the house. may 2013.

not much change to see from the outside, not yet. hopefully this summer.

After a year of steady work, we’ve finally completed this huge shelf. Here it is on the work bench for the first coat of varnish.

After the varnish, we painted the shelf back blue to match the color of our kitchen walls, and screwed on the shelf back (it provides important structural support and makes it easier to hang the shelf.) And then both of my parents helped us to haul it up to Limington and hang it up!

When we built the kitchen walls, we put sheets of 3/4″ plywood instead of strapping on top of the rigid foam insulation, under the blue board and plaster, all around the countertop areas where we expected to hang upper cabinets or shelving. So when it came time to hang the shelf, we didn’t have to wonder about where the strapping was, whether the screws would grab into wood or just plaster, whether the wall’s strong enough. We know the plaster is all backed with nice strong wood because we built it ourselves!

The shower stall was ugly but once we replaced the burst pipes and turned on the water, it seemed to work fine and we weren’t planning to replace it til we’d fixed up the rest of the house. And then around June, we sprung a leak! Downstairs, in our beautiful new bathroom, there was water coming out of the ceiling! It ruined some of the fresh new paint and plaster on the downstairs wall, which was kind of heartbreaking. We disconnected the water supply to the shower and set about searching for the leak. Because of the unorthodox and not-to-code nature of the plumbing situation, it was actually impossible to access the shower plumbing without either tearing out the plaster wall of the adjacent hallway, or else tearing out the shower stall itself. Unsure of the exact location of the problem, we decided to just bite the bullet and tear out the old shower stall. And when we did, we found no apparent source of the leak! Arghhhhhh. We inspected very carefully around every seam of the supply line and the drain line, and we could not find any moisture, nor any water stains or signs of leaking. Instead there was plenty of powdery, dry dust, which really seemed to suggest that there was never any leaking at all. Looking back on the situation now, I believe that the leak was not caused by plumbing problems in the shower, nor by cracks in the shower stall, but by water spraying out of the shower, on to the porous, unfinished floor and seeping down through the first-floor ceiling below. Oooops.

But we’d hacked up the old shower stall in the process of removing it, so we needed a new shower stall. After way too many days of living with no shower (thankfully we have a generous neighbor who let us use his shower!), we borrowed my parents’ pickup truck and headed to Home Depot to pick out our new shower stall. Hauled it home and wrestled it onto the front porch and … oops again! It won’t fit through the front door! And it won’t fit through the bathroom door either.

Next day we hauled it back to Home Depot and exchanged it for a two-part model that did fit through the front door. But it turned out to be a tiny bit larger than the old shower stall, so we had to rip out a partial wall (the one that supported the third side of the shower stall) to get it in. It was a pretty simple thing, it wasn’t a load-bearing wall, so it wasn’t a huge deal, but after we got the shower stall in, then we were missing that wall and it needed to be replaced.

Ripping out the old shower, hacking up the floor and walls to fit in the new one.

the shiny new shower unit, and the missing wall

It also seemed like a good time to replace the bathroom flooring, so we started researching Marmoleum, which my sister had used in her bathroom renovation, and seemed like the best and easiest solution. Marmoleum is the original brand of linoleum, which has made a comeback in the past few years as a green building material. It’s made from natural linseed oil, pine rosins and wood flour, without all the toxic ingredients that go into vinyl flooring. It comes in large sheets which are waterproof (except for the seams between sheets) and unlike tile it feels soft and warm under bare feet, which is important when you live in a big old drafty farmhouse in Maine!

We had to hire help for installing the marmoleum. Before he could get started, we had to remove all the fixtures from the bathroom (except for the new shower, of course).

Here’s the finished floor! It’s purple! It wasn’t my first choice for a bathroom floor color, but it was the only one we could agree on at all.

Once the floor was in, we put the toilet and sink back in, of course, and started planning for the next stage, re-building the shower wall and the corner soffit that we’d ripped out.

fall colors in the meadow behind our house

So, step one: pack up all the stuff and clear out the room.

All cleared out. This room is hideous. When we got here there was filthy carpet on this floor. Judy ripped it all out for us! Under the layers of carpet and foam backing, we found this weird particle-board stuff. It looks like there used to be some kind of vinyl tiles on this floor but they’d been removed by some previous owner. Presumably there is some real wood flooring under there somewhere, but it’s a pain in the ass to rip out this particle-board layer and we don’t really know if the wood underneath would be nice or not – some of the original floors are in pretty rough shape here, and a lot of them are covered with lead paint, which is a brutal mess to deal with. So we’ll just leave this stuff there and cover it with marmoleum, which at least will look better, and is lovely smooth and easy to clean. Unfortunately Marmoleum is not easy to install as a do-it-yourselfer, so we got some recommendations for a local fellow that does a good job.

First Dan laid down a thin plywood underlayment (because the old flooring still had residue from vinyl tiling and old adhesive that could interfere with gluing down the marmoleum) and then a natural, non-toxic adhesive and then the giant sheets of marmoleum. He used a giant, weighted roller to roll over and over the flooring, bonding it with the adhesive underneath.

I kind of like the pink walls now, they look pretty amazing with the green floor! But we’ve hated them for too long, so the next step is definitely to repaint the walls and trim.

soon it won’t be pink anymore!

Limington Academy

sign on the old Limington town hall

old church

What a relief to turn down a quiet side road away from the traffic. I wish we had more off-road paths for running and biking.

shelves on the workbench

we’ve finished assembly! sanded and planed, plugged the screw holes and we’re ready to varnish.