Announcing

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

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

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

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

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

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