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And just like that, it’s 2010.
It’s safe to say that 2009 wasn’t our best blogging year. It’s even safer to say that 2009 wasn’t our best housebuilding year. We tried. We really did. It’s just… there were a lot of distractions.
There was this distraction:
Hi. I’m two.
If you’ve lived with a two-year old, then we don’t really need to explain any more. If you haven’t, imagine a short, cute, demon that picks up everything you put down and moves it, objects to every plan, enters every day with an agenda of their own, and is otherwise generally ornery and objectionist. And cute. Did we mention cute?
Then there was this:
Hi. I’m the weather forecast from most of the summer.
It rained pretty much every day through June and July. It rained enough that Mainers started getting twitchy and lakes overflowed. Rain, rain, rain. Since the majority of the work planned for this year was exterior, you might say that this caused a problem.
And, of course, there was this distraction:
Hi. I’m the U.S. economy.
We all went through this, right? No need to elaborate? Didn’t think so.
And, finally, there is this distraction:
Yep. Another cute, short, ornery, objectionist demon will be arriving in a few weeks.
So 2009 was a bit of a bust house-wise, but we hold out high hopes for 2010. The new baby is actually working in our favor. The last major overhaul of the house was probably around the time we turned a junk-filled room into a nursery. And now that we’ve got another one on the way, well…Annabel will be needing a big girl room, right?
A few weeks ago, Michael volunteered to help out a friend who was moving into a new work space, a space previously occupied by a builder. The former tenant had left some of his custom-built furniture behind and the owner of the building told her to use what she needed and get rid of the rest. So Michael helped her retrofit an old desk to suit her needs and when all was said and done, he left with this:
A custom-built mahogany two-drawer filing cabinet.
We’d always planned on having a built-in desk in the corner of the living room, tucked away in a little nook left for that purpose at the base of the stairs. This wasn’t to be a major workspace, but just a spot to keep the laptop, sort mail, and write checks. Our idea was to modify a classic Stickley desk for this purpose, maybe with a drop-front to help make the most of the space (and to hide our “important papers” in an emergency guest situation). Or maybe with lots of pigeon holes (for more of those “important papers” and possibly some “important rubber bands”). We hadn’t really worked out the details yet. But in any case, our plans didn’t involve a filing cabinet. But…custom-built. Mahogany. Shiny. Pretty. Who are we to argue?
We also were given some mahogany plywood for a top. A quick trim and a few screws later… ta-da! A desk.
Clearly, this isn’t a permanent solution. The cabinet in that small space doesn’t leave enough legroom for a chair and it doesn’t have any of those all-important quick hiding places. But for now, it works pretty well.
So what’s the problem?
Well, having these pretty new filing cabinets around means that we need to fill them with the aforementioned important papers and rubber bands. And before we can do that, we need to sort through our current storage situation.
Right. We’ll see you in a few months.
(Cat not included.)
(Or is she?)
Something is different here… There’s something that seems warmer about our house. What could it be? What oh what…
Hey! We have a functioning woodstove!
Michael’s parents, Greg and Annie, were just up here for a visit and if there is one thing they love, it’s trying to move our house projects along with something resembling speed. So while Cherie was busy working (or should that be “working”?), Michael and Greg were doing this:
That right there is a completed metalbestos chimney. No, it’s not very Arts and Crafts-y, or even very pretty, but it provides a means for the smoke from a warm fire to safely exit our house. And that’s good enough. Besides, it’s on the back side of the house, so who cares?
We didn’t have to cut into the roof to mount the chimney, as we thought we might have to do. Instead, it goes neatly around the roofline. Here’s a closer look for those of you interested in that sort of thing.
Cherie is not interested in that sort of thing. She’s interested in this sort of thing:
Can you blame her?
(You’ll notice that we have, for the moment, abandoned the debate concerning the granite up the back of the surround. You know us. Why make a decision that will require work when stalling is possible? The cement board behind the stove is fire resistant and acceptable to our code enforcement office and that’s good enough for us.)
C: They totally all agree with me.
M: They do not! Plenty of people agree with me.
C: Your people are so outnumbered by my people. The consensus is that the rough stone looks funny.
M: A few crazy people agreeing with you does not mean a consensus.
C: Oh, I’m so going to tell them that you called them crazy.
M: You won’t even notice the difference between rough and smooth once a big, black woodstove is in front of that anyway. It will totally break it up.
C: I will notice. I will always notice. And it will drive me crazy every single day.
M: This is so ridiculous. This was the plan! Why change the plan?
C: Because the plan was flawed. I’m a visual person. I need to see it before I can make a decision. And once I saw it I knew it was wrong.
M: You know, it doesn’t matter anyway because we don’t have enough stone to cover the whole thing right now.
C: We don’t?
M: No.
C: Really? There’s so much granite out there.
M: Really. We’ve only got about a quarter of what we need. I did the math.
C: So we need to either keep scavenging granite or come up with a totally new idea regardless?
M: Yeah.
C: *frown*
M: *grump*
C: Let’s go get some ice cream.
M: Okay.
Long, long ago in a granite field far, far away, we spent so much time wandering around chunks of beautiful stone that Cherie was late to her college reunion. And when we finally showed up, it was in a low-riding truck filled to the brim with granite. Do we know how to be the hit of the party or what?
But never mind! We got a great deal on a lot of granite to serve as the woodstove surround. And that granite has spent the last year here:
Holding down the porch.
Perfect! Just like we planned!
If you remember from way back when, that there big slab of granite is actually a countertop remnant. It was roughly the size we needed, but it obviously needed to be cut to fit. It took us all winter to catch up with a friendly mason willing to take on such a small job, but Michael finally arranged to borrow an hour of his time on a weekend morning. So Michael made a template:
And they started cutting.
Sadly, we have no photos of the cutting process because Cherie was gone and Michael had to help the mason. The whole process only took about half an hour, which is amusing considering it took us a year to get him there. But you'll just have to trust us that there was a mason. Actually, you won't have to trust us because we have proof:
Next came the cement board:
(We stuffed some insulation behind it to help keep the hot water pipes, well, hot.)
You'll clearly see our plan for the back of the surround here. The small pieces of granite will follow the stairs and then be mirrored on the other side.
We set some of the back pieces of granite around to give us a sense for how it will look.
And, well…
Cherie thinks it looks…funny somehow. Something about the rough-cut pieces of the back set against the smooth, sharp-edged floor piece isn't working for her.
Unsurprisingly, Michael thinks Cherie is off her rocker.
So, we ask. What do you think?
Yay or nay?
If this doesn't work out we'll just…um…well…we don't really have a back-up plan. So there's no pressure or anything. Just because we are asking you to save our house, and our marriage, and our sanity.
No, really. What do you think?
It’s hard to explain just how white that primer on the walls was. So white. Tremendously white. Whiter than Snow White riding a white horse through new fallen snow. And that’s white.
So we clearly need to fix that. Plus, given our sloppy painting technique, painting before the flooring went in seemed to make a lot of sense. Yes, indeed, painting was next on the agenda.
Let’s meet the contenders, shall we?
For the living room, where the theme was "Not White But Still Neutral Because We Have Too Much Wacky Art":
On the left is White Hyacinth and on the right is Indian White. These are both from the Sherman Williams’ Arts and Crafts collection.
And in the dining room, where the theme was "More Exciting Than the Living Room But It Still Needs to Match So Maybe Green":
Here you can see where Cherie went a little nuts with sample colors. On the left is Ruskin Room Green, again from Sherman Williams. In the middle is Georgian Green and on the right is Kennebunkport Green. Those last two were from Benjamin Moore’s Historic Colors collection.
And the winners are:
White Hyacinth and Georgian Green. Seen here together from the front of the living room, a view which clearly demonstrates why these colors had to coordinate. Which they actually do.
The Indian White was terrifically unattractive on our wall. It looked like "flesh" tone–as in Crayola crayons or Band-Aids. (We put "flesh" in quotations because we’ve never met anyone whose "flesh" was actually "flesh" toned.) It was really quite creepy. And the two rejected greens were either too dark (Kennebunkport) or didn’t look as nice with the White Hyacinth (Ruskin Room).
As for all that debris scattered around, pay it no mind. That’s just a little something we were working on this weekend involving wood flooring and our living room. Really. Don’t pay any attention to it. At least until tomorrow, which is when we will triumphantly unveil our new living room floor.
Had just about enough of drywall? Yeah, us too. We don’t really see a light at the end of the taping-and-mudding tunnel yet, but why don’t we take a break from all that dust anyway and talk about something a little more exciting?
This weekend, we built things out of wood. And, lo, it was wonderful.
We built this:
The beadboard in front of the tub, that is. It currently has one layer of finish on it with another to come. The tile that is missing has been missing since the day after we tiled back in August. We have a problem with getting things fixed around here. We don’t want to take time to backtrack right now, so if something breaks/starts peeling/pops off we just leave it like that. We take a similar approach to housecleaning (why bother? It’s just going to get dirty again in five minutes), so we don’t recommend looking too closely at the shower.
But that wasn’t nearly enough beadboard for the likes of us:
This is the dormer in the second bedroom. We thought narrow beadboard on the ceiling would be a nice touch and so far it looks like we were right. We stopped halfway because we ran out of wood. We could have gone to buy more wood to finish up, but Cherie and the miter saw were having some disagreements. Sometimes it best just to walk away. But we are very pleased with how the ceiling is turning out. After it is all done, we’ll show you how we angled the peak of the dormer back in a very cool way. You can’t see it from this shot, so don’t even bother trying.
To get to this point, of course, we spent most of Saturday sanding and priming the walls. But we aren’t going to talk about drywall. We are all about the beadboard. Beadboard, beadboard, beadboard. Isn’t there something else that needs beadboard? Less drywall, more beadboard. Give beadboard a chance. To beadboard or not to beadboard, that is that question.
Okay, that’s it. We’re done. And we’ll stop sniffing the wood finish.
We are back from our whirlwind, take-no-prisoners, soak-in-some-sun-to-get-us-through-the-winter Thanksgiving trip to Florida. And we managed to prove that it is possible to eat your own body weight in starchy food, though you will regret it later.
We’ll write about the trip later. First, let’s take a look at why we ran for that airport like a turkey with its butt on fire.
This:
That is the wall and floor in the second bedroom. That black thing is a drywall sponge. The yellowish is stuff are bits of wood. But that weird discoloration and the gray blob? That is a leak. Behind the drywall. Spilling out onto the floor.
Michael discovered it on Wednesday when he went to put on another coat of drywall mud. If Cherie had been there, there would have been much swearing and tearing of the hair and general woe and misery, because that is what she does.
Because Cherie was not there, but instead was at work, Michael did what he does and went about finding and solving the problem. The problem was this:
That’s the dormer in the second bedroom. We left it as a cathedral ceiling to open up the room. We also didn’t vent it, because we didn’t think we needed to. Venting serves a very important function in our climate. Namely, it keeps the warm air inside the house separate from the cold air outside the house. Because when warm air and cold air meet with wood in the middle, condensation forms. Condensation means water. Water runs down the studs and out onto the floor, which is a very sad thing to see in your house. It’s been cold recently, but our nicely insulated house has been toasty warm. The result? The wood was soaked and the insulation was dripping, but except for that tiny little stain that will be covered by trim, the drywall was okay.*
So, instead of getting a whole bunch of work done on his day off, Michael pulled out all the insulation, installed the venting channels, climbed on the roof to install the roof vents, put the insulation back in the northern side, and propped the insulation from the southern side up to dry. Then he explained the whole thing to Cherie when she came home. She immediately got a beer while he made calming arguments that we found it right in time, there was no permanent damage, and we hadn’t put the beadboard on the ceiling yet so nothing expensive was ruined.
Immediately after that, we decided we’d had just about enough of this fun housebuilding adventure for the moment and left this behind to dry:
And went to Florida.
*The grey things in the bays are the newly -installed styrofoam venting channels. On the outside of the wall, vent holes are drilled into the walls, bringing cold air into the house. The venting channels then carry that cold air up the roof and out again through the roof vent. That’s all we had to do, but we didn’t do it. Lesson learned: don’t be lulled into complacency, vent the darn dormer. (Interesting fact proving the efficiency of solar power: only the north-facing side of the dormer roof had this problem. The south side, which has sun on it all day, was perfectly fine.)
It really didn’t happen by magic.
The entryway has been an ongoing project. It was drywalled back in September, when Michael’s brother Greg came to visit. We picked away at the mudding for a few weeks when we had the time. We tried in vain to tile a few weeks ago but were thwarted by a power outage (no power=no wet saw). After we finally finished the tile, grouting this tiny space took two days because weren’t sure how the tile would react to the grout. In short, despite the fact that we haven’t really talked about it and thus it probably appears that we’ve made huge progress all at once, in reality, this wee little room has been a long time a-comin’.
Let’s start with the philosophy for the entryway. We live (you may have heard) in Maine. The Maine climate has some pretty obvious disadvantages, but one of the major ones is that you need a place to put all of the "stuff." "Stuff" includes coats (in weights varying from "chilly" to "subarctic"), hats, mittens, gloves, rainjackets, boots, scarves, snowpants, and all of the other accoutrement needed to get us through a year of Maine weather. Not only do you need a place to put this stuff, but you need a way to dry it. Every Maine resident is intimately familiar with the smell of wool drying on a heat source. It’s a smell that’s as much a part of the state as pine needles and ocean air are. So, yes, we needed an entryway.
Plus, we just like the concept of an entryway. We like the formal progression from outside to inside. We liked the opportunity to set the vision for our home–warm, classic, influenced by nature, and practical–right from the start. Like everything around here, it’s a little rough around the edges, but…
Welcome to our home. Here’s a spot to hang your coat, drape your mittens, and dump your boots. Actually, there isn’t a place to hang your coat because we haven’t put the closet rod up yet. Oh, and careful where you put those boots, we’ve got extensions cords everywhere. And now that we think of it, there isn’t really a place for the mittens… just throw them on the floor. Never mind all that. Would you like some hot cocoa?
There was no way to get the whole door and the floor in the picture. Sorry.
We used slate for the floor. Slate absorbs water. Thus, with the radiant heat underneath, it is the perfect place to put wet boots.
When we first ordered the slate, we were under the impression that it would be grey. When Cherie opened the box and saw grey and yellow and apricot and red she just about had a heart attack. But we were too quick to judge. Laid out, it looks beautiful.
(See that nice wide closet in the back there?)
And please check out the door hardware. The inside:
And the outside:
So we are all ready to bring some guests in. Except that when you open the door, this is what you see:
Some might call this a hazard. We call it adventure.
Now bring us our boots!
Everything we did this weekend was boring. Endlessly, endlessly boring. We are so boring that even we are sick of ourselves.
Cherie installed the reflective insulation for the radiant heat (*yawn*). Michael built a door for the basement (*snore*). We put in the door stops in the bedroom and bathroom, built a bedframe for the bed, and put up a closet rod (drool… *snort*). In a last-ditch effort to try and jazz things up, we put up a few sheets of drywall in the living room. This clearly indicates what sad, desperate people we are.
*sigh*
Wait. Perhaps we are just taking the wrong attitude here. Maybe what we need is some positive spin. Less defeatism, more panache.
Start over.
This weekend, despite crippling physical ailments including a wicked bad* head cold and a sinus headache, Michael overcame the odds and completed an insulated door for the basement! Not to be outdone, Cherie, driven on by the bitter chill of these autumn nights, single-handedly installed over 700 square feet of Reflectix insulation. Nothing would stand between this woman and warm toes–not even the threat of brain injury from the repeated smashing of her head into floor joists. But that wasn’t enough…oh no! In his ongoing efforts to placate his wife, Michael also built a bedframe to keep Cherie, that delicate flower, from the drafts of the floor and installed a closet rod so that her beautiful garments would not be rendered unwearable from wrinkling and cat-nesting. And then, just to prove he could, he installed door stops to protect the door hinges from overwork. What a guy! Cherie, meanwhile, kept the home fires burning by completing untold loads of laundry and spending three-quarters of an hour washing dishes in the bathtub. Truly extraordinary! Finally, our heroic duo managed to summon their last remaining energy to hang three (THREE!) sheets of drywall in the living room! How do they do it? And all before dinner!
Still boring, eh? Well, we tried.
*Sometimes we worry we aren’t being Maine enough. To compensate, we will start utilizing Maine slang whenever applicable.
