Its time for beets!

Something Nate and I discussed this past year is eating more local food. We have been getting our meat (organic, free-range) delivered to our door from Englebert Farms in Nichols, NY. They are great, and great quality meats AND they deliver to Waverly! So when I saw that we could get locally grown, organic "winter" veggies delivered (to my work, now that I'm in Ithaca), I couldn't resist. So what kind of vegetables do you get in Upstate NY in the winter? Well, beets, lots of beets. And carrots, potatoes, cabbage, winter squash...lots of good stuff! And although Nate is not the biggest fan of beets, he's really making a good effort. Check out our first delivery


Its a bounty of delicousness. Especially the carrots - they may be the best carrots we've ever had! I made a great white bean chicken chili out of the navy beans. Mmmm...beans.

Thankful for Family

We had a full house here for the holiday and I took the opportunity to put them to work! With plenty of willing (or so they claimed) help, we were able to replace all of the headers, remove all of the temporary sports and get the stairs ready. The two pictures below show the porch in it's mostly final appearance (sans railing of course).

There was also several stair making classes! I decided to add a set of stairs on the side of the deck. With only the front stairs, people tended to drive into the driveway and then either walk around to the back door, or cut across the lawn to the front stairs. So I added a set of stairs to the side of the porch that would be pointing right at someone in the driveway! I added a little bit of flare to the outside stringers to make the stairs open up a little bit. Fortunately, my Dad was around to show me how to mark and cut custom stringers (with a minimum of wasted boards). Risers will be added later and I'd like to put deck lights in the risers so you can see the stairs when you pull in. Pops also cut the stringers for the front stairs and we got those attached, and I put the treads on a day later.



Also good shots of the posts and the new headers. All the headers are doubled 2x10's (4x10s?), so we should be able to safely support several elephants dancing on the roof (well maybe not dancing, 400 lb/foot * ~60 feet = 12 tons. The average adult african elephant weighs 5 tons, meaning that they would have to be dancing fairly gingerly and in the right place. Now the more local large mammal, the Holstein cow, THOSE could dance!). I used the 2x10's to be able to comfortable increase the span between posts, to reduce a couple of posts on the longer spans, but also because I wanted more reveal on the header beams. Looking around at other houses, good looking porches always seem to have a much deeper header, with lots of reveal.

This is the front pitch on the porch over the front stairs, there has ben a leak in the roof which I'll need to fix come spring, but in the meatime we had to tear everything out to the mini rafters. It actually looks rather nice open like this, I'm tempted to leave it.

Thanks again to all the family who helped out. It was cold, windy, and frozen, wet 4x10's weigh a hell of a lot. Despite all claims to the opposite, it was a lot of work and not really a fun way to spend a couple of days. But it wasn't something I could do alone, and I certainly appreciate all of the help.

Straight from the rainforest

In this episode, we'll be moving quickly through several different projects, so try to keep your hat on. First, the porch is floored! I got tigerwood (Astronium spp, it's related to mahogany) from Advantage Lumber, which after my fiasco getting cedar from True North/Duluth Timber can heartily recommend. I paid on a Friday, and the wood showed up at my door on Wednesday of the next week. It's beautiful milled as well. I have had NO (out of 80 8' boards!) boards that weren't usable. None came up short or narrow on the planar, all end cuts were already sealed, it's beautiful stuff.
Before you jump all over me about the "ripped from the rainforest", I must say this stuff is from managed forests, and the stuff has a 25+ year lifetime. So I won't be dumping paint on it every other year, which I use to try and salve my conscious about shipping wood from out of the country. It's really nice stuff, easy to work with, but very hard, it's about 2000 on the Janka scale (for reference, maple is about 1400, oak is about 1200). It's a beautiful reddish-brown with dark-brown streaks in it. I had planned on tongue and grooving the decking boards, but ended up not. The edge radiusing on the boards was very small, and so I just ended up butting the boards up against each other. The only difficult part was mitering the corner where the porch wraps around the side of the house.
I butted the miter edges about as close as I dared, I slipped a finish nail in between the miters to give a little less than 1/16". I think it came out pretty nice, there's stil dust all over the place in this picture, but you get the idea. I used colored stainless steel trim tite screws (http://www.trimscrew.com/TRIM-SCREW.htm), which made really small holes. With the hardwood decking, I had to pre-drill all the holes, so it took a little longer than you might hope to do. Especially since the 20 degree weather drains my cordless drill in about an hour. In this last picture, you get a pretty good feel for how the floor looks, with the trim screws and everything edge butted.
In even better news, the first new header is up!! If you don't understand how sexy this picture is, you're just not getting something!
The close beam is the temporary support my Dad and I installed before tearing down the porch. The beam on the right is the new header, it's made of doubled 2x10's, You can see a temporary 4x4 post holding it up. The 2x10's is massive over kill, previously, this "header" was composed of an open box made of 1x6's. I'll box this header with trim to neaten it up once the posts are all in, but this will give a good solid backbone for the porch. The installed header is the long front of the porch, but I've got a lot of pieces left to go.
Lastly, we have wood stove!
It's a Jotul F3-CB, which is one of their smallish stoves, which is what we wanted. The old fireplace was a wood-burning fireplace, retrofitted for gas and drafty as anything. I had fit a piece of blue foamboard to cover the opening, but Julie threatened that she wouldn't go through another winter with the 4'x4' piece of blue foam board in the living room. Like most things in this house, it ended up being a bigger job than expected. The built-in is installed in a chase that was built onto the side of the house, with the chimney (and the former furnace chimney) running up the chase. The built-in didn't come out without a fight, and the thing ended up having to be sawz-alled up and torn out in shards of metal. At that point was when we realized that there has been water pouring down the chase for the past couple of years. The chimney chase was built against the original siding of the house and the joint between the roof and the new chase was never sealed properly. Hopefully, that's taken care of now, but the floor under the fireplace was completely rotten (you could tear it apart with your hands), and the insulation was nice and moldy. After we tore out the old fireplace, we pretended the chase was a ceiling. A frame was boxed in inside the chase, a ceiling support box installed and a class A chimney stacked on top of the support box. I built the hearth out of 2" (4- 1/2" pieces) of concrete backer board with granite and ceramic tile on top (still have some grouting to do). Julie picked out everything, of course. We got the F3 used off of Craigslist, it's about 6 years old and in great shape and all set up for rear vent. I used Simpson double-wall vent to connect to the chimney (so I could get close to that highly combustible mantle!).
We tore out all the old insulation, replaced with new (up to about 7 feet), and boxed everything in (including the floor) with more 1/2" backer board. I still have to frame in the "ceiling", we're waiting for confirmation that the leaking has stopped before we'll do that. I found nice rock veneer things at the lowes, that I'd like to mortar to the walls back there. It shoud look nice I think.

Fall is for Everything

Despite our recent diversions from the topic at hand, we haven't forgotten our main topic and so, back to business. We've been making good progress on the guest bedroom, which we now call either the serious room or the presumptious room. Compared to the room across the hall, it seems like it takes itself quite seriously, we ended up with dark stained wood and the textured wallpaper and it looks quite formal. The paneling came out really nice, the next three pictures show the steps in constructing it. The first picture shows the 1/4" plywood that I put up against the studs and the bottom railing (3/4" plywood) that was attached over the 1/4" plywood.
You can also see the outles that will be mounted horizontally in the baseboards. The light colored plywood is just 3/4 plywood filler strips that the baseboard will hide. Next I attached the stiles and top rail, spacing out the stiles as needed. The top and bottom of the styles had small rabbets that fit into corresponding rabbets in the top and bottom rail. That should help to hold the thing together and it made things much easier to install.
The top rail also had a rabbet on the top due to the thickness difference between the 1/2" drywall and 1/4" plywood. I was unable to get full (4'x8') sheets of 1/2 plywood anywhere around here, which struck me as very odd, but the best you can do is 1/2 sheets. Half sheets of plywood would have left a lot of joints that would need to be hidden by stiles and just wasn't worth it. The stiles are 20" high, so using the golden ration as a guide, my target width was 12", and then I adusted up or down an inch to even things out. You can see one small panel in the corner where I couldn'd get things adjusted all the way. If I do this again, I'll make reduce the width slightly.
In this last picture, you can see the moulding that I put inside of each frame. I used 3/4" decorative shelf edge and mitered that into each panel and nailed things in place. I then made beaded chair rail from solid 2" strips of oak attached that to hide the top rail. Then another piece of decorative shelf edge was attached under the chair rail, it's difficult to make out both of those pieces.
Lastly, we discovered an architecural salvage place in Ithaca that has very reasonable prices on salvaged trim. So we bought new door trim and frieze boards, here's one quick shot of the molding we bought, we'll put more up once the frieze's are up and everythings stained.
I think everybody knows, but if not we officially have another dog. He's a blind Irish border collie. Sadly, he was imported from Ireland by some folks in NY who own sheep and compete in sheep herding trials. He had been here about a year when they realized he was having trouble seeing the sheep. They found he has a genetic degenerative disease which at this point has left him completely blind. He's a lousy sheep herding dog, but a very nice (if somewhat protective) pet. He's also very lazy.

Don't forget to Vote

Whether your political tendencies lean towards an elitist, tax-and-spend democrat or a codgery I-hate-science republican or perhaps some wish-i-was-relevant third party candidate, the important thing is to get out and pick your method of suicide. Remember, there's only voter fraud, the electoral college and an entrenched two party system in between you and having a meaningful impact on the governance of our fine country!

Happy Election Day everybody!

(no seriously, get out and vote and remember all politics are local, which is where your vote counts anyways).

Charts

Found a source for the historical personal savings rate from 1959 to current and it's pretty fascinating. CNN (etc) showed a very short term result from the past decade or so and it made me curious what that meant in a longer context. So you can figure it out yourself, here's the result in an ugly excel chart.
The source of the data is the U.S. Department of Commerce: Bureau of Economic Analysis for anyone interested in it. The national data as shown above is from here http://www.bea.gov/national/nipaweb/Nipa-Frb.asp?Freq=Qtr, I haven't quite yet figured out how to extract more detailed data, aka regional/income based which is the more interesting question(s). Oh well, enough of a side-track for now.

Anatomy of a Floor

I'm sick of bouncy floors. Most of the second story of our house has bouncy, creaky floors and I'm sick of it. The purple room we remodeled is a little bouncy, and so in working in the guest bedroom, I decided to guarantee the floor would be bouncy. So I knew I needed to sister the existing joists, but access to supporting walls wasn't very good. The center wall of the house where the second floor joists overlap was 4-5 feet past the end of the room, so the only place I could actually get full length joists in was around the window. For the rest of the joists, I took Tommy's advice and cut 3/4" plywood into 7 3/4" strips and glued and nailed two layers of 3/4" plywood to each joist. The total span was about 12' so it worked out well cutting from 4x8 sheets of plywood. Each piece of plywood was glued to the old joist (or plywood) and nailed every 16" to the old joist.
In the above picture, you can see the two joists that I was able to get full length joists sistered in, and the last joist you can see has two layers of plywood laminated to it. The plywood is flexible so you can really get it tight, glue and nail it place and adds a TON of stiffness to the joist. The difference was immeadiately noticeable. The plywood also made it really easy to level the floor. The corner you see in the picture was down about an 1" from the opposite corner, so it was easy to level the plywood before nailing it in place. I notched the plywood where it met the wall, so everything is as level as it's going to get. Next I put in 3 rows of blocking. I cut the blocking tight and pounded it in to place and glued and nailed it in. Lastly I cut strips off of 2x material to level the top of the old joist with the new sistered material. I belt-sanded the whole thing flat and glued and screwed sheets of OSB subfloor onto the joists. The difference is pretty amazing, I'm really pleased with how it came out.

I've been slowly moving the porch forward as well. I worked a couple of evenings this past week to get the footings dug and poured. Same old operation, 42+" hole in rocky till, sonotube and 3-4 80 lb bags of concrete.
This morning, I got 7 tons ( only wanted 6, but apparently, they got a little loose loading this morning) of #2 crushed stone delivered. I spread this under where the porch will be, I'll put brick down around the edge when I'm installing the screening later on. For now, it's a nice dry place to stand while working. In the picture below, you see our driveway, which looks like a driveway. What you can't tell is that I moved about 3 tons of new gravel on to it and spread it around. Ugh.
Next I'll need to get the sill beam of the porch flashed, housewrapped and get the ledger board installed.

Since the deck is done....

We have tackled the porch! Ugh. I had hoped to ignore the porch for another year or so, but several of the posts were rapidly turning into cabbage. Looking in the crystal ball, I knew there were going to be a large number of willing (family has no choice but to pretend to be willing) and (mostly) able bodied folks showing up for Thanksgiving. So what better time to frame and deck a porch then when I've got lots of people around? To that end, I needed to get the roof onto temporary supports and get the footings poured. I was not super looking forward to getting the porch roof onto temporary supports myself, so my I talked my Dad into coming down and helping. It was an unmitigated success!

We managed to get a 24' beam onto A-frame supports supporting the majority of the porch. This took about 8 arms, grunting, and a step-ladder. The crutches supporting the beam are all pinned. Here I am, watching the old man work!

He enjoyed himself despite all the work!
We used single crutches for the remaining parts of the porch. It was a fun day spent jacking up the porch to close to the right height, knocking out the posts and wedging in supports. Below is a nice view after I demo-ed the substructure.
Here's the dump truck that got dropped off to load the material in. I managed to step on a rusty nail while doing this, so I got to spend an evening in the emergency room getting an overdue tetanus booster and pumped full of antibiotics. Go coordination!
All in all, it was great, we went from rotten unsafe porch to fairly safely supported and all of the old material removed in a matter of 4 days. Could have done it without the help, Dad!


We just got back from the Fall Foliage Sheep Dog Trial in Cooperstown NY, which was a blast. We saw border collies that are actually useful. Max could only look on jealously!
We've got some more pictures and movie's that we'll have to post later. It was really neat to see and the weather was fabulous. Sitting out in the fall soon looking at ~peak fall color and watching some sheep dogs work was pretty nice.

In other updates, we added a motion-sensing light and some speakers to the deck a week or two ago. The speakers are great! You can know listen to football while in the hot tub, we just have to get video out there!

Julie Rules

Julie ran the Rochester Half Marathon (and has the 13.1 sticker to prove it) two weekends ago and did awesome. Here she is, flying for the finish line!


I ran two, but look much less stylish. It was hot and gross from hurricane leftovers that day, but we survived anyways.

Fall is in the air

How depressing, the last time we posted we were talking about how spring had finally broken and now fall has already arrived! Nonetheless, fall is here, whether we like it or not. Luckily, I love it! The air is cooling off, which only makes our new hot tub sound like all that much better of an idea! We rebuilt our deck this year and built a hot tub into the deck. Below is a picture of the hot tub right after I hooked it up and got the deck framing done. We had a bit of a fiasco getting the cedar decking delivered, so we had to walk very carefully on the temporary boards I nailed to the framing.

It looks pretty cool at night too!
Here you can see the decking down and working on the railing. I used the Tiger-Claw hidden fasteners to put the decking down, and the surface came out nice and smooth. Unfortunately, it took a long time and a ton of effort to put down. Luckily, the hot tub was fully operational then, so I took full advantage of it. Here's some pictures of the railing.
The posts are 2x4's mounted on end to the rim joists with carriage bolts. I painted the 2x4's to make them stand out a bit and then made the rest of the railing out of cedar. There are three horizontal rails, at the top and and bottom are 3" rails and then a smaller 1 1/2" rail at the very bottom. The ballisters are 1x3" cedar glued and screwed to the rails. You can see on the left of the picture the alternate style of ballisters I used. On the corners and under the privacy screens on the end of the deck I alternated the 1x3" with 1x6 boards laid flat on the rails. All in all, it came out great. I spent pretty much the whole 4th of July weekend doing it, but we're really happy with how it looks. It's pretty much the coolest railing in town. The curved railing over the pond was a challenge.

You can never have enough clamps!

We had company a couple of weekends ago and the whole gang sat in the living room and watched Brady go down for the season. You'll notice nobody (except Max) looks happy in this picture!

Despite having to rebuild the porch this fall (I know), I foolishly started on another bedroom upstairs. I took advantage of Julies Dad being around to get started in there. He helped pull off all the trim, pull up the flooring, and cut the bottom of the wallboard off. I'm going to put up composite paneling (similar to flat paneling), it's basically a way to make pseudo-raised paneling that allows you to use dimensionally stable veneered plywood for most of the parts. Vastly less manufacturing and no worries about wood movement. We'll see. I had to rewire most of the room once I got a look at the wiring, which let me get ready to mount the boxes horizontally, where I can put them in the baseboard, so they won't interfere with the panel placement. You can also see the cool wallpaper I put up in there this week. It's textured and fabulous!
Julie also made a seat cushion and curtains for the window seat in the purple room. They came out amazingly, even if the huge piping on the seat cushion about broke her sewing machine.

Best,
Nate

Its spring again....

Okay - so its been awhile since we've posted anything new. But don't assume that's because nothing's been going on...On the contrary, lots has been going on, so much that I think we didn't stop to reflect on anything that we did. In between everything, I spent two weeks in Japan in April. I'll post some pictures from my trip another time, first - what have we been up to in the last month?
1) Bathroom Renovation. There's a small full bathroom on the first floor. While there was nothing terrible about it, it was dark, with ugly linoleum and the sink vanity took up way too much room.
Before: Ugly wallpaper.

We wanted to lighten it up and replace the broken toilet and the oversized vanity with a pedestal sink. I decided on a blue and white theme and used blue and white mosaic tile on the floor, and white subway tile about 1/2 way up the wall. Chrome fixtures finish everything out. First of all, let me say that Nate warned me about mosaic tile. Never having laid tile before, this was a challenge. I made a good faith effort at using the manual tile cutter and after a single tile, drove to Lowe's to buy a tile saw. Much easier! We finished the floor tile, and then it was on to the walls...














We chose a white subway tile with a cobalt blue accent tile placed under the fancy chair rail tile. It really went well with the blue tile in the floor, if I do say so myself! Check out the new pedestal sink and shiny chrome fixtures too.

What's left? Caulk around the tile, hang new ceiling light/fan, and make and install a medicine cabinet/mirror. Oh yeah, and finish the trim. That's it - I think.

2) Assorted gardens. Its spring again, and of course that means working outdoors. I have planted peas and lettuce(s), and NY spring onions so far outside, but inside is where most of the action is. This March, I planted my seeds from Johnny's. I started Washington Cherry Tomatoes, Polbig, Big Beef and Brandywine tomatoes, green bell and pimiento peppers, eggplants, Thyme (why I don't know - who needs that much Thyme?), Celosia (or fuzzy brain plant, as I call it), leeks, and silver queen corn. Expecting a dismal germination rate, I planted 3 times more seeds than I actually needed or wanted. Well, as luck would have it - I successfully got pretty much a 100% germination rate - thanks to the awesome plant rack that Nate built for me (see below). So the question - what to do with all those tomatoes? I'll have to find room!

3) Compost. So last year we started a compost pile. Literally, a pile - unattended and lazily resting and decomposing against the back fence. Surprisingly, when we went to check on our compost this spring - we actually had nicely composted stuff! But, not wanting to continue letting it lean up against the fence, Nate and I (mostly Nate) built a brand new two bin composting system using the rails from our old deck (our new deck is in the process of being built - more on that later). So now, our compost is away from the fence and we have a place for good compost/dirt and another place for stuff that is in the process of composting!

So, the gardens are getting ready, stuff is composting and spring is here!

The Making of a Frieze Board

I got carried away on trim in the purple room as usual, and part of that was making frieze boards for above the doors. I started with a 5" recycled pine board (recycled from the external trim of the windows). Strangely enough, the Lowes didn't have MDF, which had been my planned base, but I improvised.
Next, I ripped some colonial base down to 3", returned it on both ends for the top cap (I didn't want to use crown moulding at the top to make a dust collector). Then I used a piece of be moulding on the top against the colonial cap to make it look like nice.

I used a piece of simple beaded mullion along the bottom the base, to provide a highlight there. Lastly, I put a piece of dentil trim on top of the mullion to spice it up a bit.

There wasn't enough room to get a full board over either door in the room, so the were both one-sided returns. Basically, I warpped the trim around one end (the right above), and flush cut the other to snug up against the wall. The fluted door trim was recycled from the room, it was in rough shape, but was able to plane and sand it down, repaint it and it came out great (IMHO). We were actually able to save a lot of the old trim in this room, so we bought relatively little new trim. We did a paneled kind of thing in this room, with vertical styles and a plate rail.

The baseboards got the same treatment as the fluted door trim, these were the baseboards that were in the room originally, just planed, primed and painted. You probably can't tell in the picture, but we used a semi-gloss for the walls and flat for the trim, which actually came out nice, despite being what you're supposed to do. The plate rail is about 3 1/2" wide, and there's a piece of cove underneath to smooth the transition to the top rail of the paneling. That cove was formerly the crown moulding in this room. Lastly, about 1/3 of the vertical styles are recycled 3" colonial base from the guest bathroom. I ripped off the top and re-used them here.

I'm really please how the trim worked out in here, things really tied together well. The vertical styles are pretty much lined up with the studs, so some of the outlets and switches ended up overlaping. So I ended up putting in box extendors (which are outrageously expensive considering it's a useless little piece of blue plastic), on, and building out the trim around it. Here's one around the outlet, worked out nice.

Oh, and in my bit of bragging, here's an end table I made! It's sycamore and finished with a couple coats of Danish oil (or as it's called around here, fancy pants oil).
Lastly, here's a cool secretary we found at an antique store near here. Julies grandmother appears to have the highboy version of the exact same piece of furniture which is pretty neat. The makers mark is missing from ours, so we'll never know for sure, but it's a dead ringer for some pictures of secretary's made by a place called Maddox Furniture. They were located in western NY (Jamestown), so that gits as well, it's nothing special of course, but neat nonetheless.
So long!