Sunnyside in Bayside, Maine

2010-12-07T20:16:00.001-08:00

I just came into some gorgeous old oval braided rugs with tremendous color in them. I took them down to Camden to get cleaned and they came back in beautiful condition. I just need to sew some of the braids back together

2010-12-07T20:10:00.000-08:00

Burning Sunnyside

No, It's not what you think! Now that the weather has turned cold, we are having more fires in the wood stove at home. I just opened a new contractor bag full of scrap wood and it happens to be a bag full of cut down 2 x 4s from the demolition @ Sunnyside last year. She gave her insides so that we could be warm. Until now, we have been burning scraps from the build out, so there are random pieces of shiplap and beadboard fueling the fires, but now, its the old board from the original building and then the 1930s spiffing up of the place. Every time I build a fire now, I think of taking down walls and of the huge scrap wood pile that I insisted on keeping out on the porch. Well, it comes in handy now.

2010-11-20T03:37:00.000-08:00

So, our other cottage, Little Bohemia, has been on the market since just after Labor Day and we have not had one person even interested in looking at the place. I know the price is too high for today's market, but I cannot believe there aren't people out there, like us, who will look at a house out of their price range in hopes that they could get it for a lower price. I am not going to price the cottage at a give-away deal, because we don't have to sell. But, that said, I know what I want for the place and am willing to deal to a certain extent. I guess the buyers just aren't there. We will only have Little Bohemia up for sale for another six weeks and then she comes off the market so that I can start renting for next season. I already have my repeat renters lined up for their weeks, which I am holding in limbo for them, and I am already fielding rental requests for the rest of the summer. We have put Little Bohemia to sleep for the winter, but still have Sunnyside up and running. If we do not have any rental interest for the Christmas holiday, I might just host a party there, which would be a nice change of pace.

2010-11-17T14:08:00.000-08:00

What a downpour today...mystery storm?? I never saw it coming. We lost power for a couple of hours this morning and I was thinking of packing up and moving to Sunnyside for the day, but there was too much to do here.

We had to move some things around at Sunnyside, and instead of putting the outdoor furniture in the basement, for now, I have it around the house. The living room looks like it's all set up for a sewing circle. I moved the sofa around so that heat from the monitor heater actually permeated the house rather than get soaked into the sofa. I've been thinking of drawing the curtains and putting down the shades at the cottage, but I really like the natural light that comes in from all sides.

Nice additions to the cottage are the new doors that finally arrived for the master bedroom. And yes, I know we need to paint the trim...in the Spring. I thought this was a nice shot of the open feeling that the upstairs rooms have for such a small space. Love the big double doors. I hope the renters did last year.

2010-11-15T06:01:00.000-08:00

Started back to work on Sunnyside this weekend. I think we will be weekend warriors there for a while. Greg and I finally found some really great carpeting for the stairs that we both liked and that would be fairly easy to work with. It is an indoor-outdoor carpeting that looks a bit like horse-hair sisal carpet. We found it at Marden's (where else) on a large roll, and had them cut three 30" wide strips. Total cost for the rug bits was about $60.00 or .68 cents a foot

I felt bad for the renters last summer who had to deal with the all white stairs. Finally when my parents came to stay, my mother complained about not being able to see the steps so much that I put blue painter's tape on the treads for her. We left it there through all the rest of the rentals. We were never able to agree or find carpeting that either one of us liked.

White stairs with pretty blue tape

The rug roll

I picked this pattern because it looks a bit Victorian and goes best with the interior.

I have to admit that I did nothing but carry the rug rolls inside the house and hand Greg some tools for a bit before setting up his Pandora channel so that he could rock out and install the carpet. It is kind of a narrow area, suitable for one person.

He did a beautiful job

We are now going back to Marden's to get more of this stuff for our house. I really like the quality.

So what was I doing for the day and a half that Greg took to install the rug? I was outside raking.......and raking......and raking. I am ready to cut down the two large maples in front of the house. They rain down so may leaves!!!

I think I must rent a leaf blower in the spring to get ALL the leaves out of the rock walls, and from under the house, but I figure 13 densely packed bags full was enough for me...Had to come home and pop some Aleve tablets after that ordeal.
I put an ad on Craig's List again for free eco-insulation and within an hour had a response from the same couple who took all the bags last year. They came yesterday and loaded the bagged leaves onto their truck and took off happy!

This is about 3/4s of the leaves

2010-10-28T14:13:00.000-07:00

If anyone knows of someone who is looking for a winter rental, or is looking for a month or two respite on the coast of Maine in a furnished and cozy house overlooking the water, send 'em my way.

I would also consider renting for the Thanksgiving, Christmas, or New Year's holidays!

2bdrm/ 2ba totally renovated cottage with amazing water views from every room. Walk in shower down and tub up. King, Queen and twin beds.
Dogs welcome.
Quaint seaside village of Bayside in Northport, ME
$1200 a month, utilities included.
207 323-8383

2010-10-28T14:10:00.000-07:00

check back in again soon. I am going to begin working on Sunnyside again this winter, so stay tuned for such stimulating entries as: "Finally, a carpet for the stairs that we both agree upon!" and "finding the #%#$& leak that only happens during Nor'Easters!" or, one of my favorites..."finally painting that bedroom trim."

All this and more in the next coming weeks!

2010-10-09T04:55:00.001-07:00

I don't know how many of you out there are still reading this blog, and I certainly do not know how many of you have children. In the wake of all the reported suicides of gay and lesbian youths due to bullying over the last several weeks, I felt the need to post about my thoughts on the subject here.

I was the fat gay kid in school when I was young. I didn't know I was gay at the time, but because I was fat and not into sports and not athletic and popular, I got bullied. Life was miserable in the public school I attended. So called "friends" would throw rocks at me when I passed by on my bicycle, a girl in my class beat me up at recess because I was taught never to hit a girl, so I didn't fight back, I ate lunch alone. A group of kids spray painted "Seth Sucks" on our driveway. Life as a boy was dreadful. It may not have been because I was gay, but it was because I was different; I was easy to pick on.

My parents went so far as to transfer me to another school. A private school where a lot of their friends sent their kids. I was still the large unpopular kid, but I did have friends; I was a side-kick to the popular boys. Life was a little better. As I got taller, I became a bully on the bus home and once made a kid cry. "I am sorry Spencer!" I still remember that afternoon and regret it to this day. But, kids will do as other kids will to fit in the scene. It is not something for which I am proud. It didn't make my life miraculously better. I was still an outsider, a feeling that stayed with me through high school where I boarded. I was not among the teachers' favorite students, and my roommate and his friends would secretly pull pranks on me...I was certainly the kid in the dorm who got picked on a lot. But I was used to it.

What I have to say here today is that is is the responsibility of the parents to make sure that 1. their kids aren't mean or bullies. If parents get a call that their kids are being mean to another student, those parents should take action. There is no reason that in this day and age that kids should be picking on others for being different. Your kids may not want to be friends with the fat kid, or the wheelchair kid, or the gay kid, or even the Jewish kid, but they shouldn't be allowed to taunt those other kids. Education is not just up to schools. You chose to have children, please choose to tell them right from wrong. That is a parent's job!!

For two college age students to cyber-bully one of their classmates to the point that the man drove to the George Washington Bridge and hurled himself into the Hudson River is such a tragedy. Such a senseless tragedy. More than one life was thrown away the morning that Tyler Clementi died. The bullies are now going to be the bullied.

My mother tells me she used to lay awake at night wondering and worrying about where I would end up in life. I do not remember getting lots of comforting words from my parents about being bullied, but I do remember spending a lot of time with my mom, who did protect me and made me feel special when I was with her. I got through all the bullshit of being a kid. I made it through the bad times into college and beyond. Childhood cruelties fell away as I became older and found good groups of loyal friends.

If your kids are small, unpopular, or feel like an outsider and they come to you feeling miserable, tell them it gets better. Make them see that another three years of high school may seem like a lifetime to them, but that it is only a small blip in an otherwise wonderful life. Make them feel special. If they are being bullied, do not ignore it, but take issues into your own hands. These are your children and they need to be loved and protected no matter who they are. If I could have come out to my parents earlier than I did, I would have, but I was not emotionally stable enough to handle the perceived rejection. It would have put me into such turmoil and the feelings of being gay at a young age are scary enough.

Please, be vigilant. No lives should be lost because of being different.

2010-09-24T06:27:00.000-07:00

I finally have a bit of time to update folks on the cottage. Here I sit in NY doing my other job, and ironically have the time to sit and type about Sunnyside.

We've had a two week gap between renters and originally, I wanted to use that time to paint the outside of the house. When the time drew near, I found I was too burned out on the cottage to effectively do the paint job. We'll wait until Spring to do that. I did do some paint touch ups inside the house, getting spots off the floor and painting over damaged areas where we had some water issues. We did get the leaks fixed, finally (fingers crossed) and I had our man Josh repair the water damaged cased beam where the waterfall leak happened.

Thankfully, we have gotten rid of the ant problem and so Sunnyside, without ants and without leaks, finally turns into a cottage without major problems (knocks on wood)

We have a family from Minnesota checking in today for three weeks. They are in for a treat as the leaves yesterday along Route 3 were painfully gorgeous. I lamented having to leave for a week as I think this will really be a fabulous color week.

Thats all for now. Most of our neighbors at Sunnyside have left for the season, so the neighborhood is wonderfully quiet and peaceful.

Enjoy,
Seth

2010-08-25T04:59:00.001-07:00

I am working on gathering information on a property that is coming up for auction in Belfast. A new blog??? Perhaps. Stay tuned.

2010-08-23T18:51:00.000-07:00

The News is out, its been leaked. We are putting Little Bohemia up for sale after Labor Day. The time has come to move onto other projects. Greg and I have been discussing building a house on some land we have on a pond in Liberty, Maine, about 20 miles outside of Belfast. We don't have to sell Little Bohemia, but I would like to continue investing in real estate, but I have to sell something to do it, and Little Bohemia is the first to go. She is a charmer of a house and shows really well and I am hoping someone falls in love with her like I did. I love the uniqueness of this wonderful Arts and Crafts cottage and the fact that it is like no other house in Bayside. Sigh....I will miss her...if she sells!

2010-08-18T05:05:00.000-07:00

I wanted to let all my blog readers know about the summit at Point Lookout. Greg and I went there last night for drinks and a light repast and had a fantastic time. The summit is open from 4:30- 9pm Tues-Thurs. There is a light bistro menu and a full bar. The view is panoramic and you can see clear to Deer Isle, Vinalhaven, and up to Belfast. It is worth a trip. The food is really good too.

2010-08-18T05:01:00.000-07:00

We spent yesterday afternoon in dishwasher hell at Sunnyside! The hose to the new dishwasher kept tearing. The first time, a neighbor called to let us know that he turned the water off and that there was now an inch of water on the first floor of Sunnyside... we hustled over there with a load of towels to find the renters mopping up the spill. There was still quite a bit of water, but luckily, it never got to the cork floor. We repaired the hose and went about our way after an hour or so and then the hose burst again! We think there was a flaw in the tubing, so we went to another hardware store and bought heavy duty hose. Should work, haven't heard anything back from the renters, so I am confident it worked, but my word there was a lot of water!!

2010-08-16T13:51:00.000-07:00

A happy report from my second set of renters: I particularly like the part about the zero gravity reclining chairs since Greg laughed at me when I bought them.

The Northeasts said... Hello From Cobourg Ontario Canada.
We were fortunate to stay at Sunnyside for the first 2 weeks of August.The pictures on line do not capture its size or beauty. We expected a much more narrow cottage...the rooms are so wide with lovely high ceilings. The upstairs deck compliments the space so much and we enjoyed all our dinners there. Terrific reclining chairs on the deck were a treasured spot for our gals
reading comics. A luxury for us was to have new beds ,new plumbing, and great water pressure for showers all in such a historic place. The community at Bayside were always most welcoming, and our kids enjoyed meeting many new friends when we walked down to the ocean front . Finding star fish and sea urchins and old pottery became a daily routine. The cottage is located perfectly in front of a small park, great privacy, and space from quiet neighbors. A nice distance from the busier ocean front , or streets with close cottages.
We have stayed in Belfast Maine before , so were familiar with this area and its great proximity to wonderful places.We would highly recommend this cottage to a couple or folks with kids. We appreciated Seths attention, and eagerness to make our stay wonderful. Any minor concerns were quickly followed up on.
The drive to Bayside takes us 2 days. We have many fond memories and hope that others will enjoy as we all did.

2010-08-07T15:24:00.000-07:00

Already booked five weeks for next summer, two are repeat renters. Yehaw!

2010-07-29T06:10:00.000-07:00

If anyone out there knows of someone who wants a winter rental in Bayside, please steer them my way. Sunnyside is a wonderful, cozy winter rental with even more view after the leaves are off the trees. $1000 a month plus utilities.

thanks

2010-07-29T06:02:00.001-07:00

The last four days have been wonderfully unproductive. I haven't even cleaned out my car from all the stuff I threw into it from Sunnyside. We have been out on the boat almost every day and I happened to snap a few photos of the house from the water. Both times (well, OK, the three times) I've powered past the house, there have been people on the second floor deck. The last time we went by, we did trade waves.

I find it interesting that 1 Clinton Lane, the house directly in front of us on the water is on the market for $700 and something thousand. Good luck with that I say and I hope you get near the asking price. True that the house is on the water, but there is no property to speak of and the balconies on the water side are small and not so useable. Clinton Lane cuts almost right under the drip lines of the house. I am tempted to put Sunnyside on the market as a competing property for a lot less money than that. But, we have to finish it first!

2010-07-26T03:40:00.001-07:00

An email from our first renters:

"Kudos to the two of you for pulling off this fantastic redo! You've succeeded in holding onto the obvious charm, style and grace of this antuque cottage while adding a sprinkling of modern touches here and there. I can't tell you how pleased we are to be here, and, according to my husband, will be returning here from now on. We've stayed in several different places in the past, and it was always part of the adventure, but you have charmed him with the ambience here.

Bruce and I are planning on building a new house in Rockport in the coming year, or as soon as our present house sells, and it's great to see some of the things we've thought about doing,actually here, like the small tiles in the bathrooms, I wasn't convinced that's what I wanted, but I am now. It's like taking a shower while being in Aladdin's cave, surrounded by jewels! I, for one, am glad your gay gene kicked in!"

2010-07-24T05:39:00.000-07:00

We finished the house at 10 minutes to five last night...just before people started to arrive for the open house. We must have had a good 40-50 people through and everyone was so nice. It was a very good time. I had to leave around 7:45 or else I was going to fall asleep standing up. The day before had been an 18 hour day. Our first renters check in today at 3pm and I still have some things to get and do. We hid a lot of things last night that I have to go around and either throw out or take home. So here are the photos of the "finished for now" Sunnyside.

Enjoy!

ay

r

2010-07-22T05:08:00.000-07:00

OPEN HOUSE

FRIDAY JULY 23RD

5pm

SUNNYSIDE

COME ENJOY A GLASS OF WINE ON THE SECOND FLOOR DECK

2010-07-19T05:20:00.001-07:00

I will have pictures after today, I promise. The boys are coming today to finish the front porch railings and perhaps the kitchen. After 12 hours of painting and doing things like putting up the shower caddies, etc., I was bushed last night. I missed a great night out on the boat with friends because I wanted to get a coat of paint on a few things. So, around 10pm, after a good long hot shower (water pressure here is GREAT!) I toddled off up to the second floor deck to sit in one of the new Zero Gravity chairs and have a bit of a break before bed. Greg got home and joined me and the two of us spent an hour up there gazing at the stars and the lights across the bay. It was total heaven. And while there is the front porch to sit on at night and watch the world go by, I much prefer the privacy of the upper deck and the view it affords!

Got to get back to it!

2010-07-15T04:50:00.000-07:00

spent our second night in the cottage last night. I was in bed by 8:30 after having not had much sleep the night before because of dogs and friends. The dogs barked at anything that moved outside the cottage all night long because they are terriers and unused to having lots of stuff going on around them. Bayside certainly hops well into the evening. Our friends from California didn't get to our house until 4am and Greg went over in his bathrobe to welcome them.

So, last night was much better. Slept on and off until 4, when I had to take the pups for a jaunt around the hood. Thought I would stay up and start to work, but I got back into bed and slept soundly until 7. We have the bare minimum here for furniture, and it is good that we are living here to see what works and what doesn't. We need some hooks and some shelving in the bathrooms and some major window treatments!

The new carriage house garage doors get installed today and that will make all the difference in the outside of the house. As soon as that is done, I can order the stone for the floor of the garage and check that project off my list of things to do.

Scraping the outside of the house today.

2010-07-13T15:39:00.000-07:00

Partly furnished the house today in prep for our moving in for the week.

I think we did it.

Enjoy.

2010-07-11T16:47:00.001-07:00

Raining cats and dogs in Maine today. Bad day for exterior painting, and the humidity didn't help me inside! But, the stairs are primed and painted, the bathroom ceilings have finish coats on them, the living room floor has a first coat of dark green on it, and the main counter top has two coats of clear poly.

Tomorrow we have beds and a couch to fetch at Mardens while also returning the broken washer and the white Whirlpool side by side fridge just cause we got a black one instead. We are moving into the cottage on Tuesday and I understand from our contractor that he and his boys are coming on Thursday and Friday to finish the exterior of the house!! I hope that means we'll have kitchen cabinets too.

I think we might finish the place with days to spare...not too bad!

2010-07-11T05:38:00.000-07:00

Installing the Jenn-Aire downdraft stove. It took us a while to level the stove out because the cabinet and thus the counter top are not completely level. As Greg says, we should rename the house "Shimmy-shim cottage" for all the appliances we have had to shim up!

OK, so the stove is a bit fancy, and I have oven envy. If I can't rent the place in the winter, I want to have Thanksgiving here.

So, this is the main kitchen counter with room for stools. It's hard figured maple and will have a clear poly finish on it. I think it is just beautiful with the stove.

2010-07-10T03:01:00.000-07:00

Final coat of green on the kitchen floor

2010-07-09T19:10:00.000-07:00

Before and After Photos.....new stairs!

I love these before and after because it shows me that we really have done remarkable work in only a few short months. This first photo shows the living room just as it was when we bought the cottage. The stairs were a bit rickety to say the least.

mid construction with a view of the temporary stairs that were in place until last week! I wasn't even freaking out at this point.

Greg's beautiful stairs, ready to be primed and painted. Notice that this staircase is a bit longer than the original, which was a really scary ride to come down because they were so narrow and steep. A tiny closet awaits a door under the stairs.

2010-07-09T04:06:00.001-07:00

My new routine seems to be: "get up, try and straighten up, chug Ibuprofin, and go to the cottage."

Greg and I are moving into the cottage for a week starting on Tuesday. Our friends from California who are coming for the week were supposed to stay there, but the house is not kid friendly yet and I was worried that with a 2 year old and a 5 year old there and no balcony railings, things could get a bit ugly. This way, we can work on the house 24 hours a day too!

We worked until 9 or so last night, after taking a two hour dinner break to go home and spend time with the dogs. Greg got his newel post and hand railing in for the stairs and I got the first coat of the floor painted in the kitchen....when I left, I really thought the floor looked amazing.

Yesterday morning I got over there around 6 and almost finished staining the last of the walls going up the stairs, but I ran out of freakin' paint with about 10 more boards to stain! Ain't it the way.

Hooked up the washer dryer, only to find out the washer doesn't work! My great bargain at Marden's, a rehabbed Bosch front loader for $200 and the thing doesn't even turn on! Back it goes, along with the fridge we bought there last month. The fridge is great, but because we bought a Jenn-Aire stove in black, we wanted a fridge to match, which we bought yesterday. It works beautifully and the dark green floors look really well with the black appliances.

Pics as soon as I get to the cottage

2010-07-07T04:07:00.000-07:00

7am on Wednesday the 7th.

I haven't hurt this much in a loooooong time. Yesterday was another banner work day where we got a lot done.

Can you see the smile on my face? All of sudden, this cottage is coming together and I really like the outcome. It is completely different from the way I envisioned it looking when we bought it, but in an amazing way. The downstairs has become a very tranquil space. I wasn't quite sure about painting it all one color, but it works very well.

. The downstairs ceiling is finished, and looks incredible, gone is the peeling bright yellow ceiling in the kitchen as well as the bluish white ceiling in the old living room that had drips of what looked like nicotine staining the underside of the beams. In it's place is a pure white beamed ceiling that really unifies the space.

The stairs have come a long way and now all the treads and risers are cut out and placed. Today, Greg should screw everything down and then start on the banister.

I had lots of neighbors stop in yesterday to have a looksee. I have given over to self-guided tours because we need every second to get the house in some condition to be habitable for our friends and their kids who are coming next Tuesday. A really nice neighbor stopped by with warm fresh baked bread last night and I gotta tell ya, I like the ritual! We like lemonade, diet coke, and fruit too.....just sayin'.

Though I have no photos this am, I spent yesterday priming two sides of the first floor exterior and was all set to keep going when the flash rain storm started and kicked the humidity levels into high gear. I put my brushes down and took several hours off and then came back last night around 7pm and decided to paint some more window trim and prep and prime the kitchen floor for a top coat. You can see the primed floor in the last photo above. What I thought might take me an hour or so, took 3 and a half. I swept, vacuumed, and scrubbed the floor of all dirt. I then taped the outside of the floor and began by tinting the primer. The floor took a load of primer and the thick goopy primer filled in a lot of the floor's imperfections. I was amazed at what it covered. Of course, by this morning, the primer had settled between the boards in the floor and so the floor doesn't look as good as it did when the paint was fresh. I got done by 10:30 and made it home soon thereafter.

2010-07-06T02:50:00.000-07:00

Great shot of dawn over the Bay from the new deck on the back of Sunnyside. This is the million dollar view!

The deck after two days. My contractors are on vacation this week, so progress on the deck will be nil until next week. We are going to take the "Victorian" spindle railings from the first floor and use them up here on this deck. The new square spindle railings for the first floor are sitting on the lawn and ready to go on the house.

2010-07-05T15:06:00.000-07:00

T'was a day for getting stuff done. I am amazed at the progress for this week already. I got to the cottage around 5am and did some sanding and some trim painting. Tim, the painter showed up around 7am and finished sanding and priming the ceiling of the first floor

Downstairs ceiling is primed and ready for painting tomorrow.

Stairs are going in nicely!!

Lots of progress here.

The front and side of the first floor exterior are scraped and sanded and ready for priming.

Looks like we are on track for the countdown to renters.

2010-07-04T07:18:00.000-07:00

Before and After, The Old Living Room

This first photo was taken just after we bought the house, and probably the day I took the old couch out of this room and finally opened the front doors for the first time in 10 years. If any of you have been reading this from the beginning, you might remember that under this piece of old cut rug, which covers the whole room, there was a layer of roofing felt over the original wooden floor boards. The room was painted a very interesting shade of Pepto pink, but note that new framing is already in place as are new windows.

Here is the room after we cleaned it out and added finished the new framing around the door and the other side of the room where the stairs are. You can just see the framing for the downstairs bathroom in the left side of the photo.

A long time coming, but the room is almost done. Ceiling and floor will be painted by the end of the week. (I hired a painter for the next seven days to catch us up). There will probably be a pull out couch here by the end of the month.

2010-07-02T04:17:00.000-07:00

The decking was put on yesterday afternoon and, though it is a fantastically big deck with lots of room, I worried all last night that it was too big. I asked a friend for his advice and he told me that no deck was too big. When I talked with Greg on the phone before bed, he concurred with me that having the deck run all the way to the perimeter of the new addition roof might be a bit of overkill.

I woke bolt upright at 5 am thinking that I had to get over there before Larry and the Boys arrived at 6:45 so I could suss out the situation. I walked around the square and went upstairs to really take a look at how big this sucker really was. It is obscenely big, bigger than practicality dictates. I could still have a table and chairs and a couple of loungers and still have room for a group Yoga session if I lopped off about 6 feet from the side of the deck.

So, all of you who are awakened this morning by the sound of drills working away, know that the Boys are working a bit backwards this morning and taking off a good portion of the deck they built yesterday.

2010-07-01T03:53:00.000-07:00

Took the day off yesterday in order to take care of some other business and to just decompress a bit. Today starts deck building off the master bedroom, which should be done by tomorrow afternoon. I am going over this am to continue scraping and sanding the outside of the house in prep for painting next week.

2010-06-29T04:58:00.000-07:00

Before and After!
I love these posts, for it makes me see how far we have come

I have posted this photo before, but this is the living room and how it looked on the day we first saw Sunnyside. An unfinished addition with no walls, floor, or ceiling, no insulation, but with very nice Anderson sliding glass doors already installed. I think this was almost a year ago.

The same room with shiplap walls and ceiling, nice track lighting, and brand new cork floors. All with 4" of foam insulation in the walls and ceiling.

2010-06-28T05:48:00.000-07:00

Here are some good pics of the cork floor in the living room. We just have to add the trim around the floor, which is already cut and ready to paint and the room will be done.

We think it looks really well.

2010-06-28T02:49:00.000-07:00

Monday:

The cork floor is finished and looks incredible! The two of us did the bulk of the floor on Saturday, me rolling and gluing tiles and the floor and Greg snapping them into place. Greg spent all yesterday sitting cross legged on the floor cutting around door moldings and walls and fitting in the tile. He did an amazing job.

Two things we know for next time: The floor has to be so level with no low spots, because you will end up with slightly indented tiles every where. a rubber mallet helps a lot!!! We bought one at the last minute and the first time I used it to flatten down the seams, the tiles just kind of melded together, it was awesome.

So, the tiles cost us $97 a box and we used about 8 boxes (retail $195 a box). The glue cost me $75 for three gallons (retail $75 a gallon) and it took us about 15 hours to install. I think we saved about $1400-1600 all told.

While Greg did the perimeter yesterday, I painted a lot more of the downstairs. I have just the living room to go and half of the hallway upstairs plus the trim. We decided to use the gray color wash on the walls throughout the downstairs. It is a beautiful color that changes with the light of the room, and is pretty neutral. Overall, the color reminds me of the pickled cypress that my grandparents had in their house in Florida. I am using a two parts water to one part paint mixture and so far have only used a quart of paint! $15.00 to paint most of the downstairs of Sunnyside.....not too bad.

Bought the Jenn- Aire downdraft roll in stove that was on sale at MacLeods in Belfast. Everyone told me it was the best move. It's black to match the granite on the island. It will look great with the natural maple counter tops.

I think that is it for now. My sister and some friends are coming to stay at Little Bohemia this week so they can use the house as a base for hiking and going on a Puffin Cruise in Bar Harbor. Gotta go make the beds there.

2010-06-27T10:46:00.000-07:00

Da cork floor!

2010-06-26T06:50:00.000-07:00

Saturday:
We finally got full power yesterday, save for a few circuits that were bad, which will be replaced on Monday....so, no hot water yet, though we had some yesterday and it was really nice!

I spent yesterday afternoon painting most of the downstairs, putting in the track lighting, and seeding the back lawn where the destruction of burying power lines occurred. My only hope is that the grass grows back before our neighbors show up!! Even though the digging happened on village property, the lawn is still their back yard.

Here are some photos of the living room stained a soft driftwood gray with whitewashed trim. The floor is all prepped for the cork, but we are waiting for a good dry day to do it.

We have sliding drawers in the kitchen! Each cabinet has sliding maple drawers for pots and pans. Cabinet doors will be made in Larry's shop and then fitted up in the kitchen.
Josh had to redo the drawers in the kitchen because the others were rickety and held together with glue. These ones are already filled with things!
Today is more painting, (kitchen today) I have three walls left to do. I will then probably go and spend more than I should on a stove for the kitchen Jenn-Aire smooth top with central downdraft fan. There is one in Belfast for $1000 off retail and I think it's a good deal. Might have to take the white fridge back in favor of a black one. sigh.....

Greg is working on stairs today....he has all the materials, and I think he can get it done today.

2010-06-23T03:07:00.000-07:00

Wednesday:
We are finally getting full power hook-up today, Central Maine Power will be at the cottage at 8:30am to get things rolling. Yesterday was a well deserved day off, though Greg and I did go and find a Whirlpool side by side fridge with water and ice maker for the cottage as well as a roll in stove. As soon as the kitchen counter tops are secured, we can add the stove and have a real working kitchen! In about a week, we will be able to add furniture to the bedrooms (I want to let the floors cure for a while before putting anything on top of them.) and then the place will be habitable.

OK, first mishap today happened when I was cleaning and organizing again. I was up in the second floor bathroom and went to pick up something, knocking the green floor paint can onto it side.....the top was not firmly attached and I spilled green paint on the bathroom floor! Luckily the tiles were sealed, but the grout was not, so I ended up staining the grout....nothing took it off, so I figured I would have to grout over it....but a razor and a bit of scraping on Larry's part got the color right off the grout....my hero!!

CMP canceled today because of the rain, so they will come on Friday. Greg started in on prepping the plywood floor with leveler so that we can lay the cork tile on Friday, when it will be sunny and warm and dry again. I painted second coats of trim color in the small bedroom and then the cavalry arrived, Larry and Josh came to work. All in all, we got the upstairs closet built and the door hung, the downstairs fridge cavity in the kitchen boarded over, the deck planned and the materials ordered, and a master plan going for the final stages of Sunnyside 2010.

Also talked with Butch at Parenteau Flooring about laying down our cork tile. He and his crew laid the cork down at the Belfast Library and our tile and that tile are very similar. The weird thing about cork that I have found is that every manufacturer has their own adhesive that they want you to use. Since we got our tiles at Marden's, a close-out surplus place, there was no accompanying adhesive. Butch took a lot of time out to show me the glue they they used at the library and to look up what we should use and how to use it. He gave me some good tips about laying the tile, and I ended up buying my glue from him. Kudos to Butch, if I ever want someone else to lay my flooring, I will go to Butch.

I still cannot figure out a color to paint the downstairs walls!!

Thursday 6am:
Still obsessing about color. Also obsessing about the Jenair roll in stove that I saw yesterday....too bad it is black and not white...Also realized that it needs to vent outside and I don't want another complication in my life with the cottage.

I am trying to clean off the porch of useless things so that we can finally pull the table saw and the chop saw out of the house on rainy days. Yesterday got three doors off the porch, today will see the painted furniture go back into storage. I also think we are pretty much done with scrap wood, so I feel a dump run coming on today.

Got a quote to install a new garage door from PDQ doors $2300.....OUCH!!!! That, I cannot afford right now.

Sigh....off to the salt mines (Last May, Greg and I visited the salt mines in Poland, they were very cool.)

2010-06-22T17:35:00.000-07:00

Greg's family just left and we are saaaaaddddd to see them go! What amazing troopers they were to do all the work they did. I cannot believe how much we got done with them here. I was expecting to only get the two bedrooms painted, but the nieces set to work finishing the bathroom trim and painting furniture outside and scraping some of the old paint off the side of the house while their mothers taped and sanded and painted and never complained a bit. (unlike me) I whitewashed the living room ceiling and painted a lot of the guest room, and then painted it again!

We decided to color wash the walls, essentially staining them with paint.
I mixed a color for the smaller bedroom with one part water and found that after we painted the WHOLE room, the color was too dark. I fretted and fussed and fumed, and then decided, on Greg's suggestion, to white wash over the very dark blue. (the original treatment looked like a pair of fresh blue jeans after one wash). A one to one bright white to water created a second surface that really lightened up the room, toned down the paint, smoothed out the surface, and gave a look of faux-weathered boards. The blue triangle above the window was the original wall color. The trim color is bright white tinted with the blue from the downstairs bathroom. The floor color is also what is on the walls.

I really like it. The whole paint process for that one bedroom took four days and we still have some touching up to do. I am sore all over... I never want to paint an18 foot ceiling again!

The master bedroom is a wonderful green color wash with the full strength color on the floor. The floor color matches the original colors of the upstairs floor, and I really like it too.

2010-06-16T14:55:00.000-07:00

We got the kitchen counter tops in and cut Monday. If you remember, there were doors to the cabinets before, but they started to warp and never fit properly, so they have to be made over again. I hope we'll have some new ones by the end of the week.

Burying the power lines was successful. ( At least burying the conduit was, as the line has not been moved yet) The entire back of the house has to be graded and seeded and watered, but not until they get the power line moved. A good thing that came out of this is that my pile of dirt and concrete from under the house has been hauled away. We can use the driveway again!!! (of course, after the grass comes back, or after I put a bit of pea stone out there)

Today, I got the last wall boarded up. We had to wait until Ron, the electrician put in the wiring for a light I forgot to install in the downstairs shower. All of the outside fixtures are up and the first floor is all set with outlets, switches, and lights. The second floor's "Deco" fans and Moravian Star chandelier should be installed tomorrow and then, when they get the wire and the new circuit box, we will have full electricity!

Took the old fridge to the dump yesterday and will go up to Dennett's in Bangor to see what they have in their bumped and bruised section for fridge's and stoves. Once I get those, the cottage will be livable!

Greg went to NYC this morning at 4am to have a night there with his two sisters and two of his nieces. They are all caravanning it back here tomorrow to start painting the upstairs bedrooms on Friday.

I called State Sand and Gravel today to inquire about peastone for the garage. When I asked when they could deliver it, the phone guy said...20 minutes be too soon??? I said yeah, I had to put down the vapor barrier. I'm gonna call him tomorrow.

Lots going on......always

2010-06-15T03:10:00.001-07:00

Larry and his boys arrived yesterday to take the shingles off the roof and put down the rubber membrane for the deck, which didn't arrive. Instead of waiting around, Larry and Josh started in on the kitchen and we got the counter tops cut and placed. The kitchen is very cute...I had to run down to Home Depot and invest in another big piece of maple and get new hinges for the cabinet doors. Josh is going to make the cabinet doors and finish off the rest of the kitchen, which he might have done by the end of the week.

The electricians came in yesterday to install the lights and the outlets and switches and today, I believe, they will dig to bury the power lines and add in the new electrical box in the basement.

Greg leaves tomorrow for New York, where he will meet his sisters and bring them back here for four days of painting.

I am off to sand the ceiling downstairs.

2010-06-14T06:44:00.000-07:00

The floors in the cottage are all sanded and ready to go. I was able to have Sherwin Williams paint match the old green on the floors upstairs. The color is gorgeous and we will repaint them this rich dark green that reminds me of grass.

The wonderful thing is that Greg and I agree on colors and treatments for the bedrooms upstairs. I really liked the distressed look of painted shiplap, but because I have neither the time nor the inclination to paint the boards and then sand it off, we are going with color washes upstairs on the walls and ceilings. It might be a lot of color, but for a Maine cottage for a week, I find that most people get cheered by bright colored rooms.

This blue with the green floors is my personal favorite.

2010-06-13T06:26:00.000-07:00

I have to constantly review these photos so that I can remember what the place looked like through the phases, we really have come a long way!

2010-06-12T03:18:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was sanding floors and putting up trim day. The upstairs rooms are all sanded and ready to paint, though they look really good right now and I toyed with the idea of just leaving them, cleaning up and furnishing the rooms.

2010-06-11T02:27:00.000-07:00

n Lots has been happening, of course. Progress on the kitchen: All the doors have been made and reinforced and hung. I found some brushed metal pulls that are fairly contemporary and look like modern boat cleats. Ended up getting figured maple for the counter tops, which should look fairly cool.

I am working on the floors upstairs. Spent about an hour on my hands and knees pulling out old linoleum tacks and punching down nail heads in preparation for sanding. I sanded a bit last night, but had to call it quits around 5:30 to entertain friends and their kids at home. It's 5:30 am now and I plan to be sanding in about 45 minutes. The master bedroom floor is easy as there is no paint on it, just trying to get the spray from the foam insulation off.

Monday all hell breaks loose as the electricians will dig to bury the power lines, finish the electrical, hook up the lights and new hot water heater we installed yesterday. Monday also has our contractor coming to install the rubber membrane on the roof for the second floor deck.

Been trying some color washing on boards. So far have not come up with a winner for colors, but I have to choose this weekend, or we will not have anything for Greg's family to do when they get here next Thursday! Plus Sherwin Williams is having a 25% off sale this weekend.

Too tired to post photos today.

2010-06-09T03:07:00.000-07:00

Photo day!

Progress is still going strong. Marcus is going strong on the kitchen, and I am going out today to get countertops, drawer slides, and other accoutrements so that he can keep moving on it. I really like the detail of the" feet" on the cases.

While I grouted yesterday, Marcus made two door mock-ups, which you can see below. I chose the one on the left with the 1 3/4" border surround rather than the one with the larger surround on the right. I wanted to put on wrought iron strap hinges, but I think the doors, which I reallllly like, are too contemporary for that. I think I will try and find some copper finish hinges and knobs instead.

Ceilings are done! The rooms upstairs look amazing

I particularly love this photo of the master bedroom. Did I mention that we are thinking of doing a tinted wash on the walls rather than painting over the knots, which have turned out to be rather beautiful.

I have bathroom tile envy! I wish we had such beautiful tiles in our own house. I finished grouting and polishing both bathroom tub and shower surrounds yesterday and they are really beautiful.

2010-06-05T02:51:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the kindness of friends, neighbors and blog readers, Bill and Suzie (whose names have been changed to protect the innocent), I was able to store all of Sunnyside's possessions in their garage yesterday. Three loads in the back of the truck, plus some hand carrying, and Little Bohemia no longer looks like a storage unit! Bill (again, not his real name) came down into the garage after I was finished and said "all of this fit into Little Bohemia???" I failed to mention to him about all the stuff hidden in closets and under beds!

I have to go over there to clean today as I have friends coming tomorrow to stay for a week with their adorable tow headded boys.

Thanks again Bill and Suzie!!

2010-06-05T01:46:00.000-07:00

I was in Aubuchon Hardware the other day, and a lovely woman looked at me and said "You're Mainecliffdweller, right? I read your blog." She was very complimentary about the progress on the cottage, which was nice. I do think that she used to read my first blog, "MaineFoodie," the one that I probably could have developed into a business, but got bored with it instead. Now there are Maine food blogs everywhere, but I was one of the first.

So, we continue to fly at the cottage. Both bathrooms are now almost done. The upstairs bathroom looks amazing! I am envious of the copper tile around the tub, it looks like pennies pressed into the walls, and Greg did such an amazing job at laying them perfectly straight.
As I keep saying, the textures are a strange combination in the upstairs bath, with the copper tile, the slate floor and the greenish sandstone walls, all with deco fixtures, but it works!

I saved the old mirrored medicine cabinet from the previous bathroom....remember this photo? See where the ceiling starts here? We raised it about two feet.

Here is the cool pocket door for the upstairs bathroom, its a maple door with the original glass inset panel at the top. It's a seven foot door, so no one can see in. I am debating about whether to find a piece of stained glass to inset over the clear glass. Because this is a pocket door, I cannot put a curtain over the glass because it won't fit.

Please do not look too closely at the downstairs shower tile, which had a bit of trouble going up! I got pretty good yesterday using the tile wet saw, which I always thought was a bit scary, but really, it's easy once one gets the hang of it. I had to cut a few of the glass tiles to fit into the corner where there was a gap. We are adding grab bars and the shower hardware and I think after the grout goes in, and the trim goes up, it won't be as noticeable. I could kick myself for not having the confidence to do the tile on my own ...next time!! Grout work on the tiles around the shower and tub happen today, whenever EBS opens.

The Kitchen is looking great, and we finalized the design yesterday. Our new hire, 21 year old Marcus, is doing a good job. The two of us came up with a design that works, simple and straightforward. I cannot believe that he has a lot of the framing work done already.
Where the broom is will be a granite topped island and there will be either open shelves on either side of the window or, if time allows, cupboards. I love the sink, which was in the original kitchen, so I decided to use it again, it's enamel over cast iron.

I found a 1" thick figured birch plywood at Home Depot, which I think will look great for countertops. We made the "L" where the stove will go measure only 8' from the wall, so a single sheet of the birch can be used and we won't have a seam to worry about.

2010-06-03T15:05:00.000-07:00

Real work has gotten in the way again and I am up to my eyeballs in art research. This means that I am freaking out about ole Sunnyside getting underway. I feel that the work has stalled somewhat, but Greg reminds me that it is now down to a lot of little things, which are actually getting done. I've called in reinforcements, which will cost me more in the end, but which will ultimately catch us up. Larry and his boys are coming the early part of next week to finish the ceilings upstairs, put the rubber membrane over the roof of the addition so that we can build the deck, finish hanging the doors (which happened today) and help with other things. When I last checked in at the cottage, Marcus had successfully trimmed out the beams in the kitchen and the living room and was half way through building the first set of kitchen cabinets.
After presenting a collections evaluation to a local client today, which she deemed "a work of art" in itself, Greg and I went to Home Depot and picked out the track lighting for the ceilings in the kitchen and the addition and the carriage lights for the outside of the house.
Greg is now over at the cottage planning out the bathroom tiling upstairs. He called to tell me we were three square feet too short and needed more tiles...these are the clear glass tiles with the copper threads running through them...which he correctly told me needed white thinset mortar rather than the gray we used elsewhere because the color will show through the tiles...details details....Home Depot is open until 9pm tonight.
Still looking for a vintage newel post while I research an 18th-century London silversmith!

2010-06-02T04:25:00.000-07:00

I took yesterday off to drive to Western Massachusetts in order to see a silk and needlework portrait done by a young girl in 1808. The 13 hour car ride was worth it!

The day before, Greg and I turned the hose on the side of Sunnyside to try and find a leak that was streaming water over the new sliders in the master bedroom. It was easy to find, since I pretty much knew where it was. The vent over the door, which was installed when the addition was built, about 10 years ago, had no caulk around it and is the perfect place for water to gather and seep down to the door frame. After about ten minutes of testing along the wall, Greg turned the hose on the vent and water streamed down over the header for the slider....

It's way high up there, too high for me to get to it, so I am getting my boy Josh to come over and fix it.

Our new finish carpenter, Marcus, started yesterday. He is working on casing in the new support beams right now before he moves onto building our new kitchen cabinets.

We have working toilets and sinks now too! Very exciting....we will even have working bathroom doors today too!

2010-05-30T14:15:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-05-29T05:13:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-05-28T13:27:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-05-25T18:27:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-25T03:43:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-23T03:08:00.001-07:00

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.

2010-05-22T15:09:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-21T03:52:00.000-07:00

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!

2010-05-19T21:19:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-05-18T04:09:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-05-17T04:54:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-05-13T18:23:00.001-07:00

Day off! Didn't even go near Sunnyside today

2010-05-12T14:38:00.000-07:00

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!

2010-05-12T03:51:00.000-07:00

"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.......

2010-05-10T04:40:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-09T02:45:00.001-07:00

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.

2010-05-08T02:44:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-05-07T16:10:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-05-07T06:23:00.001-07:00

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

2010-05-06T05:16:00.001-07:00

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.

2010-05-05T02:34:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-05-02T05:00:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-04-30T05:29:00.000-07:00

Another before and during post

The new addition from when we bought the place

What the place looks like now after rewiring, insulation and walls. Cork floors and a ceiling are next.

2010-04-29T02:44:00.000-07:00

Three solid days of putting up the walls and we've almost finished the exterior walls downstairs. It is exciting to say the least, but I couldn't even lift my head up yesterday (I've been putting up walls for five days, but I had to take down two days worth because they were the wrong boards!) I think I went to bed about 8:15 and read for approximately 3 minutes before I drifted off into neverneverland. I hardly ever sleep straight through the night, but I got a solid 7 hours in before I woke up!
Anyway, I digress. I had a hard wall day yesterday, my wall started out cockeyed and never got out of that mode. I got all the way to the stairs going to the second floor and had to stop because the next board was going 16 feet all the way up to the second floor knee wall and there were all sorts of outlets, and floor joist cut outs to contend with......I left it for another day.
Greg was a boarding machine yesterday. He finished the area around the entry door and then stayed an extra two hours after I left to try and finish the wall in the kitchen. He would've done it, but he ran out of wood! We boarded over 400 linear feet in one day, not too bad.
Seth (no relation) was also with us for a few hours. He installed both shower valves and finished the Hardi backerboard installation on the bathroom downstairs. His plumbing work is really nice and he brings bitchin' 80s music to soothe us while we plod away at our tasks. I need to find another finish nailer, life would be so much easier with two guns!

I hear from visitors to Sunnyside that lots of folks read this blog and that one of their friends told them her grandson is obsessed with reading my ramblings about fixing this place up...so a big shout out to you all!

I have to split for New York City today for a board meeting and an auction. There is a very interesting set of 18th century watercolors depicting the battles of Lexington and Concord done by a 14 year old boy in Boston that are coming up for sale. They used to be in the collection of American/ British painter John Trumbull.

2010-04-27T05:11:00.000-07:00

Greg worked in the addition yesterday while I worked in the old part of the house, so we are getting it done. He has come up with a u-shaped dish design for the ceiling in this room. Can you see how the roof line angles up? I was just planning to strap the ceiling and do a flat wood ceiling, but Greg thinks we can follow the roof line to get a more interesting look with an airier feeling to the room. This is where the cork flooring goes as well. It's the main living room, with views out to the bay from four glass doors, so it has to be beautiful.
I think we can finish off this room and the front parlor (the walls part) by the end of tomorrow.

2010-04-26T16:33:00.000-07:00

It's a Before and After Post!

Of course, this is the shot of a corner of the living room right after we bought the house.

A shot of it this evening after I finished putting up the finish wall. All we need are some trim pieces for around the windows, a coat or two of paint and the furniture. This is the nook for the pull out couch.

I did this corner of the living room this morning, AFTER I pulled down the wall I installed yesterday in the same place because the boards were beveled instead of flat. Hated that!
Greg came over this afternoon and worked on the walls in the addition. So between us we boarded about a quarter of the downstairs today. I am thinking of buying another finish nailer so that we can work pretty independently of each other.
Greg spent a good part of the last hour tonight designing and measuring for the new ceiling in the addition...He is so good at things like that.

2010-04-26T03:15:00.000-07:00

All things happen for a reason, right? When I decided on 8" wide ship lap, I went down to Home Depot to get some other supplies and decided to take what they had in ship lap boards. It wasn't a lot, perhaps 120 board feet. I was passing EBS in Camden and decided to get some more boards from them. I started with the Home Depot boards, which, by the way, are probably reject boards from every other lumber yard in the country!! The Home Depot boards covered my first stretch of wall almost completely, save for one board from EBS. You can tell my progress from on cutting and fitting across the wall, it goes from awful to pretty tight fit! After I proudly finished my first wall...keep in mind as you read this that it was only 8 feet long, I rounded the corner and was very proud of my tight crisp corner. Second board up from the EBS batch and I realized that the boards were different. The Home Depot ship lap is beveled to look like V-match and the EBS boards are flat, so they butt up against each other, creating a flat surface. AGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!

This would only happen to me...leave it to me to not notice this. I called my sister for a rational opinion and she couldn't contain her giggles into the phone. I asked her if she thought I could get away with doing the end walls in beveled ship lap and the others in flat, and she agreed that if I didn't want to take the wall down, this would be the best solution.

After getting a good run of the flat ship lap going however, I decided that the other wall will come down.....I am calling it my practice wall...I didn't want that V-match look anyway and was disappointed when I started putting it up and noticed the beveled edges. So now I am a day behind.

I do have to report that I love my new Makita 10" composite mitre saw. It has a laser and a rolling arm that is super easy to use, plus it has a dual beveling capability for board ends. I had thought our old Delta saw was fine, but one of the contractors broke the plastic blade guard and we couldn't find a replacement for it. It was on sale at Home Depot and I had a gift card from Christmas, so it was $100 cheaper than normal. My new Milwaukee 5" orbital sander works great on getting the boards to fit together well without more cutting.

I am happy to report that I am having a great time putting up the walls and have renewed energy about the cottage.

2010-04-25T01:22:00.000-07:00

This entry should be titled "On the Job Training"
Having never put up walls by myself, today was quite a challenge. The first photo below shows my progress in the old living room where I am putting up 8" pine ship lap. It's a total bitch to work with, but I am having a great time. All the second floor joist are twisted and uneven, so that coupled with my non-existent precision craftsmanship skills spells T-R-I-M-S-T-R-I-P-S. This little bit of wall right here took me about four hours to put up, though I am getting faster. Notice the nice light through the Western windows. This photo was taken around 6pm. Can you see the azalea blooming outside....Spring is here in Maine and it is a glorious one.

Seth (no relation) did most of this beadboard work in the bathroom. The two of us worked it on Friday, and even though we forgot to account for the bow in the exterior wall, which threw off the levelness of one of the walls, a quarter round trim strip and a can of paint will take care of that.

I have to clean a bit of our mess today as the cottage is in total chaos. I think I should have all the walls put up in the old parlor by sometime Monday morning. A bonus for me is that the walls in the new addition measure exactly 8' and there are no floor joists to cut around. That room should only take a day to finish.

2010-04-23T14:32:00.000-07:00

I just found this photo online of a house done in 8" shiplap, and I think I like it a lot. We put up the walls in the downstairs bath today and have about 3/4s of them up. I used a 6" beadboard for the bathroom because its such a small space. We ran out of 1/4" hardi backerboard for the shower and will get more in when the store gets their shipment.

2010-04-20T17:36:00.001-07:00

Coming home tomorrow from an amazing trip to the Bahamas. So gorgeous. Here's to hoping that a few things got done at Sunnyside while we were away. We have six weeks to put the walls up before eight family members arrive for a week of painting the place top to bottom. I did learn a bit about paint spraying this week and how much time it saves, so we may try to spray some of the interior walls, or perhaps the ceilings upstairs.

2010-04-13T02:22:00.000-07:00

Seth (no relation) left me yesterday with a phrase that could strike fear into one's heart, if one weren't in a panic to get something tangible done in "Sunnyside, phase 9." He said, "Don't worry, I'll surprise you!", right before I left on vacation.

We met over at the cottage yesterday after he called to inquire about more work there. I only had half a plan, but I ran with it. Seth (no relation)is a very nice guy with that winning trustworthy smile. I know that he will do something better than I could do. So Seth (no relation), armed with my debit card and the charge account access at Viking, will take strides to create a finished bathroom downstairs. The layout is done, we bought the glass tiles for the shower stall, we have some leftover slate, with more available at Home Depot for the floor, and I told him to get some bead board delivered. If all goes as planned, Seth (no relation) will build the bathroom as much as he can in a week, so that I can see some more progress and not feel guilty about leaving for 9 days.

2010-04-11T19:10:00.000-07:00

I unpacked the cork flooring yesterday and went online to research it a bit more because I am skeptical about the tiles we got. I figure that if I don't like them, I can always return them...but the Marden's commercial running through my head, " You should have bought it when you saw it at Marden's" made me go ahead and purchase them when we found them. The tiles are made in Portugal and distributed by a company in New Hampshire. They are made from at least 80% post consumer cork, and have a coating on them called "Greenshield" which is an enviornmentally friendly form of Scotchguard!. The manufacturer's price is $197 a box. We bought ours for $94 a box, so I am happy.

We were going to make the big wood purchase tomorrow to get the walls started while we are away, but Greg made me hold off until we get back, so that we can be here to start the walls ourselves and to oversee the rest. God forbid we got back and hated what was put up. I called a local lumber company and found that their wood is expensive, over a $1 a board foot for #4 grade pine ship lap. I think we can get it from the manufacturer, who is local, for much cheaper, and will try and do so when we have more time.

For now, we are content to close the cottage up for a week while we enjoy a vacation in the Bahamas.
Updates begin again around the 22nd or so.

2010-04-10T10:29:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I am happy about the foam. I let the cottage air out for two days and went over there this morning to close the windows and doors, etc. The inside of the place was about 46 degrees. I turned the heat on and within about 25 minutes, the temp had risen to 60 degrees. This house is now tighter than ours and as I told Greg...guess where we are living next winter!! (just kidding, dear)
I am a bit miffed at the insulation guy. He gave me a price and because I know he is a bit messy, I asked him if that price included cleanup. Apparently, his idea of clean up is to get in his truck and leave! Lucky for me we plasticed all the walls and covered over most of the things in the house with plastic sheeting. There is foam EVERYWHERE! It doesn't take much to get it off, but it is annoying to find beads of insulation on the backside of the door knob.

2010-04-07T11:40:00.000-07:00

We have Foam!

I think this completes phase eight

2010-04-06T02:57:00.000-07:00

Lots of goings on at ole Sunnyside yesterday. The rough plumbing was finished, the leaks around the second floor sliding glass door were addressed and hopefully fixed, and I took the first steps towards making some walls: That is, I went to a friend's house and snapped some photos of her walls so that I could shamelessly copy them.

Of course Greg and I disagree on wall treatments. He likes the naturalness of wood walls, which I like too, but it is a look more for a madeover barn than it is for a cute summer cottage on the water that screams for colors with names like "bluesky" and "orange buttercream."

I gave a phone interview to a newspaper while standing on the roof of Sunnyside yesterday. I hope I didn't sound too much like a neophyte. I am not sure the interviewer, who likes to make me sound like I am 12 years old in her column sometimes, got down everything that I was saying about the importance of folk rugs.

Foaming begins today. Should take two days to finish the place. I am going over to the house in about an hour to finish prepping for the foam dude, which means pulling out all the stuff from the garage so the walls can get a good coat of foam. I cannot wait for the house to be tight and dry. Once the foam is in, big portions of the house will get start falling into place.

Yay!

2010-04-04T06:14:00.000-07:00

Sunnyside seems to be the cottage where no one wants to show up on time. I swear, getting people to finish a job so that I can shove money at them for that job is not as simple as it should be! The closer we get to summer, the busier my business and Greg's business seem to get. I was away last week in North Carolina and this week I have a surprise trip down to Milford, Connecticut somewhere towards the end of the week. This trip will take some research time on my part, so there goes the time at the cottage!

Plumbing is ongoing today in hopes that it will get done sufficiently for the foam guy to come Monday or Tuesday. I have a call into my contractor to discuss having his guys put up the finish walls and ceiling upstairs while we are away for a week. In my mind, the perfect thing would be to come back and have the upstairs almost totally complete so that I can sand the floors, paint the walls, and set up some bedrooms.

2010-04-03T04:20:00.000-07:00

Cork!

We happened to be up in Elsworth yesterday and decided to check out the new Marden's there. Marden's is a surplus and salvage store and a Maine institution. It can be a treasure trove of amazing things. I have bought linen suits, silk blazers, $600 loafers made from the ass cheeks of a horse (the Marden's price? $67.00), beds, tiles, carpets, etc. Yesterday we found cork tiles. They were more than I wanted to spend on the floor in the living room, but they were also $50 cheaper a box than one can find elsewhere. We saved $500 by buying them at Mardens. The great thing is that they are thin enough so that we will not have a big hump between the floor of the kitchen and the floor of the living room. The living room is about 300 square feet and I know these tiles will look just beautiful.

In other news: I have been cleaning out the garage. There are so many old building supplies down there that I decided at the beginning of the summer to have a building supply garage sale and get rid of whatever is left over from reconstructing the house. Tubs upon tubs of electrical and plumbing supplies, (most of which we will use) a perfectly good gas heater, which I may use over at the other cottage, and all sorts of rusted out stuff. The house is ready for the foamer. The plumber is coming today and tomorrow so he can get most of the place done before the foamer comes. I would love to get a bathroom floor in before we leave for the Bahamas, but that might not happen.

Oh yeah, I need to replace the garage doors...ugghh.

2010-04-01T15:16:00.000-07:00

Shoulda bit my tongue during the last post when I was talking about drizzle and rain. While I was away, that was about all it did up here. More rain in one day than we are used to and the cottage has the leaking roof and the water in the garage to prove it. I went over yesterday to chat with the plumber and told him to watch his step downstairs as it was probably pretty wet from the rain. He comes up from there while I am sweeping and says "so were you trying to be funny when you told me it might be a little wet down there?" I said "why, are there puddles?" He said "No, no puddles, just one big pond!" The garage, which I dug out last fall, but failed to fill back up with stone, had gathered all the water because it is the low point. and there was about 5" of water floating around. The rest of the basement was pretty dry considering the rain, but boy, was it wet. By this morning, all of the water has sunk back into the ground, but I'd better do something about it before the "mud season" starts in earnest.
Meanwhile, we are having terrible troubles with the roof on the new addition, which keeps leaking. I know where the leaks are and we were going to put a rubber membrane on that portion of the roof anyway...we just have to do that a bit earlier now.
Spent the day getting ready for the foam guy, who comes next week. I had to take out the rusty storage shelves in the basement and go through all the rusty cans and bottles and containers. Jeez, what a lot of old rusty stuff. I've kept the containers that still have liquid in them so that I can dispose of them properly....there is more wood stain and other fine Minwax products than you can shake a stick at. And I finally got rid of the rest of the old wood pile that was sitting up on the porch, along with the old 6' tall pine doors. Now that folks are returning to Bayside for the summer, I don't want the place to look like too much of a rat trap!

2010-03-28T07:39:00.000-07:00

Drizzle, Rain and the Majestic Ocean

I've been sucked in by the clever name marketers at Sherwin Williams and Home Depot. There is no way that I cannot use the colors drizzle and rain in the paint scheme for Sunnyside. How can one pass up the chance to use beautiful colors with names like that . I just hope that I don't find a fantastic soft gray with a name like "fog horn" or I will just have to paint the outside of the house using fog and something like "beach foam" for the trim.
In the photo above, the Home Depot glass tile is aptly named "Majestic Ocean" which is what I consider the view out the back sliding doors. Greg and I went and bought out the last boxes at Home Depot yesterday. We have 73 square feet of tile for the bathroom, so we hope not to mess it up! The color chip on the right is "drizzle" and the one on the right is "rain" I love these colors and am thinking of painting the walls "rain" and the ceiling "drizzle."
I have painting on the brain since we extended an offer to Greg's family members to come up in June and paint their little hearts out for free airfare and accommodations. Two of Greg's sisters and his niece have taken us up on the offer.

I am currently in Charlotte North Carolina for an auction. After this spate of real work, which has lasted several weeks, I am the lead on team Sunnyside and will spend full time at the cottage for the next few weeks until we go to the Bahamas. Well, full time is relative, I was just contacted about another art project, of which I will learn more on Tuesday when I return home.

Wish me luck

2010-03-26T03:03:00.000-07:00

This entry should be titled "What to do for five hours during a cold and rainy day" or "All this florescent light is hurting my brain!"

In order for our plumber to begin work, we had to go get the fixtures for the bathrooms. Sorry renters, but no designer fixtures here, we are on a budget! But we did want to find nice things for the bathroom. We drove down to Lowes in Thomaston and then to Home Depot in Rockland, and then back to Lowes. We were on a mission, but got sidetracked by all the twinkley lights and the 24 different stone tile patterns in varying shades of brown. Why no blue stone tiles or terracotta colored tiles, why just "faux-chateau" brown? Anyway, I digress. Who knew there were so many cheap toilets from which to choose??? All I wanted was a tall, oval bowled, low water usage toilet that looked halfway cottage-y and fit in with the deco cast-iron tub upstairs! Lowes had the best price on toilets and had the one we wanted, but it didn't have the right sink for the downstairs bath. But the slate tile was really pretty!....oh wait, we need to focus on toilets...but look at these light fixtures....no, focus on sinks!! Yikes, after two hours we went to Home Depot. We found a cabinet sink for the downstairs bath that fits in perfectly and allows enough space in the bathroom (which is long, but narrow) for it to feel like a room and not a closet. I kind of like the "antique" look of it too.

I was also on a mission to get a shower stall insert so that we could just put it in and voila, a shower! But, my gay gene kicked in when I saw how cheap they were and with that look from Greg that said..."you are not going to be happy with this" we decided to get the pressed fiberglass shower pan and then tile the walls ourselves. Building walls and tiling vs. a prefab plastic shower stall comes out to about the same price if one is doing the work one's self. But the resale value and the charm factor for a tiled shower are immesurable.

HD didn't have the right olde-time toilets we wanted, but Lowes did, and they had a better deal on a pedestal sink for the upstairs bath that really goes nicely with the deco tub we saved from the old bathroom upstairs. I am amazed that we didn't get sucked into the paint color department at Lowes, but after debating the relative virtues of which toilets had the best flush factor, I was tiring out! I cannot remember why, but we went back to Home Depot and ended up finding cool glass tiles for the bathroom for $4.99 a square foot. The colors in my photo didn't come out too well for the tile, which looks too gray and silver here, but is in reality more blue and green tile with silver. The tiles are less expensive than other glass tiles because they are clear glass tile with colored paper backing rather than colored glass. They'll do the trick and with a silver grout, will be quite smashing looking!

So, to update you. The plumbing is going in this weekend and part of next week and the foam insulation (yes, that's right, my man Glenn actually showed up to give me a quote) goes in the first week of April. Glenn has done some foaming for me here at our house and also at Little Bohemia . I was hoping to get a soy based foam insulation in here, but none of those guys got back to me. Glenn came and spent about 30-40 minutes measuring the house, telling me that we needn't foam the bathroom walls because pink insulation was a better sound barrier there. We are doing 3 inches of foam under the first floor, 3 inches in the walls, and 4 inches in the roof. He told me there was 8,100 board feet to cover and gave me a price, knocked off a good amount and rounded to the nearest thousand, which was EXACTLY what we had budgeted for the project. I like Glenn and am happy to give him the business. Incidentally, when he went upstairs and saw the view, he was blown away.

I originally wanted the foam to go in the last week of March, so this puts us only a week behind schedule, not too bad. (still have the seven week cushion at the end of the project before the first renters come in)

2010-03-22T05:01:00.000-07:00

I am venting today. All these work guys are telling me that business is dead and that everyone is hurting, from plumbers to carpenters to insulators. So why is it that guys still are not calling back when I inquire about work? I am set to hand over cash for work....around $8,000 is my estimate for insulation...I have the check in hand ready to give it to whomever comes to quote a price and doesn't dick me around....Three foam guys, one never called back, one emailed, called, and then told me he had to check his appointment book...never got back to me. I called him and he dodged. The third guy has yet to call back to confirm today's appointment.
My moonlight plumber passed up the job of installing the plumbing for the house....again, I have cash in hand and he knows that. Easy money, two days of work and he tells me he doesn't want to work in the dark cottage at night. Isn't that why they call it "moonlighting?????" Anyway, I have that one taken care of already. But the foamers totally baffle me.
I am tearing my hair out here!

2010-03-21T03:24:00.000-07:00

70 degrees yesterday and I got the Spring cleaning bug. The truck was filled to overflowing with debris and old unworkable things from the garage in the cottage when I took it to the dump. I am getting the place organized for the next phase: plumbing and the phase after that: insulation. The plumber told me it would be a two day job, though that is what the electrician told me and it took him two weeks! (a testament to him though, I didn't pay any more than his estimate for the work done).
I am surprised at the insulation guys, one of whom emailed me and then called to set up an appointment and never called me back. Another of whom just didn't return my repeated phone calls, even though I told him it was a referral job. My regular foamer is coming by tomorrow to give me an estimate, though I hope he remembers as I think he is a bit of a stoner.
Anyway, I finally got rid of the big pile of scrap lumber that I thought we would use in the framing job. A lot of the wood was so dried out that the 2 x 4' boards broke in half when I chucked them out over the balcony! I ended up cutting most of it up for firewood, but did store a few pieces in the garage wood racks. So, the downstairs is now free of the large 2' tall pile of lumber and I cannot believe how big the open space looks right now! I have it in my craw to get the place totally clean by tomorrow. The electricians did a job when they drilled through the framing to set in the outlets and switches and things, there are wood curls and sawdust everwhere!!!
The great weather here has me in a panic because mentally, I'm starting to think June is next month and that I better get cracking on this place. I am not going to take any more reservations until the project is more complete and I have an idea of how long it will take us to put up the walls. I always have the fall back position of getting a crew in here to finish up the interior while I work outside on the scraping, sanding and painting of the exterior.
A nurse friend told me to email Waldo County General Hospital HR department and let them know that I have a cottage for rent over the winter months for visiting nurses and doctors. The cottage for rent at the bottom of the hill had a Nurse in there most of the winter and their bills are paid by their employer. That would be a coup for me for renting through the winter.

2010-03-19T15:09:00.000-07:00

The Bayside Historical Preservation Society (BHPS) Spring 2010 newsletter arrived today, complete with the brief article I wrote about Sunnyside. I read it and thought of all the things I left out and all the things I could have said about the cottage. One of the big goofs in the article was not mentioning that when we cleaned the house out of its contents, most of the good period pieces went into storage at Little Bohemia to be used again once we get the house up and running. I did manage to give several pieces to the BHPS for their cottage, including an aesthetic movement settee with its original crushed red velvet upholstery and wood frame complete with carved dolphins! (The chair and ottoman went to a local Bayside personality) I also handed over a 12 foot long American flag that was stuffed in a drawer upstairs. I wanted to keep the flag, but didn't know where to put it or how to work it into a rental house. Anyway, lest anyone think that we did not honor any of the furnishings, this entry is here to tell you that we did!

Speaking of furnishings, I was able to buy a number of things at auction the other night that will be perfect for the cottage, including two really nice wooden rocking chairs for the front porch, a great modern Gothic side table, and a funky farm cupboard in old paint.

This weekend will be all Sunnyside all the time.

2010-03-16T16:27:00.000-07:00

I spent the previous 36 hours on the road. Monday morning I left at 4am to make the 10:45 Wood's Hole Ferry to Martha's Vineyard. I had to pick up a colleague down in Massachusetts on the way and we missed the early ferry by about 2 minutes. We went over and back and I made it to a friend's house in Salem, Massachusetts Monday night before I passed out in my pork loin!

Before I left, I went before the board of overseers of the Village of Bayside and got permission to bury my own power line. I had to get their permission because my contractor will have to dig through a Village owned path that borders Sunnyside's Northernmost property line. This will get the largest power line out of the view. Small steps...small steps....I did mention the village, though I do not think it registered with them, that three of the four houses whose electricity comes from that pole, have lines coming into their cottages that are not to code.

The weather has been so nice here that I am itching to start work on the exterior of the house. I started the other day by scraping and sanding down the front doors. I originally thought that the doors were grain painted, but I was wrong. There is a lot of scraping and sanding to do and so I'd better get started. I also want to replace the porch posts. Right now, the posts are laminated and turned "Victorian" posts and the laminated boards are starting to separate because they were never painted. We always planned on replacing the posts and going back to the original intent, but every time I see one of the posts cracking and separating, I just want to go right out and do it that very minute.

The foam guys are coming this week to estimate for insulating.

Another beautiful week in paradise! It is supposed to get up in the 60s this week!

2010-03-12T03:10:00.001-08:00

All the electric is in the house, though my electricians did find that the electrical panel was so corroded that we were only getting half the juice into the house that we were supposed to get. So, the panel has to be replaced. They left us with two working outlets. The electricians will return once we get approval from the Village to dig a trench and bury the power line.
My man Josh finished up his work...all the windows are trimmed out and though I haven't gone to look, he was working on the repairs to the exterior around the the sliding glass door. We found a pile of primed trim boards in the garage as well as primed tongue and groove boards for the exterior repairs.
I'm going over there this morning to clean again and reassess what needs to be done next. Still cannot get any foam insulation people to get back to me. I hear that work is dead in the region, and am wondering why no one returns my calls when I say that I have a 1300 square foot house in need of insulation!

I made plans to go down to Martha's Vineyard on Monday, knowing in the back of my head that something was going on that day....of course it just hit me that the 15th is the day that the NVC has it's monthly meeting. That's where I need to be to ask permission to dig to bury my power line. Oh GREGGGGGGG......Hopefully, Greg can go in my stead. I am going to the Vineyard for the day to see an Andrew Weyth Watercolor that was bequeathed to a local museum here.

2010-03-09T11:33:00.000-08:00

A find from Sunnyside

When I was cleaning out the new house, one of my favorite finds was a watercolor signed Rockport on the back. I cannot find the artist listed anywhere, but the watercolor appears to be done in a 1930s style. The colors are still good and the image is strong. I ended up having it framed in a bronze powdered frame that I had stored in the closet. The frame and the watercolor are of the same period. I think they look swell together! The watercolor came to live at our house at the top of the stairs.

2010-03-09T11:19:00.000-08:00

Sunnyside from the Side

I took this photo this morning while cleaning up the property. I didn't realize that so much debris had been strewn about by the wind! The upper windows and the lower center window need to be trimmed out. Just imagine this house a soft yellow color with bright white trim, where you now see the red (shutters included). It will really be charming. The second floor deck will go over the first floor addition and will be quite commodious.

Ok, well that was fast. The second floor windows have been trimmed out and await a coat of paint. We kept the old trim boards and just put them back around the new windows...I want to try and use as much original material we can. Oh, and yeah, I know about the porch support that is leaning a bit. We realized there was a small river that runs underground here before we bid on the house. Note the rock wall in the lower right of the photo.

Here is where the river runs through it, you can see where water has pushed the rock wall down on the right. It's actually fine since this is about where I want to put in three steps or so down to the garage. I also want to take up the walkway and handrail up to the house, and move the stairs up to the porch over to the right, more towards the new door.
The flat grass area would make a perfect terrace with a picnic table or a dining table and chairs.

This is the view from "the terrace" area where a picnic table and grill might go.

2010-03-08T15:55:00.000-08:00

The Stuff I Kept.

I keep thinking in the back of my mind that we got rid of all the stuff inside Sunnyside. A visit yesterday to Little Bohemia to check on things put that thought right out of my head. Normally spotless and neat as a pin, Little Bohemia has become a storage shed for the winter. There is stuff everywhere. I keep forgetting about the pots and pans, the dishes, the boxes of tchotskis, and all the furniture. True, we got rid of the beds (one came to our house), but there is so much!! I think I can almost refurnish the whole place with what we have in our new storage barn.

Yowza, look at all this stuff!

The room of chairs

There are projects too...I want to make this great folk frame into a mirror. Its in really nice shape. I think I found it in a pile of frames and old prints in one corner of the cottage.

This lamp is very cool. I bid on one at auction a few years ago that had its original slag glass petal form shade. It is my goal to find the right shade for it.

Not too much exciting stuff happening at the cottage except for the ongoing electrical work. Greg and I spent a beautiful Sunday over there cleaning off the roof debris. My man Josh is coming back this week to start framing out the windows upstairs and cleaning up the damage from the bay window removal. (some of the exterior boards on the house got ripped off). It has been so glorious here in Maine that Greg and my thoughts turn to building the exterior deck.