kitchen walls

We took a big plunge and decided to hire a few contractors to help us get the kitchen up and running. We still want to try and do most everything ourselves, but it felt like a week or two of hired help could help us get a huge kick-start on the kitchen, just to get to the point where we can survive through the winter in here. Consulted our budget (ie. how much money we can borrow from my parents) and decided we could (just barely) afford to hire some help from a carpenter and a plasterer, to get the kitchen walls finished up quickly so we can move on to installing cabinets, counter, sink, all the good stuff! My dad had recently bumped into on old acquaintance named Lynn, a master carpenter who happened to be looking for new projects. And my sister Alicia recommended a plasterer friend, Laura, who had done some good work in their house and could help us whip up some kitchen walls. So we made some phone calls and… Voilà! December began with a house full of skilled tradesmen working away in our house. Lynn and Laura working on the kitchen while Nate and his helper worked away on the bathroom plumbing and basement drainpipes. We can’t afford to have them do a whole lot of work, but they can quickly get a lot of basics finished and get us further along the road! It was weird and fun to spend a few weeks with a crowd of workers in the house, we had to try and stay out of their way so they could work, and I was almost constantly employed in answering zillions of questions about “will you want to put some molding here” or “how do you want this wall to meet the ceiling” or “where should this pipe run” or “can I rip this out” or “should we plaster over this or go around it” etc etc! There were so many questions that we hadn’t thought about – it’s like a full time job just figuring out how to orchestrate and direct the contractors. At night when everybody had gone home, we’d drag two chairs into the empty kitchen and sit by the woodstove eating dinner on our laps, then in the morning we’d have to wake up super early to clear away everything from the kitchen again, drag the chairs and everything out of the worksite and start up the woodstove so it would start to get warm by the time everyone turned up for work. Then once it started snowing we had to clear and sand the driveway every morning so the work vans could get up the driveway. Mike had to stay in the bedroom to work most days, since his workday is filled with conference calls, can’t really do that in the middle of a construction site. The puppy made friends with all of the contractors and clambered all over them while they worked and tried to steal their lunches every day, but had to be locked up in the bedroom with Mike most of the time, or else she certainly would have chopped off the end of her pretty little nosy snout by getting it too close to a sawzall or a drill.

Lynn’s work in the kitchen was mostly getting everything totally finalized and prepared for hanging wallboard – in an old house, no walls are straight, no two wall segments line up quite properly, no doorway is straight, no two pieces of wood are on the same plane. There’s an infinite amount of little discrepancies to be evened out and tidied up. With a plane and impressive speed and skill, Lynn straightened out our doorways, replaced missing studs, missing bits of strapping, made walls level and plane and square, furred-out short bits and sawed off other bits, took out old broken wood and replaced it with new strong wood. We’d done our best to do the pre-wallboard preparation ourselves, but it was remarkable to see how many things we’d missed!

1-inch insulation and strapping on the ceiling, all ready to hang blueboard.

Then Laura and Rick hung blueboard all over. Blueboard is a special wallboard that’s intended for plastering over. Here’s what the kitchen looked like with all the wallboard up – what a dramatic difference!

all done with insulating, now the blueboard is up, and all is ready to plaster!

Work got slowed down with Christmas and then a big snowstorm. Just before New Years, Laura and Rick started to put up the plaster, and finished up in the first week of the new year. The plaster is kind of a mysterious and magical thing. It starts as soup and ends up as rock-hard walls. They had a bit of a struggle to work on the ceiling and walls above our woodstove, as it’s blazing hot and dry up there, and the plaster needs to complete a chemical hardening process before all the water evaporates out of it. We had to spritz the walls lightly with a spray bottle for an hour or two after they finished, to make sure it didn’t dry out too quickly.

all done with plaster!

Laura grew up learning plastering from her father and her grandfather, who were plasterers too. She said when she was just little, she would do the bottom of the walls while her father and grandfather worked on the top part. These days plastering is much less common, most people just do wallboard now, but it works really well for an old, crooked house – it fits with the history of the house, and works nicely up against the exposed beams and it helps to fill in some odd gaps and smooth over some of the irregularities.

Back when we were in the destruction and gutting phase, we found this beautiful huge beam when we ripped out the old wall by the chimney. We’d originally imagined having cabinets along this wall, but then it seemed like a shame to cover up this amazing beam, so in the end we took a few days trying to figure out whether it made sense to do some carpentry and plaster magic to keep it exposed, or just cover it over for the sake of getting work done more quickly. In the end we decided to take the time to expose it and we are really happy with how it looks now!!

before and after.

Historically speaking, this kind of exposed beams are not at all authentic, it has a fun old-timey look but the original house never would’ve had its beams showing like this. We think it looks cool anyway!

priming the kitchen walls

So… early January and we’re ready to paint the walls! This felt like such a huge exciting milestone and we were SO pumped to get started!! but turned into a huge job because the fresh plaster absorbs a TON of paint. It took something like six gallons of primer to cover the whole kitchen. I also had to tape off and mask off ALL of those precious exposed beams, a hellishly tedious process that involved balancing on top of a ladder, sweating in the heat and weirdly contorted to reach the beams overhead, carefully taping along the edges of every beam while wood splinters fall down in my eyes.

taping the ceiling for painting is really annoying

color deliberations, part one

We went through some lengthy indecision about colors, we tested EIGHT different color swatches and ended up liking this light-blue color.

benjamin moore, yarmouth blue

judy helps with painting

kitchen inspiration

we’ve been thinking hard about how to put the kitchen together… we realized that we both really aren’t into the look of a bank of store-bought cabinets, thinking about open shelving instead, not sure what to do under the counter. So anyway we came across this photo that we both love. Of course our kitchen doesn’t have brick walls, and luckily we do have big windows and lots of light, but anyway, i just dig the open shelves and the way a large open kitchen space becomes cozy and simultaneously tidily organized and informal. They have an island too, just like we’re going to. No idea where this image came from. Anyway now I want all those orange (red?) pots and pans!

insulating the kitchen

Sustainable Solutions

we hired Sustainable Structures to blow in dense pack cellulose fiber insulation into all the wall cavities in the kitchen. It made it really warm!!!

all finished and snug as a bug in a rug. they plugged up all the holes with orange spray-foam insulation. there were something like 30 holes around the kitchen.

office / kitchen / livingroom / dining room / construction site

mike at work.

kitchen insulation is all done now, we have someone coming to put up blueboard and plaster the walls within a week or two! at the moment we are spending every waking moment in this room, working and cooking and eating and living and trying to stay warm!

insulation in the kitchen

we worked like crazy this weekend to finish all electrical work in the kitchen, and put up insulation!!! Richard took the day off from work on Friday to help us, and came back on Saturday, and on Sunday, bless his heart for dedicating three entire days to helping us here. Richard finished up the electric stuff on Friday while we started measuring and cutting the insulation. The plan is to use 2″ thick sheets of rigid foam insulation, backed with a shiny foil vapor barrier on both sides. It comes in giant sheets, like 8′ x 3′ which are really unwieldy to handle and make a lot of squeaky noises whenever you move them around, but they are definitely more pleasant to handle than that horrible pink cotton-candy fiberglass batting stuff, ick. Anyway, all exterior walls get covered in these boards of rigid foam insulation, on top of the bare studs. This leaves an approx. 3.5″ cavity between the outside wall of the house and the rigid foam insulation. We’ve hired a company called Sustainable Structures , who my parents ran across at the Common Ground Fair, they will come in a cut holes in the foam board, and blow in a bunch of loose insulation fiber into the wall cavities. They use super-high-pressure blowers so it supposedly fills every last nook and cranny in there, it’s (hopefully) the most efficient way you can insulate these days. The fiber is made from recycled newspaper treated with some kind of stuff to make it moisture-proof, fire-proof and rodent-repellent. Let’s hope it’s as awesome as they say it is.

hanging Typar on the walls

2″ rigid foam sheets

So for the moment our goal is to finish hanging all the rigid foam insulation by Nov. 18th, that’s our date for them to come blow in the dense-pack cellulose insulation fiber. We spent Saturday and Sunday measuring the walls, cutting down the foam to fit each section of walls, marking out where the studs are located (so they know where to cut the holes to blow in the insulation next week) and cutting oddly-shaped holes to fit all the electrical switches and outlet boxes. Since none of our walls or floors or anything is at right angles (old house!) it’s a challenge to custom-cut every piece of insulation to fit every saggy, curvy, weirdly-angled corner of the kitchen. Then measure, cut & screw in strapping every 16″ up the wall, to anchor the insulation in place (and to give us something to hang the wallboard from, when that time comes). Then we need to use foil tape and this crazy orange canned spray foam to patch and fill every last crack and seam and opening. The wall cavity has to be airtight, in order to blow in the insulation. In some places we had to cover the exterior wall with sheets of Tyvek before hanging the insulation, to make it airtight. So at this point we’ve got the entryway / mud-room insulated, and two of the three exterior kitchen walls insulated. Still need to do one more wall, and a lot of spray-foaming. Hoping this week we can fit in a lot of work hours and get it done before next weekend?

Kit, Eliza and Mike at work on the insulation project

putting strapping over giant sheets of 2″ thick rigid foam insulation in the kitchen!

The kitchen feels really different now! Instead of rough, dusty, dark old stained, weathered wooden walls and studs, we now have BRIGHT SHINY foil walls with neat stripes of strapping all over. It certainly looks modern and clean and impressive. But the temperature outside is dropping and the winds are howling, I think it’s 27 degrees out now, and it’s plenty cold and drafty in here. The woodstove is cozy and warm! But you can’t really sit still anywhere more than 12 inches away from the woodstove. We’ve got lots more insulating and wind-proofing work to go!!!

update: 1 week later, we finished all the rigid foam! HOORAY!

putting up strapping over the very last piece of insulation!!!

more structural adjustments

structural adjustments

this is old news, from back in October. Just some photos of another structural adjustment in the kitchen, over the years with the settling of the house this joint had opened up and since we had everything torn open and stripped down to the studs, before we started rebuilding we tried to close up this as much as we could.

once we had tightened it up as best we could, Richard drove in a buncha bolts to keep it in place. They’ll show once the kitchen is finished, since the beam will be exposed.
need to post a photo of the finished beam here!

we have heat!!

We met some new friends that live right down the street in Limerick!! George is a stone mason, and was so sweet to offer us some advice and help with setting up our hearth and stove. He advised us to put some slate slabs under the feet of the woodstove and offered to cut them out for us, using a piece of slate we had lying around in the yard. They are beautiful smooth circles cut from gray slate and look fantastic with our little circular tiles. And then he helped us drag our woodstove over and put on the legs and set the whole thing up in place on the hearth – a HUGE and heavy task!!! which we are so incredibly grateful for!!! So that got done ahead of schedule, on Friday night. On Saturday morning it was so great to wake up and see this beautiful stove sitting on our new hearth, waiting for the first fire! First we had to cut down all the stove pipe bits and wrestle them all into place and cement them together.

Richard helps install the stove pipe; all finished and ready to go!

And then… Sunday morning… our FIRST FIRE! in our brand new wood stove! wow. this is so so so exciting. And cozy and warm. Not a moment too soon, as it was quite a chilly morning. Because it’s a brand-new woodstove, in the first few days we have to burn off some chemicals and stuff in the paint, so we’ve gotta keep all the windows open in the house, and fire it up slowly. Next weekend should be even colder so hopefully we can close all the windows by then.
Just look at that beautiful new woodstove. It’s so handsome! And warm!

Laika supervises our first fire. Note the beautiful little slate circles under each foot of the woodstove!

Kitchen hearth

We’ve started laying the kitchen hearth!!!!! The weather has started getting crisp and cool, and now that we’re living here it feels like time to focus on getting the woodstove in. Evenings are feeling pretty chilly around here. Before we can set up our woodstove we just need to build the hearth to set it on.

So we have these beautiful blue penny tiles that we got back in may. First we looked up size requirements and clearances for our stove. Drew up plans, then taped out the hearth plans at actual size on the floor using green painters’ tape. Ripped out the yucky vinyl flooring in the spots where it was covering up the hardwood flooring. Measured, cut and screwed down cement board.

laying down cement board. with some help from pups.

We were lucky enough to have some handy visitors at this point, so Gaurav’s partner Caroline pitched in and helped out a whole lot! Before mixing the mortar we had to build a temporary wooden frame to keep the edges of our hearth nice and neat. We did a dry run first, just to figure out how all the tiles fit on the hearth. Then mixed the mortar and slathered it all over the cement board, trying to get an even layer all over, which turned out to be a little harder than expected.

Caroline measuring tiles

spreading mortar!

And then laid down the tiles! This also turned out to be a little tricky, and we didn’t get them quite perfect, but we did a pretty good job for a first time. We had to let the mortar dry for a while (we gave it a full 48 hours since the weather’s so rainy) and then mixed up the grout. We picked a greyish color called Sahara Beige. It’s a pretty good match for the tile color, I think. Grouting was fun! The whole project was fun.

laying tiles on the mortar; tiles all set and waiting for grout!

spreading the grout

wiping off the excess

It’s really our first project actually building something finished, rather than just demolishing or doing behind-the-scenes stuff like wiring and plumbing. (that stuff is fun too but the results aren’t quite as spiffy.) Now the fancy-looking hearth looks wildly out of place in our messed-up, gutted old kitchen. I still haven’t really worked out what our kitchen will look like, haven’t decided on paint colors or anything. So I’m a little unsure whether this fancy hearth will fit in with the rest of our kitchen, hopefully it won’t stick out too much.

Now the grout’s dry, I think we need to put on a sealant. Then take up the frame and then set up the wood stove! Hoping to have our first fire by Sunday, when the weather’s supposed to turn cold again. And soon we should put some molding around the edge of th hearth. We’re thinking it should be hardwood so we’ll have to make it ourselves, in my dad’s workshop.

modest progress on many fronts

The past month has been super duper crazy and busy. We spent a lot of time getting ready for the Renegade Craft Fair in Brooklyn, and a lot more time working away at various bits of this big house project.

We had our well water tested and found that it has elevated levels of lead, and coliform bacteria. We’ll need to replace some plumbing to take care of the lead problem, and we will do that eventually, but a temporary solution is to just run the water for a few minutes before drinking. To deal with the coliform, we had to dump about 4 gallons of bleach into our well. String together enough hoses to stretch out into the well, and turn them on full blast – so basically we’re pumping water up out of the well, running it through the pump and piping, through the hoses, and right back into the well again. Just to get that chlorine really spread around. And then the water suddenly turned black! I guess since the well had been unused for a while, there was all kinds of pond scum growing in there and the chlorine broke it up and it came gushing out. So, for the next two weeks our tap water came out black and green and chunky and smelling like chlorine. Yuck! And then finally one day it came out crystal clear and beautiful. We’re still not drinking it, until we get it re-tested and make sure the problem is really gone, but it looks a lot better now!

We’ve also spent a lot of time mowing. We’ve got two acres of grass and fields, the front lawn looks OK but the back forty has become an impassable, un-mowable no-mans-land. We tried mowing it a few times with my parents’ huge heavy-duty mower but I think it’s too far gone, we’re going to need to rent a tractor or something to tackle it.

And of course… I stepped on a rusty nail! I had to go get a tetanus shot. That’s what you get for walking around in crocs. There’s a great health center nearby in Porter and I’m happy I got to meet them.

Richard finally called up the Limington building inspector to have him approve our projects. He was an amiable older fellow, a pretty funny guy, and he mentioned that he’d also considered buying our house about twenty-five years ago, when he first moved to Limington! He loved the place but even then it was in pretty rough condition and he decided it was a bigger project than he wanted to take on. But he seemed happy to find somebody ambitious and foolish enough to take on the challenge. The most interesting tidbit he mentioned is that back when he looked at the property, our front left room was working as a beauty parlor! We had no idea! It did look like it had once housed some kind of business (it has a separate entry, and a recessed, spotlit display area set into one wall) but we never would’ve guessed it was a hair salon. I love how these bits of history unfold here.

richard and eliza, talkin’ bout exposed beams in the kitchen.

Meanwhile… as we’ve been working on the kitchen, we’ve noticed some pretty dramatic angles and sagging in the kitchen floor. So we decided this is the best time to try and even it out a bit. We brought in some extra columns and set them up down in the basement below the kitchen, and each one sits atop a 20-ton hydraulic jack. Each week we raise them up another 1/4 inch, hoping to straighten out some of the sag from that floor.

jacks in the basement. trying to straighten out the kitchen a bit!

Which is a great idea, but it caused some repercussions up in the kitchen: a noticeable sag in the beam over the doorway that leads to the dining room. At some point in the past, that doorway was widened, and the big support beam above it was damaged but no additional support was added to redistribute the weight. It was probably saggy to begin with, and our jacking seemed to cause more sagging, as the two beams on either side push up into the floor above, and nothing pushes in the center. We like the wide doorway (and even widened it some more!) but didn’t like the sagging beam overhead so we’ve sistered it with some other beams and placed temporary columns across the open doorway to even out the pressure of the jacking. We salvaged some big old heavy beams (maybe 10″ by 10″?) that came from my parents’ 1700′s farmhouse and had been sitting unused in the basement since their most recent renovation.

jacking the kitchen doorway

We fitted one directly underneath the compromised beam, horizontally above the doorway, and then fitted two others vertically on either end to hold it up. Sort of a Stonehenge type arrangement. If this doesn’t hold then we might need to switch to a steel support beam, but these big old wood beams are much prettier so I hope it’ll work.

At the same time, we’ve been doing some work in the bathrooms… In the downstairs bathroom, Paz helped us smash out this wall! which used to separate the laundry room from a closet, now the spaces will be combined into one big bathroom.

bathroom wall destruction, and plumbing.

And we’ve been on a plumbing adventure which began with relocating the waste pipe (coming down from the upstairs toilet) and involved temporarily uprooting our only functioning toilet, plus lots of in-depth plumbing lessons from Richard! I think we’re learning a lot. And although we are unfortunately spending a few weeks without indoor plumbing, the end result should be a properly vented and thus better-functioning toilet, a WORKING SHOWER, and more convenient placement of the pipes, plus a hook-in spot where we will attach the vent line for the downstairs bathroom appliances, in due time. While we have the toilet pulled out, I’m taking the opportunity to remove all the vile, stinky, filth-sodden flooring that surrounded it. Hooray and good riddance!

Back in the kitchen: we’ve finished gutting everything and we’re slowly, slowly starting the rebuilding! Mike and Richard have been doing electrical wiring lessons and we’ve planned out where all outlets and appliances will be located, and installed all of the outlet boxes!

outlet boxes are all installed!

Also in the kitchen, we noticed during the destruction that a lot of rodents have made their homes in our ceiling and walls over the years. We would like to prevent this in the future, so we need to seal up EVERY opening in the kitchen walls. I’ve been cutting heavy-duty hardware cloth screening to fit over every opening and stapling it firmly in place. Then we will attempt to fill the holes with spray foam insulation. Might even cram a bit of steel wool into the bigger holes for good measure.

rodent-proofing the kitchen

And… then there’s the never-ending chore of packing up wooden lath to use for kindling.

a giant pile of lath

Every wall in our house is made of plaster over wooden lath; most of them need to be torn down to put in insulation and modern electrical wiring, etc. Since we’ll be heating primarily with the wood stove, we save the old wood lath to chop up and use as kindling in the woodstove. Great stuff for starting fires but it’s a huge job to cut it all down and pack it up in boxes for the winter. It took me basically two whole weeks to chop it all up and pack it away. And then, of course, as soon as we need to smash out another wall, there will be more lath to chop up and pack away. But I think we’ll be grateful for it when the cold winter comes!

finally! a table and chairs

We got a great new kitchen table & chairs for $15, at a yard sale down the street. We can’t put them in the kitchen yet because we don’t really have a kitchen at the moment, but they fit nicely here in the livingroom and make the place feel a lot more cozy and civilized. (In the same morning of yard-saling we also found an extra wooden chair, an old rocking chair for the porch, a small fifties-looking wooden cabinet, a hand-truck for carrying heavy stuff, a stack of old country LP’s, and a cute summery blouse with stripes and puffy sleeves! What a good morning. )

Weekend progress

it’s starting to feel like spring!

What else is new? I think we’ve finished removing all the lath from the kitchen! We had to break it and saw it away from the walls so we can get in there to run electrical wiring and insulate. It’s perfect for use as kindling in the woodstove; I sorted and boxed it up neatly to pack it away til the fall. Did lots of clean-up and organizing that’s made the place feel more civilized and house-like; our work spaces had gotten completely chaotic with all the destruction and debris and activity and no place to store things. I got a cheapo wire shelving unit to help hold some clutter, and we dragged in a work bench from the ell to use for storage and work space in the dining room which has become our de facto workshop room. We dismantled the cabinets from one of the apartments in the ell, we will clean those up and refinish them and use them for our new kitchen. Dragged the counter tops and sink off to the dump. Found a rickety set of four bar stools at the dump and brought them home. It was a good week for free stuff; we also found a cool wooden crate (dated 1905) in the dump, found a sweet little old wooden chair by the side of the road with a “free” sign, and on craigslist we found a free working electric organ! It’s a really kitschy 1970′s looking thing, it’s no piano but it is pretty hilarious to look at and fun to play with- we plugged it in and it really plays!

kindling boxes, our new electric organ!

We also stopped by Pete’s Place salvage yard in Hollis and got a few extra storage crates, they’re beautiful old wooden soda crates, and a vintage wire card rack for me to sell my cards at craft fairs. It’s pretty fun having a pickup truck and a whole empty house to fill up!!

pete’s place salvage in Hollis

Pulled up the carpeting in the area that will become our new bathroom, and knocked out some of the back wall there. Mike mowed the lawn for the first time! And stapled down most of the invisible dog fence line that runs around the property perimeter. Now we need to start the tedious process of training the beasts to understand and respect it. And… I did some more work on the kitchen planning. I’ve been working on some floor plans but I felt like we needed to see a sketch of what the room will actually look like… it’s a hack job but this is what I’ve got so far. Don’t laugh!

And… the rhubarb patch is starting to look pretty impressive! Time for pie, really soon.

rhubarb and blackflies, mike & dogs in the back yard