building new front steps

before: no door, no steps

When we first got here we were using the back door (complete with “no trespassing” sign) as the main entrance; then back in November we finally installed a beautiful new door from the kitchen onto the porch, and we switched over to using the new door all the time despite a lack of steps – we would just leap up from the driveway onto the porch and in through the new door. Winter came and the snow piled up so high it reached the porch and you didn’t miss the steps at all. But come spring thaw, the absence was notable and if you happened to be carrying something big or heavy, you’d have to stop and set it down on the porch in order to hop up; visitors wondered which door to knock on, since the lack of steps was not exactly inviting. So, time to build some steps.

first cuts on the bandsaw

starting to assemble the pieces

screwing the pieces together

this was a fun and quick project! after the demanding challenge of the cabinetry project, it was nice to do something so snappy an easy. here’s the almost-finished steps in situ:

we’re happily using the steps now, but we’re not totally done here, the next stage will be to take the steps out, dig up the ground underneath and pour some proper cement footing, then fill in the area with crushed rock or something, put the steps back in and then paint them white! Maybe someday we could even add a railing.

improving the guest room!

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…

before: yucky carpet and battle-scarred walls

before: found graffiti, carved into the guest room wall!

half way there… new comforter cover / walls are patched and primed but still unpainted

took apart the guest room to fix and paint the walls.

painting the guest room!

“after” photos to come next week… stay tuned!

kitchen progress

here are some newer photos of the kitchen becoming more kitcheny and inhabited.

feels like things have been moving slowly here, but we have been plugging away on the cabinets, bit by bit. Actually Richard is putting in a lot of hours on the cabinets – he’s building the drawers and we’re supposed to be doing the cabinet cases but we’ve fallen behind a bit. Tomorrow I will hopefully put in some good long hours in the workshop and get caught up!

working on cabinets

for the first set of drawers, Richard experimented with different construction techniques, each of these drawers is a bit different! We weren’t sure whether it would work to use wooden runners and forego the metal hardware. The benefit of runners is that they make your drawers move smoothly and easily (even if the drawer construction is a bit imprecise or imperfect); the drawbacks are that they’re kind of ugly, they’re kind of expensive and they reduce the size of the drawer. We talked it over and we really just love the simplicity and integrity of all-wood construction, without the ugly modern metal hardware, and since we’ve got Richard’s expert skills and we’re not mass-producing this stuff, we can attempt to make all of our drawers so tidy and perfect that they will slide easily on wooden runners without wheels. You can put a bit of special wax on the wooden runners to help the drawers slide more easily.

Judy and Paprika celebrating our new cabinets!

Here’s the first set of drawers, installed next to the beautiful sink cabinet! We did load up those drawers with heavy silverware and dishes and they still slide quite nicely. In this picture we had mis-matching drawer knobs on the drawers; we’ve since changed them all to the smaller size which looks much better! I ought to post a more recent photo here but the kitchen is a total mess at the moment so it’ll have to wait. Now that we’ve got the stove and sink installed and everything, I am so absolutely chuffed that I can finally COOK again, for real! It’s been almost a year since I had my own kitchen to cook in!! So I’ve been baking a bit, and really obsessed with making fruit smoothies every morning (I know that doesn’t sound like cooking, but when you have no countertops to cut on or sink to rinse fruits and clean up, it’s just not that easy to chop up fruits every morning!), and on a total pizza-making kick. We got a bread machine at a yardsale last year and I finally dusted it off and tried it out, it makes up some delicious pizza dough for me to play with. In general I feel like I’m just wildly appreciative of some really basic kitchen pleasures and amenities that one would ordinarily take for granted.

hooray for cooking again

exciting kitchen progress

here’s the finished sink cabinet

now we’ve got the first cabinet box done, we get to really start moving in, and install our beautiful countertop and sink!! Mike unpacked our lovely cherry butcherblock countertop and started giving it a tung-oil treatment that should protect it against water and stains and stuff. Basically just painting on lots of oil and then rubbing it off with a rag a few minutes later and repeat once a day for a few days.

before and after – the tung oil really changes the color.

Then we had to do a bit of work to get the sink ready. Because it was an old salvaged sink (from Pete’s Place in Hollis), we had to use a wire brush to scrub off some rust from the bottom side and then paint over it with some smelly white rust-oleum type stuff.

salvaged sink took a bit of repair work before using.

Then dropped the counter into place and trimmed the edges/corners to fit snugly against our not-straight kitchen wall, then cut out the hole to fit the sink in.

cutting the sink hole into the countertop

And then… the sink goes in! hooray!!!

this is the old faucet, we have a slightly nicer one that we’re going to replace it with

Now we just need to get the sink hooked up and we’ll have a real kitchen!! We dragged in the fridge too, and Mike sealed and finished the counters. Cooking dinner is SO much easier and funner now, and it’s going to be such a delight when the sink is working too.

whoo! we’re on our way

cabinets

We had a tough time deciding what to do for cabinets. Thought about rescuing/restoring the old ones we found in one of the ruined apartments in our ell, but those were in bad shape, and kind of cheap and depressing to begin with. I did a bit of shopping around to mass-market cabinet places, home depot etc, and found absolutely all of the new cabinets to be really ugly and way too expensive. So, because we’re crazy, we decided to BUILD OUR OWN CABINETS instead! As if we didn’t have enough projects to work on.

starting the kitchen cabinets in my dad’s workshop

My dad is a very handy carpenter and has a nicely fitted-out woodworking shop that is just perfect for such a project. We set to reading all kinds of books and articles about cabinetry. Richard has a very organized collection of woodworking magazines that have advice and project directions and everything, and Mike got us some exhaustively detailed DIY cabinetry books. It was all kind of dizzying and overwhelming to me, but Richard is really in his element here, and he managed to sort out all the options and explain most of it to us. We now know the difference between dadoes and rabbets, pocket screws and biscuit joints, plywood and laminates, shaker style cabinets, colonial, modern, european, etc etc! Richard got to buy some fun new tools for his shop, and jumped right in to experimenting with different materials and joinery. We figured out what seemed like the easiest and most attractive construction, a super-simple shaker style cabinet with pocket screws and biscuit joints.

Richard and Mike at work on the first cabinet

It took us about a full weekend’s worth of work to get the first one, the under-sink cabinet put together. A lot of setting up workstations and jigs, drawing plans, spatial thinking and painstaking carefulness. I never could attain this degree of carefulness on my own, but that’s where Richard is helpful, he’s absoultely meticulous, as a carpenter should be.

cabinet plans, clamping everything

This project has honestly been one of the funnest parts of the whole house so far, it’s really exciting so far and it’s been so great to spend time in the shop with Richard, learning new stuff and making this amazingly beautiful and tidy thing. Hopefully it will be just as fun to finish the cabinets – we’ve only just begun, lots more work to go!

mike drills in pocket screws for our first cabinet! This is the under sink cabinet on the workbench in my dad’s woodshop.

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

bathroom floor

we are working on the downstairs bathroom today, putting in a new wood floor! will post photos soon. HERE ARE THE PHOTOS!

laying the first planks … and then a day later, almost finished!

we found a pretty good deal on the white oak flooring. we had originally decided to do native Maine slate tiles, but I got worried that the slate would feel dreadfully cold underfoot, and I am such a wuss about cold. especially in and around the bathtub. at first I was hesitant about using wood in the bathroom (because of all the moisture) but Judy and Richard have wood floors in both of their bathrooms and they love it, it holds up well, and they don’t seem to do any crazy kind of maintenance to keep it up. Just don’t leave standing water on the floor all the time. And it looks beautiful in their house, both Mike and I liked the idea (we are trying to make all decisions by consensus and luckily, so far we can usually find something we both agree upon)! Richard recommended white oak (which is what they used in their bathrooms) because it is a naturally water-resistant wood that’s commonly used for boatbuilding. So now it’s just a few planks away from being all finished and it looks SO FANTASTIC! ♥ ♥ ♥

cutting planks of wood to fit

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!!!

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.