the bathtub

at the salvage place.

We bought this bath tub so long ago. I think it was in the fall of 2010? We thought the bathroom would be happening quickly, so we went and picked out and paid for this lovely tub from one of our local architectural salvage places, Old House Parts in Kennebunk, and we said we’d be back in a week to pick it up. But then we decided to work on the kitchen instead, and kinda forgot about that poor old tub. It spent the winter sitting in their lot, filling up with snow. We kept calling them and asking if we could just keep it there for a few more weeks. All spring and all summer we made plans to go pick it up, but it was a busy summer and it turned out to be hard to find a weekend that we were both in town, both free, and could borrow the truck, and it wasn’t a hurricane. So the tub waited all summer and finally we managed to go pick it up and drag it home sometime in August.

We hauled it into the kitchen, and it looked pretty good in there! It spent a few weeks by the kitchen window, waiting for the bathroom walls to be finished so we could move it in. Mike got to thinking the exterior paint looked pretty shabby and he set his mind on stripping and re-finishing it! He dragged it out onto the porch and set to work, unscrewing the dainty claw feet first. It was such a huge project, incredibly stinky with solvents and messy and hard. Unfortunately, since it was just a few weeks before our wedding, we were all so busy and crazy that nobody took a picture of Mike out there with his respirator on, scrubbing away with steel brushes and sandpaper, in the hot August sun. You’ll have to try and imagine it. Once he got all the old stuff scrubbed off, we decided it should be painted blue. We compared all the spray-cans of rust-oleum at the hardware store and picked the nicest shade of blue. He spent two days spraying it with even coats of enamel, and when it was finished it looked ridiculous! The spray-can cap had looked like a nice lively blue color, but the result was like fluorescent electric blue, and it was pretty easy to agree that it looked totally wrong. So we went back to the rust-oleum section at the hardware store, and picked gray instead. Hard to go wrong with gray. Mike spent another two days patiently repainting the whole thing, and he painted the feet ivory, which I think was a great choice. It looks fantastic. We dragged it into the bathroom as soon as the paint was dry and the fumes had cleared.

what a beautiful bathtub!

We still need to save up for the hardware to make it functional. It’s amazingly expensive to buy the whole shower conversion rig – we’ll need a special kind of faucet setup that has the shower add-on attached, they are specially made for that narrow market segment of people who want to convert a claw-foot tub to have a standing shower. One of those tall skinny pipes with the big shower head at the top (those always remind me of sunflowers), with the circular shower curtain rod, attached to the shower pipe, with supports hanging from the wall or ceiling. It’s a good deal more complicated and expensive than we expected! Hoping to make it happen sometime this year. Meanwhile, I think this tub is good-looking enough to serve as decoration.

this is not our bathroom! but this is the kind of shower conversion that i’m talking about

Hurricane Irene

the barn before the hurricane

the barn after the hurricane

wood trim added in kitchen!!

We hired our favorite carpenter, Lynn, to help us with trim in the kitchen. He’s put in beautiful new trim around the windows and doors, and it makes such a huge difference – I think it’s been the most dramatic step in the progression from construction site to almost-finished-living-space!
Like so many other parts of this project, we’d originally planned to do all our own wood trim, but Lynn is so much better at it than we are, so much faster, and his work is just beautiful!

Judy and Stephanie help painting the new woodwork

The only thing we didn’t end up trimming out is the huge picture window in the kitchen. I always kind of hated that window because it’s a really obviously mismatched 1970′s style picture window stuck on this 19th century-style victorian house, and as if that weren’t silly enough, it’s almost-but-not-quite-centered on the dormer windows above it on the second floor, so it looks incredibly lopsided from the outside. In short, as much as I enjoy the light and view through this window, it is one of the ugliest things going on in this whole mess of a house, which is saying a lot. It’s a perfectly fine style of window for a mid-century bungalow, but it’s just sad on a Victorian farmhouse. So I was not incredibly disappointed when Lynn told us that he didn’t want to put trim on it – the whole business is completely rotten and that we should rip it out and replace it rather than putting trim on. YES YES YES YES YES! i am counting the days until we can haul this thing off to the dump and replace it with something better-suited to our house.

Kitten gets comfortable

we’re all working like madmen and look at this lazy bum sleeping all day.

naming update: we can’t get a name to stick to this cat. I previously reported that her name was Lina, but that only lasted a week. We just call her Kitten, and she always looks up when we say it.

major landscaping work

As I’ve mentioned, one of our big goals for this year was to improve the yard! We started out with hauling away a TON of garbage, then mowing, mowing, and mowing. Once we tamed a lot of the tall grass and weeds we set our sights on some of the big bramble patches and our amazing neighbors helped us hack those down. It was amazing to see how much the form of the backyard changed as we hacked away at the choking overgrowth and discovered old stone foundations, pear and apple trees, old garden plots and of course lots more garbage piles. Our neighbor Fausto actually borrowed our other neighbor Mike R’s tractor to come over and push around some dirt and rocks, cleaning up the remains of what must’ve been a foundation of a big old barn. It was a massive undertaking! He piled the huge rocks back on top of each other, shaping and revealing this beautiful rustic stone wall beside the pear tree, where we’d once had only a giant morass of weeds and garbage.

hard to see what’s going on here, but trust me, things are improving.

Later, Judy and Stephanie helped us plant chrysanthemums in the bare earth in front of the wall.

Meanwhile, more weed-whacking revealed another pile of rocks, another wall of the same old foundation. I started clearing away the nettles and trying to stack the rocks back in a neat line.

stone wall: before. it started as a messy pile of rocks…

That’s when George came over and went into stonemason mode. One sweaty afternoon of hard work, and he transformed that mound of rocks into this gorgeous stone wall!

LOOK AT THIS BEAUTIFUL STONE WALL!

more guest room updates

We did some work on the guest room in the spring (see previous post here) and finally finished up painting the trim and put everything back together in June, I think. Then Lynn (our amazing hired carpenter!) went back and replaced all the missing trim pieces, so now we’ve got to go back in and paint some more. But things are definitely starting to look pretty good in here! (especially compared with the rest of our house, haha!)

much improved

It’s great to have one room that’s almost done!! In addition to painting the new pieces of trim, we still need to put in a ceiling light and switch, which will be a bit of a project because this room has never had a light switch! we’ll need to cut a hole in the wall, run wires through the walls and ceilings, and probably do some patching and re-painting afterwards. And then it should be all set, for the moment! Someday I’d love to replace the ugly ceiling (it’s a filthy, seventies-looking dropped ceiling with those pressed-fiber tiles) and strip & repaint the floors, which have a patchwork of old lead paint colors. But that stuff can wait another five or ten years! Here’s a “before” picture for comparison:

before: yucky carpet and battle-scarred walls

endless yard work and mowing!

We resolved to make some major improvements to the yard this summer and pitted ourselves against the mounds of half-buried garbage and rubble and relentlessly energetic grass and weeds. It’s been an fairly grueling, time consuming, buggy, sweaty, muggy, muddy crusade but with some great help from friends, neighbors and family, it feels like we are making progress. Hopefully our back yard will one day be fully transformed from an overgrown dump to a beautiful space to hang out and enjoy the view.

We spent the first half of the spring and summer pretty thoroughly occupied with trying to conquer the wild, bramble-covered and weed-choked land out back. We have two acres, and what ground isn’t occupied with the dilapidated barn has been covered with an impenetrable jungle of thistles, burrs, vines and weeds that grows to shoulder-high in full summer and is completely wild and impassable without a machete. So this year we’re trying to clear out as much land as we can and mow down the weeds before they get too big to tackle, and seed some nice soft grass, hoping to be able to enjoy more of our land during the summer. We started with hauling away lots of garbage that was left around the land by the previous owners. There were the shredded remains of several huge (inflatable) plastic swimming pools, a handful of mangled kids’ bicycles, plastic kids toys and trucks, pool floaties, lots of pepsi cans and milk jugs and just general garbage strewn about and hidden in the weeds, making for a lot of surprises when we’d accidentally mow over bike parts or soda bottles hidden in the knotted grass. We found a nest of at least 30 garter snakes living in one of the crumpled swimming pools! Imagine Mike’s surprise when he gathered up a heap of soggy plastic in his arms to drag it away, and found it squirming with dozens of startled snakes!

There were tons of tiny babies, and lots of huge adult snakes too. We felt a little bad displacing them, but the heaps of crumpled plastic garbage had to go.

Rainy May weather made the grass go crazy and we found that even if we spent every waking hour mowing, it was still growing faster than we could cut it. I suppose this is a common springtime homeowners lament. We decided we need to sow the whole thing with wildflowers or something. Anything that doesn’t need to be mown. We were super excited to get a new mower, which at least made the fight a bit fairer! Mike wishes we could get a riding mower, but I think we can use the extra exercise. Could do without the blackflies though.

Husqvarna!

Sometime around June, our amazing neighbors Mike and Fausto took pity on us and offered to help out. Fausto brought over his brush hog and weed whacker, and Mike brought his giant tractor, and they made SO much progress, transforming seas of brambly mounds to tidy fields and stone walls.

Mike and his tractor!

Fausto and Mike at work in the back yard

Man. Good neighbors are the best. What a difference it has made!

unexpected bovine visitors

oh hello.

this afternoon a dozen cows wandered into our yard to nibble our lilacs! the dog was super terrified and ran inside to hide. she’s not much of a guard dog! the ladies ambled around our yard nibbling stuff for a few minutes while we called the neighbors’ farm to report the visitors. Farmer was already out chasing them, and they were herded back home within a few minutes, so it was only a quick visit.

really enjoying the kitchen!

It feels like such a luxury to finally have a real kitchen, with a sink and oven and everything. I can finally cook! We still have a lot of work to do on the kitchen, but we’re feeling so happy with what we’ve got so far.

electrical work!

new electrical panel, front and back.

we brought in a real electrician to put in a new panel on the 2nd floor, which will allow us to put in a proper circuit for the washing machine and dryer, and also will let us start wiring the whole second floor for electricity! hooray! hopefully this means less extension cords in our future.