beautiful drive to Vermont and back

Monday was Presidents Day, so Mike had the day off from work and we made a kind of impulse decision to drive over to Vermont and buy some butternut wood! We needed some more butternut wood to finish our kitchen shelving project, and we were surprised to discover that none of the local hardwood lumber yards sells butternut! Turns out it’s not that popular. Mike took a look around the internet and found a place in Marshfield, VT called Vermont Wildwoods, that sells salvaged butternut wood – we didn’t realize that, sadly, butternut trees are suffering a blight that’s killing them off pretty quickly (similar to Dutch Elm disease that killed all the elm trees a few decades back). Vermont Wildwoods sells “irregular” butternut wood cut from the fallen and disease-killed trees, paying loggers to leave the healthy trees intact and instead salvage the wood from the fallen trees. The wood from these trees has interesting and irregular grain patterns, and the whole concept seems pretty cool. So, unable to work in the wood-shop since we’d run out of usable wood, we decided to take the day off and go fetch some more wood from Vermont. The trip was four hours heading due west, through Crawford Notch and the White Mountain National Forest, into the hills of Vermont. It was perfect and sunny out, and we got to check out lots of snowy peaks, cute little tourist towns, busy ski slopes, old farm houses and winding country roads along the way.
The guy from Vermont Wildwoods was super nice and helpful, letting us pick through a huge stack of butternut lumber to find the right planks for our job. It seems like he normally works with builders on big-scale architectural projects so he did a nice favor in letting us show up (on a holiday!) and dig through his wood for this little small-potatoes project. We took plenty of time to pick just the right pieces. My parents let us borrow their truck for the trip, so we had room to carry all the wood home. Now we’ve got this huge stack of wood waiting to be planed down, glued, sanded, cut up and assembled into our kitchen shelving!

our new wood!

this was how we had living room before.

In February we started prepping to re-paint the walls. There were A LOT of spots that needed spackling, and a bunch of areas that needed major repairs to the wallboard. It took about two weeks of spackling and sanding to get everything tidied up.

early stages of spackling

It took THREE COATS of primer to color up that crazy red! I think we’re finally ready for the color now.

primer

We had decided on Yarmouth Blue for the trim and Stuart Gold for the walls (from Benjamin Moore historical colors). We’ve looked lots of photos of Colonial through Victorian era interiors and they used to do some really saturated colors! This seemed like a pretty cool historical color combo. We did the windows in blue and I think they look great; we actually bought a gallon of the Stuart Gold for the walls and then at the very last minute, Mike got cold feet and said “it looks too YELLOW!”

Stuart Gold: do we really want this?

I rolled my eyes, but then I sat down and did some photoshop mockups with different color options. When we actually saw it mocked up, the gold does indeed look a little crazy?! So we decided on this Prescott Green instead. I think I’m going to paint it today!

Prescott Green

Now we’re wondering what to do with that gallon of gold paint. Maybe upstairs?

What about these photoshop mockups?

I wish we knew the date of this. Folks around town generally say “Oh, the old Brunck place!” when we tell them where we live. They bought the house in 1949, well after the date of this photo (I’m not sure who lived here at the time of this picture). It’s been through a bunch of owners since they left, but they were here the longest, Mr. Ed Brunck ran the dairy farm in the barn out back and Mrs. Doris Brunck, who just passed on recently, ran a beauty parlor out of one of the front rooms. Anyway one of our neighbors is their grandson, he spent a lot of time in this house growing up and it’s always a treat to chat with him about the history of the place. His wife kindly emailed us this photo, and it just made my day. My year, really. What a delightful view of the house in better days. This is so inspiring! I’m guessing this is late 1800′s or early 1900′s (if I knew anything about the history of photography I could probably date it better). It’s interesting to see that at this time, it had a side porch but no front porch. Also, obviously the old barn was still there. That’s the furthest structure on the left. We heard it burned down (and I don’t know how it burned without taking the rest of the house with it). The trees out front were elms, which woud have been wiped out by Dutch Elm disease in the nineteen-thirties or forties. The two windows to the left of the porch are the kitchen windows, and above them the room that’s currently my studio – someone later added a dormer there, to fit three full-sized windows instead of those tiny eyebrow windows. I could stare at this picture forever.

Mike and I just installed the final cabinet in the kitchen! They’re all in now! Let’s celebrate for a minute: we totally made these cabinets ourselves! Every single bit of them! (except the knobs and hinges, which we bought.) My dad helped us a whole lot and made a bunch of the hardest parts like drawers and drawer slides. Thanks Richard! Not only are these beautiful and flawless in their function, I think we picked a pretty great color of green for these. (All those little sticky notes in the pictures? That’s our notes to remind us what goes in which drawers. Since it’s all a little new, we still need help remembering where to put everything.)

the skinny cabinet

The last cabinet was the skinniest. This little tiny one goes next to the oven, to hold flat stuff like baking sheets and cutting boards.

The remaining “open” spot is where the dishwasher will go. Someday. We’re not really in a rush to get one, so for the moment we just store the dog food in there, and I think I’ll make a curtain to hang there so it looks prettier in the meantime. If you want to look back at the long long process of planning and building our cabinets, there are lots more posts and pictures!

Just for fun, let’s look back at the same kitchen view, as it’s changed through the years:

June 20, 2011

January 16, 2011

December 16, 2010

April 17, 2010

March 27, 2010

March 5, 2010

realtor’s photo of the kitchen, sometime before 2008.

Next… on to the upper shelving. We’re going to do open shelves instead of upper cabinets. They’re already on the workbench in the wood shop, but no photos yet, so stay tuned…

We finally got (almost) all the fixtures and shades for the kitchen ceiling lights! It was really hard to pick because we love old stuff but we don’t have any particular historical period that we’re trying to recreate. Our house has some prominent Victorian features, but most of the structure is older, and the exterior looks like it was originally made in a Greek Revival style before it got its Victorian makeover. But almost nothing of the original interior remains, aside from crumbly plaster and old lath. So the house doesn’t really give us any particular direction to follow. And anyway, electric lights weren’t around when our house was built. So we’re just going with a sort of 19th and 20th century hodge-podge. We didn’t think anything too dainty or flashy would make sense in a farmhouse kitchen with these rough exposed ceiling beams. These schoolhouse style shades were pretty popular around the 1920′s – 1940′s, though they most often hang from longer pendants. Because of our low ceilings, we chose 1930′s reproduction ceramic flush mount fixtures. I think they fit the space pretty well! They give a slightly warm, yellow light, which I like.

We did four of these same lights, and then we have two industrial pendant lights that go over the island. We got these metal shades at the salvage place in Kennebunk, and we bought these pendant fixtures online but I really do not like them at all so they’re only staying here til we replace them with something better.

We’ll have one different fixture over the sink that we haven’t gotten yet (probably some kind of modern strip lighting that will hide behind the ceiling beam) and a different light in the corner by the fridge. We picked this crazy stripey shade, which I’m still trying to get used to. I’m not sure the fixture and shade are a perfect match for each other, but I’m going to wait and see if it grows on me. We can always switch it around later.

before: bare bulbs / after: stripey shade

old plaster / no plaster

We finally tore down all the plaster from this crumbling wall in the stairway. It was very satisifying. Out with the old, in with the new! We will keep the old lath but we’re going to replace the plaster with wallboard.

progress…

So many changes have happened in the downstairs bathroom! We’ve been inching along, sporadically, doing work on the bathroom here and there, for a while. We actually made a lot of progress over last winter, framing and plumbing work that doesn’t make it look pretty but laid the important groundwork. And then it just stayed like that, with disconnected plumbing and dangling wires, for a few months, while we paid attention to other stuff. Finally George, a dear friend and neighbor, came in to help us with putting up the wallboard in June. Once we had everything ready to go, we realized we hadn’t done any rodent-proofing, which seemed prudent, considering how many mouse and squirrel nests I had ripped out in the process of gutting the room. So the wallboard was delayed a few days while we (mostly George) stapled wire mesh over all the little holes in the walls. Then the wallboard went up! We used greenboard, which is supposed to be waterproof- it’s basically a type of cement-board made for bathroom walls. We would’ve loved to do some tiled walls, especially adjacent to the shower, but we couldn’t find any affordable tiles that we really loved, so: greenboard. Hope it holds up well!

Then, once the walls were up, we were finally able to buy a TOILET! Some people were surprised that we chose a new toilet (rather than “vintage”); I will admit that I originally considered rehabilitating one of the old toilets from our house, but our plumber, whose opinion I respect, managed to talk me out of it: too much work, not worth it, and new toilets are much more efficient. OK! A new toilet. George created this handsome, custom-made slate piece to sit under the toilet. Because we have a wood floor, we worried about condensation dripping off the exterior of the toilet tank (as it often does in our humid climate) and rotting the floor. The slate slab should take care of that.
We were still missing one bathroom door. I learned from Lynn that four-panel doors would be historically appropriate for our house. We poked around at Pete’s Place, our local salvage yard, and found a trio of nice old four-panel doors, two for the kitchen and one for the bathroom. Judy has put in innumerable hours carefully stripping, scraping and sanding off the old lead paint from all three of the doors, with all their fussy molding details, and priming and re-painting them to look shiny and beautiful and new.

With the wedding coming up, we started working fast to try and get the new bathroom (among many other projects) in working order before the big party! We had SO MUCH HELP from wonderful friends & relatives who pitched in to make it happen: Alicia and Kathy and Rob and Paz and Aunt Barbara all helped us with priming and painting the walls! Rob taught me a great cutting-in technique, to make a neat edge where the white of the ceiling meets the green of the walls. I had to do a bunch of patching on the one exterior wall, where we had kept the original wallboard but had to cut big holes in it to have insulation blown in to the wall cavity. A few days of patching all the holes, spackling and sanding and it was good as new. We chose a sort of avocado green for the bathroom walls. I think we must have been influenced by spending so many weeks looking a the color of the greenboard; our final wall color is only a few shades away from the color of the unfinished greenboard. We chose a gloss finish because there’s going to be a lot of moisture in there and we thought the gloss finish would be best for repelling moisture. Honestly, now that it’s done, I’m not 100% sure about this color choice, and the glossy look is a little bit hideous, but it’s going to have to be ok because i’m not painting it again!

Next we picked up our tub from the architectural salvage place and hauled our bathroom sink out of storage. While Mike worked on rehabilitating the peeling bathtub, we set about trying to make the sink usable.

old sink discovered in the barn

dog and cat help clean up the sink

Judy and Richard noticed this sink in the barn when we first bought the house, and we fell in love with it, hauled it indoors and stuck it in a corner waiting for the bathroom to happen. It’s got some rust stains and spotty enamel that we haven’t managed to get rid of yet, but it’s still a lovely old sink, I really like the octagonal shape. Our regular carpenter, Lynn, built us this custom bead-board cabinet with beveled corners matching the shape of the sink.

custom cabinet

We had a bit of a challenge finding hardware for the sink – it came with older style hardware, separate hot and cold spigots and a central drain lever, that were all rusted and corroded and were nearly impossible to get off. It took a few days, all kinds of solvent and a few strong men to part the corroded hardware from the old sink. The central opening is too small to fit a spigot, so we had limited choices for hardware that would work with our sink. I always hated the separate hot and cold spigots, but it’s REALLY expensive to buy a “bridge” faucet that mixes the hot and cold taps into a single spigot, so we ended up compromising on this crazy looking thing that has separate spigots, both angled inward to pour into the ceramic funnel thing, so the water comes out in a single, warm stream. I think it’s a pretty interesting solution and looks kind of cool!

this is how our faucet is supposed to work

The trouble is, we were a little too hasty in our purchase. Turns out it doesn’t really fit our sink properly – the spigots are just a tiny bit too far apart and they don’t reach the ceramic spout. DOH. Since it only arrived a few days before our wedding, we decided to just go with it rather than return it. The ceramic spout doesn’t really do anything, though it looks like a fancy kind of a soap dish or something. Maybe one day we can have a potter make us a custom ceramic spout to fit our sink! Or maybe someday we’ll save up for a bridge faucet to replace it. Meanwhile, we’ve got separate spigots and a fancy soap-dish-thing in the middle. Sigh.

this didn’t work out right.

Next, we hauled in our washer and dryer, which we had bought on sale almost a year earlier! They had just been sitting in an empty room, waiting until the bathroom walls were finished. (It took another month before we got the washing machine actually hooked up and running, and another five months before we got the dryer working!)
We’d brought in an electrician to do the wiring for the bathroom before the walls went up, and we called him back to finish up the last bits – we didn’t have our final light fixtures yet, but we had temporary fixtures and he hooked them up to light switches and made it all work!
With all the spackling and painting done and the heavy appliances in, we finally got to pull up the layers of cardboard and plastic off the floor to reveal the beautiful new white oak flooring that we put down last year! There’s still one patch of original hardwood floor, over by the washer, it’s all covered with crusty, gunky linoleum adhesive and crud and it will need to be stripped refinished at some point.
The bathroom was looking almost complete, but still conspicuously missing a mirror. I think it was the day before our wedding when Bonnie and Les (that’s Mike’s mom and stepdad), who were already up in Maine for the wedding, said they were thinking of heading to Kennebunk for the day, but offered to help with anything we might need for the wedding. I asked them if they’d be interested in stopping by Old House Parts, our favorite architectural salvage depot in Kennebunk, to look for a bathroom mirror. They did stop in, had a good look around and sent us a handful of iphone photos of different mirrors for us to choose from! We picked this one, which they’d found hanging up in the shop’s bathroom but luckily they thought to inquire if it was for sale. Yes, it could be purchased. So they got us this beautiful new bathroom mirror!

the new mirror!

Thanks to some generous wedding gifts, we were able to buy beautiful lights for the bathroom too! We chose these kind of art-deco looking reproduction fixtures to match the geometric look of the sink. The shades were ones that we’d originally gotten for the kitchen but they didn’t fit in the kitchen at all – luckily they work perfectly here! We got them hooked up around the end of December.

Aunt Barbara sewed us these cheery curtains for the bathroom window. I’d fallen in love with this fabric while shopping for something else and brought home a small square of it without any project in mind, just because it’s so cute! We noticed how the colors match the bathroom wall color perfectly, so Barbara offered to make us curtains with it!! I went back to Joann and they were all out of it, didn’t know what I was talking about, couldn’t re-order it. And then Barbara managed to find several yards of the same fabric at her local JoAnn in New York! So she stitched them up for us. I think it really makes the room look much cozier to have some proper curtains.

So what’s still left to do? A lot, actually. The tub is sitting in the bathroom but not hooked up to anything. It turns out it’s quite expensive to buy the hardware sets to convert claw-foot tubs to have a shower spigot and curtain. I’m sure it will be wonderful when it’s all done, but for the moment it’s waiting til we have a few thousand bucks sitting around to buy all the hardware and pay the plumber to hook it up. Then we’re planning to build some shelves over/around the washer/dryer. I’d like to see less expanse of shiny white metal and less plumbing and ducts. I think there will be some cupboards or shelves above the washer/dryer where we can store soap and linens and stuff. Also we’ll build in some shelves near the doors, one near the sink area and one near the tub (which will cover up those pipes currently sticking out of the floor). There is still one battered hollow-core door that should be replaced with an old-style four-panel wood door, and there’s still that patch of old crummy wood flooring that will need to be refinished. Eventually I’d love to have a laundry-folding-table in front of the window, and maybe some off those accordion-style wall-mounted drying racks, for hanging laundry. Now that we’ve spent so many months without a clothes dryer, I’ve gotten used to hanging everything! The dryer is great (and so fast!), perfect for big stuff like sheets and blankets, but I feel a little guilty wasting electricity on t-shirts and socks when I can just hang them up to dry.

We took a week off to catch our breath and chill out with some friends in the family cabin in Intervale, the white mountains of New Hampshire. Way back when we first saw this house for sale, I remember thinking, “Limington — that’s close to Intervale! Let’s move there!” so it’s been really great to actually spend some more time there this season. We had ambitious plans to do lots of hiking and brought along our newish AMC hiking guide with the intention of checking out some new trails. It turned out to be a little difficult because of the recent hurricane. Our first hike was going to be Sugarloaf mountain, near Crawford Notch area, but it turned out that Route 302, the only road through the notch area, was closed because of a bridge washed out in the hurricane! With no real detour route available, we resorted to taking a much shorter hike, to splash and wade in the icy pools at Diana’s Baths, a perennial favorite.

with friends at Diana’s Baths

Next day we picked out another new hike, Champney Brook Trail, which follows the brook partway up the back side of Mt. Chocorua, from a trailhead off the Kankamagus highway to a series of waterfalls with some mountain views from the top of the falls. Since the rivers were all running high after the hurricane, we thought it would be a good time for a waterfall trail, and with an unseasonably warm afternoon it was perfect for splashing in the stream a bit. The trail was a pretty gentle ascent at first, with an astounding array of beautiful mushrooms and toadstools and fungi growing everywhere, and the first bright-colored sugar maple leaves on the ground, in contrast with the balmy weather.

It was about 1 hour gentle climbing through mossy pine forest, alongside the brook the whole time, until we reached the upper loop of the trail. You’re supposed to go up the left side of the loop, alongside the falls, where the path becomes a fairly steep rocky staircase. We stopped at the lower part of the falls and explored off to the left, beyond the main brook, where big rock cliffs rise up on each side of a little gorge with a tall, slender little waterfall at the back.

Climbing further up the rocky steps, we came up on top of the bigger falls. You have to clamber across some big boulders to get into the middle of the brook before you can see a lovely sliver of mountains between the trees.
I think you can continue further up the trail from here, probably to higher falls and wider views, and eventually I think this path leads to the summit of Mt. Chocorua, but we had to get Kristi back to the airport in Portland that evening, so we didn’t linger to explore further – pretty much jogged back down the trail, to the puppy’s delight. This was a fun hike, pretty quick and easy if you don’t mind a very little bit of steep, scrambly ascent.

clouds and white mountains. from the Intervale scenic vista.

Friday we planned a bigger hike, and found a beautiful trail description of an 8-mile hike accessible from a long dirt road in the Evans Notch area, right on the Maine/NH border in a much quieter, more remote part of the White Mountain National Forest. Woke up to bitter cold, grey and cloudy skies. We stopped in town to buy me a warm wooly winter hat – I figured that was the least bulky way to keep from getting chilled on the trail – and then drove on over Hurricane Mountain towards the Maine border, as the grey skies turned to rain. It was a gorgeous drive up 113 into the park, as the road became a winding single lane. When we got to our turnoff to the dirt road, it was closed off due to hurricane wash-out. We would’ve had to walk an extra 5 miles in rain to reach the trail head, so instead we reconsidered and picked out a plan B, which was The Roost trail, just a few hundred yards down the road, a very quick 1.8 mile loop trail, very steep scramble up to a high bluff with a lovely view. It took maybe 20 minutes to scramble straight up to the summit, and then we had a leisurely snack and enjoyed the cloudy view. (Our sandwiches were notably super delicious, from the Local Grocery in North Conway which I would highly recommend!)

Thankfully the return leg of the loop is a gentler pitch, easier on the knees for descending. We crossed a tiny stream and saw some kind of old stone foundation right on the banks – probably the remains of a little mill, I guess? Soon we passed a few apple trees, mixed in among the pine and beech. We didn’t see any other signs of human life, but it must’ve been a farmstead with an orchard or something. Amazing that the apple trees were the longest lasting sign that somebody had once lived there, in the middle of what is now an utterly remote forest. The apples looked big and beautiful, but I tried one and it was awfully sour!

sour apples, wild river?

It was a lovely hike, but felt a little short, since we’d been thinking to do a whole big day-long expedition. On the way home we stopped at the top of Hurrican Mountain and hiked up to Black Cap, which is another familiar favorite! Even with clouds it was spectacular.
Mike and Dan decided to go back to Limington that evening, both because it had gotten quite cold, and because they needed to get some work done and wanted a better internet connection. And Laika and I decided to stay on in Intervale by ourselves! It wasn’t too awfully cold, with the electric blanket and some warm PJ’s.
Next day Laika and I picked out a few hikes, plans A, B and C, since we didn’t know which trails might be closed due to hurricane damage. We were tempted to try a big hike up Mt. Chocorua but decided to put it off til later (maybe next year?) and ended up just taking a walk along Sawyer River in Crawford Notch near the bridge that had washed out on 302. It was a dirt road, again closed off with a sign about hurricane damage. I thought it might not be safe to drive, but it looked perfectly walkable and delightfully deserted, perfect for letting the dog run off-leash. So we set off into the woods and had a nice hour-long walk before we abruptly came to the very edge of the world! The road had washed out almost completely. We didn’t even think about trying to go on any further, let alone going anywhere near the edge! Just turned back home. On the way we stopped by the river to splash a bit. No scenic vistas on this walk, but a nice quiet time in the woods, with the sound of the rushing river nearby.

hurricane damage, woodsy delights

Next time we plan hiking adventures in the white mountains we’ll definitely have to research trail and road conditions, since it seemed like almost every dirt / gravel road was damaged or at least closed off. Hopefully it will be easier to get around by springtime! The missing bridge on 302 had been replaced by the end of the week.

temporary bridge on 302

It was great to have a long quiet weekend in Intervale with just me and the dog and the birds outside in the trees. I got to do some sketching, and some reading, and some good relaxing by the fireside.

photo by Pamela Vachon

We got married! It was really fun.

Sometimes (many, many times) it seemed like a crazy idea to get married at our house, in our back yard, in the middle of trying to renovate our house, especially since our back yard was nothing but a giant pile of garbage and tenacious weeds and brambles. But I think the whole idea is about being together, with your entire family and your whole circle of wonderful human beings, and being who you are, how you are, all together. We wouldn’t want to get married in some impersonal place, all dressed in white and made up to look like different people. We just wanted to have a big fun party with everyone we love, in our own space. And we did, and it was great. I wish we could have so many of our favorite people together in one place more often.

We cannot thank our friends and family and neighbors enough for all the incredible amounts of hard work that everyone did to help us get everything ready!!!!! We got SO MUCH work done in a big hurry because of this big exciting deadline, and because of the generous help of so many friends and family!

Our back yard has definitely never looked this beautiful before, and may never look this good again. Giant collapsing wreck of a barn notwithstanding. It was pure magic to see our back yard transformed into this beautiful space filled with loving faces, bright wildflowers and bunting, delicious food and drink and music.

tables. Pamela Vachon

If you wanted to see 1,000,000 more photos of the big day, you could see them here.