spring clean-up

yuck.

Now that the snow’s melted, the yard is looking ghastly. Mud, dead grass, all that crap and garbage we forgot about when the snow hid it in the fall. There was just a lot of flotsam and jetsam scattering the yard when we moved in last year – dozens of big plastic toys, two deflated swimming pools, all kinds of old tires, metal roofing pieces blown off from the deteriorating barn, etc. We started hauling away some of it last year, but there’s still a lot left. Anyway, we decided this summer’s going to be the summer of cleaning up the yard! Last week we made a few good trips to the dump…

headed for the dump

Definitely still need to haul a few more big truckloads off to the dump. Also next week we’re planning to rent a brush hog mower to tackle the explosion of brambles and wild jungle in the back forty (last summer we tried to tackle it with a big-time mower and had to give up as we nearly broke the machine!) and hopefully our little wilderness of thistles and burrs will become a nice soft barefoot-friendly lawn. We’ll see how that goes – although we might not be able to improve the exterior of the house just yet, I hope we can make some progress on cleaning up the land.

We also took the first warm afternoon to work on our underground dog fence, which got messed up by the snowplow near the end of winter. The dog fence is such a blessing when it works, but it’s been a hassle to maintain – hopefully we dug it deep enough this time that it won’t need to be fixed again for a long time.

digging up the driveway to replace a section of the underground dog fence

tiling the mudroom

so we FINALLY got to put in our lovely Argentine encaustic tiles on the mudroom floor. We’ve been working away on the mudroom, slowly, for a loooonnng time and we bought these tiles over a year ago, before we moved from Buenos Aires! So this has been a long time coming! And it feels great to finally have them down.

first I made a grid… then laid out all the tiles for a dry fitting.

cutting the tiles to fit the space turned out to be a big challenge. we built a little wooden jig to help us cut the tiles neatly.

cutting cement tiles is messy business

laying down mortar and tiles

all done!

I did grout them and now we just need to scrub them and seal them and they’ll be done! I have to say that they are not totally perfect, the surface is a bit uneven but… hey, I did my best – I think it’s going to work fine!

a new door for the guest room

We’re expecting our first wintertime guest, hooray!! Which means it’s time to put a proper door on the guest room so we can put a little heater in there and make it hospitably warm. We have like 20 assorted doors piled up in our ell, but after measuring all of them, we found that none of them were the right dimensions to fit the guest room doorway. So we headed off to search for a door at our favorite bargain architectural salvage spot, Pete’s Place.

a visit to Pete’s Place after a few blizzards. We were kind of amazed to find Pete open for business even in the snowiest depths of winter!

we had to dig and wallow through hip-high snow to find a new (used) door for the guest room.

Pete was super cheery and helpful and actually fired up his tractor to snowplow a path for us so we could haul our new door back to the car.

new door in snow, and hung on the hinges in our house!

hanging a new door in an old house is a pretty big piece of work, as there are no right angles involved, everything is completely crooked! Mike and Richard spent most of a weekend working on this, planing and trimming the door and replacing parts of the doorframe in order to set in hinges and strike plate, etc etc. it’s all set now, keeping the bedroom toasty warm (and keeping the pe(s)ts out too).

Downstairs bathroom

Around November we decided to focus on the downstairs bathroom and try to hurry up and get it working asap. We brought in Laura (wallboard and plaster) and Lynn (carpentry) and Nate (plumbing) to look at the situation. We thought we’d finished the demolition phase, but they all said we still needed to do more demolition work before they could get started! So we laid down cardboard and plastic sheets to protect our beautiful new white oak floors, and dragged in garbage cans and crowbars and set to ripping out all the rest of the old plaster and lath. Tearing down old plaster is getting really old, it’s so dusty and gritty and icky. Also, of course (as we have now learned to expect), behind every old wall in our house is a huge stinky rats nest or squirrel nest or something, matted wads of urine-stinking filthy batting and shreds of old clothes and candy wrappers and cascades of turds and birdseed that all comes crumbling down among the plaster chunks, raining upon your face when you take out an old wall. I’ve learned to put on a hooded sweatshirt, dust mask, goggles, gloves, and cinch the hood all around my face when I’m doing this work, but I still come away picking plaster crumbs out of my clothes and birdseed out of my ears and feeling like I need a shower. Anyway, we got it all out of the bathroom now!

before

during

after (all done with demolition, ready to start rebuilding!)

close up on giant rat nest

Then Lynn set to work furring out some walls to get them ready for hanging wallboard, framing out some areas to run the pipes through. The thing about old houses is that they were never intended to have plumbing in them, so it can be hard to find (or make) a place to run the pipes through. It was kind of a big consensus decision to figure that out, with input from plumber, carpenter, myself, mike, Judy and Richard. Got it all worked out and drafted some plans and directions for the workers to refer to. I started working in Google Sketchup to try and imagine how best to fit all the pieces together.
Then Nate (plumber) came in with his trusty assistant and set to work ripping out all our old plumbing (including the beautiful plumbing work I did myself over the summer, this was heartbreaking!) and laying in fresh, tidy pex in its place.

tidy lines of pex (heating pipes, hot and cold water and drain pipe to upstairs bathroom) and washer/dryer hookup

plumbers also did a bunch of work in the basement, had to replace the entire waste line as it was archaic and rusty cast-iron, quite difficult to join drains into it, and too narrow for modern codes. And they hooked up an old radiator in the basement, we were getting worried about the cold weather and frozen pipes in the basement so we had them hook that up to the furnace to keep the basement above freezing temperature.

Meanwhile Lynn got the bathroom all squared-away and ready for hanging wallboard! Strapping and studs on walls and ceiling. We’re going to have exposed beams on the bathroom ceiling too, as the beams in there are really gorgeous and huge, like 12″ square and very handsome.

carpentry all finished, ready to hang wallboard!

Meanwhile, Laura (the plasterer) was working away on the kitchen. In the end, it turned out that after tallying up the cost of all this work we really don’t have enough cash to have Laura do wallboard and plaster in the bathroom, as we had initially planned! So the question is: do we hang blueboard ourselves, and then have Laura do the plaster over it? Do we hang greenboard ourselves, and skip the plaster? (this would be the cheaper choice.) Do we just go ahead and install and connect the toilet, sink, bathtub and all the appliances in the bathroom now, without having any proper walls, and then at a later date remove the appliances, do the walls, and replace the appliances? Or do we put the bathroom on hold for the moment, until we’ve got a working kitchen, and then return to the bathroom, do the walls, and then install the toilet and everything once the walls are finished?
We ended up going with the last choice. We had originally thought we’d be closing off the 2nd floor for the winter and moving our bed into the diningroom or something. But we just never really got so cold that it seemed worth the bother. So it turns out it’s fine having our only bathroom on the 2nd floor. It would be great to have a downstairs bathroom too, but it doesn’t seem as urgent anymore. And now we’re excited about working on the kitchen instead, so… for the moment the downstairs bathroom has moved to the back burner. I think we’ll hang greenboard in there eventually, we’ll do it ourselves and then get the appliances in, and it will be fantastic whenever it happens.

workshop

just a gratuitous messy-workshop photo.

moving in!?

dining table, fall foliage

On August 25th we finally got the HOT WATER turned on! It took a long time because first we had to fix all the plumbing and get the correct pipes replaced and connected to carry hot water up to the 2nd floor bathroom (and not to anywhere else – we did have a little mix-up where a six-foot geyser came spurting out of the floor downstairs!) and then once we had the plumbing ready it took a few weeks to get our plumber out to set up the hot water heater. We have this fabulously complicated, fancy furnace that is equipped to heat the whole house with hot-water radiators (too bad every single one of those radiators is broken at the moment!) and the hot water heater is hooked up to this furnace. So finally the date came, the plumber came, we finally got the furnace serviced and started up, and the hot water heater started to do its magic. And with that… we were able to move in! Just in time to enjoy the bright fall foliage and plummeting temperatures.

We already had moved a lot of our stuff in, so it just took one car trip to bring a bunch of clothes and dog beds stuff. We’d already been sleeping over on weekends, but now that we can take showers so we get to sleep here all the time. The bedroom has gotten kind of homey and cozy, we hung up some tentative curtains and tacked a few pictures on the wall. And now we live here!

kinda moved in

We still don’t have a real kitchen, just a microwave, toaster, hotplate and fridge, so we’re eating lots of apples, toast, soup, Amy’s Organic frozen dinners, takeout salad bar, italians, pizza, etc. The worst thing at the moment is that our well water still has high levels of bacteria – we’ve tried to shock it with bleach but it didn’t work. We need to mess around with the plumbing a bit, and try bleaching the well again. Til then we have to use bottled water for drinking, brushing teeth, cooking, etc. And we can’t wash our dishes with the tap water! Ugh. So every few days we pop over to my mom’s house with a basket full of dirty dishes and a bag full of dirty laundry, and do our washing-up at her house. It’s not so bad but it’s not exactly a convenient arrangement

My sister Amy gave us a fridge so we were able to set up a little temporary kitchen!

Mike’s got a new job now, he’s working from home too – so that’s pretty perfect! We each have our little office, side by side upstairs, the puppy sits under our desks while we work (or destroys everything in the room, depending on her mood) and we get to take breaks and go walk the dog in the woods together, it’s so cute and nice!

guest room

It feels good, and also a bit weird and tentative, to be finally living here. It’s great because we have our own space and that’s awesome. It feels like the house progressed slowly over the summer – there have been so many distractions and other things to do, we are hoping that now we actually are LIVING here it will help us to get more work done on the house. But it’s not exactly the Ritz, we’re definitely roughing it. The water thing sucks. We don’t have glass in all our windows at the moment. The weather’s getting chilly. We do own a woodstove and we just need to build the hearth and hook up the stove to the chimney, so it could be running within a week or two if we get to work! And as the weather gets colder we will hopefully get the electric wiring finished in the kitchen, so we can start to put in insulation on the walls, and then it should start to get cozy and warm in there.

We’re racing against the cold now, and I’m not entirely certain that we’re going to make it – if we can’t get the insulation in the kitchen, get the downstairs bathroom functional (right now it’s just an empty room, nothing else!), and get the second floor closed off for the winter, then I guess we’ll need to just pack up our goods, drain all the pipes and move back in with my parents for the winter. Which wouldn’t be so terrible – but we’re hoping we can stay here and make it through the winter! So… the race is on. Next steps: hearth, woodstove, electric wiring in the kitchen, then put up insulation and wallboard… and start putting down a floor in the downstairs bathroom… and on and on and on!

Firewood

stacking wood

Despite the godawful sweltering heatwave this week, we’ve been thinking about the coming winter and how to store up enough firewood to get by. We’ve got this marvelous high-efficiency, clean-burning woodstove (or so the salesman said; we haven’t tested it out yet) and we’re planning to close off most of the house and only heat two or three rooms, so we think we can get through the winter with around three to five cords of wood. Earlier in the summer we stacked our first cord neatly and moved on to our next shipment of wood, two cords green wood. Before we got through the second pile, the first one fell over! Argh.

wood stack fell over

So I started scheming… How to make a nice solid woodstack with minimal effort? Richard recommends a row of three cinder blocks on the bottom, each one dug into a little hole and leveled, then two lengths of pressure-treated lumber atop the cinder blocks. This gives a nice level footing and keeps the bottom of your stack up out of the dirt so they don’t get all rotten. I decided to add on vertical endpieces, like bookends, and diagonal supports to hold them up. That way we don’t have to fuss around with criss-cross stacking at the ends.

wood stacking project … in progress

The finished plan called for six cinder blocks, twelve eight-foot pressure-treated timbers, eight giant bolts. Took a bit of trial and error to get it all put together but we did it! We’re hoping it will hold nearly one cord of wood and last a good 20 years or more! If it doesn’t tip over or fall apart. Now we just need to make three more and we’ll be all set!

the new firewood stacks

mudroom floor

new subfloor in mudroom/entryway

We’re putting in a new subfloor in the little mudroom off the kitchen. This had once been an entrance from the porch into the kitchen, later it was closed up and boarded over and turned into a pantry or something. We want it to be our new main entrance. Judy and Richard found this amazing Victorian door in our attic and lovingly restored and repainted it, it’s all finished now and just waiting to be installed.

Beautiful new door!

First though, we’ll need to fix up this mudroom floor, before we can put in the threshold and straighten out the doorframe to hang the door. We’ve already gutted the walls down to the studs an ripped up some weird crooked flooring, and then put down a layer of metal screening across the entire room, between the beat-up old subfloor and the new subfloor, to keep all the squirrels and critters out. We are planning to eventually tile the floor with the Argentine encaustic tiles that we brought from Buenos Aires!

rough mockup of what the argentine encaustic floor tiles will look like….

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. )

Mike & Richard

men at work.

modifying the wall near the chimney. Moving a beam, cutting open the doorway to make it wider and higher. All to make room for our new woodstove!