I took our first reservation for July last night for Sunnyside. Yikes! Gonna start moving fast on the ole place now. Work begins again in earnest tomorrow. Back to Maine today. Happy New Year!

Construction on the cottage is on hold until after the holidays. Both Greg and I are busy with other work things, Christmas things, packing things, cooking things, and leaving for a week-type things.

Merry Christmas to all.

11:30 am and it's dump day. I got up at 5 and started cooking at 6...making Christmas goodies: spiced pecans, gluten free chocolate chip cookies with cashews and peanut butter chips, orange shortbread cookies dipped in milk chocolate, and cashew peanut butter brittle (suffice it to say that I have gone through about 6 lbs of butter this morning!!)

I am avoiding the dump because I am lazy and don't want to have to go and finish cleaning the damn work site....But I need to before anything else can happen and the next dump day is Tuesday. I have one more thing in the oven and then I will go over there. There is a truckload full of cardboard alone from all the window boxes! Speaking of windows, did you know that ours were put in day before yesterday??? Can you tell I am excited?? Here are some more shots of the new windows from the inside:

Kitchen window. The walls and studs aren't straight but the window is!

These new windows in the front are awesome, I really like them, they make the place look like a cottage again. With wooden walls and the peak exposed, I think this upstairs is going to rock!

We moved one of the small square windows (the covered up hole to the left) so that the stairway would have natural light. We are expanding the stairway and the wall will go right through the old window. Its a squeeze, but there will be a wall between these two windows.

The new sliders....though they have to be removed because the door opens on the wrong side. I see why there was a bay window here now. The sliders made the room feel smaller,

but then again, you couldn't do this with a bay window!! Deck to follow. See the debris I have to get out onto the roof to clean? Its a bitter cold day here...ugghh :(

I like this series of three, showing the transformation of the front of the house because of the windows. And oh, by the way...the sky really is that blue here today! After trimming the windows we will wait for Spring to paint!

The Windows are IN!!!!!

As I write this, the thermostat on the monitor heater says its 42 degrees in the cottage. It is still warmer than it was in here the last two days when the workmen were here putting the new windows in. The place looks so much better than before. I've spent the last few hours pulling off the sticky protective film off the glass on all the windows and putting in the mullions, which, I have to say, really make the look of the place. The only hitch is that the sliding glass doors for the upstairs master bedroom came with the slider on the wrong side. That has to be replaced, which should take at least another month. Ugghh

Before:

During:

Finished without trim

A new project: The removal of the ugly window

BEFORE

AFTER:

It took me about 20 minutes to get the upstairs window out. It's been there awhile and interestingly to me....the window was only secured to the house by moldings. There was nary a screw holding the casement to the frame. When I removed the interior moldings, the window panes pretty much just fell out! Luckily I was fast and so the 4' x 4' central window pane came out in my hands in one piece. Good thing its warm today! Well, relatively


I toyed with the idea of taking out the bay window too, but I will wait for help with that one. I still have three small windows to remove upstairs and I have to make a clear path for the installers...as you can see, my pile of scrap wood is still pretty big upstairs.

Finished the knee wall and the clean up of the space underneath the main house this morning. There is the wall at the right. I ran out of gas today or I would have put the sheeting down. The morning started out sunny and nice and so I spent a nice morning digging, raking, and moving dirt. I prepared this room for sheeting and stone and so it was done by about 10am.

I still had the garage to prepare, which I thought had been done, but needed a few more hours to make the level of the garage consistent. I needed some more room under the garage doors for the stone, so I ended up taking out the big high spot in the floor there as well as the one at the back of the garage. I've pulled away about 3" of dirt from the garage floor and now its ready for sheeting and stone too.
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Took a break to have lunch and walk the dogs. By the time I went to order the stone, the contractor's office had closed for the day. The clouds and the wind are both wicked out there, so I decided to not do the sheeting today, but rather rest my back. (read: Hide under the covers blogging for the afternoon) Did I mention that I took a pick axe to my finger yesterday? Took a nice section of top skin off my index finger and so it's difficult to do much without a slight pain.

I'm taking the day off tomorrow to shop and cook for Greg's trunk show he is having in Belfast. I am making parmesan stuffed bacon wrapped dates, miniature beef filled empanadas, and something else that I have not decided upon yet...I might make a few cornmeal cookies.

I've given up my art history books in favor of a pick-axe and a shovel.

My digging project is still on-going. I spent yesterday rebuilding the knee wall that I hired someone to make for me because it was neither straight, nor the way I wanted it to look. I spent most of the morning digging a trench for the wall, which is made of about 90 cement blocks that I moved around myself. I took the excess dirt and filled the holes in the bricks so that the unmortared wall is solid. So, the wall dips in the middle and not all the way straight....it's staying!! It does fufiill my plan to increase the dry storage under the house. I also finished making the space under the house flat and ready for sheeting and stone. I still have to back fill behind the wall and also finish filling the holes in the wall...no problem since there is a pile of dirt in the driveway that needs to go somewhere. I then have to do some more digging in the garage area to level it out. I should be done by tomorrow.

Work is getting in the way again though. Greg is working as fast as his fingers will let him to get pieces out by Christmas. He is having a trunk show on Saturday night at the home of one of his best clients. I am making the finger food.

Hopefully, we will be able to remove the windows on the second floor starting on Sunday. I arrived at the house yesterday to find a three foot long snow pile in the living room. It was located just under the area where the first floor addition joins to the house. We had wicked winds here the other day when the snow storm hit, so I think the snow came in underneath the bay window.

After the windows are in, framing the walls comes next, then electric, plumbing, insulation and walls....

Already Furnishing the Cottage!

Greg thought I was nuts yesterday when I yelled at him to stop the truck on a back road yesterday. I jumped out for there, in a junk pile, was this great period Windsor chair. A bit broken, but fixable. The chair dates to the mid to late 19th century and probably hails from Philadelphia. I know there is a photo of this chair somewhere in a book in my library. The seat looks original, but the yellow paint was sanded off...so sad. Anyway, he thinks I am nuts, but I really like this chair.

Underground excavation continues. We are digging out the floor by a few inches so that a 6 mil plastic sheeting can go down over the dirt and then pea stone laid over top of that. The garage will be very neat and tidy looking after that (and after I take all the hazardous materials to be recycled.) We've actually moved from the garage to the basement portion and I found all sorts of things there that need to be recycled. Below is my dump pile, minus the sink, which we can use as a utility sink in the basement once it gets all nice looking! Depending on dampness, we may put the washer dryer down there since we never made room for them in our plan upstairs. If we do that, the sink might be a nice touch. Everything underneath the house that could be rusty, was rusty. The condensation problem is a bit daunting, but I hope the plastic and stone route will cut that down tremendously.

The most interesting find was the 50 gallon cement mixer that was crusted with old cement on the inside and looked to be a few decades old. I tried to get rid of it fast on Craig's list, but lost patience and took it to the scrap metal pile.

All of this stuff (including a vintage "STOP" sign) was crammed into a corner of the basement and sitting on about 50 cement blocks that were embedded in the dirt. I moved all the blocks out and we will backfill in here and level it out for the pea stone. I am using the blocks to build a kneewall that separates the usable basement space from the unexcavated space filled with boulders and other debris. It's not a real wall, but just stacked blocks that just tidy up the space. It runs three blocks high right in front of the boulder you see to the right in the picture below. By adding a layer of plastic and then pea stone, we will triple our storage space in this room and we will make the garage a usable space.
In our original budget plan, I budgeted $1000 to fix up and pour a slab in this area and in the garage....by doing it this way, I am cutting that figure in half at least. Because I did not want to dig, I hired someone to do it for $10 an hour. The sheeting costs a lot less than I thought and the pea stone should run us a couple of hundred bucks. To clean out and recycle all the old stuff from underneath the basement cost me a total of $8.00. I would like new garage doors, which we did not budget for, so at the end of the project, if there is money left over, that is where I would like it to go.

I spent yesterday cleaning and familiarizing myself with everything in the basement. It was dump day, so I was able to clean out and get out a whole bunch of rusted metals and other items that went to the scrap piles at the transfer station. I swear those boys who prowl around the piles of twisted scrap love to see me coming. Sometimes I can hand someone a piece of scrap from my truck and they just put it into theirs...that makes me feel good.

If you can embiggen the photo, you might be able to see the large slab of slate that sits in the middle of the garage. I was able to get this out the door and I believe it will make a really nice threshold or top step somewhere around the property.

I found a lot of dried up old paint cans, which is good, since I can throw them away without worry. There are still a lot of full cans, which will have to be disposed of properly. I had to clean because we are beginning a new project tomorrow...or rather, we have hired out to have it done. The basement is dirt and rather wet, so I hired a friend to come in and level off the floor, perhaps removing some of the dirt so that we can put down a layer of plastic and then a layer of stone over that. This serves as an inexpensive way to help keep the basement drier and help the water flow through. It will also help keep moisture levels down and be an aesthetic improvement over what is there now.

And off to the left, you can see our BASC (Big Ass Support Column) that is keeping the bounce out of the bouncy house.

With all the snow today, I may be a shut in...seeing how it is Sunday and all, it seems like a great day to work on Christmas presents and watch movies!

Happy Sunday

Back with a vengeance after our whirlwind trip to New York. Greg and I decided to tackle the "soft corner" of the house where there wasn't enough support for the large beam that takes the place of the old outer wall of the original house. I took us awhile to figure out the best way to go about it. After much hemming and hawing and a few calls to our resident consultant contractor, we went and borrowed jacks and heavy wood scraps and we were going to jack the beam to get it level (it was 3/8" off on the rear right corner of the house). But first came the support post in the basement: a 102" long 6 x 6" pressure treated support post that would sit on a concrete pill and get whacked into place underneath the unsupported wall on the first floor.

You can see in the photo below that the post goes right up through a long homemade bench that was in the house already. What strikes me as funny is that where it counts, the house is underbuilt, but in cases like this shelf, there are five support brackets underneath the shelf, each having 6 stripped screws anchoring the shelf. There was no way that I could remove the shelf and not take all day doing it, so I simply cut out a space for the support beam. I love bashing stuff, so it was my pleasure to wield a sledgehammer over my head to whack this beam into place. We cut it a 1/2" taller than it needed to be and after a bit of whacking the top into place and then whacking the concrete pill back a few inches, and some leveling out here and there, the damn thing was in place.....and I needed to go lie down!!!

Then we went upstairs to get the jack in place, and low and behold, the house has stopped shaking and the beam was spot on level. We had raised the sagging floor enough on the first floor to bring the whole damn thing in-line. This was a HUGE impediment to me mentally, for one part of me thought that we were going to have this shaky house to rent out. I was euphoric! Greg and I had debated back and forth about the best way to try and do this project and in the end, I think each one of us contributed out bit and we ended up not having to take the next step of jacking and shimming.

As well as putting the post in downstairs, Greg redid the support post on the first floor to correct the flawed support underneath the large beam. Originally, the beam sat squarely on a header with two 2 x 6" boards sistered together on either side, making up a support post. Naturally, these 2 x 6" supports bowed out because the weight of the overhead beam (carrying the weight of the back half of the second floor) was not directly supported overhead. Now, there is one solid support post directly under the overhead beam, which corrected the improper deflection of the beam above. (I think)

Phew! Today I am going over to contemplate taking out some of the old windows in prep for the new ones!