bedroom

looking pretty good, right?

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!

pulling up particle-board, discovering a mysterious hole underneath.

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.

before: realtor’s photo of the upstairs bedroom before the house was sold.

stuff from Argentina!

our stuff arrives in a big truck!

This is all of it. It doesn’t even look like that much stuff!

We had all our stuff shipped to Maine from Buenos Aires, Argentina, by cargo freight ship! It took a long time and caused lots of stress but it was cheap and … miraculously, here’s our stuff! delivered to our doorstep. Arrived on Wednesday, right on time! (there’s more detail about the harrowing process of arranging the cargo shipment here)

springing!

I think the previous owner of our house worked in landscaping. Heaven knows he wasn’t a carpenter and didn’t do much home maintenance, but it seems like he really put some love into our yard! Everything’s been dry and dormant through the winter but now that it’s starting to get warm we are excited to see what beautiful new perennial plants peek out to brighten up the yard each day, it seems like there’s something new sprouting or blooming, every time we visit!

rhododendron?

crocuses and daffodils

sunny bunches of daffodils are bursting out everywhere

violets on the shady side of the house

mystery bush: what is it? we’ve been eagerly watching the buds grow and open, hoping to figure out what kind of a plant it is. still a mystery – looks like a purple cauliflower bush!

we have SO much rhubarb. Richard makes great rhubarb pies!! Any other recipes to suggest?

spring buds on trees

kitchen before & after

We’ve gotten pretty far into demolishing the kitchen! I’d love to start re-building soon but there is actually more destruction to do first. We got the counters, cabinets, sink, wallboard and old insulation out; we still need to get some remaining tidbits of wallboard out, and maybe the ceiling too. Also thinking of demolishing a bit of a wall, between kitchen and dining room. Right now there is a wall with a big wide doorway; we’re thinking of leaving just 1/3 wall and the other end wide open. The soon-to-be-exposed chimney would be all that remains where that end of the wall is now. This would make it easier to place the wood stove smack in between the two rooms, to heat both kitchen and dining room!

kitchen, before demolition

kitchen, in the early stages of demolition.

I want to keep that memory curve over the sink! It has been carefully set aside and hopefully we can fit it back in when we’re done. I’m drawing up floor-plans for the new kitchen and trying to think about what we want to do for the new kitchen – it’s so exciting to have a blank slate but also I have no idea what I’m doing and I’ve never really thought about how to plan a kitchen before. I wish I had more inspiration materials to look at but whenever I look at magazines (or apartment therapy or any of those websites) I just think “ugh, I don’t want to live in a magazine house with a magazine kitchen!” They all look too sterile and trendy and over-designed. I guess it’s best to just let our kitchen evolve, rather than trying to design it.

no more kitchen! Just windows and plumbing!!!!

One of the best things about this whole project is that pretty much every day I come in to start work and I look at the task before me and think, “Uh oh, I don’t know how to do this. I better wait until somebody else comes along to help me or show me how or do it for me.” Then I look around for an easier task, and everywhere my eye falls, I think “That looks really hard. I don’t think I can do that right now.” And then I realize there is nothing easy to work on, it’s all complicated and messy and unfamiliar and difficult, and then I’m like “OK, I better just try and figure out how to get started” and I make a first cautious attempt, and next thing I know I am knee-deep in plaster and figuring out how to get it done! And then afterwards I’m all “That was easy!”

taking apart the sink!

The Ell, or the Other Barn, or what should we call this thing?

view from the driveway

This is the thing we’ve been calling the Ell. It’s come to my attention that it’s not a proper ell, because an ell is an addition to the main farmhouse that creates an “L”-shaped footprint, and the structure isn’t like a classic ell, so some people have been calling in “the barn,” but that’s confusing because we already have another barn on the property, and furthermore this building doesn’t have a traditional barn design and has never been used for animals, at least not that we can see. Nobody’s certain what the original function of this structure was, it’s got a garage door cut into it, but it definitely was not originally a garage and you certainly couldn’t put a car in it now, nor do we plan to use it as a garage anytime soon. I think I’ll have to go on calling it The Ell because I don’t know what else to call it, and besides it seems like the right thing to call it. I grew up in a house with an ell, which was a drafty, crooked and rickety old structure attached next to our house and used for storing piles of old junk and housing my dad’s woodworking shop. Exactly like this building here.

inside the ell, ground floor

We’ve been thinking a lot about what to do with this ell. It’s old and huge and beautiful, but it’s badly damaged and probably needs to be saved soon. The roof has tons of leaky holes, and some of the major beams and sills have rotted away where the water’s gotten into them. The roofline is starting to sag, because major support beams are no longer holding weight. We’re afraid it might cave in or collapse soon and since it’s attached to the house we’re afraid it could cause structural damage to the main house if it goes down. We all feel that it’s a beautiful old structure and should be saved if possible! It’s made of impressive old beams, it’s crazy to think about how big and old those trees were. It’s got a cement-floor basement, a big first floor that’s been split into two sections, one used as a workshop and the other side finished as a full apartment with kitchen and bath, and then it’s got this massive, amazing attic with the most beautiful roof rafters. We could totally use all this space for woodworking shop, storing firewood and lumber, giant screenprinting studio or space for other messy art projects, or who knows. Basketball games, farmhouse theater shows, an extra guest apartment, whatever. I’m sure we could find a lot of good uses for all that beautiful space!

the ell attic

Rob & Mike in the ell attic

kitchen in the finished apartment in the ell. the kitchen is pretty new and looks decent but unfortunately it’s got a leaky roof and it will have to be all ripped out and gutted to make necessary structural repairs.

But we’re also trying to figure out how to make the house livable, so it’s hard to spare more money and time and resources towards working on the ell. We really would like to stabilize the structure, so we don’t have to worry about it falling down, and then forget about it for five or ten years while we focus on restoring our house. Whenever we get the house to a good point, then we might be able to spare some time and money to work on the ell.
We’ve called in a few friends and contractors to look at the ell, the first contractor said he didn’t want anything to do with it! And the second contractor said it would probably cost around $60,000 for the initial repairs to stabilize the structure and then more money to finish the interior (that is way over our budget! That’s way more than we paid for the house!) so we have been sadly trying to prepare ourselves for the thought that we might have to pay money to have the ell safely demolished. Makes me want to cry just thinking about it! We’d have to pay someone to take it down, and then if we wanted to build something to replace it, we’d probably have to pay twice as much to build a new structure half the size. What a shame to waste this beautiful building! We’ve all been lying awake nights trying to figure out what to do.
Finally, last week we met a contractor named Arron Sturgis, who is a barn restoration expert and gave us the news we had been dying to hear: he thinks that it will be totally possible to stabilize the structure cheaply, basically use cribbing and scaffolding to take the weight off the damaged beams and sills, redistribute the weight properly and stop the deterioration of the building. Then drape roofing rubber over the leaking roof, and cheaply get the building to a point where we could leave it alone for a few years and not have to worry about it falling down every time a storm blows through town. Then in a few years we can start to replace the damaged sections and eventually get a stable framework, then put on a metal roof, and take it from there. So… hooray! Sounds like good news at last! Arron is coming over on Thursday to start the first stage of stabilization. We have four days to clear all that junk out of there! We rented a dumpster and we’re working hard in cold pouring rain to get it cleaned out and ready for his team to start.

treasure!! we found this beautiful sink under a pile of junk in the ell! definitely hope to bring this into the house and use it in our new bathroom.

getting started

We’ve only just begun… but we’ve finally begun! We’ve started to form some ideas about what to tackle first. There’s so much to be done! There is one upstairs bedroom that had wall-to-wall carpeting that REEKED of piss. So gross! This past week we got in there with a utility knife and started by ripping the carpet into three big strips (thanks Judy for the strategy advice!), then rolling them up and dragging them out. Tough going because two sides of the room have baseboard heaters and the nails holding the carpet down are under the baseboard heater, which is all fragile (take off the cover and it’s just copper piping with billions of delicate little fins that are ridiculously easy to mangle if you even touch them) so despite our best efforts we kinda messed up those heating fins, oops. This was the worst part of the process, the carpet is so heavy and clumsy that we ended up getting way more up-close-and-personal than anyone would want to get with something that thoroughly pee-soaked. Then there’s another layer of stained and stinky batting, and underneath there is a layer of stinky and crumbly particle board, nailed down to the floor. Had to pry this up gently with crowbars, we developed a good teamwork strategy and figured out how to ease it up in relatively large chunks. This also presented further complications with the baseboard heating pipes. And underneath… beautiful wood floors! Covered in lead paint, of course. But still lovely! We opened up some windows to get the smell out.

Before & after… we ripped out the carpet!

Mike got the cabinets out!

At the same time, we got started on the kitchen downstairs. We’re gonna gut it completely, since the exterior walls need to be insulated, it needs new electrical wiring, and everything in there was super gross and old. We smashed out the fake bricks and tore out the old cabinets, saving some for possible re-use and just tearing others into firewood. Found tons of rat poop, one entire rat skeleton, one mummified rat, and one box of shaw’s orange jello powder. Also found a weird birthday card and a five-year-old 7th grade report card for a little boy who had a very bad academic year. It’s just so weird to find yourself picking through bits & pieces left from someone else’s life. Who were these people? Where did they go to? Why did they install wall-to-wall carpeting and who peed all over it? Why did they leave a plastic christmas tree atop a sea of baby clothes in the upstairs bathtub?
So, lots of trips to the dump! It’s so satisfying to destroy all the crappy stuff and rip it out and drag it to the dump. Sometimes I feel bad about throwing things away, I don’t like to be wasteful but… it’s really satisfying to hurl the stinky carpets and chunks of stained particle board into those dumpsters. No guilt about that.
As of this writing, we’re done working on the upstairs for this year, focusing all efforts on the downstairs. Still need to rip out a few more cabinets from the kitchen, rip out wallboard and plaster and insulate, run new electrical wires (with Richard’s master electrical guidance of course) and then install some recycled cabinets (found some in good condition in one of the apartments in the ell). Found a good price on beech wood counter top at Ikea (cheaper than Formica!), perhaps we can use the same stuff to build a matching island or kitchen table?! Very excited about designing and reconstructing the new kitchen. Then… on to the downstairs bathroom!!! Again, we’ll need to completely destroy and rebuild.
Oh, also… in the ell apartment, there is a REFRIGERATOR FILLED WITH FOOD FROM LAST YEAR. My mom of course opened it up to show us… and it smells BAD. We have a date to put on respirator masks, long rubber gloves, drag it into the front yard and tackle it. (in order to drop refrigerators at the dump you’ve got to remove the door and empty them!) Next Monday afternoon. Ugh.

Our first view of the house

our first visit to our new house! My mom made this beautiful banner out of paper towels and the letters cut out of feed sack. The house was very cold but exciting to see.

here, now

We’ve arrived in Maine at last! Got in to Boston mid-morning (beautiful snow falling all around) and made it to Gorham in the afternoon, after about 23 hours in transit. Feels like a miracle that we made it here. Dogs didn’t enjoy the flight, but are still alive and are now in high spirits. Today we went to SEE the house for the very first time! It was mostly just as I expected it, after seeing photos and videos. But I was really struck by how BIG and cold and messed-up it is. It’s like a maze that just goes on and on. The walls are basically totally uninsulated and it was bitter cold today. And it is a mess! A beautiful, rambling shambles. There is so much stuff left behind by the previous tenants; in the ruins of the upstairs ell apartment, the bathtub is filled with baby clothes, a large old beige computer monitor and a smallish plastic christmas tree. The fridge and freezer are still filled with stinking, eight-month old food. In other rooms their traces are fainter, just cigarette burns and half-painted walls. It’s weird and a bit creepy but oh, it’s ours, and filled with possibilities. The room that might be my studio is huge and has six windows and a beautiful peaked ceiling. The dogs went nuts running in the yard, Inga was careening around, crazed by more open grassy space than she’s ever seen in her life.

our custom tiles!

Custom tiles back from the tile factory!

SO EXCITING! these are really heavy… we are shipping them to Maine via boat – I hope we don’t go over our weight limit! The colors aren’t exactly as we wanted, the orange came out as a very pale pinkish color where we’d asked for a more intense pumpkin-orange color… so they look a bit more dusty and washed-out than we had pictured them, but… whatever. I’m sure they’ll look amazing when they’re installed on the floor! Hooray!!

314 Sokokis Ave, Limington, Maine

Deal is done. This is our new house! we’re still trying to get used to this crazy idea.