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A while back, you may remember, we bought ourselves a new front door.
You don’t remember that? Yes, well, it was some time ago, we admit, but it did happen. And since we bought it, that door has held a special place of honor in our dining room. Oh, yes, we admired it all winter long. Cherie would occasionally stroke it and talk to it about how pretty it was and Michael would tell it stories about how some day it would grow up to be a real door, but that’s about it. But no more! Last week Michael had a few days in-between jobs and decided to devote himself to some long-delayed house projects. And high on the list was the door.
First, he ripped out the old door.
This is one of those projects Cherie was really glad she missed.
Next he extended the door jamb. Remember that the door was such a deal because it was an exterior door for a 2X4 wall, not a 2X6. In order to make it fit our wall, the frame needed to be extended those extra 2 inches.
The white part is the extension, the unpainted wood is the original frame.
Then it was merely a case of installing the frame and hanging the door. Here’s the finished product on the inside. On the left you will see the sad, dejected white fiberglass door that was removed.
On the table you will see a sad, dejected Annabel shoe. We don’t ask anymore.
And–bada bing, bada boom–this was the view Cherie had on her return from work: a pretty new wooden door that’s much more suited to the house.
It goes without saying that this is how Cherie prefers all housework to be completed, right? While she is off somewhere else entirely? Right.
We’d call that a pretty successful day of door swapping.
The weather was beautiful on the coast of Maine this weekend. Unseasonably high temperatures up in the mid-70s with bright beautiful sunshine meant that we had to get outdoors. And what could we do outside?
Hmmmm….
Well, there was a little bit of this:
That’s copper flashing (in case there are any Cheries out there).
Then there was some of these:
Yes, we know that it is misspelled on the can. We know what we mean, so let’s all move on, eh?
And, of course, where you find those, you find this:
Hello, old friend.
Because we are almost up to the second floor windows, we needed some of this:
Trimmy trim trim. (You try to find something witty to say about trim.)
And, of course, it almost goes without saying that we had plenty of these:
Cherie occasionally has nightmares about being attacked by shingles. We have no idea why.
And that was our weekend in a nut shell. A little of this, a little of that, and a whole lotta this:
You are impressed at our progress, right? Please tell us you are impressed.
Because this was an incredibly boring post and you deserve a reward for making it this far, we include a gratuitous Annabel shot for your enjoyment. You’re welcome.
Look at that wary expression. She knows what’s in store at the top of that ladder.
Here's what was in our housebuilding budget for 2008:
Shingles and stain
Chimney for woodstove
Wood for kitchen cabinets
Upstairs trim
Possibly the kitchen countertop
Here's what was not in our housebuilding budget for 2008:
A new back door
Our back door is… functional. It keeps the rain out and the dogs in. It locks and therefore discourages those would break in to steal our coveted collection of dust (both saw and drywall. Oooohhh, fancy). It is a full glass door, which allows the cat to stare out and dream big dreams of open woods full of squirrels to chase.
It also cost $60 at a Habitat for Humanity yard sale. And looks like it.
(Actually, that's not strictly true. We did buy a door at a Habitat for Humanity yard sale and it did cost $60. Then when we tried to install it we discovered that we had purchased a 6'6" door for a 6'8" doorframe. So then we had to go out a purchase another 6'8" door, but we don't remember how much it cost. Regardless: it was cheap. Also, that story is far less interesting so do you see why we tried to skip over it?)
So, our current back door is…did we already use the word "functional"? We did? Shoot. Because it's really the best word for this particular door. It's a full-light, white vinyl door. It doesn't improve the look of the house. It doesn't detract from it in any significant way. It's a door. It is what it is. It works, and, like our plywood countertops and Advantix stairs, that's good enough for right now.
Or it was good enough until a few weeks ago when Michael happened to stop by the FS pile at our local building supply store. The FS pile consists of custom orders that were rejected, misorders, overstocks, and other good that need to be off-loaded quickly. There are good deals to be found in the FS pile. We've pulled a few items that have gone in this house from there, including boxes of slate tile for the entryway and the giant bay window in our kitchen. We can't tell you what "FS" stands for… well, we could tell you but it totally ruin the PG rating of this blog and cause both our mothers to wash our mouths out with soup. [Edited to add: Obviously, that should be "soap." But the image of getting our mouths washed out with "soup" is so nice, we're leaving it. Cherie's pick for a punishing soup would be split pea, which she never has learned to like.] Suffice it to say that it's not-very-nice jargon for items that are messed up.
Anyway, Michael cruised by the FS pile one day and happened to see a door sitting there. Not a white vinyl door, but a really nice, 15-pane, fir door. It was a misorder, as it was designed to go in a 2×4 wall, not a 2×6 wall as most exterior walls are. This would prevent it from opening completely flat in a 2×6 wall. But our back door can't open fully anyway because of where our kitchen table is located. And the folks at the building supply were desperate to unload it, so they were willing to deal.
In other words, we have a new door.
It will still be functional. Only now, it will be functional AND attractive. And cheap.
Win, win. And win.
The upstairs trim can wait.
This is our front yard…
Actually, wait a minute. You shouldn’t look at this unprepared. Go get yourself a cup of tea, a stiff drink, or a bowl of ice cream. Whatever fortifies you in your times of need.
You ready?
Okay.
This is our front yard:
Pretty grim, eh? We’ve got logs that still haven’t been shipped off to the sawmill, the infamous Drip-o-Matic shingle dipping station (version 2.1!), a canoe and kayak that really should be stored in a more appropriate manner, random detritus laying hither and yon, and dead trees clogging the background. And, of course, it’s all brought together by the unifying beauty of fill and topped off by our plasticked porch. It had better be unplasticked for enjoyment pretty soon considering that it is getting warm out and the time between when it gets warm and when the black flies and mosquitoes come out is pretty short, but that’s another story.
Yes, our front yard is extremely depressing. This past weekend it was sunny and beautiful out and Cherie spent a good deal of time lamenting that she couldn’t take the baby out and spend the afternoon on the grass, because there was no grass. There’s not likely to be grass anytime soon, either. It was looking like our kid would have to grow up without grass and that just doesn’t seem right.
So it was quite a nice surprise when Cherie came home from work on Monday to discover that Michael had done this:
That’s a nice layer of topsoil that’s been seeded with grass seed.
Yes, he planted his wife and daughter a little grass patch. Say it together, everyone: Awwwwww.
Annabel is very excited and is ready to get in there and start on her first grass stains:
Sorry, sweetheart. It’s not quite ready yet. The package says germination takes five days. But then we’ll have a picnic.
We’d thought that what we were building was a house. It had walls and rooms and a roof. It was the general shape and size of a house. We talked about it like it was a house as in, “Hey, are we going up to the house today?” But we were wrong. It wasn’t a house.
It turns out that a house doesn’t really look like a house until the roof is shingled. Because now that the roof is done, we can see that what was there before was just a construction site.
This is a house:
Answer to the asked question: Gregory was correct. It is a sun tube, or Sun Tunnel. We’d originally planned on putting a skylight into the bathroom to bring in more natural light but it became immediately clear that there wasn’t enough room for that. The Sun Tunnel will help brighten up the bathroom without taking up the entire bathroom ceiling.
Answer to the unasked question: Yes, Cherie is still dipping shingles. See above picture?
There is a roof out there for us somewhere. And we will someday find it. But not quite yet. Why rush these things?
Saturday we finished putting up all the plywood on the exterior, closing in the trusses and sealing in the foundation. Then we built a downstairs wall in order to start the stairwell. We forgot to take pictures, so you’ll have to imagine it.
We do have pictures from Sunday, which was arts and crafts day.
First we cut:
Then we sanded:
And then we painted:
And that is the story of how we made the rafter tails.
(Hopefully by next weekend we’ll have a roof to attach them to.)
And then, because it was such a nice day and sometimes you just gotta go enjoy it, we helped Mark put his boat into the water and take it for a test drive.
Everyone will be happy to know that we have refined the shingle-dipping system. We have, in fact, brought shingle-dipping to a never before dreamed of level. If there were a shingle-dipping Olympics, we would come in…well, not first, but definitely somewhere above the Lithuanians. (With all due respect to Lithuanians. Don’t send hate mail. We’ll cry.)
But we did improve the process. Please witness:
The New and Improved Shingle-Dipping System
The components of system, listed in descending order because Cherie accidentally lined up this photo backwards (get that look off your face. It happens).
5) Shingles (duh).
4) Clothespins
3) Giant vat o’ stain
2) Cherie’s patented Stain Drip-o-Matic (also known in some parts as a dish drainer over a tub)
1) Stir stick
The process: Grab shingle. Dip in Giant vat o’ stain. Transfer quickly to Stain Drip-o-Matic. Let drip off while dipping the rest of the 15 shingles that the drainer (sorry, I mean Drip-o-Matic) will hold. Clear space on clothesline while shingles drip off by removing dry shingles. Pin newly dipped shingles. Stir stain periodically. Repeat. And repeat. And repeat. And repeat. And repeat. And, oh heck, repeat again.
Using this method, Cherie managed to dip 1 1/2 bundles of shingles in 3 hours, as opposed to 1 bundle in 5 hours. Plus, we can recover the stain from the tub, thus wasting less.
Yes, we were thrilled by this system. Yes, we know we need to get lives. We know.
Have you ever dipped shingles in stain? Would you like to try? ‘Cause Cherie dipped for five hours on Sunday and only managed to do a little over one bundle. We estimate it will take 60 bundles to do the house.
And each shingle needs to be dipped twice.
And needs to dry for 24 hours in between.
You can do the math if you’d like. We haven’t done it, because we’d like to keep the strength to go on living.
The good part is that dipping isn’t hard. It’s just boring. And tedious. And did we mention boring?
It is indeed possible to get shingles that are pre-dipped at the factory, but they cost a lot more. And we could just put the shingles up, then paint on the stain, but then we wouldn’t have such thorough protection against the elements.
So dipping it is. In classic Cherie and Michael fashion, we constructed an incredibly sophisticated drying system consisting of 400 feet of clothesline and 250 clothespins.
What do you think of the color? It’s called “Bark Mulch,” which seems
like not the best marketing idea. Or maybe it is. We bought
it.
You don’t really want to know how much work it took (hint: working until after dark in the cold rain) and how much help it took (we think we now owe Greg and Mark every favor we have to give for the next year) to get us to this point. But here we are. There’s something that looks very much like a house standing on our lot:
Details, the whys and hows, and pictures to follow later.
No time for a big update, but we did want to show you that over the weekend this big pile of wood:
turned into this:
A floor! Well, a subfloor. A subfloor! No matter, the Cement Pit/Dog Containment Unit is no more. And, no, we are not keeping the dog down there any more.
But that’s only the start of the excitement. We found out that we were bumped up the list for our wall panels, so instead of coming in a few weeks, they are coming on Tuesday. Walls! We will have walls! This week! Stay tuned.
For those who are interested, we will put together a more detailed explanation of the process of constructing the subfloor later.
