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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We have Foam!

I think this completes phase eight

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!

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.

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.

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!