The boats are starting to moor in the harbor....summer is here!

My project today was to paint the upstairs bathroom so that we can install the fixtures on Tuesday. We painted the room a strange shade of desert rock called "ancestral gold" Not a color I would normally choose, but it went so well with the tiles, both the copper glass for the bath and the multi-colored slate for the floor.

I couldn't get this photo to stay rotated. It shows all three elements together.

Random photo day

Arrived here at 6:30 this gorgeous Memorial Day Saturday morning. The sea is calm and a beautiful power boat is moored in front of the house, making for a stunning view.

I am here on a mission to paint the downstairs bathroom so that we can install the fixtures and have a working bathroom.....I need that progress. I chose to go with "Rain" for the wall color. I think it was a perfect choice for the room, as it completely matches the glass shower tiles. It was a happy accident, I promise....saw the wall color before I saw the tile, so I had it in the back of my mind.
The upstairs dormers are both done...They are a bit quirky and have a lot going on, but painted out, they will be perfect for the house. I really wanted to try and retain or add as much quirkiness to this cottage as possible, while also providing modern amenities.

One set of double doors has been installed. The one on the left is maple and the one on the right is walnut. They need a bit of work, but they look incredible. I wonder how the fact that one is a pocket door and one is a swing door will work for renters

From the hallway

I grouted this floor yesterday, the secret to grouting slate, I have found out, is to pre-seal the tiles before grouting and to have a REALLY GOOD grouting sponge. The grout lifted right off the stone and provided a fantastic surface. I love these tiles in the upstairs bathroom.

I had a weird case of vertigo the other day and had to stop the ceiling boarding because I kept feeling that I was going to fall from my place up above the stringers and I was sweating and just all over in panic mode. So, until another person comes to help Greg finish the ceilings upstairs, we have moved onto other things.

Greg finished trimming out all the windows downstairs and all of the windows upstairs are done too, save for the big glass door to the deck. We are saving this job until after we pinpoint the leak from above.

I have grouted both bathroom floors and I must say, the secret to grouting stone tile is to pre-seal tiles before grouting. The grout slips right off. I am very proud of my two grouting jobs.! Have also completely primed the downstairs bathroom walls in prep for painting tomorrow morning. I want to paint the walls before we install the toilet and the sink. Will have photos of those two projects up in a few days.

Going out to sand and spray paint the rocking chairs.

Doors and Floors day

OK, so we mixed a bit too much thinset and decided to race against the clock and use it all...or rather Seth (no relation) did. He thought he'd have a leisurely day at the cottage and attempt to lay down one floor. Well, the slate on the first floor went down so easily that he thought he'd try the second floor, which went down even easier! He still had 2 gallons of thinset left, so he tiled the downstairs shower...it all looks awesome!

Me, mixin the thinset

The upstairs slate tile....it looks so much better than the picture

Downstairs slate...awesome

While the Seths worked the floors, Greg continued with the trim downstairs while Josh worked on the dormers upstairs. Greg wanted to do something special over the old double doors and he worked on it a long time.

Here he is making a pattern for the pediment

You can just see it here, a wonderful sunburst over the doorway, on the Sunnyside of the street.

Then we went boating....it was 92 degrees yesterday, in May, in Maine!!
Greg with Sharon and Guinness

Things go way faster on the downhill slide

A lot went on at the cottage yesterday. We had a hard time figuring out the angles of the two dormers and so I asked Josh, who framed them out to come back and board them out too. It will take him about 6 hours to do the whole job because he says its a pain in the rear. But, here is a photo of the almost finished dormer and corresponding ceiling. This is the second bedroom in the corner where the Queen bed will go. It's nice and sunny in the afternoon.

Josh earlier in the day, figuring out the angles

We have water!

I started scraping the outside of the house yesterday. Only the trim around the front door is original and so scraping shouldn't be too much of a problem because the house is simply a box..It's boring as hell though.

Found the original paint colors, which were a pale yellow with cream trim

I hired a finish carpenter yesterday to come in and build the kitchen for us. Sounds like he has good experience and his eyes lit up when I told him we had to build a deck on the second floor as well. I think he and Greg will get along just fine and will go to town on building the kitchen and deck together while I sand and scrape the outside of the house in preparation for painting.

OUCH!

When I close my eyes, all I can see are knot holes and pine boards! Greg and I have been working away, he a bit more obsessively than I, and we are pretty much on schedule to finish the shiplap work by Tuesday. Greg has trimmed out all of the doors in the addition and two windows, thus trading time from Trim Week for finishing Boarding Week.

We have about an hour and a half left to finish the walls once and for all and then all we have left is the ceiling. Now the lower half of the ceiling shouldn't be too hard and I think we can do it in a few hours. The upper part of the ceiling is going to take a day because of height, etc.

I know, none of you care to read what I write, you just want the photos. Well here they are:

Greg's totally cute trim job around the kitchen window. More about the kitchen in another post

The sleeping nook in the smaller of the two bedrooms. I'll put a single day bed here with a sconce for a light overhead and it will feel like sleeping onboard a ship. Where I am standing taking this photo is where the queen bed will go.

The cute stairway. I just ordered a Moravian Star pendant light fixture for here. Should be here by next week.

Walls are finished in the master bedroom

Closet and beams in the second bedroom. Double doors to hall.

Dining room window trimmed out

Living room doors trimmed out. What a nice May day in Maine...72 degrees today...no boats in this part of the mooring field yet...as you can clearly see through the windows

Doors trimmed out

My old door project! The door with the glass panel is for the upstairs bathroom. It is an oak door with a maple veneer on one side. I am sanding and filling in the hardware holes to convert them to pocket doors. They are gorgeous! The other doors you see are for the pocket doors upstairs

OMG! or wow, people in Bayside are wicked cool!

Greg and I have been working like bears on the cottage the last few days. Yesterday, tired and cranky, we were working on boarding in the hallway upstairs (finished!) and two neighbors, Dick and Marge Brockway walked in the front door, wanting to see the progress. We were just putting in a tricky board and I turned to look down the stairs and Dick Brockway was holding a huge box. Marge introduced herself and said it was a tradition of theirs to give "this little gift" was I think how she put it. Well, much to my delight, amazement, and pleasure, Dick pulled this out of the box:

It's a scale model of Sunnyside and how she originally looked before the addition was added and the porch was changed......I mean, right down to the gingerbread trim....I was totally at a loss for words, it is such a thing of beauty. Now I know I have to get the original columns right, because they are so cute on the model!

The details are amazing, right down to the actual design of the decorative elements at the roof ends. I am in awe that anyone would do such an amazing thing for people they had never met.

I do have to say that I wish Sunnyside still looked like this. She was a beauty!

Thank you Dick and Marge.....What a welcoming present! It is just beautiful!

Ouch!

Another "bang bang " note from Greg this morning...6:30 he was over at the cottage banging away and making walls. I got there and together we worked all day. I got most of the downstairs bathroom boarded and Greg hauled it out and pretty much finished the hallway walls upstairs. The boy worked for almost 13 hours today, he was one tired puppy.

Our two Paslode finish nailers are starting to malfunction and probably need a good cleaning...so we'll be one gun down tomorrow. Might be a good day to take off from boarding and do some other things.

We still have a leak over the sliding glass door in the bedroom. Both it and the roof over the addition leaked today in the rain. We have to find the source before it ruins the door frame!

I am getting tired of this cottage already...today had some ups, but mostly it was a hassle. Every second board I cut had to fit around a 125 year old twisted wooden floor joist, or around a door frame or around an electrical socket. I am slow already and it seemed to take forever today.

Before and After!
Ok, a little hard to see in the before and after photos, but I wanted to show the new ceiling in the addition. I've never really taken good before shots of the addition because it was a new room and essentially was just never finished before we bought the house. I think it's going to make a really awesome living room space. We followed the shape of the ceiling and made a 3/4 dish ceiling. If time allows this year we will box in the ugly manufactured beam that you can just see at the top of the after photo.

In the before photo, you can make out the beautiful vintage wicker console table which will make an appearance back in the living room, right over top of the monitor heater you see in the last photo. The table is a really rare piece of Bar Harbor wicker and matches all the other vintage wicker we picked up last week. The two tall back rockers will most likely go on the front porch.

BEFORE:

I guess this is more properly termed "DURING:"

The wires are for the ceiling lights. The whole room will be trimmed out and have the cork floor laid in the next three weeks.

It's a pretty spacious room. 22 feet long and 14 feet wide with five glass panel doors opening on two sides. I might paint this room a really, really light shade of yellow with a shade lighter ceiling and trim. There are two colors I want to try for the walls, both are Sherwin-Williams: one called "Daybreak," which might have just a touch too much green in it, and one called "Lily," which is a pure light yellow.

Finished the ceiling in the addition yesterday and continued to prepare walls and the dormers upstairs for boarding. Some of the walls needed nailers in places, and some needed shims, etc. Also finished with the sound barrier around the downstairs bathroom, now I can go ahead and board over that.

Found my camera, so do not fear, pictures will be forthcoming!

We've come up with a schedule for the next three weeks. I need to have most of the furniture out of Little Bohemia for guests that arrive for a week on the 6th of June.

We will finish boarding the walls and the ceiling upstairs this week and then we can get the extra wood out of the inside of the house, clearing it away for the next step. Next week is trim week, where all the windows and doors will be trimmed out, and the following week is floor week...we hope to have the cork floor installed and the wooden floors sanded by the end of the week. The bathrooms will also be done by this time. I can move out furniture in a day and clean Little Bohemia for my guests. Then I have about 1o days or so until Greg's family arrives to help paint. I will use that time to sand portions of the exterior of Sunnyside in preparation for paint. I will also try to paint the floors of Sunnyside in several rooms so that I can set them up. You would never know that we are ready to do all this by looking at the cottage today...what a wreck! I will probably spend most of today in cleaning mode, sweeping up the chunks of foam that I had to get off the walls of the dormers, and bagging up pieces of wood to take down to 3Tides so David can use it as kindling.

Day off! Didn't even go near Sunnyside today

Spent the whole day putting up the ceiling in the downstairs living room. We got 90% of it done and it looks great...totally not what we designed to do, but when we saw a similar ceiling in the Bahamas, we had to do it. Pics soon!

"Saw, Saw, Bang, Bang"

This is a message that I found on a yellow sticky note on our kitchen table this morning at 6:30am. The truck is gone. I texted Greg to find out when he went over to the cottage to start working and he sent back a "4:30, when r u coming over?"

First let me apologize to anyone in Bayside who heard the chop saw running at 5am. Second, let me say that, while I was there at 6:15 yesterday morning, I am in no shape to go over there right yet. My muscles ache from swinging from walls yesterday trying to scrape off foam insulation and put up strapping and cripples between studs so that we can finish the walls upstairs. That's right folks, we are well on our way to having walls throughout the house. We have made great strides, including getting floors laid in the bathroom downstairs.

Pictures soon, but first I need a few ibuprophen.......

Cute Little Downstairs Bathroom!

A Preview:

With a slate floor and the glass tile shower, this should be a totally adorable bathroom. Fixtures in place to sight the grab-bars, the door is wide enough for a wheelchair and the bathroom will have grab bars in the shower and around the other fixtures and so will be handicapped-friendly. The narrow sink makes it possible to swing a wheelchair around in the space, which I think is quite nice. I love how the beadboard came out.

We are working as fast as possible to get the walls up. Greg and I finished the East wall in the master bedroom yesterday, which was a pain with all the angles and the height of the boards, etc. I hate ladders because being a big lummox with a too tall center of gravity makes me feel like an elephant with a long neck up on the top of one of those tall ladders. But, we got it done.

I can't believe we got the whole thing level. Here is a corner shot of where the master bed will go. All the 5 foot walls are done upstairs too. By the end of today we will have completed all the exterior walls and will just have the room divider walls to do...I cannot wait for those to go up.

Greg's beautiful stairway wall

Bless my Boyfriend

While I went to Yarmouth yesterday, Greg went to the cottage and put the remaining boards up the stairs, which looks amazing! He easily fixed a problem spot where the wall was 1" out of plumb...It would have taken me hours to get it right. After I got back, I got busy preparing the East end wall upstairs for boards....I had to make room for nailers for the ceiling boards, so that meant getting on the top step of our 8' ladder and scraping foam insulation off the studs...I hate ladders, but have to do it, right?

Anyway, after much prep of the wall, we started boarding from the middle outwards so that we got the shiplap board at the peak, just right. Greg is fast at measuring, making patterns, and cutting, because, as he said: "This is what I do all day long." So, we are well on our way to finishing the first of the very hard walls today and having a good start on finishing the Master Bedroom walls and ceiling over the next few days. Perfect.

Sore!

Oh my, 10 hours of hauling boards and walking up and down the stairs and up and down ladders has made me very sore! I went to bed last night around 10:30 and slept soundly until about 4:30, never moving once....that hardly ever happens to this very light sleeper! It feels good actually.

It is almost 6am and I am off to Yarmouth to pick up the other finish nailer that I bought on Craig's. Greg is working at the cottage all day for the next few, so I thought it was best for each of us to have a gun so we can work independently, or together with longer boards.

I see the end in my mind. I decided that July 10th will be my deadline to have the whole house done and in rentable shape. I will have an open house at that point and invite the neighbors and friends to come see so that they can spread the word.

Finally got in the work groove and finished two of the five foot walls in the master bedroom. I figure that once I get the groove on to do the end wall in that room, It should take me a day or so to put those boards up. The ceiling doesn't look as bad as I thought and I think we could probably have one side of that room done in a day, I figure two and a half weeks of one person boarding to finish upstairs, with another week to do the hallway and stairwell. We are on schedule as far as I can see.

I am having one of those days where I feel I cannot do anything because I am all thumbs. I am getting increasingly frustrated because I am not an angles and math guy, so measurements do not come easy to me. Feel that I am wasting materials by measuring and cutting and not getting it right. It's just been me here for the last two days and yesterday was a total loss, save for my cleaning abilities. Greg says he'll be here for the next three of four days, so that gives me solace that we can get the downstairs ceiling up.

Ugghh

Our Adventure Downeast Pays Off

I got a call from a friend on Tuesday asking if I might want some of her mom's old wicker for one of our cottages. Yes, please! I said. The only catch was that I had to drive to Brooksville, ME and could I come the next day as she and her brothers had sold the house and were cleaning it out. She assured me that the wicker was old and "really sturdy." She said there were two chairs that I could have a party on, they were so sturdy. I figured we were talking old rattan, but I was game and Greg wanted to come along too, so adventuring we were going to go! We also had an errand to run in Trenton, ME where we dropped the prop from the boat off to be cleaned and polished.

Well, as you can tell from the photo above, we did alright. Seven pieces of vintage wicker, all in the Bar Harbor pattern, including two large arm chairs, seen below.

and two smaller arms,. as well as two slipper chairs and a round table where my friend's mother used to place her champagne cocktail at night while she watched the osprey circle over the cove below their house. We also scored some newish wicker bedside tables, an aray of fireplace tools, including a 5 foot tall twig broom that I wanted for Little Bohemia .

We also went dumpster diving and came up with a few other pieces of new wicker for use outdoors here at our house. Rain does terrible things to wicker, so the plastic stuff works great outdoors.
I asked my friend to give us a price and told her point blank that whatever she said, I would counter offer. She said $300....I said $200 and we agreed on $250 plus we helped them haul a huge and heavy sofa bed out to the dumpster. What I think is also cool is that the large vintage wicker console table that came with Sunnyside is also a Bar Harbor pattern and matches the chairs. So, besides three beds and a couch, I think we are all set with furniture for Sunnyside!....oh right, I still need a dining table and chairs.

Lots going on at the cottage these days. We finished boarding the downstairs walls, save for the exterior walls of the bathroom as we have to install the grab bars first and then add the pink insulation for a sound barrier. I worked all day yesterday and was just calling it quits at 4pm when Seth (no relation) came in. He worked for about four hours and wrapped the outside of the stairs with boards to complete what I had been working on. It looks great, The kitchen area really just came right together, so I am really pleased.

I had the monitor heater moved on Monday. It was right in the area that I had chosen for the kitchen table, across from the open kitchen, so I had them move it to the big wall in the new addition. The previous owners left us a beautiful vintage wicker console table with a glass top that will fit right over the heater, essentially making it disappear.

Yesterday, a friend on facebook offered me 6 vintage wicker chairs out of her mother's house in Brooksville. We have to get them out by the end of the week, so we are going off on an adventure today to pick them up. Funny that Brooksvillle is directly across the bay, not more than 10 miles as the crow flies, but it will take us over an hour and a half to drive there!

Pictures soon my pets, I promise.

UPDATE:
Ok, I couldn't stand it, so I had to go see what Seth (no relation) did last night and to take photos. WOW is all I can say, I am very excited to see most of the downstairs boarded. Once we clean up the detritus from working like dogs over the last week, the place will be spectacular. If we wanted, we could have a finished downstairs by next Wednesday...that means bathroom tiling done, pink insulation installed, and exterior bathroom walls done as well as a working bathroom and possibly a working sink area.

First, the front doors and the parlor

This is the wow effect for me, the kitchen area done. Makes a huge difference!

The stereo is now where the heater used to be. This will be the dining room area

And finally, the new living room and the place for the heater, which some day might actually be a fireplace wall.

In the airport coming home after an unsuccessful weekend of auctioning...actually, there is one more lot coming up to bid on this afternoon and I will do it by phone while driving home from the airport. I was the underbidder on a set of fantastic 18th century watercolors scenes of the Battles of Lexington and Concord done by a young man between the ages of 14 and 16 when he did them. I might have gotten them, but discovered they were glued down to another piece of paper sometime in the early 20th century. I found this out right before the auction, so I was the only bidder to figure this out...I lowered my bid by what the conservation would've cost and ended up not getting them.....oh well. This afternoon I am bidding on a folk artist's self portrait done when he was 19 years old in Portland, Maine. It is signed and dated on the back of the canvas.

Anyway, while out of town, I found another Paslode finish nailer on Craig's list. I think we will need it. The person who listed it is contacting me after I land in Portland and will meet me somewhere near the airport. It was a good deal and I saved over $150.00 from buying a new one.