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No, not that new member. That new member is still happily cooking away in Cherie’s Frank belly.
Meet Frances.
Frances is the latest houseguest here at Chez M and C. Cherie’s sister Andrea has temporarily relocated to New York City for some fancy edumencation. Given the difficulties of finding dog-friendly housing in NYC, as well as the lack of running-through-the-woods opportunities for an active pup, it was thought best all around if Frances came to stay with us for a bit. So here she is for the next year or so. We’re happy to report that Frances recently lived through a full house renovation, which means that she is completely unconcerned with table saws, dust, air compressors, and prolific swearing, and thus is perfect for our household.
Like our own neurotic wonder dog, Nori, she’s a shelter mutt. With respect to all the lovely purebreds out there, we are mutt people. We believe in the power of the mutt. Unless the Cockadoodle and Labradoodle people have decided to recognize Whack-a-Doodle as a new breed. If so, we’ve got two full-blooded Whack-a-Doodles here if anyone is interested.
Frances has many charms, including her devotion to something that we’ve termed “Squirrel TV.”
We never noticed, but apparently there are squirrel telenovas playing in our backyard on a daily basis. She’s a big fan.
She also likes to wander out and check on us when we are working.
If we could figure out a way for her to help, we’d bring her on in a second. Do you think she can be trained to fetch shingles?
Frances also enjoys bounding through the woods at top speed, destroying toys within 2.5 seconds of delivery, and racing Nori for dropped food scraps.
But mostly she just likes to sit around and smile.
We must note, however, that it’s not quite all happiness and joy. Observing that doubling the number of dog feet in the house seems to triple the amount of damage to the floor, we’ve decided to invest in area rugs a little sooner than planned.
In case you missed all the complaining about it this summer, we have been shingling. Admittedly, we have been shingling very slowly, but the shingling has been happening. We had a pretty good head of steam going early on, but then we ran into a period of rain and out of dipped shingles. Last summer, shingle dipping was Cherie’s job and she developed a pretty good efficiency. But this summer that wasn’t possible. The stain that we are using is low VOC, but it still didn’t seem like a great idea to have the pregnant lady inhaling fumes all summer long.
Which meant that Michael was in charge of shingle dipping. Unfortunately, he didn’t attack the task with the same fervor as Cherie, probably because he is actually useful in other areas of housebuilding. (Cherie never did get over the feeling that she got put in charge of shingle dipping because it kept her out of the way.) Of course, Michael being Michael, he wasn’t happy with the clothesline approach and created new-and-improved way to dip, because there is nothing Michael likes better than designing a "system."
Behold the Drip-O-Matic , version 2.1:
What you see here is a box built out of scrap plywood. There is wire mesh on the bottom of the box and the whole bottom half is wrapped in a spare tarp. Nails were hammered halfway in on the short ends of the box every 1/2" to 3/4" and fishing line was strung very, very tightly between the nails. After the shingles are dipped, they are set in the rack to dry. The line keeps them from touching each other and the spare stain runs down through the mesh. Poke a hole in the low point of the tarp, set a bucket under it to catch the dripping stain, and viola! Dipped shingles with no clothespins required.
You will notice, of course, that Michael couldn’t be bothered to come up with this creation as long as Cherie was doing the dipping. Not that she’s bitter.
As it turns out, while staining shingles isn’t a particularly great activity for a pregnant woman, putting up shingles is. It requires no heavy lifting–unless you consider the nail gun heavy, which Cherie doesn’t as her love for it is unconditional. Shingling doesn’t require much moving around either, at least not quickly, and it’s easy to stop and take a break when needed. The only bad part is that since she really shouldn’t be up on a ladder right now, shingling can only go as high as she can reach with both feet on the ground or on very low scaffolding. Also, the combination of pregnancy belly and tool belt makes Cherie look like her name should be "Frank." That’s also a problem.
Nonetheless, we are making slow but steady shingling progress. Here’s the round-up of where we stand.
Here’s the back side of the house:
It looks very impressive except that it’s been done this far since last summer, which is when we were able to corral some houseguests into doing it. We haven’t touched it since. Still, it’s a cheering sight.
And here’s the north side:
We’ve done all of this shingling this summer, but needed to stop because 1) this is when we ran out of shingles, and 2) we were approaching the spot where we will need to install the chimney. The chimney pipe will exit the wall somewhere around that middle "EBS." There’s no sense in continuing here until that chimney is in.
Which brings us to the front, which Cherie just started working on:
She will eventually get the entire front done to the top of the windows before winter sets in. That’s the goal. And please don’t comment on how trashy our house is. We know. WE KNOW. Trust us.
And here’s the south side:
Again, partly done last summer, partly this summer. Cherie may try to wrap around the corner from the front and get the front edge as well.
There you have it. No, we definitely aren’t flying through the shingles. But we are all about honesty here, not making ourselves look good. And it’s only September. We should be able to get a little further in the next month or so as long as the rain holds out.
Because, if nothing else, shingling keeps Cherie out of the way. And that’s always a good thing.
Sure, we have plenty on our plates for the rest of the year–building the kitchen cabinets, installing the wood stove, painting the rest of the interior, shingling as much as we can, weatherproofing a little more before the cold hits, and, oh yeah, finishing one little room so that’s safe and dust-free enough for the baby–but that doesn’t mean we won’t distract ourselves with new and fun projects now and then. You’ve got to mix it up once in a while. Keeps the spice in the old housebuilding romance, you know?
In that spirit we took some time this week to tackle a project that we’ve been eyeing since before we even bought the property: that tree. Out in our power line easement there is an enormous red oak that was taken down several years ago by the power company when they did a periodic clearing of the easement. We have no idea how the tree was spared as long as it was, since it was quite blatantly in the way, or why they finally took it down when they did. All we know is that on our very first walk-through of the property we said, “Wow. That’s a big tree,” and immediately began making plans for what we could do with all that wood.
The main portion of the tree is around 22 feet long and 31 inches at the base. There’s another 30 feet or so of auxiliary chunks laying nearby that are about 10 inches in diameter and were clearly the by-product of the de-limbing before the whole tree was taken down. The ends of the wood are gray and weathered, but solid. It is all usable wood. There’s enough red oak there to trim out our whole house, build some furniture, and still have some leftover for firewood. It’s a big tree.
Unfortunately, the tree is a good 200 feet from our driveway, and not 200 feet of easily navigable gently sloping gravel road, either. 200 feet of trees, boulders, blow-downs, blueberry patches, and other obstacles. We could think of no way to getting the tree, or even some of the pieces, out of there. The smallest pieces easily weigh 150 pounds. And that big chunk? Who could even guess. A thousand pounds? A pulp truck can’t get up to the easement. We could rent a small bulldozer or other heavy equipment, but getting the machinery up there and dragging the pieces out would rip up the area that we hope will eventually be a nicely maintained wooded grove. We considered just cutting off slabs to use in building a table or two, but our chain saw isn’t big enough to cut through the diameter without chewing it up badly. So we haven’t done anything with the tree except comment to each other every time we happen to be wandering up there, “We really should do something with that tree.”
This is the tree.
It’s okay. Go ahead and say it. “Wow. That’s a big tree.”
So you might understand how, when Michael came home with a borrowed two-man saw thrown triumphantly over his shoulder, we knew that it was finally time to do something about this wooden albatross.
Cherie tried to be one of the two men on the two-man saw. She really did. But after some significant time spent sawing and only getting maybe a sixth of the way through the tree, it became pretty clear that somebody other than a seven-month-pregnant woman with questionable upper body strength was needed.
So we called our friend Todd. Since Todd refused to payment for his help in the form of food or beer, we will pay him back by publicly announcing that we called Todd because he is the manliest man we know. He crushes beer cans on his head. He lifts heavy objects for fun. He eats raw eggs for breakfast and sweats kerosene. He is clearly the guy you want on the other end of the two-man saw and the only reason we didn’t call him first is because we didn’t want him to show up Michael.*
Anyway, Todd the Manly Man came over to help and he and Michael sawed a three-foot chunk off the beastly tree. It took, according to the neighbor children that thoughtfully kept track, 547 strokes and close to an hour to get through the thing. Unfortunately, we have no pictures of this event because they did all of this before Cherie got home from work and Michael cannot be trusted to remember the camera for these occasions. (This also explains why the above picture of the tree is clearly post-cut.) Nevertheless, victory was achieved, even if it was undocumented.
Now all that remained was the part where we needed to somehow maneuver the 250 pound chunk of wood through the obstacle course of the woods and get it settled somewhere close to the house, where Michael could saw slabs off at his leisure.
That took some rolling:
And some flipping:
And more rolling:
Until it finally settled in the side yard.
In case you were wondering about the last logs that we spent time hauling around, well… they are still sitting in our front yard. All 20 of them. The guy that we are sharing the pulp truck with hasn’t been by yet.
So it is very likely that this thing will still be squatting next to our house come next spring. But, hey. At least we’ve finally done something with that tree.
*None of that is true. We’re just trying to make sure our volunteers know they are valued. We called Todd because he was available. He sure is a nice guy, though.
