Category Archive

Hello?

Hello?

Anyone out there?

Wait…we are the ones who have been missing, haven't we?

Yes, yes we have been.

We have a few very good excuses for why we haven't been updating.  You can pick your favorite or, if you are feeling particularly saucy, make any combination of the below:

1) All of the projects we've been working on have been rather small, rather scattered, and not all that exciting.

2) Our camera died and a houseblog without pictures is…dull.  To say the least.  (Though perhaps not as dull as a houseblog that is never updated.)

3) We've been just plain old busy.

4) We've been spending far too much time engaged in summer-y type activities, including drinking margaritas, going to barbecues, and visiting the local swimming hole.

There you have it: our pitiful excuses for being absent so long.  But we would like to publicly declare that we are turning over a new leaf.  Looking through our photos we have found all sorts of projects that we completed but haven't written about.  Some of them are even interesting.  So over the next few weeks we'll go back and fill you in.

As soon as we can pry Annabel away from that swimming hole, that is.

We can hear you asking, "Wait, what happened to Weekend 123?  They promised us non-stop weekend action!"

True, we did.  But we didn't promise prompt updates. 

Here's what happened last weekend:

We held a grilling party and Michael built a fire pit for atmosphere.

Sadly, the wind picked up too much to use it.  But we are prepared for the next one!

And we turned a $3 thrift shop purchase into a baby entertainment unit.

She doesn't mind the wind.  It helps keep the black flies off.

And that was our weekend.  Okay then.  You're up to speed.

Weekend 124 arrived and we started to look around for what could become our next major accomplishment.   We haven't been able to dip more shingles because the weather has been a little rainy, so shingling was out.  We had pretty much used up all of the materials we had on hand, so major projects were out.  What could we do?  What could we do? What could we do?

Suddenly Michael said, "If I go and buy a sheet of plywood, I bet I can do something cool in the corner of the kitchen."

More specifically, he was talking about this part:

That right there is a $40 Ikea bookshelf that Cherie has owned since about 1998.  Since we moved into the house it has been a critical, yet unattractive and marginally functional, part of our kitchen, holding bowls, pans, cookbooks, baking supplies, and approximately 752 different kinds of tea.  It has always been a placeholder for the multi-purpose cabinet we had planned for the space.  Since this is a small house, we try to utilize space wisely, which is why when we say "multi-purpose" we really mean that this little three foot area was planned out as a message center/bookshelf/baking cabinet/wine rack.  Got all that?

Anyway, Michael went and purchased the plywood and we ripped it down.  Then Cherie and Annabel went on with weekend business and tried to ignore the banging and sawing and nailing happening in the kitchen.  And then–bada-bim, bada-boom–this was sitting where the Ikea bookcase used to be:

One slab of plywood as a countertop later we had our multi-multi-multi-multi-purpose built-in.

It holds cookie sheets, bowls, tea, small appliances, and wine.  A pitifully small collection of wine, by the looks of it.

And Michael even had enough plywood left over to make an upper cabinet to give all the cookbooks a good home.

We hadn't originally planned on an upper cabinet here, which explains why the phone jack is so high.  We may move it down someday, but until then we'll just try to not bash our knuckles when we answer.

And if we do injure ourselves…well.  That's why the wine is right there.

Two years.

That’s how long we’ve been doing this. Building a house, we mean. Not writing this entry. Although, if you consider that a blog is really an ongoing conversation then this entry has been influenced by all the previous blog entries and thus we really have been writing this entry for two years.

That much philosophical thinking hurts. Let’s move along, shall we?

Right. Two years.  It was two years ago that we started up this blog and chopped down the first trees for this housebuilding adventure.

Lately we’ve been feeling like we aren’t accomplishing anything. The baby has really slowed down operations. And we all know that those operations weren’t exactly moving at light speed anyway, so it has been a bit disheartening to realize that we are slowing down even further.

Thus it was rather cheering when we looked in the archives to see what we were up to last year at this time. That’s how we learned that in January 2007, we still had a table saw in the living room, no walls in the downstairs, and no functioning bathroom sink. We were using the guest room as a living room, had no flooring anywhere but the kitchen and bedroom, and had just begun thinking about kitchen cabinets. (Go ahead, ask us how the kitchen is coming. And then stand back whilst the Fight Over the Kitchen, Round 357 starts up.)  Life was dusty, chaotic, dusty, inconvenient, dusty, and borderline dangerous.  And did we mention dusty?

In short? We’ve come a really long way in a year. We discussed our goals for 2008 this morning and while it’s a daunting list (upstairs trim, woodstove installed, downstairs half bathroom, FINISH THE KITCHEN) it is nothing compared to what was facing us last year.

Progress. We have made progress.  How fantastic. Happy blogiversary to us, indeed.

 

Christmas last year was a pretty sad affair .  We were still using our guest bedroom as a temporary living room, our tree was a Charlie Brown reject, and the angel on top was an insult to the holiday.

This year things are looking a whole lot brighter.  Maybe it’s because we have an actual, somewhat complete living room to gather in.  Maybe it’s because the two feet of snow prevented us from searching the back forty (really, the back one-and-a-half) for a tree and we instead purchased one from the high school music boosters.  Or maybe it was because Cherie went ahead and got lights so that we could have more than 50 sad little red lights wrapped around the trunk.  Maybe the stockings hung on the make-shift banister with care add the proper ambiance.

Or perhaps it was the extra decorating assistance that we had.

Whatever the reason, the tree looks much better this year.

Especially because you’ll notice that Cherie put her foot down about the angel.

She utterly refused to put that cheap plastic angel up.  It was a bit lonely up top there, however.

So Michael put on his crafty hat and made us a star.

Anyone else want one?  We’re taking orders.

Annabel had her two-week check-up yesterday and we are proud to tell you that we have managed to keep her alive and healthy so far.  She is making great strides in keeping her eyes open for more than five minutes at a time and we hold out great hope for smiling soon.  Because after that comes head control and between that and helping daddy finish the kitchen cabinets are a few mere moments.

Meanwhile, in the "why does this always happen to us" department, we are less proud to tell you that the troublesome  dormer  is once again proving troublesome:

Can you even believe that this thing is leaking again?  We were so sure that we had fixed this problem last year by drilling through the rafters to allow for air flow, but here it is, leaking again from condensation.  We are at a loss about what to do here.  Our current plan is to just remove the bottom pieces of beadboard to keep it from getting ruined and then figure something out in the summer. 

We can do that because this particular problem only happens in the late fall, when the nights are below freezing and the days are warmer.  And considering that our backyard currently looks like this:

We are thinking that we may be beyond that "late fall" point for this year at least.  And, heck, we were going to repaint that room anyway.

Despite the fact that we now had all the basic parts and pieces of the nursery in place, it never felt like it was quite put together.  This may be because we tended to keep ladders and cans of paint in there.  it may be because we never seemed to get around to vacuuming up the sawdust.  It may be because the furniture felt crammed in and discombobulated and there were boxes of stuff everywhere.

Finally we buckled down and got to work cleaning, unpacking, and arranging.  Then we hit upon a furniture rearrangement that made the whole thing work.  And, ta-da!  A nursery.

But it was still missing something.  Don’t you think?

So we went out and got one more thing.  We recommend one for every nursery.  It’s called an Annabel.

We’re not sure you can still get this particular model, but you should try to if it hasn’t sold out.  At 22 inches long and 10 pounds, 5 ounces, it’s the heavy duty solution to all your nursery accessory problems.

Our highest priority over the last few weeks has been whipping the nursery into shape. 

This little room has always been the biggest question mark in our minds. 

First it spent a long and unglorious period as our storage closet:

This was also known as the room that made Cherie weep.

At this point we were thinking that it would make a nice office.  After moving the closet back out into the hallway , we finally got the place drywalled and primed and decided that it
would make a good nursery.  It’s quiet and, due to only one
north-facing window, dark.  (That’s really all we look for in a
nursery: is it conducive to sleeping?)  So its fate was decided but… it sat.  And sat.  And sat.  Until the unceasing growth of this:

finally prodded us into motion.   

(Please note: objects in this picture are way, way larger than they appear.)

As we’ve mentioned about 150 times, this is a tiny little room.  Therefore, our plan for it has always involved maximizing the space as much as possible.  We planned to build a loft into the attic for use as storage, playspace, and even guest sleeping quarters.  We also had hoped to utilize the "stairs to nowhere," as these are fondly known

(they really are the headroom for the stairs below) by building a dresser around them.

For right now we’ve given up on the dresser.  We’d like to make that built-in really nice and we don’t have the time or money to make that happen at this very moment. 

Instead, Michael whipped up a changing table for storage right now. 

But we decided to go ahead and try to put the loft in.  First we had to take down the temporary ceiling, a piece of drywall that we’d tacked up there last winter to keep the heat in the house instead of the attic.

Once that was done, Michael cut back the rafters with the Sawzall and pulled them out. 

(Apparently this process was very damaging to his hairstyle.)

Next he framed out a wall to block off the loft space from the rest of the attic, with an access panel into the attic space.  Our plan was to run wood, either beadboard or v-notch pine, up along the ceiling and on the walls to make the loft space as cozy as possible.  But after framing out the wall, we reassessed the situation.  We had a whole room to finish and only a little time to do it.  Perhaps this wasn’t the best time to get ourselves knee deep in a loft-building project that wasn’t really necessary yet. 

So we canceled that project too.  (Clearly, we are just fine with being quitters.)

We pulled a piece of plywood over the hole, packed some insulation in the space to help keep the nursery warm this winter and moved on to other baby-related activities.

We admit that this isn’t the most attractive view for a baby to have, but then again, why fill this kid with delusion?  The rest of the house is still in chaos; why should this room be any different?  I mean, we don’t want this little one to grow up thinking she’s better than the rest of us.  Really, we are just starting her off with a little dose of reality.

That’s healthy, right?

Coming up in Part II: painting and why you should always measure furniture before assembling it.

Cherie had her college reunion this past Saturday.  Her *mumblemumblemumble* reunion.  Ahem.  That one.  You know.  The reunion where people walk around and try to pretend that they are still young and beer-gut free because they haven’t quite given in to being full-fledged adults.  (Us included: M: Don’t you think that everyone here looks a lot older than us? C: Um, honey, this is what we look like. M: No way!)  The reunion was a surprisingly good time, and we especially appreciated all the people who pretended they found the housebuilding thing to be interesting, instead of just nutty.  Thanks, guys.

Anyway, we learned the week before that Freshwater Stone  was having their annual clearance sale that very day.  This is the sale when they clear out all of the scrap and remnants that have been collecting in their yard for the last year.  It’s a great time for people like us that are flexible in what they want and too broke to hire the professionals themselves.  (But if we had the money, we would hire these fine folks.  We highly recommend checking out their galleries.  They do beautiful work.) As luck would have it, we had to drive right by the sale to get to the reunion.

We’ve been planning on using granite as the woodstove surround and Michael had been half-heartedly collecting various scrap pieces from some friendly local masons to use on the walls.  We weren’t sure what we were going to put underneath the stove but were considering slate to match the entryway.  Granite pieces seemed possibly unstable, but the mismatched granite/slate idea wasn’t quite right either.  Either way it was worth a stop in to the sale.

Here’s just a small sample of what we saw:

Fields and fields of granite, the vast majority of it from local Maine quarries.  It was pretty amazing.  Or overwhelming.  It was possibly very overwhelming.

First we started picking through their big scrap pile, looking for good pieces for the walls–small pieces that were flat on one side for easy adhesion but rough on the other for interest.  We weren’t picky about color, figuring that as long as it was local and natural, the color would work itself out.  And it pretty much did.  After we loaded up the truck we wandered around to see what else was out there, and that was when we hit the goldmine: countertop remnants.  The perfect solution for under the stove.  A chunk of granite countertop is exactly what we needed: flat, even, fairly thin.  A short investigation of the options with the tape measure and we found our perfect piece: a 50 inch by 50 inch chunk of pinkish granite.

Of course, getting it in the truck meant that we had to unload all of the rock that we’d already piled in, but Cherie didn’t mind doing that while Michael hunted down the guys with the heavy machinery.

This is Cherie using her happy face to show how she didn’t mind at all.  Really.

By the end of it all, we were late for the reunion but had scored a bargain-priced $200 worth of fine Maine granite for the woodstove surround.  And Cherie got to scare former classmates with her enthusiasm for rocks.

What’s not to love?

Must be summer.  We’ve vanished from view.  It’s nothing personal.  It’s just that it’s warm and sunny and birds are singing and the breeze is blowing and our little corner of the world is officially "In Season" and we got a little distracted by all that.

We’ve been working on things here and there. 

We built and installed the beginnings of our upper cabinets:

That slightly odd-looking wire is for the future microwave/hood combo.  Pay it no mind.

We cleaned up our yard some more and planted a few things here and there (no pictures because it’s all rather sad still).

We  bought a chainsaw and an axe and began building up our woodpile for next winter.

But mostly we’ve just been nesting.

Like our friends on the porch.

We’ll get motivated here eventually.

When checking the website statistics for the last few days, we discovered that yesterday someone found our site by searching: "bread in pipe before solder?"

No kidding.  Other people have heard of this?

Apparently they have.  If you follow some of the links from that Google search you will learn that this stuff-bread-in-the-pipes trick is known by HVAC technicians, hardware store folk, and general handy people (scroll down to step 4) among others.

All around we are feeling a little better about the suggestion, since this seems to be a time-tested solution (Michael wants you to know that he never had any doubts).  At the very least, now we know that this trick has been outed by other people before us and therefore the plumber mafia will not be coming after us.

Solder on!