we’re all working like madmen and look at this lazy bum sleeping all day.
naming update: we can’t get a name to stick to this cat. I previously reported that her name was Lina, but that only lasted a week. We just call her Kitten, and she always looks up when we say it.
We had a few spring visitors already, which has been an excellent cure for the loneliness of the long maine winter, and a great incentive to do some more work on the guest room. The walls were really messed up (seems like this was the kids’ room – i think three boys lived in here – so the walls were covered with drawings, doodles, graffiti, red paint splatters, mysterious smears, giant gouges and craters, boogers, and god-knows-what) so the first step was to get some joint compound and some special adhesive mesh for repairing wallboard. I can’t even imagine how these walls got such huge holes in them! Wrapped the bed in plastic and emptied everything out of the room, patched the giant holes over the course of a few days – spackle, wait for it to dry, wet sand, dry sand, spackle again, repeat. Then a few days of priming everything. The window and door trim are so crappy and covered in crud – I would like to just replace them in due time, but for now I just covered up all the crud with primer. Then painted the walls a kind of purple-gray color, and the window/door trim a nice rich blue; we have some old wool rugs that we brought back from Bolivia, which are mostly red and orange, and a navy blue couch that mike’s mom gave us, so we tried to pick colors that would match with those. The paint really transformed the room! Got curtains for the windows, a new comforter cover for the bed, hung a bright tomato-red curtain in the closet door. We also recently added a door to this room. It’s starting to look kind of civilized! BUT we don’t have the finished “after” photos yet! hang in there for an update…
“after” photos to come next week… stay tuned!
We’re expecting our first wintertime guest, hooray!! Which means it’s time to put a proper door on the guest room so we can put a little heater in there and make it hospitably warm. We have like 20 assorted doors piled up in our ell, but after measuring all of them, we found that none of them were the right dimensions to fit the guest room doorway. So we headed off to search for a door at our favorite bargain architectural salvage spot, Pete’s Place.
Pete was super cheery and helpful and actually fired up his tractor to snowplow a path for us so we could haul our new door back to the car.
hanging a new door in an old house is a pretty big piece of work, as there are no right angles involved, everything is completely crooked! Mike and Richard spent most of a weekend working on this, planing and trimming the door and replacing parts of the doorframe in order to set in hinges and strike plate, etc etc. it’s all set now, keeping the bedroom toasty warm (and keeping the pe(s)ts out too).
Back in June we ripped up the bedroom carpet to discover this strange hole in the wood floor. We’ve since moved into the bedroom and I should have patched it long ago, but I’ve just been stepping over it for a few months now, putting off the job until later. Finally I fell right in, like my whole leg just went right down through the floor one night as I was heading to bed in the dark! I wish I could’ve been downstairs in the livingroom to see what that looked like. I think my whole leg came thru the livingroom ceiling. (I was fine, livingroom ceiling didn’t fare so well)
On August 25th we finally got the HOT WATER turned on! It took a long time because first we had to fix all the plumbing and get the correct pipes replaced and connected to carry hot water up to the 2nd floor bathroom (and not to anywhere else – we did have a little mix-up where a six-foot geyser came spurting out of the floor downstairs!) and then once we had the plumbing ready it took a few weeks to get our plumber out to set up the hot water heater. We have this fabulously complicated, fancy furnace that is equipped to heat the whole house with hot-water radiators (too bad every single one of those radiators is broken at the moment!) and the hot water heater is hooked up to this furnace. So finally the date came, the plumber came, we finally got the furnace serviced and started up, and the hot water heater started to do its magic. And with that… we were able to move in! Just in time to enjoy the bright fall foliage and plummeting temperatures.
We already had moved a lot of our stuff in, so it just took one car trip to bring a bunch of clothes and dog beds stuff. We’d already been sleeping over on weekends, but now that we can take showers so we get to sleep here all the time. The bedroom has gotten kind of homey and cozy, we hung up some tentative curtains and tacked a few pictures on the wall. And now we live here!
We still don’t have a real kitchen, just a microwave, toaster, hotplate and fridge, so we’re eating lots of apples, toast, soup, Amy’s Organic frozen dinners, takeout salad bar, italians, pizza, etc. The worst thing at the moment is that our well water still has high levels of bacteria – we’ve tried to shock it with bleach but it didn’t work. We need to mess around with the plumbing a bit, and try bleaching the well again. Til then we have to use bottled water for drinking, brushing teeth, cooking, etc. And we can’t wash our dishes with the tap water! Ugh. So every few days we pop over to my mom’s house with a basket full of dirty dishes and a bag full of dirty laundry, and do our washing-up at her house. It’s not so bad but it’s not exactly a convenient arrangement
Mike’s got a new job now, he’s working from home too – so that’s pretty perfect! We each have our little office, side by side upstairs, the puppy sits under our desks while we work (or destroys everything in the room, depending on her mood) and we get to take breaks and go walk the dog in the woods together, it’s so cute and nice!
It feels good, and also a bit weird and tentative, to be finally living here. It’s great because we have our own space and that’s awesome. It feels like the house progressed slowly over the summer – there have been so many distractions and other things to do, we are hoping that now we actually are LIVING here it will help us to get more work done on the house. But it’s not exactly the Ritz, we’re definitely roughing it. The water thing sucks. We don’t have glass in all our windows at the moment. The weather’s getting chilly. We do own a woodstove and we just need to build the hearth and hook up the stove to the chimney, so it could be running within a week or two if we get to work! And as the weather gets colder we will hopefully get the electric wiring finished in the kitchen, so we can start to put in insulation on the walls, and then it should start to get cozy and warm in there.
We’re racing against the cold now, and I’m not entirely certain that we’re going to make it – if we can’t get the insulation in the kitchen, get the downstairs bathroom functional (right now it’s just an empty room, nothing else!), and get the second floor closed off for the winter, then I guess we’ll need to just pack up our goods, drain all the pipes and move back in with my parents for the winter. Which wouldn’t be so terrible – but we’re hoping we can stay here and make it through the winter! So… the race is on. Next steps: hearth, woodstove, electric wiring in the kitchen, then put up insulation and wallboard… and start putting down a floor in the downstairs bathroom… and on and on and on!
Although we’re supposed to be focusing our efforts on the kitchen and the downstairs, we’re hoping to start living (or at least camping out!) in our house sometime this summer. So I’ve spent a little time tidying up our future bedroom, hoping to get a bed in there sometime soon. We tore out the carpeting and particle board and there’s a beautiful wood floor underneath! Cleaned and reassembled the baseboard heater, it’s still ugly but it looks a lot better now. Overall the room is starting to look really beautiful! I’m excited about sleeping in here!
My mom had torn up the carpeting before we even got home from South America! Then I ripped up the particle-board floor underneath (with some help from both Vickie and Mike), and while we were prying it up, we discovered underneath… whoa! There’s a giant, perfectly circular hole in the middle of the wood floor! Why? It goes down about 8 inches but doesn’t go through the ceiling of the livingroom below, the lath and plaster below is at least 100 years old, so it’s not like it was used for a stovepipe or something. Was it perhaps a circular heating register? We can’t figure out a good explanation. Mysterious!
We’re hoping to enjoy some summer nights up here, but it’s not well insulated and we don’t want to deal with heating the drafty second floor during the cold months, so when the winter comes we’ll have to move our bedroom downstairs, probably we’ll be camping out in the livingroom or dining room for the first winter. Hopefully we’ll get the second floor winterized within a year or two? Meanwhile, we have a lovely summer bedroom.
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