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.

IT FLUSHES!

toilet: before and after

Exciting bathroom progress: I finally got this stinking toilet clean! It took me a few months of hard labor and experimenting with different cleaning products. I started by putting on rubber gloves and throwing away the ghastly toilet seat, then over the course of a few months I tried scrubbing it with toilet bowl cleaner, soaking it in bleach, dumping in vinegar, and scrubbing it with more cleaners (sequentially, not all at once). Each effort produced slight improvements but the real winning trick was to wait until it was disconnected (and therefore empty), then scrub the living hell out of it with a pumice stone and liberal doses of Ajax. Why did I waste so much time on this thing, instead of throwing it away and replacing it as any normal person would’ve done? I guess I hate to waste something that could be saved. I’m on a tight budget. And once I’d wasted a few afternoons scrubbing it I just refused to accept defeat and had to keep scrubbing until I conquered it. Today I declare victory!
But the best part is: it is now reconnected and it works!! The most satisfying thing about this whole weekend was completing the plumbing updates so that we once again have indoor plumbing. Just as we were re-installing the toilet, I discovered a pair of childrens’ scissors lodged in the drainpipe! Glad I caught that. Explains why it wasn’t working so well.

baby’s first plumbing project! it took me a ridiculous amount of time and thought and trial-and-error and labeling and marking and color-coding (and infinite amounts of help from my dad) to figure out how to run the pipes and fit all the pieces together. But it was worth it because it WORKS.

I also improved the bathroom by ripping out all the flooring. It’s a shame because it was sort of new and relatively decent (compared to the rest of the house, that is) but it had such an unholy stink. You don’t even want to think about it. Now the flooring is all out and the smell is basically gone. The subfloor seems to be in decent condition, not too stinky, though I’m treating it with a hydrogen peroxide-baking-soda odor removal treatment just to be thorough.

refinishing the front door

Judy sanding down the front door

Judy’s been working away at the front door! Every day she takes it off the hinges and lays it out to work… first she stripped off most of the lead paint using a soy based stripper (supposedly less toxic ) and then she started sanding away the remaining bits, stopping to vacuum up the lead dust every few minutes. The wood underneath is so beautiful! We think we’ll keep the grain exposed on the inside of the door, and paint the outside of the door Portsmouth Spice (a dusty pumpkiny kind of color) to match the beautiful side door (which she also refinished over the winter!) Every day at the end of work, we have to re-hang the front door on its hinges, it looks nicer already!

door before … door in progress

studio

I have been working like mad on the new house! So much to do, and the summer is flying by already…

studio room: before

We picked a big room upstairs from the kitchen to be my studio. It’s got six beautiful windows and lots of open space. On the negative side, the floor is in bad shape, it’s got damaged old wood planks with a few big gaps where you can see through to the kitchen below, all covered over by vinyl flooring which is peeling and curling and torn away in a few spots, then covered in some places with a second layer of peeling and curling vinyl, it’s hideous. And the walls are covered with seventies-style fake wood paneling which someone partially painted forest green and then gave up and just punched a few holes through the wall instead of finishing the paint job. They even painted over a few random sections of the cruddy brown trim with what looks like black nail polish.

ugh.

I don’t need my studio to be very fancy at all, it’s just a place for making messes anyway, and we’re supposed to be focusing our renovation efforts on the kitchen and bathroom downstairs, so the studio is like the last priority for real renovations. But the ugly splotches of green paint were going to drive me crazy, so I decided to do a quick and dirty paint job just to give the place a little bit fresher look.

first order of business: cover up those crazy patches of green paint. I can’t possibly concentrate on work if I have to look at that crazy paint job all day.

I even primed everything and then painted it all some historic shade of greenish-blue. (I will admit that I have a strong urge to paint EVERYTHING in the whole house greenish-blue or bluish-green or robins-egg blue or dusty aqua or anything along those lines. I am going to have to use a lot of self control to avoid making the whole house look like a swimming pool.) Anyway, I haven’t totally finished painting but it’s looking a lot better already. I was in a rush to get working so I could print up a bunch of t-shirts and new cards for the Renegade Craft Fair, so I had to start filling up the studio and working in it even before the painting was done. I swear I am going to finish the paint job soon!

it’s not all painted yet, but at least one entire wall is done…

silkscreen printing table

silkscreen set up! My first screen made using my new light table!

I found some small shelves for free on craigslist, and got some more cheap sturdy shelves at a big box store (ugh). Shelving is the one thing I can never find used at the salvation army or on craigslist. My parents gave me a beautiful, incredibly heavy, big long work table (I think maybe an old army mess table?) which they’d in their basement for eons. The table-top is too rough to print on directly, so I made a portable printing station with a smooth, flat slab of wood and silkscreening hinges. I covered the wood with a layer of clear acetate so it’ll be easier to keep the surface clean. For drawing at my worktable, I found a super comfy giant office chair by the side of the road in Limington. For drying printed t-shirts, I strung a clothesline across the back of the studio and tied little loops for hanging clothes hangers at regular intervals. For drying printed cards, I found a beautiful folding drying rack by the side of the street in White Rock, what luck! (I have a sharp eye for free stuff, right?) The biggest studio project was the light box which I need for exposing photo-sensitive emulsion to create my silkscreen stencils. It’s just two long fluorescent shop-light fixtures inside of a big box, on legs, with a thick sturdy glass tabletop. I built one a few years ago when I was setting up my first studio in New York, and it took me a few days in the workshop with my dad’s help. But this time I whipped it up in just one day, in my dad’s workshop, with just a little help from Mike to screw in the light fixtures that evening. And it works!

building my new light table (in Richard’s workshop) … and the finished product!

At the moment I’m using the icky, windowless downstairs bathroom as my darkroom though I would like to eventually build a little darkroom in the closet attached to my studio, I just need to do some major clean-up in there, and hang a door. And I’m using the garden hose for all my washing-up needs, but one day soon we will get running water and plumbing in the studio! I found a utility sink in the back yard at limington (perfect!), and my parents have been trying to get us to take this old claw-foot tub that’s been sitting in their back yard in Gorham for thirty or forty years at least. I think the tub and sink will go side-by-side on the back wall of the studio, by the chimney. I can use the sink for cleaning up small stuff like paintbrushes, and the tub will be excellent for washing out big screens. And gorgeous too. I am going to have such a great wash-up station! The studio’s definitely not finished but it is really exciting to have ONE room in the house that is actually functional. I spent a lot of hours in there during the past few weeks, working late into the night. It’s a great space already.

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

Slow motion kitchen

Feels like things have been moving slowly these past few weeks. Lots of things have happened but so much remains to do! We’re STILL ostensibly working on the kitchen, but I think we’ve spent equal time working on other various projects lately. So the kitchen still needs more destruction before we can start rebuilding! After tearing out the counters and cabinets we got the sink out and saved it, thinking we may reuse it. It’s not pretty but it works.

we got the sink out!

We’ve gotten wallboard and insulation off two and a half walls, one more wall left to tear out. We need to strip down to the studs on all exterior walls so we can put in new insulation, as the existing insulation looks at least 40 years old and a lot of the old pink fiberglass batting has been eaten away by critters. (how hungry do you have to be to eat fiberglass?!)

left: smashing things is fun! right: peeling away an entire sheet of wallboard

Once we got most of the walls gone, we realized we wanted to take down the ceiling too. It didn’t look too bad in the first place, but once we started poking around in there, we found that billions of rodents (probably rats and chipmunks, maybe mice, who knows what else!) had been living above our ceiling and eating the delicious pink fiberglass insulation, chowing on birdseed and sunflower seeds and piling their empty shells everywhere, building cozy nests filled with chewed-up old shirts and shiny things (mainly quarters and candy wrappers!) and peeing and pooping everywhere. Once we got up on ladders and got close to the ceiling we noticed it really did smell like a rat bathroom. Yuck! So we decided to tear it all down.

pulling down the kitchen ceiling

It was nasty work, you’d get a crowbar under one edge of the wallboard and start to pry, and then maybe you’d have to pry out 5 or 6 nails before it would budge, or maybe you’d just pry one nail and whoosh… without any warning the whole thing would come crashing down, sending the dogs running in terror and showering a massive load of shredded fiberglass, sunflower seeds, rodent shit and chewed sunflower shells all over your head. We took to wearing old parkas with the hoods up while working on the ceiling so that at least the sunflower seeds couldn’t go down the back of our necks and leave us shaking chipmunk debris out of our shirts and pants all day.

a sudden cascade of sunflower seeds and rodent-related debris

bare ceiling after we got all the wallboard and insulation and chipmunk nests removed!

really scary old wiring revealed when we pulled away all the insulation

We bought our new woodstove!!! We figured that spring was the best time to get a good price on a wood stove. We were tempted to get an old one, but we’re hoping to use the woodstove as our primary heat throughout the long Maine winters (we do have an oil burning furnace in the basement but we only want to use it for back-up), so we felt it would be best to get the most modern, efficient woodstove possible. We ended up going for a welded steel Regency woodstove, it’s not pretty like the old-time cast iron stoves but it has a nice big firebox so that we can load it up and only have to feed it a few times a day, not every few hours, and hopefully it will even burn through the night until morning! Also, the new woodstoves burn much more efficiently, wasting less energy and causing less air pollution and less creosote build-up in the chimney, so they’re just cleaner and safer. And I don’t mind the modern look too much!

the new woodstove, peeling back the layers on the chimney

Now that we’ve got the woodstove, we need a chimney. The kitchen chimney had been cut off at some point (probably when the roof was replaced) so it needs to be rebuilt from the second floor up through the roof, and lined and insulated (for safety) and we need a new thimble installed in the kitchen for the woodstove to plug into. We’ve met with a mason and he should be coming back to do the job within a few weeks! So we needed to expose the brick chimney, which had been covered with wallboard. Behind the wallboard we found a frame of 2x4s, behind that many many layers of old wallpaper covering an inch of horse-hair plaster which Mike chiseled off very carefully to reveal the bricks and mortar.

Meanwhile… we’ve also spent a ton of time working on dog fencing. We’re installing invisible dog fencing around the entire perimiter of our 2 acre lot plus our next-door-neighbor’s 1-acre lot. She has three dogs! And we figured it would be impossible and annoying to try and keep them apart, so it’s best to have them all share one fence system so they can play together. We’re so glad to have great neighbors who are into doing stuff and sharing stuff together! Our dream is to let the dogs run around our giant back yard anytime, without having to worry that they’ll run into the busy street in front of our house. They’ll have the whole back yard but they won’t be allowed in the front yard (near the street), only as far as the front porch. Here’s hoping they will enjoy the backyard and not sit on the front porch and bark at passing cars all day… It’s a pretty long process to map out the edges of our property, run electric wire around the whole perimeter and staple it down or bury it, and meanwhile it takes at least a month to train the dogs to understand and respect the invisible fence (they wear collars that beep, then shock(!) if they go near the invisible perimeter). We’ve been training on the fence system that’s already installed at my parents’ house in Gorham and I think they’ve pretty much got it down pat already!

Beatrice is one of the dogs next door! She’s an English Sheepdog puppy, like a crazy happy muppet! She comes to visit us a lot.

And… stacking next winter’s firewood in the sunshine. Still another cord and a half to go. Best to get it done before the weather gets hot.

seasoned wood is already stacked, now we’re working on the green wood.

bathroom plumbing!

meanwhile, Richard has been working to get water running in the upstairs bathroom, and simultaneously prepare the pipes for our new downstairs bathroom, which will be relocated to sit directly under the upstairs bathroom. (easy, right? That way the pipes are all in the same area!)

new copper pipes, a makeshift sink arrangement

We had no running water in the house because the pipes had split and burst at some point in the past. The pipes running to the bathroom were all broken PVC so Richard replaced those with copper, and we got to sit in and learn some tricks about soldering and fitting pipes too! Right now our plan is to have the horrible little bathroom upstairs functional for now (we’ve already got a working toilet up there and Mike and Richard rigged up this makeshift sink using a length of flex-hose and a bent coat-hanger to shape it into a spout!!), and just use the upstairs bathroom until we’ve finished building our downstairs bathroom. Unfortunately the upstairs bathroom was really REALLY disgusting and no matter how much I clean it and bleach everything, it still smells like pee in there