Christmas time is here

Well its Christmas eve eve - time flies when your having fun! Or renovating an old house. We've had an eventful fall Nate was able to install new low-e anderson windows in the upstairs before it got too cold.















We started renovating the inside of that room as well. I came home from work one day and all of the dry wall was in the driveway. It was painted a terrible dark blue, and there was an equally terrible purple shag carpet in there. But that was all removed down to the studs...Nate was able
install new additional outlets around the room (he even passed the electrical inspection -what a stud!). And then we hung new drywall. Yes, even me. Nate showed me how to cut and hang drywall sheets. I even got pretty good at "dimpling" the drywall screws, if I do say so myself!














I was also able to finally take care of something that had been bothering me since we moved in - the kitchen stove. Its an older Jenn Air convection/electric range, which is supposedly a nice unit - but it only had two burners on one side, and this stupid and useless grill feature on the other. You cannot heat that much cast iron with electricity. Its just not possible, unless you have all day. So all this time I was cooking with two burners, and it sucked. But, I found that the stove allows you to remove and replace the burner units and Jenn Air hasn't changed to connections in quite some time so I was able to find a replacement two burner unit for the stove and finally get rid of the disgusting grill!














Before: Useless grill! Only two burners! After: Behold the glory of four burners!

In between all of this we found time to go to see the Pats at Buffalo with our friends Sarah and Brandon. Turns out Buffalo's not that far away! Unfortunately, it was not friendly territory for us Pats Fans and on top of that it was a blow out at 56-10! But that's okay we had a lot of fun anyway and I'm sure we'll back again next year!














I would be remiss if I didn't mention the snow...we got a good bit of snow - maybe 10-12 inches or so followed by a few more inches. It's an early snow which is good maybe we'll get to x-country ski this year. At least Max is having fun in it!

Oh Canada!

Well, Fall has approached and is rapidly turning into winter. We went from 80 degrees in the middle of October to more seasonable weather now that its November. At least my plants will stop being confused and actually try to go dormant!

Nate and I have been keeping busy. At the end of September , Nate and I celebrated our one year anniversary. We took a trip around western NY and also into Ontario to Toronto. We started our trip camping in Letchworth State Park. It was the first time that our dog, Max had been camping. As you can see, he really enjoyed himself. He managed to not burn himself in the campfire and he carried his own pack on the trails! Good Dog!
We also went to Rochester (which is a very cool city) where we visited the Seneca Zoo and then we traversed the border into the Great White North. We made a pit stop at Niagara Falls before headed to Toronto. We camped at this great park - Bronte Provincial Park outside of Toronto - it was empty and so clean and they had an awesome system of trails and an off-leash area for dogs. We ran into a very nice native who let her dog play with (or be herded by) Max. Everyone had lots of fun. We were visited during the night by the Canadian striped bear. It tried to get into our cooler and it ate Max's dog food which we foolishly left out.
If we are ever back there, we will be sure to go camping there again.
Toronto was nice - clean for such a large city. We ate lunch on top of the CN tower which has a rotating restaurant. THe food was great and the view was spectacular. It took a little getting used to - Sit and spin, indeed. We also took in the Hockey Hall of Fame and got our hands on the vaunted Stanley Cup! And I even got to try what it feels like to be a goalie - its harder than I make it look, I assure you!
Over all it was a very good vacation, for Nate and me and even for Max. Of course, we couldn't be on vacation for ever - the cats wouldn't let us! So we are back to NY. We got our new XV95 Trane furnace installed (woo hoo!) so we even have heat now. Well, well write more about the house later - for now, I'm going to reminisce about vacaion :)

Summer Trips

Fun pictures today. There is a park not far from us which is on the path of Sullivans march, which was a significant revolutionary event in western NY. Every year, they have a revolutionary war re-enactment, with campsites, vendors and of course, a battle! We only got a few pictures as our battery died, but it was pretty neat.


At least as important to note is that Football season has started! It's a long slow drag through summer with only mid-season baseball on to watch, but now thankfully the Pats are back on TV, and looking pretty good. We are trying to turn our Demon Dog into a pats fan, which appeared to work pretty well, judging by the beating the cheating pats put down on the Chargers.


We also had to return to Illinois for family business, but we did get to see the whole family, which doesn't happen very often. We're awfully spread out across the country, so it's rare that everybody is in the same place. The other big adventure was that Julie got to ride in a corn picker. My mother's family contains a bunch of farmers and a relative hooked her up. Which is a pretty big experience for a city girls who's never been to the midwest!



Enjoy!

Cheap Countertop

You may remember from a previous entry we installed two base cabinets in our laundry room, with the plan of putting a counter top there for folding clothes or whatever else it is you do in there. The expense of buying a solid surface counter top was fairly prohibitive (roughly double the cost of the remodel), so I had decided to make a counter top. I had planned on making a laminate top, when I remembered I had some granite tile that I had bought on clearance somewhere (1$ a tile or so). So I decided to make myself a "granite" countertop using that. I winged it a bit as I didn't know what I was doing. So here's what I did.

First I made my base by screwing 3/8 inch hardiboard to 3/4 inch playwood
I wasn't sure how to attach this, but the hardiboard had a grid on it that looked like it wanted me to put screws there, so I did. I had planned on attaching like I would underlayment, and the grid layout was about the same, so this seemed to work out well. I then attached my tile using thinset, I didn't leave any spaces between the tile, so I didn't need to grout anything. I talked Julie into helping me lug the heavy thing up stairs to the laundry room and attached it to the cabinets. I trimmed out the counter top with 1x2" oak trim that I stained to match the cabinets.
This came out looking pretty nice, but the walls have some wiggle in them, so the edges weren't really tight with the walls. They were close, but there was up to about a 1/8" gap in the worst spot. Not a deal breaker, but large enough to lose things in and didn't look all that nice. I had thought I was going to make a backsplash out of 6" granite tile (just the normal tile cut in half), but 6" looked pretty gigantic, so I decided not to do that afterall. Instead, I got another piece of oak trim and stained and trimmed. I just put a chamger on the edge of the trim to match the edging, made a little corner block and nailed to the wall.
I made little mitered returns at the edges of trim to hide the endgrain, caulked the edges with clear silicone, patted myself on the back and declared it Miller Time (well, Ithaca Beer Company Time, if I'm being honest!).

Garden's Alive!

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The Waverly Community Garden

Well, the end of August is rapidly approaching and with it the end of summer. I can't help but think that I could have spent a little more time in the sun or on the water. What could I have possibly been doing rather than spending time sunbathing ? Well, gardening, of course! We have a vegetable garden behind our garage and we have also been working in the Waverly community garden. Our garden - squash is creeping into the yard...

Everything is in full swing now - we have been inundated with zucchini, some are as big as my thigh! Of course its the season where everybody who leaves their car unlocked gets a free squash, but even still I have been making lots of zucchini bread. We also have been getting a fair amount of acorn squash, patty pan squash and decorative gourds, as you can see below. You wouldn't believe how many different meals you can make under the general category of "stuffed squash." I just picked another batch of delicious pole beans from our garden - I love eating them right off the plant. Max likes to eat them too, although he just eats the beans out of the pod. Beans, beans the musical fruit..

We have lots of beautiful, plump tomatoes - trouble is, they are mostly still green! Hopefully they will ripen soon, or I'll be making green salsa this fall.
Our pumpkins are coming along very well, and I'm hoping to have another banner year of pumpkin carving and pie making (and eating). Nate and I have learned a lot this summer about gardening in this area. Its certainly different than NC and we've had to get used to things growing a lot more slowly up here. But we haven't had to water nearly as much - so that's a good thing. Nate just planted some fall carrots at the community garden and hopes to plant some garlic as well.

Well, I've got to go and find some more unlocked cars...want any squash?

The Snapping Sounds are Typical

Today is a most happy day. Barring some minor adjustments for settling, the house jacking has ceased and been declared a success!
This picture (look carefully for the bubble) is on the new beam running crosswise on the house. The picture below shows the new beam running the length of the house and shows the best picture of the post forest in the basement.

The long beam on the right runs down the center of the front of the house and has stiffened a too long span behind where I'm standing. It also lightened the load on the monster short beam you can see on the left by the old chimney remains. Straight ahead in front of the 1960's furnace is the crosswise beam that I had the level on in the picture above. The total length of the long beam is >20ft and the highest spot is about 1/2" above the lowest spot. There are still some occasional waves in various places, but the major sag has been taken out and everything is nice and solid now. You can stomp around in the dining room all you want and nothing will happen. The brunt of the work was done by this beast below. It's 5 2x12's nailed into a beam underneath a severly weakened (they just had to have heat register there, huh) that wasn't well supported and had settled nicely to the tune of 2.5"+. It was all we could do with a pair of 25 ton jacks to get it where it is and this thing's holding a lot of the weight.
We used steel posts for everything, mostly sitting on newly poured reinforced concrete pads. The posts above are sitting on an old poured slab that we discovered was significantly thicker and tougher than anticipated when a section of it was ripped up for one footing. It's a minimum of 4" and as thick as 6" in places sitting on top of nasty NY glacial till.
The damage to the house while jacking was relatively small. A lot of the trim in the living room and dining room (directly above the lowest point) had all been carefully applied to look reasonable square with the massive sink in the floor. So there's some fairly crazy-town trim downstairs, a significant amount of it had to get yanked at various times during the jacking as the walls started to move and it started racking against each other. We got 3 or 4 small cracks above doorways upstairs and none of the upstairs doors operate normally any more!


You can see an example crack on the left and one of the crazy doors on the right. It would appear I'm going to be getting lots of practice in re-hanging doors in my near future. I'll take that over the refrigerator sinkhole!


Lastly, Some already shady drain plumbing that was badly sloped and held together w/ duct tape had finally broken basically wide open and had become a mild flood of, uh, tainted water in the basement. So I broke out my mad plumbing skills and replaced the horizontal branch line that feeds all three of our bathrooms. And, it only took me two trys. Luckily 3" PVC is only 7$ for 5 feet, so it only cost me

15$ and a few extra swears. I'm still not quite sure how I loused that up. I figure in the adhesives degree of difficulty scale, there's double sticky tape, solvent welding, then hot glue guns. Which means, skill level wise, I'm significantly below those needed for scrapbooking. Win some, lose some I suppose!

Hope you are enjoying the last bit of summer and your gardens are producing mountains of head sized acorn squash.

Nature is touching me!

Well, we've had a busy couple of weeks. We went to CA and Nate has been in NC for work this week. He's driving back here from PHL right now. I am trying to stay awake until he gets home...We are so close to finishing the bathroom! We finished staining the cabinets for the laundry room and brought them upstairs. Check out the brushed nickel and white hardware - it matches the other new hardware we put in the bathroom - towel holders, hooks, etc. Now we are looking for a countertop and a matching sink for the bathroom. Also, Nate installed a great new light fixture in the laundry room - check out the before and after photos... Before..

&
After!In other lighting news, the fan/light fixture in the bathroom was terrible. The hole was visible around the metal vent-not pretty. But what to do? There's not too many options, 1) buy a whole new fan fixture in a larger size. But there was nothing wrong with this one except the installation that is. 2) Buy a medallion to place around the fixture against the ceiling to hide the hole. But these are white plastic....So we went with the medallion with the plan to paint it. A trip to the spray paint aisle at Lowes brought us some "hammered look" brushed silver paint. Nate was unsure about this one, but I went with it. It actually turned out great if I do say so myself!


In other weird news from the past couple of weeks. BIRDS. We had a baby robin trapped in the rafters in the garage so Nate and I (mostly Nate) corralled the poor bird with our pond scooper net and a plastic rake and managed to get it outside. It was so tired, we could literally just pick him up! This is him sitting on my finger ....

The very next day, another baby bird followed Nate home from a morning trip to get coffee and the paper. The bird may have been pushed out of the nest , or possibly just lazy, but he wanted food...he opened his mouth and we fed him bits of mashed up biscuit. Eventually, he got full or bored and managed to fly away! Strange, two bird incidents two days in a row! Isn't that a sign of the coming apocalypse? Oh wait, no...that's locusts. Okay we're still safe.

Fun with Landscape Ties

Fully operational bathroom get's tested.
Max is such a faithful companion!

But seriously, we dragged home as many landscape ties as we could strap to the top of the Audi and made ourselves some creations in the backyard. We've been working on "boundary" training the puppy and so we built a little area for him to do his business. The hope is to keep him restricted to this area and save our grass (and occasionally our shoes) and to make him understand where it's acceptable for him to go the bathroom!
I just filled it with free mulch from the town pit. Our town has a yard waste pit where you can dump prunings, grass clippings, blowdowns, etc, etc and periodically they run that pile through the chipper and leave the mulch piles for people to take if they want. The dog bathroom seemed a perfect use for free mulch, so we filled it up.
Max is a fence runner. He runs up and down the fence trying to figure out how to get to the dogs on the other side, and we wanted to break up his run a bit, so we decided to put our native garden in the middle of his run area so that he would at least wouldn't have a straight run at the fence. I had some fun mitering landscape ties and built up a low area for our native garden. We have wanted to do this for a while, and we'll populate it with native phlox, blue bells, and whatever else we dig up that we like.
We also cleaned up and made a (rock) border around our azalea garden. Next spring, we'll need to remove an azalea or two from here as they're really over crowded, but we'll worry about that next year!

Lastly, with the bathroom and laundry room floor COMPLETELY FINISHED. We started working on the cabinets we want in the laundry room. We got some unfinished cabinets and have got one coat of stain on them (golden pecan), and next weekend we should finished up staining, and move them up into the laundry room. Then we've got to make a countertop of some sort for them!

First coat of stain:


Guess who's stupider:


Hope everyone is enjoying their summer as much as we are!

Nate

Laundry Room Floor

We have a Floor!

We finally got the floor on the laundry room installed. It looks pretty fantastic actually. We used Armstront ArtEffects CV Tile, which we basically stumbled on. It's 1/8" gauge resiliant tile made up vinyl. It's similar in composition to the Armstrong Exelon tile that you see at home stores eveywhere, except that the Arteffects tile is very attractive. However, the ArtEffects has the same good characteristics of the Exelon tile, indestructable and easy care. We (of course) got fancy and insisted on doing a three color setup, with a border around the edge of the room and alternating diamonds throughout the room which made it a heck of a lot of work to put down, but it came out looking (IMHO) really quite fantastic!
Below is a close up of what we did and where I spent most of an afternoon getting the annoying pieces cut just right. The downside of the vinyl tile (as opposed to ceramic tile), is that the cuts have to be really precise, there's no fudging a 1/32" in the grout line anywhere. The upside is the installation is really simple:
1) Spread the glue
2) Wait an hour for the glue to set up
3) Place Tile
4) Roll tile with 100lb tile roller
5) Drink a beer
Ugh, those two red tiles hurt!
I also never showed a picture of my lovely laundry box that I installed. It was a minor improvement over the garden house spigots and pvc sticking out the wall that we used to have. Picky, picky I realize. Now we just need to finish the floor in the bathroom, and possible reinstall the toilet, but we fear that may only encourage guests. Though, in all honesty, the lack of a toilet has not yet deterred anyone.
The folks were here recently and fort some reason, my dad vandalized one of our windows!
This is the picture window in the second story that is the first set of windows that are going to be replaced. They were incredibly leaky last window and in fact were missing a sash in one window (an aluminum storm window was keeping out the zero degree cold. Kind of). Figured I'd also put a picture of the nails that hold the house together. Kind of neat!