Category Archive

You may have noticed that our enthusiasm for the ol’ house blog has waned a bit.  It’s partly time, which is mighty short these days, and it’s partly other demands, which are many, and it’s partly, sad to say, lack of content.

There’s just not that much happening on the house front.  There’s too much happening on the life front.

So it’s time to move on from the house blog.  Instead, maybe, we’ll try a life blog.  Okay, fine, Cherie will try a life blog.  Michael is going to try simply having a life.

There will likely be house stuff over there as well, but not as much, and not as technical.  Michael may continue to update over here very sporadically, as content warrants.

Otherwise, find Cherie (and Michael, when she allows it) here: beyondthedooryard.wordpress.com

And thanks for coming along for the ride.

This is Sam:

Sam isn’t looking at you like that because he’s being forced to share his swing with Annabel’s doll.  Nor is he looking at you like that because this angle makes his uneven newborn hair look like a receding hairline.  He’s not even looking at you like that because he’s sad that he has been dressed in horizontal stripes.  He’s looking at you like that because he’s trying to gain you sympathy because his parents, slackers that we are, kind of forgot to mention his existence.

So we are mentioning it.  This is Sam.  He’s *mumble mumble* weeks old.

Internet: He’s HOW old?

Uh, *mumble mumble* weeks old.

Internet: We still can’t hear you.

EIGHT weeks, okay?  He’s almost eight weeks old and we haven’t written about him and we are terrible and we’re sorry.

Okay?

Okay.

Don’t hold it against the baby.  The baby is totally innocent in all this.  Say hi to Sam, internet.

We always have such big plans, don’t we?  “Let’s build a house,” we say.  “How about we start a blog?” we ponder.  “Let’s save the wood from the trees that we had to cut down and use it as our trim,” we decide.

Mm-hmm.

And that’s how we end up living in a half-built house, with a website we never update, and a pile of logs sitting in our front yard for a year-and-a-half.

We had such high hopes for those logs.  But, alas, our original plan fell through when our pulp truck connection didn’t work out.  We always meant to find another way to get the logs to the sawmill, but it turned out to be one of those things that was really, really easy to put off.  And thus they never went off to become real boards, but sat in our yard (and sat and sat and sat) until, finally, we noticed this:

Mushrooms.

Wood that has mushroomed isn’t really wood you want to use as trim.

We just let them sit too long.  Typical.

Luckily, as always, we had an alternate plan.

It involved chunking the logs up into smaller bits,

hitting them repeatedly with a sharp, heavy instrument

and stacking them neatly in a row, where they will stay until they are needed to keep Cherie’s feet warm next winter.

Not quite what we were hoping for, but in the battle of window trim versus warmth, warmth always, always wins.

If you are reading this, you’ve found your way to our new home.  Please ignore the boxes and dust while we rearrange.  Things will likely be changing here for a while. 

If you read this blog through a reader, you may need to change your settings.  See the “Subscribe to this feed” link at the top.  And let us know if you are having any problems with the site.  We likely will not be able to fix your problem, but we will nod sympathetically at you while you complain.  And, really, did you expect more?

Welcome!

This year marks our third Christmas in Chez M and C.  Our first year we scavenged a tree from our land, with predictably depressing results.  The second year, suitably distracted by a new baby and a flurry of snowstorms, we just bought one and remembered what a Christmas tree was supposed to look like.

This year…well… you know our motto:

“Why pay for something decent when you can throw a baby on your back and tromp through the snow in search of a completely imperfect, but free, tree?”

(That’s one of our mottos, anyway.)

We divided duties in the usual fashion.  Cherie carried Annabel and gave helpful suggestions while Michael did the actual work.  It didn’t take us long before we found a tree we thought might work.

(He is actually sawing the tree down in this picture, though it doesn’t much look like it.)

We brought the tree in, shook off all the snow, trimmed off the bottom branches, set it up in the stand, and took a good hard look.  And…hmmm.

Seems a bit sparse, doesn’t it?

It’s not that bad, of course, and it’s certainly light years ahead of that first sad, little tree.  But it could be better.

Luckily, we are very (veeeery) used to making do and thinking creatively.  And we had all those extra branches that were trimmed off the bottom.  Why don’t we just drill some holes…

Whittle down those spare branches…

And use them to, you know, fill things out a bit?

That is better, don’t you think?  Now it just needs some lights and decorations…

And we’re ready to go.

Oh, wait, one more thing.  How could we forget?  The star!  That most valuable star that we made last year when we desperately needed something to top off our otherwise wonderful tree.

That’s what we are looking for.  Now that is a proper DIY tree.

Happy holidays!  May all your trees be jerryrigged and your ornaments homemade!

In our last post, we talked about our new woodstove.  Actually, the woodstove was a hand-me-down from Cherie's mother who in turn inherited it from Cherie's grandfather.  So the woodstove itself is quite old.  The chimney was new.  At any rate, the post was all about how when Michael's parents came to visit they helped us finish up the woodstove.  We were so excited about that part that we neglected to mention the reason they visited.  Hint: it had nothing to do with a woodstove.  It had to with this:

Um.  Yes.  We forgot to mention Annabel's first birthday.  Let's just all pretend that didn't happen and that we aren't posting this almost a month late, shall we?

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ANNABEL!  Thanks for putting up with all the sawdust.

Also, weeks ago (or was it months ago?  Yes, it was probably months) we finished the bathroom vanity but never showed you a picture of it.  In our defense, we didn't have a camera at the time.  We considered doing a charcoal sketch of the vanity, or perhaps a nice watercolor, but ultimately decided that such an artistic display would raise the classiness of this blog to a level that we can't support.  So, to maintain the present low-expectations of our readers, we decided instead to just hold off until we had a camera again.  Which we now do!

Here's the finished vanity:

 

HAPPY FINISHING, VANITY!  Thanks for holding our toothbrushes!

The doors and drawfronts are made of Douglas Fir plywood with mahogany trim.  Instead of the usual non-working applied drawfront below the sink, we installed two sink front tip-out organizers, which make a handy place to stash toothpaste.  The mismatched hardware is on purpose, because we are just craaazy that way.  And the doors usually have a white plastic child lock to keep curious fingers out of the cleaning products, but we took that off for the picture because we are vain about our vanity.  (Get it?  Vain? Vanity? *sigh*)

We think that clears up all past obligations.  For the moment.  Likely a short moment.

It's not that we've been purposely neglecting the blog.  It's not that we haven't been working.  It's just that what we've been doing is so mindnumbingly boring that not only do we not want to do it, we don't even want to talk about doing it.  And heaven knows that is unusual for us.

Here, this is what you've missed out on the last month or so:

Take shingle.  Dip in stain.  Prop in drying rack.  Take shingle.  Dip in stain.  Prop in drying rack.  Take shingle.  Dip in stain.  Prop in drying rack.  Etc.

OR:

Take shingle.  Line up on wall.  Nail.  Take shingle.  Line up on wall.  Nail.  Take shingle.  Line up on wall.  Nail.  Etc.

Do you see the problem here?  Just those few sentences were enough to make us want to poke our eyes out with sticks and we are the ones who should be the most fascinated by the process.  So, really, the silence was for your own protection.

But we have been busy shingling, trying to get the south wall finished before winter hits.  Like the Aesop's famous grasshopper, we apparently spent all summer fiddling (we did?) and have now been caught unawares by the rapidly chilling air.  So we've been trying to to batten down, insulate up, and otherwise brace ourselves for what is to come.

Other exciting, winter-related developments that we can attribute to this drive:

• Our woodstove is in place and has a chimney piece that runs through the interior wall, under the stairs, and through the exterior wall where it goes straight up…for four feet.  Which makes it almost, but not quite, usable.  The rest of the chimney will be installed…sometime.
• We finally finished insulating the attic, including new insulation in the perpetually leaking dormer.  Michael pulled down all of the wood in the ceiling, installed reflexive insulation on both the interior and exterior sides with R30 fiberglass insulation sandwiched in between, in yet another attempt to prevent cold air and warm air from making acquaintance and resulting in that ugliest of offspring: condensation.  Will it work?  Who knows.  We've given up predicting what will happen with that dormer.  We hope it works, because our next step involves a flamethrower and a big can of gasoline.
• We put up more hooks in the entryway so we could hang winter coats, hats, and scarves, especially Annabel's coats and hats which keep getting lost in the chaos of our coat closet.
• Michael finished the bathroom vanity.  Okay, that has absolutely nothing to do with winter, but it did get done and it looks great so we had to mention it.  Of course, our camera is still broken so you are just going to imagine the prettiest vanity you've ever seen and multiply that prettiness by two.  No, prettier.  There you go.  That's how pretty it is.  (Note to selves: figure out what vanity we can show instead of ours once we get a new camera.)

So we say: bring it on Winter.  We're (almost, as soon as that chimney gets done) ready for you!

Of course, feel free to send your friend Summer instead, if you're busy.  That would be fine, too.