of paneling, and then one day, it's all beautifully trimmed out, looking so official and clean.

Before:

After:

This was accomplished in several weeknights, an odd Saturday morning here and there, and then most of this Saturday. We trotted up and down the basement stairs making cuts and taking measurements and out to the back porch where the paint was set up and back in for another measurement. John worked some magic with drywall mud and trickycuts to make this project come out right.

Before:

After:

This all feels so much less dire, and lighter, than what we were doing a year ago, say. Quote from our blog, July 27, 2007: "Monday we'll install a vapor barrier on the ground of the entire crawl space, and by Tuesday we should officially be engaged in the heat system installation—anticipated to be a major project, second only to the bathroom." Argh [shaking head]. 2008 freaking RULES, freaking kicks 2007's ASS.

And, in other news, our garden is in a happy state, with a phalanx of tangly tomato plants, a keyhole bed bursting with squash plants, a little community of peppers making more fruit than we can count, some elderly beets and carrots, parsley here and there, and young turnips between the beans and the herbs. Keeping all these plants watered, bug-free (we do a lot of picking worms and beetles off by hand) and mulched takes much of our time, and we've been doing some food preservation too—freezing giant batches of pesto and beet burgers, canning tomatoes. All this, along with our rain barrels and compost pile, makes the place feel more and more like a Household, as in a place of production and not only consumption. This is good. When this blog starts talking about chickens and bees and big swaths of nitrogen-fixers waving in the breeze, that'll be a happy day.

John sort of offhandedly dug an entire new 3x6 bed, then sifted it, by himself on Sunday. This is the kind of thing he now does while I'm on the phone for 40 minutes. It's sick. In this bed, he found some concrete chunks, a rat's nest of barbed wire, and three Natty Ice cans. Soil improvements to come.

- Erika

The Problem:

The Solution:

The Results:

Successfully Rested

2008-06-23T10:17:00.008-05:00

After a while, we began to notice the distance between the present time and the time that was spent on the house. And, that there is a limited amount of time from the present to the time by which we've been expecting to accomplish certain things. But in the meantime, berries!

The wine berries are back in bloom! As soon as the first ones popped, Erika was on it. The tart goodness of summer. There were several in my cereal this morning. The cherry tree that we saw blooming south of the double walnut is covered with shiny red cherries. Saturday, we took a ladder back there and picked about two quarts worth. They're small and very sweet. It's awesome.

For the past couple of months, we've been outside until dark. The spring veggies are out or on their way out, the summer ones are all in various states of growth, and fall plantings are in our conversations. Our main compost pile is hot and active, the experimental compost bed is also hot and active and winter rye seeds are growing where I spread them on top (and potatoes are stashed deep inside). Rain barrels have been full, emptied, and replenished, and experimental dig-less bed idea in the front has sprouted cantaloupe. Our turnip take is legendary in its own time.

So having had an excellent spring and arriving at summer with food and land in satisfactory states, we took up tape measure and mitre saw once again.

Some months ago, we actually came up with the design idea for how we were going to trim-out where the ceiling meets the walls in the dining and living rooms, as well as the vertical corners. We even bought the materials. So Friday night we were ready to go. Or at least ready to spend the night figuring out the details and finding a place to start. Let me give you the basic ideas of the design:

For the vertical corners of the rooms, we'll use "cove" moulding. It's a strip of wood with a 90 degree angle in back and the front is concave. It fits into the corner of the room and softens the angle. We need moulding in the corners of the room because you can see the gap where the walls come together.

Same goes for where the ceiling meets the walls: gap. But instead of cove along the ceiling, we've decided on "door stop." If you look at the inside of your door frame, you'll see a two-inch-wide strip of wood. It's flat on one side (where the door stops against) and often decoratively scrolled on the other. It's about a half inch thick.

The design trick here is dealing with the points at which the cove and the door stop mouldings intersect. They don't match up incredibly well. So we decided to use a soapstone tile in those corners to interrupt the two different shapes. After much deliberation over details, patterns, and significances that we don't expect most people to notice, we settled on using these tiles only at intersections that occur along the oak posts.

For the soapstone tiles, we dug into the bucket of soapstone triangles that Erika found that day we were rummaging through the scrap pile at the quarry. Using epoxy, we glued several pairs of triangles together to make these three-inch by three-inch squares. Of course, these would only look good if they were buffed.

Sunday it was down to the basement, clamp a tile in the work bench, and buff the soapstone the same way we did for the bathroom sink top. Rounded the edges, too.

Before:

During:

After:

Back upstairs, we chose a tile for the first corner, tested the fit, then epoxied it in place. We used a few beads of super glue as well to hold it in place while the epoxy set.

We measured and cut the first piece of cove moulding. We're using oak to match the posts and beams for the cove pieces along the posts, but we're using pine in the other corners. We'll be painting the pine coves and ceiling mouldings the same color as the wall that they're on. The oak pieces along the posts will be treated the same as the posts and beams (oiled).

By the time we quit, there were two tiles in place and five pieces of moulding cut, two coves installed, and the rest had the first coat of paint on them. Today, another coat of paint and then we'll nail those up.

About 50 times yesterday I said, "man it feels really good to be working on the house again." I'm excited that we're finishing more stuff. It's nice to close gaps.

- John

Those were the [10] days

2008-05-22T15:32:00.004-05:00

One year ago today, we:

Phoned in a pizza order
Met our dumpster
Narrowed down some bathroom colors
Cut the stone sink top
Cleaned up the bedroom
Squared off the kitchen floor planks
Turned the back porch electricity on
Put up a plastic ceiling in the bedroom

Faithful readers will remember the start of the 10 Day Challenge. That was one year ago today!

Yesterday evening, as we enjoyed a beer outside after potting up 26 pepper plants, transplanting a half dozen cucumbers, and planting fennel and a dhalia, we thought about what things were like at this time last year. We also agreed that we're just about ready to dive back in and finish a few things that we've left undone: ceiling and vertical trim in the living and dining rooms, thresholds/floor repair under the beams, light fixtures, porch painting. Well, we're almost ready to dive back in.

Most of our efforts over the past few months have gone into the garden. We've managed to prepare about 300 square feet of space by hand (with the exception of that time we used the truck to pull out a huge chunk o' granite) and plant a number of our favorite spring veggies. We just finished putting our tomato plants out - 47 in all (and we gave a dozen away, too...excellent germination this time around!). From our garden, we've been eating lettuces, arugula, spinach, chard, radishes, and our turnips are bustin' out the dirt. There's still a lot of space to prepare and there's still a lot of veggies to go.

It has been nice to enjoy the spring outside this year. We've got some amazing flowers and flowering trees: great bearded irises, lilac, rhododendron, apple, cherry, red bud, dogwood, locust.

Anyway, the point of this post was to say, happy 10 Day Challenge-iversary! And remember, it's much more relaxing to pick a salad than to put up a plastic ceiling in the bedroom!

- John

etc...

The great outdoors

2008-04-22T15:29:00.008-05:00

Friends, we have entered a new era. We don't eat dinner at 11:30 anymore. We don't sling 2x4s around our living space. We hardly ever go in the basement. Instead, we spend all our time outside making piles of rocks.

Along with rock piles, we have created three sifted garden beds, one and a half of which are sheltering seedlings—lettuce, arugula, turnips, broccoli, kale, collards, chard, spinach, beets, carrots, parsley, radishes, peas, and cabbage! We also have an insane number of young tomato plants living in our dining room. We have split something less than half the pieces of firewood that are piled at the edges of the lawn, and stacked something less than half of what we've split. We have planted azaleas given to us by John's grandmother. The spot where the shed used to be is now cleared of trash and most major rocks, raked over and spread with compost. (What should we plant there?) Many, many of these projects have resulted in piles of rocks. Need any rocks?

Also, thanks to John the Goat, two big areas have been freed of tangly vines and briars. One is next to "the second shed"—the one we didn't move. It has a lilac and a small apple tree growing nearby, and after we planted an azalea there he started clearing and clearing, shoveling away a big pile of bricks and exposing a funny little concrete platform with four white tiles inlaid. (One theory: This is where the chickens used to lose their heads.) There's a big boulder there too, good for sitting. It feels like part of the yard now.

After that, he kept on going, clearing a huge space under our favorite big walnut tree, pulling out vines and briars.

It's great to be outside. The grass is growing like crazy; we have redbud and dogwood blooming and the hillsides are getting green from the bottom up. Spring! Spring! The cardinal and the phoebe sing from the wire! The Carolina wren feeds its babies on our back porch! The tufted titmouse opens wide its beak! And the creek, friends, the roaring creek!

We also finished our bathroom trim, but have apparently gotten too jaded about house work to bother taking even a single picture.

- Erika

2008-04-08T14:59:00.000-05:00

I'm thinking red could draw us all together.

2008-03-31T13:27:00.010-05:00

We've been digging up a garden site for almost a month now. Not steady, just a bit on the weekends and whenever we get a bit of time during the week. It's obvious though, that we really need to pick up the pace if our healthy little seedlings are to have a home by next week, when they're too big to stay in the flats.

Saturday (after running 10 miles, mind you), Erika and her dad set to unearthing the largest, heaviest garden boulder to date. With a combination of steel bars, 2x4s, and grunts, they dug out and leveraged this monolith out of the bed.

Then, as if they'd done this before, they propped it up on small sections of pvc pipe and a plank track and shuttled it down the yard a bit and set it in position as the cornerstone of the stone wall that we plan to redo.

Meanwhile, I was fulfilling a week-long dream of constructing a sieve. Even though we remove about a half dozen boulders and a large mound of rocks for every 12'x5'x1' bed we dig, the soil is still incredibly stony. Carrots wouldn't stand a chance in here, and to be honest I've had my doubts about any of our tender seedlings' chances of survival in such harsh beds.

We bought a roll of 1/4" screen (1/4" refers to the size of the holes in the screen) and I whacked together a 2x4 frame sized to fit nicely on top of the garden cart. I used "safety staples" to attach the screen to the frame.

Took it over to the garden and tossed a couple of shovels-full of soil onto it. Moved the dirt around with my hands and voila, rocks on top, soil below!

So from there, I just started digging a trench across the bed, one foot wide and one foot deep, much like our old days of double-digging. When the sieve would fill, we'd dump the rocks into the wheel barrow. When the wheel barrow would fill, we would dump the rocks in the trench for the hot water lines, since it has settled quite a bit. Once I had a nice two-foot wide trench dug out, I set up some planks in the there to keep the sifted soil separate from what still needed to be sifted, and shoveled the nice soft soil back into the bed. I was totally surprised that it had fluffed up enough to bring the bed back to ground-level.

Also that day, while Erika was digging bed #3, we discovered a baby turtle shell, caked and packed with dirt. Who knows how deep it was buried. We were all pretty excited by this find.

And then it woke up!

The quarters are for scale:

* * *

Sunday was a nice grey day, and we spent a couple of hours pricking out seedlings from their flats and putting them into cells.

We transplanted broccoli, chard, kale, collards, lettuce, arugula, and turnips. We had a lot of seedlings left over, and rather than compost them, Erika cut them at their bases, rinsed them off, and made a nice little salad out of these micro-greens. Even at only two weeks old, arugula tastes like arugula, as does broccoli and chard. We took an eyes-closed taste test just to prove it to ourselves.

Hello, Chard:

Hello, Beets:

We also planted spinach and some more kale, since we only ended up with 5 plants germinated, as if 5 kale plants isn't enough. But, better safe than sorry. We can always thin them once we plant in the beds.

- John

2008-03-31T10:14:00.001-05:00

A carved flower isn't identifiable.

Artifacts

2008-03-25T12:38:00.010-05:00

Our house has yielded some traces of human hands, dwellments from the past, ghosts that inhabit old Saturdays and crannies inside walls. Surprisingly little, actually, given it’s 76 years old. No gold coins, no newspaper photos of Eisenhower or the Challenger. But these:

Rook card. The 10 of green. See here for more about Rooks, especially My Collection/By Card Back.

Message scrawled on a triangular piece of drywall installed in our attic. It reads “1 Because” with copious underlining. That’s a numeral, not a personal pronoun.

Two sets of initials carved in different areas of the concrete basement floor. Perhaps it was poured after 1932. Perhaps these two humans are related by blood or marriage.

The piece de resistance, mentioned previously on this blog. A set of about 12 Polaroids found tucked against the chimney in a part of the crawlspace relatively inaccessible by crawling, but reachable from the more convenient basement with long arms and/or a stepladder. They show a young woman in various states of dress/undress and in increasing levels of intimacy with the photographer. This one is on the tamer side. Red leaf added for privacy, and I do like how it matches her garment.

Troublingly, in just one of the dozen photos, she is bundled in a quilt and baggy T-shirt, sitting on the floor, with a resentful expression.--Erika

2008-03-20T07:49:00.000-05:00

The center ceiling panel is a paradox of envy.

Sowin' the seeds

2008-03-17T15:13:00.004-05:00

Sunday morning, sunny and mild, maybe in the 40s by the time I made it outside. We've got a whole lot of scrap lumber piled up by the fire pit. Old 2x4s and 2x6s that have been ripped from the house, the shed, or dragged out from the crawl spaces. Some nailed together or peppered with screws. This is stuff we can't use, really, and it's just hanging around, in 6+ foot lengths mostly, waiting to be burned in the fire pit. But burning is a slow process and we'd like to be rid of this pile sooner rather than later. Walking around it with my coffee, I figured that, with some bricks or blocks, we could actually use a lot of it to stack our firewood on. So I started carrying some of the longer pieces out towards the area I had cleared behind the furnace.

It was when I went up to the shed to look for bricks that I got distracted, called once again by the meadow-like clearing behind the walnut tree on the south side of the yard.

I followed some deer paths and found myself in a clearing that I don't think I've ever noticed. At the north end of the clearing is a stone wall. Growing along the stone wall is typical vegetation - walnut trees and scrub. Turning around to face south, there is a pretty thick barrier of these still-unidentified saplings and thorns. I learned that if I get down on my hands and knees, at rabbit level, I could make my way into the thicket. I hung out in there for a while, took some pictures of the saplings and vines, hoping that these would help me identify them, and then pushed on through the thicket and into another clearing. I knew where I was this time, just a bit further south, a bit closer to the road.

I noticed that this clearing is bordered by another stone wall, and is higher than the final strip of land which is right near the road. We've got real, intentional borders within our property lines. In the past, we've hypothesized that these walls surround land that was once cultivated; the ground is softer, there are more grasses and less trees, and it would make sense that they cleared the rocks to the borders. But what I realized Sunday, was that we've actually got three levels of terraced land, each one bordered by stone walls. The whole thing makes a nice wide strip up hill to the North, and is connected to our back field, the one we always imagined we might start our veggie expansion in. It was a neat and exciting discovery, and it puts that back field better into context.

That was a nice start to the day that we would sow our first seeds.

We washed out our seed flats and mixed up some soil, using 1 part garden bed soil to about 3 or 4 parts potting soil mix. We spent most of our time removing every tiny stone from the bed soil that we added. Once the soil was mixed and added to the flats, we got our garden journal, reference book, and seeds, and started sowing. Two varieties of tomatoes (about 48 plants!), beets, broccoli, carrots, arugula, kale, collards, lettuces, onions, chard, turnips, and parsley. That's the first round - next week, we'll be sowing other veggies and with luck, we'll be pricking out seedlings. We set them up indoors by the windows and we hope that Toes won't jump up on them and think that they're special litter boxes.

Then we packed up some lunches and hiked up to the top o' the prop, and kept going up the steep ridge behind the house. We found a trail of some sort and followed for a while. We didn't make it to the summit, but we got pretty high up. A nice place to eat a late lunch.

Back down the ridge and off to the storage space to bail out a few more things, including another book shelf, and the rocking chair.

Erika touched up the paint on the narrow trim pieces in the studio ceiling, then we swept and mopped the floor in there and it's officially done.

The living room is starting to look much cozier. We made a tasty lasagna.

- John

And that's that

2008-03-17T15:01:00.003-05:00

We've been off the work wagon for a month or more now, but just last Friday we finally got the last final official goodbye nod from the bank—meaning we've done everything we agreed to do back when we got our loan. Basically, then, we have entered a new era of renovation-because-we-want-to as opposed to renovation-to-avoid-financial-ruin. Also: No deadlines!

This was worth a bottle of champagne (yeah, another one) and a hunk of soft French cheese.

The next day we got right back to work on the tool room (a name that's fast becoming outdated). A week earlier, we'd started putting up ceiling trim but got discouraged by our uneven ceiling, which has a major low spot so that when you put a straight piece of wood up against it, there are giant gaps on both ends. We'd routed out a dip in the trim where the low spot is, but when our bank consultant was here he suggested a better technique involving a compass. Yep, that old tool you used in fourth grade to draw a circle. Here, you put the pointy arm against the ceiling and the pencil arm against your trim piece, draw a line left to right, and then cut on that line. Now you have a trim piece custom-fit to your screwed-up ceiling. Much better.

The problem:

The solution:

We employed this technique all around the room and soon had a fairly reasonable trim job. Meanwhile, I planed the corners and primed the two smaller trim pieces that cover the seams in the plybead. Put a top coat on them later in the day, and by evening it was dry enough so that we could nail those up too.

In the meantime, I'd been eyeing up the other trim in this room—baseboards, door and window trim—and decided it just needed a fresh coat of white so that we could move our stuff in and be all fresh and white and worry-free like the lady in the detergent commercial. So we busted out our brushes and did it up. John took the baseboards (after I, usually the point person for tricky edge painting, attempted the task and exhibited all the skill of a blind three-year-old with a caffeine problem) and I did the windows and doors. Ah yes. You can practically smell the freshness!

The only thing now that's not all nice and homey about this room is the floor. It's a cheaper type of tongue-and-groove flooring than the other hardwoods we have, seemingly meant to go underneath linoleum or carpeting, and has no finish on it (other than a patina of age and some random spots of paint). We're debating what to do with it—paint it, maybe?—but in the meantime our old rug does a lot for it.

Made a storage space run and brought back a few crucial items, and voila! Welcome to The Studio!

The living room ain't looking half bad neither. More to come on that front.

- Erika

2008-03-14T07:29:00.000-05:00

Floors are just sections of a platform, in our case separated by gaps and tubing.

One year older and a whole lot more ecru

2008-03-06T09:17:00.003-05:00

Tomorrow, March 7, is the first anniversary of buying the house. Permit me a brief rundown of what we've done in Year One of home ownership:

Plumbed, wired, framed, floored, drywalled, painted, and fixtured the bathroom
Installed several windows, an exterior door, and some cedar shingles
Repaired and painted the roof
Rewired much of the house
Cleaned and conditioned the crawlspace
Insulated much of the house
Sistered all ceiling joists between first floor and attic
Removed several walls and replaced two of them with beams
Installed a freaking heat system and outdoor wood furnace
Installed ceilings throughout the house, vaulted the kitchen ceiling
Moved a shed up the hill
Repaired and re-railinged our porch and built new front steps
Scraped and painted maybe 2/3 of exterior trim
Painted every room downstairs

We can claim that last one just as of yesterday—put the first coat of GOLDEN ECRU and PRUSSIAN BLUE on the tool room walls!

We like it.

As for the Year Two of home ownership, we think it will involve a lot more plant care (radishes, snap peas, etc.) and a lot less construction (tape measure, shin bruises, etc.).

- Erika

Hello again, March

2008-03-04T08:24:00.003-05:00

March is here! We took it easy during the second half of February, though it was hard to stop working entirely...we did manage to empty out the tool room, taking stock of surpluses, organizing and moving lumber scraps, and pitching whatever else couldn't be recycled or donated.

Saturday we spent most of the day in the woods with the chainsaw. We have almost run out of wood to heat with and we're trying to get by without purchasing another load. After all, the weather is becoming mild and spring comes early over here. It was tricky to find some trunks that were already down and not too rotten or wet, but we managed to find a few. I would cut and Erika would carry the logs over to the creek. The plan was that we'd ride the logs down the creek back to the homestead and use our steer to haul the timber up to the furnace.

The plan turned out to be a silly one, so we opted for the next silliest option: log toss the pile 15 feet across the creek, then toss them up the (very) steep embankment where Erika was maintaining mountain goat-esque footing, trapping the logs from rolling back down into the creek, then tossing them up onto the dirt drive where she had parked the truck. By quittin' time, we had loaded the truck one and a half times, split what needed to be split, and stacked it up. Definitely enough to last us through March, though some of the wood is of questionable quality.

After all this work we did what anyone in their right mind would have done: we gathered up some more wood for a bonfire, lit the pit, and cracked a beer. Roasted up some beets and turnips and tossed a steak on the wood fire. The eve was crisp and the stars were bright. And we were very sore.

Sunday

We're making progress with the garden! A couple weeks back, we started digging our first bed. This was slow going with the spade forks. There are tons of rocks. Really. We took a different approach Sunday, aided by the purchase of a cutting mattock - picture a sledgehammer of a hoe. I wielded this monster while Erika swung the hand tool version. We also laid down a rule about some of the underground boulders: let 'em stay.

We removed so many rocks that the bed actually looks sunken rather than raised. We'll mix in a good amount of manure and compost to make up for it. I think the bed is about 12'x5' now, a decent start...about a fifth or so of our goal for the season.

Our seeds should be here this week!

Then it was back to the tool room with us. It was just like old times, only more relaxed. We painted the ceiling, measured/cut/routed/primed some 1" pine stock for ceiling trim, and spackled some of the more severe cracks and gouges in the drywall.

We've got a few colors picked out for this room...we're off to get some samples!

- John

2008-03-03T16:50:00.001-05:00

Are you going to put some kind of moulding there?

2008-02-27T10:49:00.001-05:00

It's so soft-looking but it was sweating, talking only when necessary.

Feel-goodery

2008-02-25T09:13:00.025-05:00

Now that we have free time, we are amusing ourselves by recreating moments from the past--specifically the first few weeks after we bought the house, nearly a year ago. And oh, the present is so superior.

If only we could communicate the difference in smell along with the visuals. You'll just have to imagine a fragrance of dust and dead ladybugs (then) versus good food and recent showers (now).

Behold, the great before-and-after project:

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2008-02-21T15:43:00.001-05:00

Very few things have been lost. A number of things have been cut.

2008-02-21T15:41:00.002-05:00

At any time we can exit the house and walk into the homes of hundreds of birds.

Last days

2008-02-19T13:55:00.011-05:00

So we painted the living/dining room again! Jumped through all the hoops one more time of getting chips, buying samples, squinting at them for a few days, then picking a color. "Onion powder." And we brought back the idea of red in the dining room—"Ancient Copper," a squirmy kind of name but a very nice color—and confined it safely to one wall instead of letting it close in on us from all sides.

Painted it all up over a few nights after work, and here it is!

So that was the last task in this phase of renovation. As we've found out, the whole idea of being "done" with this house work is quite slippery, since the minute we finish one thing we both look directly at the thing next to it that still has to be done. But we need a rest and we're slowing down a lot for now, doing leisurely things, and basking in all those tasks we've put behind us. The heat system, for one—it's keeping us warm! That means a lot after the three months we spent installing it last summer. We smile at each other whenever we hear the floor creak as the water moves through the radiant tubes.

OK, so we have poked at a few house-related projects. One, we did a deep cleaning of most of the downstairs and brought in a couple pieces of furniture. Amazing what a simple bookshelf can do to make the place feel better.

Two, we started cleaning out the basement. We'll bring our tools down here and set up a work area—you know, the very thing it would have been so handy to have for the last year.

Three, we've been talking about ideas. Ideas for the house and for the blog. Things are going to happen. That's all I can say for now.

- Erika

The Exorcism

2008-02-12T15:10:00.000-05:00

I primed over the gingerbread. Aahh, what a relief! Now we're deep in discussion over what color's going on top of that. More soon, pumpkin lovers!

- Erika

Gingerdread

2008-01-31T14:02:00.000-05:00

I can't take credit for that title; it's John's. Might be my favorite title on the whole blog, though, since it encloses in one word the spreading horror I feel this morning at what happened last night. No, nothing burned down, nobody was injured, nothing remotely permanent went wrong. But a dream was lost, my friends.

The dream was that we'd get done tonight. By done, I mean not (of course) truly finished, but done in a way that would let us take a break in February—which, as you might know, begins tomorrow. We have all the hard stuff done. We wanted to get our dining/living rooms painted this week and then draw the line in the sand. To that end, we chose a paint color Tuesday night ("Gingerbread") and bought the paint yesterday, thinking that by tonight we could put a second coat on, pop some champagne and come up with something appropriate to say to mark the occasion. All was going according to plan, except:

This color is so freaking ugly.

It's orange. Orange! Why did we paint half our house orange? What happened in our brains to make us choose this? Not just one brain, mind you. We both thought it would work. I was deluded into thinking we had chosen some nice shade of brown. (Perhaps because gingerbread is brown? Yes, I like that explanation. It allows me to blame the person who named the paint color.) The white trim is popping out like crazy—imagine you're in the day-care room in the mall, near the restrooms, where parents park their leaky-nosed children in the care of unqualified teenagers while they go shopping for tennis bracelets or Shih Tzu calendars. That's what the orange and white is like. And the subtle colors of the beams and ceiling are getting way overwhelmed. I feel like a sophomore design major whose project was just given an F by a professor I have a crush on.

There are a lot worse problems in the world than the color of our walls. But for some reason I'm feeling a major amount of embarrassment over this. We're not sure what to do. I don't think we'll bother with the second coat tonight; we could just paint it white and start over.

On the way into work this morning, as I was gnashing my teeth about this and John was trying in vain to comfort me, we noticed that we were behind a True Value semi-truck with this printed on the back: "Follow me to your perfect paint color."

- Erika

Hatching

2008-01-29T08:05:00.001-05:00

Monday night we were back in the attic, which, by the way, is much warmer since we installed a proper door in place of the plywood that has been there since we moved in. This time in the attic, we were working on the attic hatch. The gap for the stairway to the attic measures about nine and a half feet by about three feet. Pretty large. Most normal folks would construct something out of plywood, maybe a simple 2x4 frame on four sides, hinges, trying to keep the beast light. But not us. No, instead we stuck to this funky idea of incorporating one of the extra interior doors that was original to the house. It's solid wood.

Sunday night we knocked together the frame. We built it like a stud wall, 16"o.c. and all. The reasons were so it would be strong enough to support the door on its frame and also so that it would be strong enough to walk across when it's closed.

First thing to remember is that the door itself is not a functional part of the hatch. It's purely aesthetic. We centered the door on the hatch frame and screwed it in with plenty of 3" decking screws. Next, we picked through our stack of scrap birch plywood (leftover from the ceiling project) and found ones that would fit.

Rather than measure and mark, as we did with the ceiling, this time we just held the pieces against the frame and traced. All but two of the cuts were done freestyle with the circular saw, no guides. Time is of the essence, and the actual edges would be hidden against the attic floor anyway. Then Erika marked where the screws would go and I used the ol' forstner bit to drill the 1/2" flat-bottom holes, halfway through. In them, we sank the screws and kept our traditional 1/8" gap for design. The whole idea is that this hatch paneling would match the ceilings.

The thing weighs a ton. It is very, very heavy. Not a very practical hatch. But, we're scheming on a pulley and counterweight system that will make it easy to open.

We are very happy with how it turned out. It looks ultra funky. A door on the ceiling, over a stairway that looks like it leads to nowhere.

- John

Latch, then hatch

2008-01-28T13:02:00.003-05:00

We took a nice walk around the property Sunday morning with Matt and Emily, then had some omelets and sent them on their merry way. Repaired to the attic to finish up the door project.

These were easy steps compared with Saturday's tasks: Building stops (we robbed from our stash of ½ x 2 ½ trim wood; not cost-effective, but whatever) and screwing them up along with weatherstripping. Then cutting a special piece out of a 2x6 to fill in part of the door frame that was missing. This tested John's skill freehanding the circular saw. It basically was a case of multiple modifications. Originally, where this door is, there was a window. Then somebody built the deck and put in a door, with a not-exactly-textbook door frame. Then we come along and further rig it up. So at this point the door frame is made of like five different types of wood, all in different dimensions. This is a prime example of what we here at Permit the Frog like to call "trickycuts."

Into the new special piece would go the little hole for our latch. We got the knob and handle into the door after some fiddling, then John marked where the latchplate would sit on the frame. Chiseled out a shallow area for the plate and a deeper well for the latch to slide into. It's funny how you go in and out of doors a zillion times in your life and never think about whether the curved or flat part of a latch faces outward. Just takes a second to figure it out, but you'd never have a reason to bother until you had to install it. John caulked up the frame outside while I made a list of all the tools we had assembled in the attic during this door installation. (That's for February, when we have time to Get Creative With the Blog. Look out, loyal readers.)

Anyway, here's what we had now: a door that opens, closes, locks and makes a halfway decent seal on three sides. (Still need a rubber sweep on the bottom.) Yeah!

You know what this means? It means that the last project of any consequence or anxiety before we can close out our loan is DONE. Done!

Another awesome thing is that, in doing this project, we spent all this time in the attic and out on the little deck. Notable for two reasons: One, it's like being in a different house up there, because you can see over the trees and appreciate this big sweeping view we have—very exciting to think about when we can use this space for actual living. We really haven't spent much time up there.

Two, it reminded me very much of the first weekend we worked at our house, last March. The weather was similar. Back then, we'd gone through the crawlspace hazing and then headed up to the attic to take out that broken bay window, and it was the first time we really saw our view. Now here we were on the last weekend of this phase of renovation, and we're up there again. But there's so much behind us now. It really was pretty moving.

OK, so that's not the end of Sunday. We have to make an attic hatch and John has come up with a nifty design involving a leftover interior door we have floating around. We—mostly he, actually—got it framed out last night. We'll attach the door and some plywood tonight and put it on hinges.

Stay tuned for some major celebrations.

- Erika

Final Saturday

2008-01-28T13:02:00.001-05:00

There isn't a whole lot left on the list, people. The last of the tricky tasks was dealing with an exterior door install in the attic. Since we moved in, plastic and plywood have substituted for this missing door to the attic deck. Everything we had read on the subject said that framing and hanging and exterior door is tedious and often difficult work. So you know, we said what the hell, let's just buy a pre-hung door and nail that puppy in and be done with it. We deserve a little break by now, right? Well, our rough opening was only 79 3/8" and the standard exterior door, pre-hung, required an 82" opening. Of course.

So Friday evening I made it to the Habitat Store minutes before closing so that we could buy the old salvaged wooden door that we picked out the day before. I noticed that it was cracked all the way through. The guy who usually helps us at that store started looking through doors with me. Originally, we wanted a door with windows, preferably one large, full length window. Now, all we wanted now was a door that would fit so that this project wouldn't be delayed. We lucked out and found a steel door, insulated, with full-length double-paned insulated glass. The only problem is that it was going to be about two inches too tall. Nothing a metal cutting blade on the trusty circular saw wouldn't be able to handle. Sold.

Saturday morning, we took care of a couple of random things and then pulled down the plywood and plastic from the attic doorway so that we could have a look at exactly what we were going to be dealing with and assess what materials we would need to purchase. We decided that we wouldn't have to buy any lumber, aside from a pre-made oak sill/threshold. The rest of the shopping list consisted of hinges, a latch/knob set, and some weather stripping.

Oh, and here's a first: The header above the door frame is level! Seriously, we didn't do it! Imagine that...we hadn't run across a single level or plumb thing existing in this house since we started and now, starting one of the last big tasks of the project, we get a level header.

The oak threshold that I bought turned out to be too small. We needed a six or seven inch-wide one, and this was only five. Looks like we'll be building the threshold, as well. We had some treated 1x8 pine left over from the columns project that we thought would work just fine. You're supposed to use a hardwood for this because of the heavy traffic it receives. Well, the attic deck threshold won't be receiving that sort of traffic, so no problems there.

We cut away and pried up some subfloor that functioned as the previous door's threshold. Shortly after, our friends Matt and Emily arrived, down from DC to pitch in with the final push. And, they brought lunch! After filling our bellies and a short tour of the place, they took on the job of planing and sanding the porch rails and stair hand rails. It's amazing what their hand work did to these 2x4 rails. The corners have been shaved off, replaced with subtle, irregular contours. Very nice to touch.

Meanwhile, Erika and I had been slowly measuring, figuring, and doing some cutting. Our threshold turned out great. We shimmed it slightly so that it had a gentle outward slope, and cut a 45 degree angle on the outside edge of it for a smoother transition. It sits flush with the flooring on the inside.

Next, we cut a 1/2 inch thick, 6 inch wide piece of wood to run the height of the door, on the inside-right edge of the frame, and a similar piece across the top. We kept the previous frame's 2x4 in place on the left side. By our calculations, we had arrived at the correct frame size.

We measured the height of the opening several times and then measured the door and marked it for cutting. There was a metal piece running the width of the door along the bottom edge, a cap of sorts, held in by four screws. They all came out except for one, its phillips head quickly stripped. Hmm. Ahh..hacksaw. I cut a notch in the screw. There, now it's a flat head! Out it came.

Matt and Emily had been helping us keep morale up this whole time, entertaining us with third person observations and perspectives that we can't get when it's just the two of us, in a cold, dark attic, trying to remain focused and on task. It was a good boost. Plus, they brought us hot cocoa!

Now it was time to take a couple of inches off the bottom of the steel door. We propped it up so that the end to be cut was outside on the deck (in the snow) and Erika and I fell into our routine of lining up the blade and clamping down a guide. I triggered the saw and as it sliced into the steel, the sparks flew. Wee! But, the guide wasn't working out well and the blade started to travel off the mark. So we just took the guide off and I free handed it. No shortage of light, with those sparks. The blade diameter wasn't enough to bite all the way through on the first pass, so we flipped the door and came at it from underneath. A perfect cut.

The next step was to stand the door up in place and shim it up from underneath to keep it propped in position while we marked where the hinges would mount to the frame. This went smoothly, with Erika outside, keeping the door from falling that way, and Matt and I inside, shimming, tapping, and then marking.

Someone with more foresight than I - either Erika or Emily - suggested that dinner get started downstairs while Matt and I forged on. I was determined get this door hung. I didn't know what time it was and I didn't want to know. I traced the new hinges onto the door frame and carefully mortised the door frame (chiseled the shape of the hinges, 1/8" deep so that they will sit recessed, flush with the frame). The hinges fit perfectly so I put a couple of screws in each one.

Now for the moment of truth: Matt and I lifted the door and guided the hinges. The top one went it, the bottom one looked to be about a 32nd off, so I gave it a few light taps with the hammer and the door slipped right in. High five! Sweet! We tapped the pins into the hinges and called Erika and Emily upstairs to check it out.

Downstairs, wine was flowing and I jumped into the cooking fray. I noticed the time: 10:30. Yup, sounds about right. By 11:30, we sat down to home made mac and cheese and tomato, black eyed peas with onions and garlic, collard greens, home made biscuits, and some chicken fried up with cayenne and an egg/flour batter. Apple crisp for dessert! More wine, anyone?

The meal, music, company, and day of work: all damn fine. A memorable "final Saturday."

- John

Head first

2008-01-24T13:13:00.000-05:00

I feel like we're actually running through January. Another metaphor I used last night was "boxing match." This is a crazy series of work days right now, trying to get wrapped up before February. Last night we crossed one of the last notable hurdles in our quest for completion—building railings for the porch stairs.

We knew we wanted these to match the railings we just put on the porch itself, height-wise, and we'd been talking over the design during our commute, trying to think through it as much as possible before the time actually came. Not that it's a complicated design, but this kind of project always presents some unanticipated problem.

Right after work I painted a couple more samples onto the dining room wall. We're still looking for the right color in there. Getting closer. Is copper too dark? Do we want something more red? Help?

On to the railings! First major task was to install 4x4 posts halfway up the stairs. We did a bunch of math and cut the first post. John also notched out the stair tread so the post could slide in against the stringer. Then he predrilled the post so we could put 5" lag screws through it.

As he was predrilling I thought more about our math. Uh-oh. We forgot something. If we wanted the stair rails to begin at the same height as our porch rails, the entire stair rail would be much lower than we'd figured. John had read that the hand rail should be 36" above the front edge of each tread. Ours was going to be less than 29". We solved this problem by looking in a different book and finding the answer we wanted—that a good height is 30" off the middle of each tread. Great! On with the plan.

Next there was a long frustrating sequence of attempts at getting that post positioned just right (correct height and plumb) and bolted in satisfyingly. The night closed in around us. I imagined that we were completely alone on a dark rocky planet, that just beyond our drop light and house and cars was a vast void in which nothing breathed or stirred, and no light shone. This did not make me feel better. Then we got the post bolted in pretty well and kept going.

Put up the top rail after figuring out an angled cut at top and bottom. John started marking and cutting the lumber for the right side of the stairs before we even got both left-hand rails screwed up, which I still think was kind of a trick to get me to keep working until we finished the entire project, although he denies it. (To be fair, he did ask if I wanted to stop, and we made a deal that we'd quit at 10:30 no matter what, which we did not.) Long story short, thanks to the fact that the second time through anything is always way faster, we did get the right side done too. Can't say it was fun, but it feels good that it's finished. And that working outside, in late evening, in January, is now behind us!

You may now walk up our stairs and stand on our porch in complete safety.

- Erika

Railings

2008-01-23T11:34:00.001-05:00

Well, we're still on track, though sometimes it's a real push. We successfully built and installed our porch railings last night. You'll remember what was there...those white picket fence-looking things. We wanted something very simple, more minimal. So we went with two horizontals only, like a horse paddock fence.

We settled on proportions and figured out how to design it and verified our measurements. We continued to measure, cut, level, plumb, fasten. Determined to complete this in one night, we pushed on until 10:45. And we did it.

Looks good, too. We'll probably run the block plane over the top corner edges to soften them a bit and add some depth and irregularity. This weekend we'll prime them and paint 'em white.

Tonight, our goal is to build and install hand rails on the porch stairs. They're going to match the new porch rails...same proportions, same idea. Very nice.

- John

The next-to-last weekend

2008-01-22T14:25:00.000-05:00

Friday night, we painted the kitchen Sonoma!

That's a nice orange-yellow, Mediterranean sort of color. We were to realize later that it was not exactly what we thought we were getting-thanks again, Blowe's paint department-but at this stage in the game, there's really zero time to linger over paint choices or regrets of any description. We like it fine.

Saturday morning, I put a second coat on while John went into town for supplies for our porch repair project. He returned and helped me finish up painting along with some caulking, and we broke for what we thought would be an hour and a half of cleaning up before my parents arrived. Just then they called and said they were five miles from the house. We literally ran around cleaning until they pulled into the driveway, our standards of decent living dropping by the second.

They hadn't seen the place since late September when we put in the second beam, so there was a lot to show them. After the long tour and some snacks, we roused ourselves with difficulty: John, Mom and I headed outside to work on porch joists, while Dad started planing the first beam and posts. It was the type of grey, eyes-half-closed winter afternoon-somewhere in the 30s-where you could easily slip into a pleasant coma if you stayed on the couch long enough.

The joist project is sort of a blur in my mind, but I remember Mom holding up joists on her shoulder or back while they got fastened in (you can't quite stand up under the porch), and a general cheeriness as we measured, cut, and nailed. Put in 8 new joists between the old, bowed ones that were pulling away from the center support. We had our circular saw and a bunch of other tools under there in the dirt with us, and when we'd step out from under there was an icy carpet of snow all over the lawn. We worked well past dark. Mom was a good sport when we decided to go for all 8 instead of stopping after 4.

Before:

After:

Meanwhile, inside, Dad had done all the power planing on the oak beams, leaving the chisel work for the next day.

We'd been making a tomato sauce all day and now we ate it with pasta and eggplant parmesan. Eagerly to bed.

- Erika

Sunday morning, after some breakfast sandwiches and a third round of coffee, we got back to it. Erika's mom continued the long and tedious task of painting all the white things white in the kitchen with great patience and accuracy, while her dad started securing the oak posts to the wall studs.

I'm too tired to do this bloggins any justice. We did too much. We spent Saturday afternoon/evening through Monday night outside in below freezing weather kicking out the porch project.

Sunday, we removed the old picket railings (Erika accomplished this with the Sawzall), constructed a new porch column from 1x8 planks (matching the original) and a new column base, jacked that corner of the porch roof up, knocked out the old column and installed our new one, and replaced about a half dozen rotted tongue-and-groove floor planks with fresh lumber.

The prob:

Cuttin':

Newly constructed:

Raise the roof:

Out with the old:

In with the new:

Originally, we thought we would only replace a couple of planks in the column at the opposite end of the porch, maybe just cut away the rotten sections and splice in some new wood. First we cut with the circular saw, then finished it off with the reciprocating saw:

But after reconstructing and replacing an entire column with relative ease, we figured we'd be better off doing the same thing at the other end. We'd need to get more 1x8s, though.

By the end of the day, all of our kitchen trim had been repainted, as had the kitchen and bathroom doors and trim. It looks awesome.

Also, the posts had not only been bolted to the studs, but Marty had cut eight diamond from a piece of walnut that he had milled decades ago (from the root of a walnut tree), bevelled their edges, and chiseled out around each bolt hole where he set the diamonds. Our posts with diamond-shaped inlays are classy. Quite.

Monday morning, Marty and I left the house before dawn to get some more lumber for the second column. Frigid. Before we got back to work, we feasted on banana walnut pancakes, an amazingly rich yogurt with honey, blood oranges, plums, bacon, coffee, and orange juice. Then back into the below-freezing temps with all our tools to replace the other column.

We knocked out the existing column and replaced a few tongue and groove planks that ran under it. Then we built a new base for the column. The bases are 10"x10" squares with all four top edges bevelled 45 degrees and four 1/2"x1/2" grooves cut to criss cross underneath, for water drainage. We were working quickly.

It was mid afternoon and our family was saying goodbye. With continued luck, we won't have to work so hard the next time they visit - we will actually be able to leave the property and have some fun around this beautiful county. Or maybe we'll just stay in and cook and eat and relax. Who knows what we'll do...but we do expect things to be far less brutal!

Erika and I pushed on, determined to finish building and installing the column and intent on completing the replacement of the remaining rotted floor planks. We ran into some snags while aligning our new assembly with the existing column top plate, but after a few misfires we found the correct positioning. We got the column good and plumb then let the jack down, bringing the porch roof down upon the column with a little creak. Very nice. We nailed the column in place and turned our attention back to the planks.

The plank replacements went smoothly. Chiseled a space on either end so I could drop the Skil Saw blade, run the saw along the seam to the joist, rip out the plank, clean out the old tongue, chisel off the neighboring tongue, cut the new plank to length, line it up and slide it in, nail it down. Etc. Actually, we used our usual carpentry method: Prepare (cut, clean), measure the lengths for all the planks we'd cut, cut 'em all at once, slip 'em all in, nail 'em all down. Assembly line.

It was dusk. Didn't even spend a minute admiring the work. We just started cleaning up all the saws, hand tools, debris, lumber scraps, uncut pieces, and so on. With the porch clean and swept, we removed the ashes from the furnace (a few days overdue), then went inside and cleaned the house and vacuumed stray wood chips, mud clumps, and saw dust.

It was only 6:30 but it felt like 10 o'clock. What a weekend. We're still on track with the unpublished January Challenge, pretty much. Next up: build and install the porch railings and porch stair hand rails. This will be at night. It's still pretty cold (35 degrees) and it's drizzling out.

We'll rest in February.

- John

All aboard Tuesday

2008-01-16T08:23:00.003-05:00

…it's a wild ride.

I started swigging coffee at work around 3pm to get ready for this one. We knew it would be big after our crappy night Monday, and we have something going on Wednesday night and parents coming Friday so our schedule is tight for the week, with some pretty definite goals. Translation: the whiny tone of the following entry is due to sleep deprivation. Proceed at your own risk.

The drywall man met us at home right after work, finished up his sanding and patching, then bid adieu with the words, "Y'all are nice people." We made two attempts at cutting the last little piece of kitchen window trim—actually had it right the first time, but stuck it in backwards, making it seem incorrect, and then altered it, making it worse…oh well. Once the good one was nailed in I started priming that window while John did some sanding.

Oh yeah: We also have been trying to choose paint colors for kitchen and dining room and had 4 chips picked out. John took them to Blowe's during the day to get small sample amounts we could try out, and was greeted with the news that they could not match one of the colors exactly. Huh? They've done this for us several times before. John asked how close they could get it. "Close enough," says the highly motivated employee.

Fast forward to us painting a scrap of drywall with this "close enough" color and getting our eyes blasted with an orange the color of those plastic pumpkins kids carry around at Halloween. Meanwhile the chip is a classy red-orange-brown shade. Oh well. The yellow for the kitchen is nice enough to redeem the situation.

Next up: installing the rest of the trim. Various foibles ensued: scrolling back on the digital camera to last Thursday's photos, looking for clues about where exactly the studs were located along one wall so we could nail in the trim piece. (That "knocking" method of finding studs makes me feel like a complete tool, by the way. Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello?) Then there was the realization that part of the design for the trim was bad enough to warrant building a whole different piece. And let's not forget the fact that when we broke to go pick up a pizza, the IGA was closed and we couldn't get any beer!

Anyway. We pushed bravely ahead. John started caulking the gaps along the top of the trim (the magic method that, admittedly, causes us some guilt) while I primed the new drywall. When this was done we wiped everybody's shoe dirt off the kitchen counter, brought our dirty dishes in from the bathtub where they'd been living, washed 'em up, vacuumed, straightened up, showered, admired our work, and went to bed. 1:30am.

We're tired, but we're on track! (Pun on title not intended. Time for some coffee.) Looking good. February, here we come.

- Erika

Mondays

2008-01-16T08:23:00.001-05:00

Monday nights are the worst I think, because we ramp up all week long until by Friday night we're sprinting and we go nonstop and all-out Saturdays and Sundays then Monday night we just want to keep going but nothing goes well and it's generally unproductive and we realize it's just because we're exhausted.

That's how it was. We got a few pieces of bathroom door trim up before we decided it would be best for the sake of quality workmanship to just stop right there. Wasn't going too well. I put a bit o' spackle on the kitchen wall areas in need of touch up before we paint and that was that.

Made some big salads, some cheese quesadillas to go with 'em and the rest of the red wine and called it a night.

- John

Plowing through

2008-01-14T16:15:00.001-05:00

Here comes the weekend download!

Saturday: We'd designed kitchen trim similar to what we put on our bedroom ceiling, so we had measurements and coffee for breakfast and then sped off in the truck to the building supply place, for trim wood and sundries. John got to climb a very big ladder in the warehouse.

Back at home, we marched right through the now-very-familiar process of making two more ceiling panels. No big troubles anymore. I'm glad to be done with this project—I for one was well over the interest of figuring out a new task and edging toward slight boredom with the routine…

…Lucky for me, this is the January Challenge! So we allowed ourselves less than 5 minutes of admiring our now-complete living room ceiling (meaning all the ceilings downstairs are totally installed—dude!) before plowing onward to the kitchen ceiling.

Faithful readers will recall that we installed this thing around Thanksgiving, but left it primed and untrimmed. Now we're ready to pounce on it as soon as the drywall guy finishes his work (and when I say pounce, I'm not exaggerating. He's practically begging us to let the mud dry before we put trim and primer over it.)

Again—this happens a lot more often than it used to—this is something we know how to do. The kitchen does have some odd shapes in it that challenged us. We got to work measuring and making a big numbered list of all the trim pieces to complete the room. During this process we discovered that where the ceiling dips kinda severely where it meets the front wall—must be a low rafter—and so if we tried putting the stiff 1x4 trim we planned on there, it would leave gaps that an elephant could sleep in. Changed the plan to more flexible quarter-round instead for that particular spot. It won't look too weird.

We brought the miter saw up into the dining room and proceeded to turn our living space into a good approximation of a woodshop. Went down the big list to cut all the pieces, then routed and planed the edges for style. Sawdust in deep drifts on the floor and covering our long-suffering houseplants. Then we set up our ironing board and workbench, laid out all the trim pieces, and primed them. Swept up. Made burritos.

Sunday: We worshipped at the altar of the roller: a thick white coat of ceiling paint in the kitchen. Then a top coat on the trim. We also sized up two upcoming projects: the attic hatch and the porch repair. The drywall man came over and did some more sanding and mudding. After he left we nailed up as much of the trim as we could, but we'll have to wait on most of it until he's done.

It was 6:30, and although it seemed like a stopping point, our now almost yearlong habits of working like crazy until 9:30pm were just too strong to deny. We started eyeing that funny replacement window we put in the kitchen last fall. Could we whip out some trim for that puppy? Uh-huh. And we did. Needs one more piece to be finished, then some coats of paint.

Finish work is its own special addiction.

Often heard in our house these days: "We are SO CLOSE…"

- Erika

Sprinting into the weekend

2008-01-14T16:08:00.000-05:00

Remember how we were threatening to hire some folks soon? Well, we did.

Thursday morning, around 7:15am, a couple of guys showed up to line our chimney. The masonry isn't in good enough shape to safely handle a fire, so we had it reconditioned and lined with a stainless steel tube. They showed up, cleaned out the chimney, and plugged up three of the four "thimbles" with mortar. The thimbles are the ports in the chimney where a stove pipe (from a furnace or stove) would connect. We want to have a small wood stove in the living room for winter power-outages, cozy nights, and those in between season days when it's inefficient to run the furnace.

I finished insulating the exterior wall-wedge above the kitchen sink. Around 9:30, our drywall guy showed up. Yes, our drywall guy. We are heeding some sage wisdom here. The areas of kitchen wall that were left exposed from the vaulting of the ceiling total about 200 square feet or less. You'll remember that we took care of all the framing concerns with regard to drywalling. But here's how we figured: It would take us about a week to hang that stuff and we'd sand and sand and probably not get the quality of work that a pro could do in just a handful of hours. So, for the sake of time and sanity and priority, we chose luxury.

And luxurious it was. It was kinda nice to sit there sipping coffee in the kitchen, looking up and watching someone else deal with this.

Insulated, and before drywall:

drywall hung:

It was definitely a little weird to have people working; I wasn't sure what to do with myself. I just kind of walked around and made sure everyone had what they needed. I'd duck into the woods and take little walks.

The chimney guys had everything installed and were ready to pour the TherMix. This stuff is granular and dusty while they work with it. It gets poured between the chimney and the liner and expands. It's an insulator and also adds strength to the chimney itself. I heard the stuff coming down the chimney and went over to listen. That's when I noticed a stream of dust shooting out the side of it, in the living room.

I called one of them down to check it out. He patched it with some mortar but told me it would stop on its own by virtue of the material. We checked the basement and attic, the attic needed a quick patch, too.

And they were gone by around 12:30. Wow.

Drywall was hung and taped, but he wanted to run back to his shop to grab a heavier drywall mud because, surprise, there's a lot of offset and irregularity in the plane of the wall. He left and came back, and by 2:30, was done for the day. He planned to come back a couple more times to add mud and do some sanding.

That evening, we put two more ceiling panels up (one of them was pretty big). I checked the time again, we're still averaging an hour and a half per panel - that includes everything measuring the bay, marking, cutting, marking the neighboring panels' hole locations, transposing, marking, drilling, and installing.

Friday night we got three panels up. We pushed ourselves so that come Saturday, we'd only have one panel left. The first two went very well. The last one would be a bit trickier, and would have an arm on one side so that it would go along the edge of the stairwell. The beauty of this design would be that it would keep the same seam edge as the neighboring panel, giving the impression of a larger panel with a notch cut out of it.

This was going exceptionally well...the marking and cutting, that is. It was one of those panels that requires the circular saw as well as the skill saw, and a little freehand cut. While executing the second to last cut, I just zoned out and zzzzing, cut the arm off the panel. I was supposed to cut up to it and instead, just cut clear across it. What a dunce. No biggy though, still looks good. We're over it.

- John

Short sheeted

2008-01-09T12:10:00.000-05:00

Monday was rough. We cut the center panel to size and cut the hole for the light fixture in it without a problem, but then for some reason we were having a really hard time getting the panel to line up correctly. Twice, we started screwing it in and then had to back 'em out and try again.

We also discovered that the nice red piece with weird and beautiful lines in it - the one that we were depending on to complete the dark center stripe in the living room - was very damaged. The thin veneer was all warped and cracked. Great, now what.

We took a descriptive inventory of the remaining ceiling material. Each piece is different and we have taken pains to consider all of this while laying out the design. We decided we would take the damaged one back and try to pick out one of similar color tone.

I just hate those nights when we accomplish only a fraction of what we thought we would.

So Tuesday I took a ride over to the builder's supply company where we purchased the original 13 sheets of birch plywood. A guy at the counter recognized me and remembered that we had returned another 4x8 sheet of damaged wood, I corrected him that it was the plybead last time and it's the birch this time. He seemed annoyed. Well whatever - so was I. Maybe if they didn't back over these expensive sheets of wood with a forklift before selling them, people wouldn't have to bring them back.

I pulled around to the loading dock to help select the new piece. "I need a red one. Some are light, some are dark." They gave me the first one off the top. "No man, red. Some are dark. This is light." He looked at me like I was crazy. I tried to tell him what we got last time. Another guy came over. He told the first guy to just take the whole stack down (20 sheets or so, about 10 feet up) and let me look through them.

I looked and looked. No dark sheets. Now what? I took a nice clean sheet. We call them "blanks," since they're light in color and have few to no knots.

Talking with one of the dudes, I learned that our first batch of birch was uncommon. We had red ones in there, blond sheets with beautiful knots and lines, wormy stripes, all sorts of variation that we hadn't expected. Most batches are like the one I brought home yesterday. Considering we based our entire dining room and living room designs on having dark and light sheets, we could have been a lot worse off. At least we were only short one red sheet.

It was totally by chance that we ended up with some red and some knotty sheets and we're thankful to have them. None the less and true to form, we've ended up with some unique or rare need. What's our problem?

The evening was a success, though. Erika came up with a design change that really saved our dark strip design. The first panel (by the beam) is four feet. The center one is two feet. We decided to make the next panel one foot, using a scrap from a dark piece...sort of a tapering off, or transition into the final, larger, blank piece. But then we had another look at a sheet we dubbed "red clouds," which was mostly light but had some red stripes in it. Perfect to complete the "tapering" effect and transition the red to blond.

By the way, we started drinking coffee at 7PM. I really think that coffee is helping us.

The measuring, cutting, marking, transposing, and drilling all went smoothly, as did the installation of both of these panels. We felt good.

- John

Some more shots from Tuesday night:

And we're back!

2008-01-07T15:41:00.001-05:00

Hope everyone had joyous celebrations! Not working on the house took a little getting used to, but we adapted to the temporary life of relaxation, warm weather, and good food quite well.

John says:

Friday night we worked our way back to stride and built and installed two dining room ceiling panels along the beam.

Then Saturday. With the van down for the count (front and rear seals, anyone?) and the rabbit in need of down time so that I can swap out the dangerously worn axles, cv joints, front and rear struts, and repair one of the brake calipers, we have been in desperate need of a vehicle. We've been considering getting a small pickup for hauling building materials, firewood, and eventually manure and compost in addition to some commuter duties. It was do or die (and if you've taken a ride in the rabbit lately, you know I'm not exaggerating), so we spent most of Saturday inspecting and negotiating in Richmond. We drove home in a cute little Nissan getting 25 miles per gallon. Not bad for a truck. It's also a more comfortable drive than what we're used to.

By 5 o'clock, we were back to selecting, measuring, marking, cutting, marking, transposing, drilling, and installing ceiling panels. We finished three more panels (along the outer edge of the room) and even got the first panel along the inner edge installed. We made something of that Saturday after all!

Erika says:

Sunday

We knew Sunday needed to be big. Accordingly, we started the day by procrastinating: a short walk around our land, practicing our version of tree identification, which involves pointing at trees and saying "Wonder what that one is?" (Should have brought that tree and shrub field guide we got for Christmas. Next time.) Then a trip to the hardware store, then oatmeal. Ready to go.

First task was to cut the weirdest panel in the whole dining room ceiling, an L-shape with a notch in it that wraps around the end of one wall and abuts the basement door. Though it was a challenge to our spatial comprehension skills, we managed to do it without cutting backwards, like we did that time in the kitchen ceiling. We use homemade cardinal directions when discussing these ceiling panels: Heatmor, walnut tree, beam and bathroom. They roughly correspond to north, south, east, west. Try it!

Took a couple of dry-fits, trimmings, and a modification to the end of that wall, but we got it to fit. Oh yeah, we'd put up a couple of nailers for it too. And we hadn't painted them black, like we did with the others—we were testing the theory that the black paint wasn't really necessary.

One piece left for the dining room! A simple rectangle. And we totally botched it. Well, I exaggerate. But it is a little short (meaning the seam along the beam is funky), and even worse, I marked and drilled a whole bunch of extra screw holes that I shouldn't have—they don't match our pattern and they don't even correspond to anything we can screw into. What th'? I plead temporary insanity. John says we can put plugs in them; I dream of just replacing the whole stinking panel.

Oh yeah—the black paint IS necessary to make those 1/8-inch gaps along seams look decent. Rather than waiting for paint to dry on this one, we used a Sharpie. Hee hee.

Anyway…dining room is done!

We hardly took any time to admire it; we just busted into the living room and started moving furniture and plants out. This one is our last ceiling. Can you believe that? After rigorous training in the dining room, we're ready to plaster our skills all over the living room. (By the way, we are officially underway with the January Challenge. We are going to finish this phase of renovation—yes we are—by February 1. We have a timeline and everything. Our first goal is to finish the living room ceiling by end of day on Friday.)

Off to a good start—we measured, cut and installed all the nailers in the living room in 90 minutes! We worked like caffeinated robots. Then John took apart the ceiling light while I painted black on the joists and nailers. By 8pm we were looking through our remaining plywood pieces to choose some nice dark ones for this room's center stripe. Cut the first two pieces, put the holes in the first one and popped it up there. Whew!

Sat on the couch and contemplated everything. In the dining and living room were deep drifts of sawdust, dozens of small hand tools, several extension cords, two ladders, stacks of 4x8' plywood sheets plus a bunch of scrap pieces, long-suffering house plants, and in the middle of it all, our stereo, playing Stevie Wonder.

A Room Full of Ceiling Nailers in Record Time:

1. Mark your joists and measure your gaps

2. Cut 'em up!

3. Start your screws...

4. Screw 'em in!

5. Paint 'em black!

We've done this (minus the black painting) for every ceiling in the house. It usually takes us a couple of nights after work, but this time we rocked it. As has been said here before, once again we master something just as we're leaving it behind.

Thursday night

2007-12-21T08:38:00.000-05:00

We got two more pieces of ceiling up! This is a neat project in a lot of ways, one of which being that we accept the slow and deliberate pace at which each piece needs to happen. It's calming and gratifying. Erika measures and I write it down. Then I measure and she checks it against hers. If it's different, even by a 16th or 32nd of an inch, we each measure again. It's like this when we mark up the board for cutting as well.

Measuring up and clamping down a 2x4 guide for the circular saw:

Tape along the edge of the neighboring panel so that we can mark the locations of the screws and transpose them to the new board:

Two more pieces in place, aligned, and installed:

- John

Another one up

2007-12-19T08:34:00.000-05:00

And the ceiling expands...

A sheet, cut to size:

The mighty forstner:

Press play!

And then we put it up...

Another reason we can't wait to get these ceilings finished is because the attic is pretty cold. Cold air just blows down from under the roof and right into the dining room. The house is fairly cozy now, but once we're closed up, the coze will be intensified.

- John

plywood goodwood

2007-12-18T08:28:00.001-05:00

this is the "plan." dining room is on the right. the little square between the dining and living rooms is the chimney.

got two more pieces up on the ceiling last night. it is taking a while. everyone has heard measure twice but we've been measure fifteen times. we're keeping an eighth inch gap along all edges and we use a couple pieces of wooden paint mixing sticks, which happen to be the right width, as spacers.

and there's lining up the holes that we're boring for the screws with the holes on the neighboring panel. sometimes, you don't want the hole to line up, instead you want it to be exactly midway between two. after trying a couple of times to transpose this stuff from a panel that is already on the ceiling to one that is laying on the floor, Erika had a pretty brilliant idea: run a length of masking tape along the installed panel and make our marks on the tape. then we just removed the tape and lined it up on the new panel on the floor and transposed our marks. using a drywall square, we lined up with each mark so that we could mark the corresponding points in the center and on the other end of the panel. about thirty marks, total.

next, boring the half-inch holes with the forstner bit. very carefully stick the point of the bit onto a tiny mark, plumb the drill, a bit of pressure to cut through the top ply without splintering, then steady, easy, boring to a quarter-inch depth. some sections of the board are harder than others. sometimes the bit just bores through quickly. really need to remain focused for the entirety of each hole.

position the ladders and lift it up over our heads, line it up, put the spacers in. start predrilling for the screws with one hand while holding it perfectly steady with the other. start screws by hand, carefully drive them in while watching the height of the board's edge, repeat thirty times, and a panel is up.

at the moment, we like the look of the bored holes with the dark screw head centered and recessed inside them. time will tell whether we decide to cut plugs for them or not. everything changes with each panel that goes up. I was saying that it's hard to imagine what this is actually going to look like when it's all up. for each panel in our pattern, we've got to choose a sheet of wood to use. no sheet is the same, so we've got to think about the tone of the panel and how it's going to balance with it's counterpart(s) in this somewhat symmetrical design that we're going with. in this way, it reminds me of when we laid out the soapstone for the bathroom floor. the spacer and gap lines remind us of tiling the bathroom walls.

it was a late night. have I mentioned that it's slow going?

- John

Pure class

2007-12-17T08:39:00.003-05:00

Woke up Sunday morning with one major task remaining before we could actually start putting up the ceiling. That would be running the electric planer along the first beam, since ceilings will make it much tougher to get the planer in there. (Back in September, when we put those beams in, things were moving fast. We didn't have the planer in time to dress the first beam-and-posts, so we just put them in as they were. For the second set, we were able to plane and bevel them outside in the yard, which is much easier than doing it once they're installed.)

We made a makeshift scaffolding, John tried out the planer on a scrap of oak post, and then climbed up to attack the beam. It was slow going, taking off a layer of splintery wood, black saw marks and blue pencil graffiti. Plus there were deep grooves at regular intervals from, we think, a broken tooth at the sawmill. John got enough done on one face of the beam so that we could get the ceiling up, but this will definitely be a big job to finish another time—three sides of the beam and three each on two posts. It's looking better already.

After leftover pizza and still more planning, we felt ready to cut our first piece of ceiling. No wait—make that a dress rehearsal—John wisely suggested that we cut a practice panel first, to get our technique down. The first panel would be unusual, with "tabs" that wrap around both sides of the chimney: another reason to practice.

We both feel like this ceiling is the culmination of our renovation project in a couple of ways. First of all, the dining room feels like the heart of the house, and we've always known we wanted it to feel really cosy and warm. We decided long ago that a boring sheetrock ceiling wouldn't cut it, and we went back and forth about what to use instead. We thought of plywood but weren't sure what that would actually look like. I fantasized about some kind of reclaimed wooden planks, but we had no time or money to acquire such a thing. We learned more about finish-grade plywood and eventually settled on that; choosing a species of wood and designing the layout of the panels was kind of a hasty process, but what else is new? We're excited about what we're doing, and it's a big step up from the other ceilings we've put in.

It's also a culmination because this way of putting up plywood—with deliberate gaps between panels, and making the fasteners part of the design—is not going to leave a lot of room for error. It's going to take all the skills we've developed in our nine months of work. There will be no paintable caulk hiding mistakes on this one.

So here we were, cutting our first panel. We were working without any music on; it felt like serious business. Measured super carefully, clamped a guide on for the circular saw, John made two of the cuts. Then there were some Skil saw cuts to do. The guide didn't work out for this saw, so he freehanded them. We got up on ladders and dry-fit it: almost. Need to shave some off the tabs. We did and it fit. OK!

We were glad we'd rehearsed. Time for opening night. Now, our ceiling design calls for a "stripe" of darker wood down the center of the room—an idea John had long ago. Of our 13 plywood panels, two are noticeably darker. Perfect! We laid out a lovely panel, figured which part of the grain we wanted to use for this piece, and marked it up. Many minutes of careful cutting. And here it is.

Now for the fasteners. We have to plan every screw, since they will all be visible. We marked them out and John drilled into those spots with the "forstener" bit. What this does is make a dimple in the plywood—only halfway through. Then you put your screw through the middle of this dimple and cover the head with a round wooden plug.

We held the panel up, predrilled for the screws, fastened it in and hurrah!

Did one more panel last night. It's the very center of the room, a perfect square, in the middle of which hangs the "chandelier" (which sounds a lot grander than the ancient used fixture we bought at a junk shop). We rotated this one 90 degrees so that the grain will go perpendicular to the rest of the room. (More last-minute design.) Cut out the light fixture opening, put it up using a paint mixer to space it evenly off the first panel, and hurrah again!

So far, so excellent. We're really happy with it. John said, "This is gonna look like a university library!" Yep, not just a college library, folks, a university library. It looks modern, with the gaps along the seams, and also very warm and visually interesting because of the grain. And we've only covered about 14 square feet so far. I'm hoping we get a little faster as we continue.

Ate our dinner under the two panels with our heads craning back to look.

- Erika

More nuts and bolts

2007-12-17T08:39:00.001-05:00

Friday, our ceiling materials were delivered. We have decided to build our dining room and living room ceilings out of 1/2", cabinet-grade, birch plywood. It looks beautiful just sitting there. 13 4x8 sheets of it.

I can't even remember what we did Friday night. Seriously. Is that bad? We did something...it had to do with getting the dining room ceiling joists ready for the ceiling installation. I know we fired the furnace back up in time for the cold and windy weekend we were expecting. I think we finalized our dining room ceiling design and made a list of everything we needed to get for that project. Oh well, certainly I remember what we did on Saturday.

Saturday morning, grey and cold, snow on the way. I headed over the mountain with a long list of items including a forstner bit, wood plug cutter, fine circular saw blade, standard drill bits, quart of flat black paint, ceiling fan hanger, Christmas gift, Danish oil, a dozen steel L brackets, 4 dozen lag screws, and even some non-items such as "escutcheon research."

Safely back in our warm home and re-coffeed, I set myself to the task of securing the ceiling joists to the living room beam. Ceiling joists from the dining room and living room both rest on this beam and they hadn't been nailed back down since we removed the old top plate and replaced it with that hunk of red oak. These joists, in addition to holding up the attic floor, keep the outer walls from falling out. If they're not nailed down, our outer walls aren't getting the support they need. This has kept me awake on more than one occasion. Of course, with a floor above and all of our joists doubled up, there is no way to swing a hammer, toe nailing several heavy nails into the beam. So, galvanized L brackets and 2" lag screws to the rescue.

This was tedious and tiring. Each hole had to be started by tapping a nail in and pulling it out (difficult, again, with no space to move a hammer). Then I would work on ratcheting the screws in, which wasn't too hard once you get 'em to grab. Ratchet ratchet ratchet, ratchet ratchet...ratchet ratchet ratchet. Yeah. For like three hours. But now we've got those joists tied down good and solid, and at the last minute too; we had some wicked winds blowing through here the day after. I'm sure it would've been fine even if we hadn't secured the joists, but it feels good to not be worrying about this anymore.

I took a quick break to go make some pizza dough and set it in the oven to rise over a pot of steaming water. Mmmm.

Next up, nailers! Sound familiar? Having decided on which of Erika's ceiling panel layouts to go with, it was time to measure up and mark off where the ends of each panel will fall so that we can screw in blocks of wood to nail 'em to. We marked, Erika measured, cut, and started screws in them, and then I went around installing them flush with the bottom of each old joist. I've found that, once I get a nailer lined up, tacking them in with the finish nailer helps keep them from shifting as I sink the screws. Erika followed behind, painting the nailers black. She also put a coat of black paint along the lengths of the joists that will be under panel seams. We plan to keep an eighth inch gap between panels, which is why we're painting the joists and nailers black.

We cleaned up and that was it for the night. I had spent all day on the ladder, looking up, reaching up, ratcheting, nailing, drilling. We laid on the hardwood floor underneath our work and rested our backs, looked up at the black outline, the first full-scale representation of our dining room ceiling.

I could smell the risen dough from the kitchen...let's go crack a beer and make some pizzas!

- John

of bedrooms and biscuits

2007-12-10T08:13:00.001-05:00

Sunday was another warm day, in the 50s. We were noticing the deep blue haze that was moving low over the mountains and appreciated the difference in the weather up here, as opposed to down on the open farm land about 20 miles east of the Blue Ridge where we used to live. I also walked around the back field for a while under the pretense of scoping out some fallen trees to cut up and haul back later on. I see and hear wood peckers, a chicadee, an eastern phoebe, and several cardinals. The land has returned to the way it was when we first starting checking the place out a year ago and it's easy to walk into the field without a path. I look down and see grasses that have spent the spring and summer suppressed by the now dried golden rod and imagine this area returning to a healthy meadow. I also imagine what it would be like to finish up the bedroom today. So I left the woods and we got ready to put the second coat of bee pollen on the walls.

Finish coat of white on the ceiling, done. Second coat of yellow on the walls, done. Put a finish coat of white on the narrow strips of trim that will cross the ceiling.

While all the paint dried, we took the opportunity to go out and collect some wood for the furnace. There was a small tree, a black birch I think, that someone had cut down before we lived here. It laid across one of the paths we had cut and I always imagined we'd start any small wood collecting effort with it. So, I cut it into four foot lengths with the chainsaw and we carried them back down the hill to the house. There were a couple of other trunks out there, much fatter but much shorter, too, and we cut and hauled those back as well. It's hard to say, but in that short time we probably gained about a week's worth of wood.

Breaked for lunch and a trip to town for the necessities (wine, eggnog, fresh buttermilk), came back and made some coffee, decided break time was over and got ready to put the ceiling trim up.

Trimming went pretty smoothly, all things considered. We held the first long board in place against the wall where it meets the ceiling and pressed it firmly up against the ceiling. We knew there would be some gaps that we'd have to address - as you've heard us say so many times, there isn't much that's level, square, or plumb up in here. But, everything looked as expected so, using our indispensable finish nailer, we nailed it right up. Same story for the next three boards, forming a nice top border all around the room. Gettin' there.

Then we picked up the narrow strip of trim that we designed to run across the ceiling and hide the butt joints and held that in place. We needed to trim 3/8" off. There we go. Fits nicely. Nailed it up. Repeat for the second strip. Erika called the second strip "the decoy," because it isn't being used to hide anything; it's just there for design sense, to add balance to the first one.

Things were looking good, but it was looking like we'd need some quarter-round moulding to run along the top of all the perimeter trim, since there were some gaps that really show through with a white ceiling and trim. We hadn't planned on using quarter-round and were slightly let down that we wouldn't have a finished-looking room tonight. I had planned on caulking the trim anyway, to keep cold air out, and got my favorite paintable white caulk - the stuff that saved our asses with the bathroom window trim.

I drew a bead along the top of the trim/ceiling and then followed up by tooling it with my finger. Forget the quarter-round, this looks great, and it's going to look nearly perfect after we touch up the paint. While I took care of the perimeter, Erika went around and dabbed extra caulk in all of the nail holes.

Then we straightened up the house, which had been destroyed over the course of our working 7 days straight in the bedroom and living with our bedroom in the living room. We poured a couple of ales and sat on the floor of our bedroom, gazing up and around at our awesome, awesome work, feeling a little giddy, feeling beat down and sore, feeling accomplished.

And if that wasn't accomplishment enough, I think we set a personal biscuit record by baking the best biscuits ever to go with our vegetable soup. I'm telling you, they were unbelievable. It's all because we thought we were buying this local, non-homoginized whole milk for them but instead we got the buttermilk. Had never used this in our biscuit recipe before. Now I don't think we'll use anything but.

- John

By the way, to follow up on Erika's previous post about doubting the color...we like it.

Another giant weekend

2007-12-10T08:12:00.000-05:00

We're pushing hard. Our weekends lately are like running a marathon, only with coffee instead of protein drinks. Celebrated the beginning of the weekend Friday night by slapping up the rest of the bedroom ceiling, then priming it. Once again we master a task just as we finish it and leave it behind!

Next up: In order to be able to move our bed back into the bedroom and enjoy a relatively finished state of affairs in there, we needed to trim out the ceiling. (This would be the moment of truth, since the ceiling installation had left various gaps along walls and between panels, and we'd always said "trim will cover that." Were we right?) And we decided to paint our walls while we were at it. They were a color I dubbed "dingy peach," seemingly chosen in an ill-advised attempt to match the forest green trim around the windows and doors. Also, they were cracked and dented and generally abused. John put some spackle on the cracks. On Saturday morning, we chose a new color at lightning speed—Bee Pollen!—because it works with the green and because we had to get going to Lowe's.

Over the mountain, down the other side, and into the big box. We bought three kinds of paint (ceiling, Bee Pollen, and wall primer), two kinds of trim (one for the tops of the walls and one to cover the "butt joints" between ceiling panels) and various sundries. Then we went to this coffee shop in a nearby strip mall. We'd been there once before. Its main advantage is that it's not Starbucks. Last time we went, John ordered a ham and cheese croissant and was given a squashed croissant with ham and melted cheese piled on top, in that order. What the hell is this mess? Well, maybe the kitchen person was in training. If at first you don't succeed, try again. Saturday, John wanted to order the same thing but said, apologetically, "This might sound weird, but do you put the ham and cheese inside the croissant?" The kid at the register says, "No, we put it on top." John: "Well, can you put it inside?" Kid: "No."

Back at home, we tried to imagine how all the timing would work out for the day, what with the various paints and primers needing to dry between coats. You don't really care about this puzzle, do you? In some order that I don't totally remember, we:

-Caulked the ceiling joints
-Sanded the spackle, then primed the walls
-Cut the trim pieces, beveled the edges with the router and hand plane, sanded them (John got a splinter the size of a toothpick which went in one side of his finger AND OUT THE OTHER SIDE), primed and painted them
-Painted the door and closet door for good measure
-Put the first coat of yellow on the walls. Uh-oh. Do we like this? It's pretty damn bright.

Cooked up some dinner and collapsed.

- Erika

Plybead marches on

2007-12-06T15:56:00.001-05:00

We've been working on putting up the bedroom ceiling! After our big cleaning on Sunday, we enjoyed about 48 hours of cleanliness and order before destroying it all by moving our bedroom stuff into the living room. Did some framing Monday and Tuesday, and by Wednesday we were ready to insulate and put up the two full sheets of beadboard this room will take. Now we have the 5 small pieces still to go. This is our last beadboard ceiling; for the living and dining rooms, we're concocting a plan to use finished plywood. More on that soon.

Also had another very successful visit from our renovation inspector. The upshot is, next time he comes out we should be closing out our loan and ending this phase of our life and of the renovation. There will still be plenty to do on the house, but we'll be doing it on our own terms, which probably won't mean every freaking evening and weekend. If you are a friend or a family member of ours, you can expect the shameless neglect to stop sometime in January! Yay!

Don't count on the endless house-babble to go anywhere, though.

- Erika

A Sunday in December

2007-12-03T09:19:00.003-05:00

Creaky morning after such a big push on Saturday. We had a bunch of small things left on our list for the weekend. I got up, made coffee, started washing dishes and foolishly (and apropos of nothing) said to John, "I'm glad we don't have to go in the crawlspace today."

A few minutes later I was draining the dishwater and heard a funny sound under the sink. Busted drain line! John checked under the house and sure enough, there was soapy water making a lake on the vapor barrier. So, after a bowl of oatmeal for fortification, it was into the crawlspace with me.

I pushed up on the drain, John screwed the fitting back together in the kitchen, and then I put a piece of strapping under the elbow for good measure. Mopped up the puddle. Onward.

We plan to have our main electrical line moved to a different point on the outside of the house. (That's because it now takes a pathway between the power pole and the house that crosses right over our second-floor deck—according to our home inspector, "the most outrageous safety violation [he'd] ever seen.") All the eaves and trim on that side of the house need to be scraped and painted, and I figured I'd do the area where the electrical line will be going. Then we can have it moved and I can scrape the rest. And so, John helped me put the ladder in place and I climbed up there and did the deed. It started raining before I could finish the painting, but what can you do?

Meanwhile, John was putting in clamp fittings to support the pex lines that come inside from the Heatmor and go to the water heater. These have been flopping over and looking unprofessional. Now they're all nice and square.

Next up: A whole bunch of cleaning. Can I tell you about the way we've been living since we started the kitchen ceiling project? All our kitchen stuff has been piled all over our living room. The dining room has had 4x8' sheets of plywood and drywall stacked in the middle of the floor, leaving small pathways around the edges of the room. Our table has been next to the kitchen window, meaning our cat thinks she has the right to sit on it and look outside and leave a thick layer of fur on the tabletop. Sawdust and filth has covered everything from the countertops to the couch. When we want an onion or a jar of nutmeg to add to our filthy dinner simmering on our filthy stove, we wedge ourselves between large objects in the living room and reach down onto a filthy attic step where the onions and spicerack are ignominiously stored.

So we fixed all that and now we feel much better.

- Erika

Another day, another ceiling

2007-12-03T09:19:00.001-05:00

Friday, Erika primed the kitchen ceiling.

Friday night, we finished the tool room ceiling framing (nailers, shimming, etc) and insulated the room.

We had a big day planned Saturday.

No time was wasted getting going, either. I was in the basement swapping out the radiant mixing valve before the coffee was done steeping. It went smoothly. We isolated that section of the system by closing the valves at the send and return manifolds, drained the relatively small amount of water, and unscrewed the three nuts that hold the mixing valve on the copper tail pieces. The reason we swapped it out was because the one that was supplied to us with the system was noisy and we were told that they had received a batch like this, so we were sent a replacement. Once it was in, we closed down all but the first circuit and purged the air. Opened everything back up and we were ready to fire up the Heatmor again.

The weather has been mild, so we let the furnace burn out a few weeks ago and have been relying on our space heater on cold nights. We cleaned out the ashes from the furnace, checked the water level, and got the fire going. This time around, we got it lit on the first try and we had the water up to temperature in under an hour. We had no troubles keeping the fire going all day and over night - we've had some practice with it since the initial firing over a month ago.

Next on the list, tool room ceiling. We call it the "tool room." Eventually we will call it studio or office. In house speak, it's a bedroom. Call it what you will. But it needs a ceiling. We had to trim a little length off of Deadman. We dry-fitted the first full sheet and all looked well, so we made a mess of the gluing then hoisted the sheet up there and wedged Deadman underneath it. Pop pop pop, nail gun on the case. The room took two full sheets, approximately a third of a sheet (8' long, though), and three smaller pieces. Several hours later and with little trouble, we got the ceilings up in the room. We even got our light fixture cut correct the first time.

We still had a few odd cuts to make if we were going to complete the kitchen ceiling. We made the cuts and got those pieces up as well.

The night was still young. Why not prime it all? So prime it all we did.

Done by around 9:30, dry, sore, and hungry. Feeling victorious, we feasted.

- John

Sad story

2007-11-29T10:03:00.000-05:00

Not to ruin John's triumphant tale of roof rackery, but I must report that we are drooling idiots and last night when we cut that diagonal piece to go in the ceiling by the bathroom door--a 90-minute process--we did it backwards.

In atonement, we cleaned out the tool room.

That is all.

- Erika

John here: Let's not forget that also last night while working on that piece, I accidentally cut into part of our kitchen floor and part of our "temporary" floor. Whoops!

Rack Rabbit

2007-11-29T08:20:00.001-05:00

I left the house for work with the following items: battery powered circular saw and drill, brown bag of 3" decking screws, square, tape measure.

With the van down, we've had to have our building materials delivered: lumber, insulation, drywall, beadboard; three or four times now. It adds up, and we fully expect there to be more.

So, on my lunch hour yesterday, I sped up to the big box with plans to build a guerrilla roof rack for the GTI. Nothing fancy, just enough to be able to transport 4x8 sheets of ceiling material home when we need to.

I purchased some 2x4s and a couple of come-alongs and laid them out in the parking lot. Using the circular saw, I cut three pieces at 4'3" to function as cross members, and I used two 8' sticks for the front-to-back runners. People walked past. I spaced the runners so that they'd fall along the roof corners (most rigid part) and laid the cross members over them and squared it all up. Screwed in two screws per joint.

Placed it atop the Rabbit. Ratcheted it down with two come-alongs. Drove back to work.

The front strap vibrated in the wind and made a very loud reedy buzz. I was able to quiet it down a bit, but it's a pretty noisy roof rack. That's okay, it's a pretty noisy car.

Later, we stopped to pick up our next order of beadboard and carefully loaded it onto the roof, tied it down.

Success! It really worked great, nothing shifted. So now we can use the Rabbit to bring home lumber for a while. Cool.

- John

Onward

2007-11-28T08:20:00.001-05:00

We went home for Thanksgiving with four full sheets of beadboard on our kitchen ceiling. This left some partial pieces to be installed along two sides of the room, plus the entire "nook" area (the flat ceiling outside the bathroom). The last night before our vacation, I'd had a brief moment of insanity in which I proposed staying up all night and finishing the entire ceiling. My thinking was, this is just like when you're in college and you have some paper to write before you can leave for spring break, and you get it done at 6:30am and hand it in just as the sun is coming up and then go home exhausted and there's something weirdly fun about it. Well, this little dream ended 20 minutes later with a measuring mistake and a ruined sheet of beadboard. So much for that.

So, Monday night, we jumped back in. Got the two long pieces in along the highest part of the ceiling, then two short ones along the bathroom side. This only left a small empty square up in one corner. We've developed a habit of just circular-sawing this stuff right on the kitchen floor, so every night when we're finished working there's a big pile of sawdust to be swept up.

Tuesday we started looking at the nook ceiling. We'd already shimmed and put nailers in, but now when we looked at it we realized that the pieces we'd planned to use were not quite long enough. This caused some consternation. Ended up deciding to measure the bedroom and tool room to figure out how many sheets we'll use in there, then see if we could piece together scraps to fill that nook.

The tricky thing is that the sheets of beadboard come with "lap joints" on the long sides, making for nearly invisible seams. Once you cut into a sheet, you no longer have lap joints; you just have square cuts. When we decided we didn't care, and also that we officially didn't mind redoing our nailers, the puzzle of putting scraps together got much simpler. Or at least possible.

John's getting awfully good at freehand circular sawing; we measure super carefully, tape along the cut to avoid splintering, and set the beadboard up on 2x4 blocking so he can cut and I can aim the droplight at the blade with a finger in one ear and the other one pressed to my shoulder. (Why don't I just wear earplugs, you might ask? Good question.) We got three scraps into the nook, leaving only the hardest part where the diagonal bathroom wall is going to make us do a tough cut at an angle across some unlucky piece of beadboard. Ha, I first typed "beardboard." Picture that.

We'll do that tonight. We're also looking ahead to painting this stuff, insulating the bedroom and putting up the ceiling there, installing our stove vent through the side of the house, getting the drywallers in to finish the kitchen walls…lots of stuff coming up. Say it with me: "WE'RE GETTING THERE."

- Erika

Art now

2007-11-27T16:11:00.001-05:00

It's time for another photo essay, everybody.

- Erika

The truth only costs 75 cents

2007-11-20T08:26:00.000-05:00

Feeling pretty beatdown after last night. We did a lot of figuring, a lot of head scratching, and just couldn't figure out a way to square up the existing ceiling frame of what we're calling "the nook." Basically, it's an area of flat ceiling adjacent to the vaulted one, dropped between the bathroom and the kitchen. Actually, I don't even want to talk about it. Erika suggested we quit and let our subconscious sort it out. I can get behind that. So we did. After we cleaned up and got the pasta in water, we did in fact realize how we could make it work. And this morning we figured just how we could build it.

And with that I confidently declared, "well, once we figure this out I'm pretty certain that there will be no unforeseen challenged or obstacles while putting up the ceilings throughout the rest of the house!" and we felt better.

* * *

Cutting into the house, stuffing it with cotton, and encasing it all: It displaces. Like borate to a rat, it repels you, its trillions of tiny particles coat our nest. It has not been a pretty week.

what greets us at the front door:

the same spot last week, for contrast...

- John

More than a ceiling

2007-11-19T13:29:00.002-05:00

Let's fill you in on what we did last week and over the weekend. Ready? Okay.

It took several nights and some weekend time to finish the framing in the kitchen so that the ceilings and drywall would go up properly. At the front wall of the kitchen, where the now-vaulted ceiling reaches its highest point, there are short 2x4 studs that support the kitchen roof rafters at about mid-span. These things are not plumb and usually don't line up with the wall. Rather than try to repair them, we decided it would be easiest to just cut all new studs and attach them to the existing ones, only aligned correctly. We did that Tuesday or Wednesday night, I think.

Before:

After:

Next, we had to deal with the ends of the kitchen high walls. These wedge-shaped sections of wall up above needed all sorts of work if they were going to be turned into walls. On the sink-end of the room, we had to remove a mysterious electric receptacle and then cut away the 1x6 plank that runs the width of the kitchen so that it would be flush with the wall. This was done by standing on the counter and running the circular saw at eye level. I cut what I could and then the rest was handled with a chizzle (sic). The wood split easily this way and I was surprised by how quickly the work went.

With that board trimmed back, we cut and installed studs along that wall to use as drywall nailers. Then, we ran ten feet of 2x4 along the top of them, flush with the existing rafters, to use as a nailer for the ceiling.

Erika had also managed to cut and repair window trim in the dining room that was altered many years ago when someone needed to fit a window-unit air conditioner.

Erika here. Friday, I worked on bathroom window trim (it's now all puttied, primed and painted and looks amazingly good considering how crappy it was when we nailed it up), helped the delivery guy unload our beadboard and drywall, put up a couple small pieces of drywall around our replacement kitchen window, and finished
screwing down the porch steps. And took some pictures (more on that later).

John again. Friday night we would work on the opposite wall of the kitchen. This section, another wedge end, seemed the most daunting to design. But, being the experienced framers that we've become, we got it done that night. First, we had to trim an inch or so off the depth of a horizontal brace that crossed the lower plane of the rafters which if left untouched, would result in a lumpy ceiling. Done with the Sawzall and chisel. Needed to touch up another brace in the same way, though it wasn't as severe.

Then we ran an old 2x4 from the back wall to the kitchen beam to serve as the corner of the nook ceiling. Once it was wedged and screwed into place, we cut and installed vertical studs for drywall nailers. A successful Friday night.

Saturday, we called our local builder's supply store to ask about renting a nail gun but they had rented their last one for the weekend. We'll deal with that later. I dug out my notes from when I removed all the wiring and lighting fixtures from the kitchen. Erika painted window trim and windows in the bathroom while I installed junction boxes and re-assembled the kitchen electric system. We installed a box for a light above the sink, one for a central light/ceiling fan, and one that will be uncovered at a future date when we remodel the kitchen - not in use now, but we thought ahead the best we could. Of course, this took half a day.

Saturday, late afternoon, time to insulate! This didn't start off well. In order to get the properly rated insulation for our kitchen ceiling (R-21), we had to settle for 16" batts when we really need 24". We just ordered more of it and resigned ourselves to tearing the stuff lengthwise to fit into our old style wide rafter bays. The first couple of bays are oddly sized, so the flexible metal rods that we use to hold the stuff up weren't working well. It was uncomfortable and frustrating work, plus our friends' party was getting started around that time and we knew we were going to be late - really late.

After a bit of cursing and some minor lacerations, we figured it out. We insulated about 90 percent of the kitchen before we decided to just quit, clean up, and go party.

Sunday morning. Oh yeah, the nail gun. There was no way that we were going to attempt to hang 4x8 sheets of plywood on our ceiling using a hammer and finish nails. Too many reasons to list. So we took a Sunday morning drive over the mountains and bought a pneumatic finish nailer and some other supplies for the day.

Back at the house, we finished insulating. We had also realized that we were going to need nailers running lengthwise for our plywood ceiling. That meant measuring, cutting, and installing about 18 lengths of 2x4 across the ceiling, between each set of rafters. We are framing machines. We measured everything and wrote it all down on a notebook. Then we took the notebook to the basement and set up for cuttin''. Slap the board on the bench, Erika would measure and square up a line, I'd zing it off with the circular saw, repeat. We carried the armloads of cut lumber back to the kitchen, started screws in 'em on the floor, then got up on the ladders and put them in.

Ready to put up a ceiling? Almost...the ceiling here counts as an exterior "wall," so we had to staple up a vapor barrier of 4 to 6 mil plastic. We had just enough left over from the crawl space vapor barrier project to do this job with. But as we started putting it up, Erika noticed that since we were using black plastic, we wouldn't be able to see our rafters or nailers.

This would make ceiling panel installation most difficult. The hardware store was closing in 6 minutes. I flew down the road and made it just in time for some clear plastic. That was my third trip to the store since 11am.

Pop pop pop, the familiar sound of the staple gun. Vapor barrier up!

Alright, party people, now it's time to put up a ceiling!

We built our first "dead man," which is a length of 2x4 a few inches longer than the height of the ceiling, with a 3' length of 2x4 attached at the top like a T. You use this to prop the ceiling panel up, wedged between it and the floor. This tool was so necessary. Seriously. We love the dead man.

A quick note on our choice of kitchen ceiling: We wanted to use bead board, which is basically beveled and lapped narrow planks. To use "the real thing" would have meant spending about twice as much money and exponentially more time. Two things that we don't have. So, we went with "ply-bead," which is 3/8" plywood with the beads routed into the sheet, so it looks like individual planks. The long edges are still lapped, so the seams won't be visible along the long ends. For the butt ends, we'll either get creative with wood putty or we'll just use some narrow trim pieces. The sheets are 4x8.

I broke out the nail gun, loaded it up, and connected it to our air compressor. We measured the first length and cut the panel accordingly. We moved the ladders into position and visualized the process. We climbed onto counter and ladder with huge floppy sheet of plywood balanced over head. After a couple of dry fittings and adjustments, we had it in a position that we liked. Erika slowly let go as I held the sheet in place overhead so she could wedge the dead man into place. Once in place, Erika assisted the dead man with the lifting and I started nailing it up.

It went well. We've got the slightest wave in the first panel, but we'll be able to fix that. You've got to nail across the sheet so as to smooth it out. We got good quickly, though. One sheet needed two holes cut out for the light fixtures. I don't think we ever got this right on the first shot when we were drywalling, so I was really nervous about doing it with wood. We measured and transposed carefully, and the results were excellent. We did need to file a little bit off the edges, but we got a good fit. The beads and edges line up nicely, and I couldn't imagine doing this without the finish nailer. No way.

It was hard work. The wood is heavy and awkward and we're up on ladders and counters (and sometimes the stove). We were sore as soon as we stopped working. But we powered on because we knew that margaritas and enchiladas awaited us down the road. It was about 9:30. The house is trashed after this weekend. We just left it that way and headed down the hill and got our reward.

- John

Note: It just looks like plywood in the photos. But once it's painted, the grain will disappear and the "individual plank grooves" will be obvious.

Building a better box

2007-11-15T15:42:00.000-05:00

The other night was kind of typical of our weeknight routine:

Arrive home after work. Feed cat, check messages. Eat unexpectedly large snack. Change into battered work clothes.

Begin clearing out kitchen of breakables and exposed foodstuffs. Bring in ladders, mallet, hammer and chisel, two sizes of wood screw, battery drill, other drill, circular saw, workbench, level, square, pen, Sawzall, Skil saw, goggles and gloves.

Remove last ceiling joist but not before dealing with junction box screwed to it. Measure existing short studs where the new top of the wall will be. Go outside, find used 2x4s from the beam project, clean them up and cut them to length so they'll sister with the old studs. Bring them inside and realize half of them need to be recut. Recut them. Chase panicked sparrow out of house. Standing on ladders, countertops, and refrigerator, with drop light clipped to rafter, attach main rafters to beam and topplate; clean up gnarly blocking with various power tools; shower sawdust all over kitchen. Discover dead termite in tiny hole in one piece of blocking.

Start screws in sister studs and then attempt to fasten to old studs while holding perfectly plumb and flush with topplate of wall so as to provide nailing surface for drywallers. Gaze around a lot at trim, electrical rerouting, and other miscellaneous tasks that will need to be done, some other night.

Begin cleaning up just after 10. Straighten up, put tools away, sweep floor and bring breakables back into kitchen. Open beers and heat oil for leftovers. While dinner warms up, measure ceiling and wall area for ordering beadboard and drywall next day. Eat. Brush teeth. Bed.

- Erika

Shed your extras

2007-11-12T13:48:00.000-05:00

Brief dispatches from the weekend times:

Thursday night: We discovered that wood putty, though stinky, is a miraculous material. It covered our window-trim troubles nicely. Filled holes and cracks with that stuff, put some primer on it after it dried, caulked some gaps, and already our trim looked much much better. Just imagine it with a finish coat of paint! Yes'm.

Friday: I did some cleaning to get ready for a big family weekend, then dug two holes at the base of our porch steps so that we could put posts in there below frostline. Also, I received a delivery of more insulation (including R-21 for the kitchen ceiling) and a bunch of borate-treated lumber for the new porch steps. What's that white stuff? Oh yes, it's the borate. The guy told me we could wait for it to wash off in the rain, or scrub with a plastic scrubby.

John came home a little early from work and soon after, his parents and sister Sarah arrived after a day-and-a-half trip from Florida. My dad and brother Seth followed shortly after that and we all feasted on pasta and the usual libations. Then we did an art project where we filled every square inch of available floor space with air mattresses and futons and sleeping relatives. I'd say it was a success, but the
critics seemed ambivalent.

Saturday: While the stair crew tackled the front of the house, my dad and I returned to the scene of our earlier crime, where the shed was resting on temporary supports and, we thought, needing to be rotated until it was square with the house. Later Saturday night, looking back on our day, we would agree that basically what we had done was to lift the shed up and put it back down. But Saturday morning, full of coffee and ambition, we didn't know this. We thought we were going to pivot the shed.

Massive calculations ensued. For a four-cornered building to rotate on one of those corners until the other three land on predetermined points is more complicated than we thought. It's simple if you're just taking a piece of paper to represent the building and rotating it on the table. It's not simple when you have to set up skids and rollers on which the building will move, and jacking and blocking and dirt and
grass and a winch hooked to two young trees are involved. We sketched and jacked and visualized and winched, and this went on until lunchtime or beyond. We'd rotated the shed about 3 inches along a 3-foot proposed path, and the prospect of simply leaving the shed facing the way it was became more and more attractive. And so that is what we did.

It's not square with the house, but it does follow the line that marks the edge of our yard, so it actually works perfectly well aesthetically. Why torture ourselves? Building posts under the corners will make it official. We dug two holes under the front and then joined the stairs team. Welcome to your new home, Snoopy.

Sunday: We didn't have much time until Dad and Seth had to leave, especially after we took a nice leisurely walk and had breakfast. We did use Dad's truck to move stones from the old shed foundation up to its new spot, and I started to construct one of the new posts. Won't be a tough job to finish this up.

And meanwhile, as you can see in John's post, the porch stairs were really coming together. What a feeling to have another major item on our list mostly finished in one blur of a weekend! Thanks to all our wonderful helpers.

- Erika