New Home, Old Home

It seems like a distant memory, so much has happened since we moved to CT from Waverly. So much has happened in the time between then and now, that I don't know where to begin. We rented in Noank, moved in temporarily with my parents, rented in Groton Long Point...Looked and looked for a new home...Fionna grew, Max and Sweep got older and greyer, I got older and greyer...Sold a car, bought a new car, quit an old job, got new jobs. My dad was sick, but lived to tell about it. A hurricane brought lots of destruction to our second home in Keene, NY - we got away lucky, only having to completely rip out and redo the basement. Ran a my first marathon. I never posted to the blog because I'm not so sure I want to have a clear memory of the last 2 years. I want to remember to good times, and while I want to remember the not so good times too, I want the edges to be blunter and a little blurry.

So, we didn't sell Waverly...and ended up renting it to a long-term tenant. Its a tough experience to let someone live in your house that doesn't care about it the way you do. As much as its a business decision, it felt deeply personal at times and as Nate can tell you, was an emotional land mine. The house is back on the market now and we are looking forward to not having to look backwards at where we used to live. I'll keep the good memories of our time there in my heart, but we are moving on. We have moved on.

Finished?

Wow, today is the official start of fall and it is also the first official day that our beloved house is on the market. What happened between that photo of delicious strawberries in early jun and now? Lots! Nate is moving on to a new job in Groton, CT and Fionna and I will be following along shortly. We spent the summer finishing things up around the house after taking a break of sorts (if you call taking care of Fionna a break). Nate finished the windows in the dining room and I finally made curtains!

Nate also painted and put new engineered floor in what used to be the sport-themed gues bedroom office. Its still a guest bedroom and office, but its a little less sport themed and a little less blue.

The master bath was mostly finished, but we put the finishing touches on and Nate built an awesome built-in storage unit for our towels and sheets. This room is awesome, it is a superb combination of modern conveniences and victorian charm. I will miss it. It sucks, because this was one of the last rooms we did, and I feel like we didn't get a lot of time to enjoy the two person shower and heated travertine floors. Oh well, in the next house, I am insisting on a similar level of deluxe master bath.

We painted the front entryway from dark red, to a lighter more neutral light beige, and de-cluttered and did all those stupid things you have to do to make your house sale-able.

Looking back over the last almost 4 years, we've done a lot to this house and it in turn gave us a great place to live. I can say at least for myself, that as many changes as we made to the house, living here changed me too. We learned so much and made so many great memories here. This house has been around for 130 years, some people were born here, many people lived here, some people died here. My only hope is that who ever lives here next is good to the house and makes it a home. It was our first home and we lived here.

...Now I just have to figure out what to do with the headstones in the basement....

The end? Or just the beginning of the next chapter....

Fruit

We are in full strawberry season here. Here's our current daily haul from the patch. It's more than we can eat, which means crisps and freezing galore for the next couple of weeks! Eating these as you pick them straight from the patch makes you a believer in B. Kingsolver's arguments. It's worth waiting for these to be in season locally, the difference between these and the red tasteless things from South America you get in February is just huge. The early's are producing now, the ever-blooming are still flowering (I think, they're pretty mixed together these days). We probably have another two weeks of the early's left, so it's lots of strawberries on cereal!
Our patch has continued to expand itself this year. It has completely taken over the front garden and has made it all the way around the apple and has even made it into the side garden by the neighbors driveway. I guess the strawberries and hops will fight it out. All of that jungle low greenery around the privet and hosta is all strawberry plants. At some point we'll have to draw the line at their expansion and probably this year we have to do the "kill the mothers" thing. Strawberries supposedly have a three year cycle, and this is year two, so we're supposed to dig the older plants (mothers) and leave the new offspring (daughters). Speaking of the apple tree, I have apples!
I've thinned the apples out so that there's no more than two apples per cluster and trying to keep on top of the aphids. The espalier tree's haven't started producing yet, but I'm hoping they two will be producing next year.

Spring is Here?

It snowed on my very first Mother's day! Admittedly, it was not a lot of snow, but still! May 10th and there's snow? Fortunately, we've also has some great weather thrown in there so spring did sprung, but then it kind of took a break for a few days. All of our tulips have come and mostly gone, they were beautiful. Last fall Nate and I planted tons (100's?) of tulips bulbs - fancy ones from Breck's and regular, but still colorful ones from Lowe's. A lot of them came up and our front and side gardens looked awesome

Check out the cool green tulips!

Fionna is crawling around like crazy - she really gets around. She's very adept at pulling herself into a standing position and a few weeks ago she started clapping her hands. She loves the dogs and wants to climb up on them. Let's just say that they don't like it as much as she does, but they are being very good and they tolerate a lot of abuse. Here she is eating an Easter card from Memere - she loves eating paper!

Pulling herself up on the windowsill is fun, but it really tires her out!

The Tax Man Cometh

Well, here it is, already March and I'm feeling myself begin to thaw from winter. After Christmas, Nate and I were able to get our stuff together enough to purchase a small vacation house up in Keene, NY. Its a small A-frame, just enough for us and the dogs to enjoy the High Peaks and rent it out for others to enjoy when we are not there.

It was completely stressful trying to get everything together for closing, but now that its done, I think we can both say that its so great to own a place up there. We got to XC ski in Mount Van Hoevenberg (http://www.whiteface.com/activities/xc.php), which was quite enjoyable, and just this past weekend I took the dogs to hike a trail around Marcy Field. We are looking forward to spring and doing some hiking and maybe doing some landscaping projects up there.

On another note, I did our taxes last weekend. Ouch. Turns out Fionna wasn't as big of a deduction as I had hoped and who knew that there was no Border Collie deduction? Either way, a large bill is looming in our future. So the impetus is to save money before April 15th. I'm from Worcester, MA where "frugal" (read: cheap) is pretty much a birth right so I think we can do this. Plus frugal living is green living which is something I try to do anyway, but this puts my money where my mouth is.

1) We disconnected DirecTV. This was hard for me, since I love TV, but its close to $100/mo. and Fionna doesn't need to watch it anyway. Internet TV from here on out. Luckily for me, Nate is really good at getting all that kind of stuff up and running.

2) We're not using our dryer. Yes folks - we bought a drying rack and as we speak it is set up by the fire quietly drying our clothes. I'm not sure how much money this will actually save, but I hear that the dryer is one of the largest energy hogs in the home. We shall see, I suppose.

3) Our "heat" is set at 57. Good-bye 60! See above - we're using our wood stove (mix of wood and envi blocks). Cold? Put on a sweater, grab a dog or a cat. At least we're moving out of heating season!

4) Smarter grocery shopping. We're pretty smart about grocery shopping as it is. And some things I will not sacrifice - eating meat from our local farm, buying local whenever I can (dairy, eggs, CSA veggies) that can be more expensive, but I would much rather give my money to other NYS businesses that employ people from NY and pay taxes in NY. For other things though - store brands (store brand cereal can save you almost $2.00 a box), eight o'clock coffee beans (it was good enough in grad school), no more soda, and coupons if I can use them. Even the dogs may not be getting the top shelf dog food anymore. I guess everyone has to sacrifice.

We already carpool (with the Jetta TDI which gets pretty awesome gas milage (38-40 mpg), and pretty much everything Fionna owns is from craigslist, but I'm sure we'll find other ways to save money so when the tax man cometh - we will be ready.

Holiday Time!

Christmas has already come and gone, and we are in that delightful time between Christmas and the New Year. Our Christmas was quiet this year, as we did all of our traveling during Thanksgiving. It is very cold here today with wind chills down to -1 F. Here's a picture of our beautiful tree (with Max).

Fionna's first tooth is visible today (bottom left-central incisor). Fionna enjoyed her very first Christmas - she got lots of gifts from generous friends and relatives. She loves holding books and at least looking at the pictures.






Nate and I have had some time off so we have been tackling little projects around the house and finishing those unfinished projects. For Christmas, Nate made me a spice-rack addition to the pantry. This is great because for those of you who have been to my house and tried unsuccessfully to find spices - worry no more! My spices are now visible and alphabetized - from allspice to vanilla extract! He also made me some cabinets dividers to organize my cookie sheets, cutting boards, trays, etc. Now, my kitchen is more organized which makes me more happy!

Pantry-tastic!

After we recovered from a Thanksgiving adventure to New England, we have slowly gotten back to working around the house. One thing that I have wanted is some more pantry space to store small appliances and canned goods. There were some shelves and peg board on the way down the cellar stairs, but it was kind of dark and gross down there and there wasn't enough storage. Its really the perfect place to store winter veggies like potatoes, carrots and beets because it stays pretty cool. Nate installed two new lights and we put up a new wooden shelf along the top of the foundation wall on the way down the stairs, and then put up new wire shelves. Here's a picture of me working on it.
I painted everything with porch paint so it would look brighter and clean up more easily. Nate also built me a great canned-goods shelf which holds a lot of stuff. We covered all the exposed insulation with more pegboard. You'll also notice the awesome veggie bins on the bottom shelf - those were just two cheap plastic bins that we cut the front of and then melted the plastic a bit so it wouldn't be sharp. Now I can just reach in and grab a beet or two! Now we have room for things like the dehydrator and I have plenty of room for my winter CSA veggies and lots of cans of salsa and apple sauce. I even have room for paper goods and cleaning supplies. It looks so much cleaner and more organized down there now, its great.

Fionna and the Mobile

Yes, its bees awhile since we've posted. But we've got a good excuse - really! Our lovely daughter has been keeping us busy. Nate has still found some time to work on finishing up some projects around the house - more on that later.
Fionna is 2 months olds now, its hard to believe. She's really starting to notice things now. And she smiles and laughs. She seems to be a mostly happy baby. She likes to listen to the "Coffee House" channel on XM which is this acoustic/folk music channel. She sleeps for ~ 6 hours a night before waking up and wanting to be fed - which is great. She is a great sleeper, at least right now. She really likes sleeping in her "doughnut" which is what we call this breast-feeding pillow thing. She digs it!
Over labor day weekend, we took Fionna and the dogs up to Lake Placid. Fionna did really well traveling. She still slept and ate well and we were able to take her on a gondola ride up Whiteface! Her first mountain!


Last week, Nate bought her a mobile for above her crib - she really seems to like it. I took a video - check it out!

More Fionna

Well, its just Fionna and me today. Nate is at work and the parents have left (thanks for all the help!). I'm hoping for a relaxing day, maybe I'll be able to take a nap or get outside for a little while and play with the dogs. It looks like it will be a beautiful day. I thought I'd post a few more pictures from last week - our little girl is just so cute. She's sleeping right now, so I'm actually able to sit down at the computer for a little while!

Fionna Aline Woody

We're a little busy so just a short update with some pictures. Everybody is fine and learning how to deal with each other!

Stawberries Galore

Well, as summer finally gets underway, its time to talk about the garden. First, our strawberries that we planted and then transplanted into the front garden last year have been producing like mad! We've gotten an abundance of the sweetest, most delicious fresh strawberries this year. I honestly thought that I'd be able to eat them all, but it turns out I really couldn't keep up. So I've been freezing the leftovers which I'm sure will be excellent come this winter.

The peas are also coming along, I planted sugar snap and shelling type peas. I figured that I'd be able to store the shelled peas to make baby food this winter. That's the plan anyway. The onions and lettuce are doing great, not surprising given the amount of rain and cooler weather we've been having. Even still, the tomatoes are getting tall and I even have some cherry tomatoes set on as well as some "New Girls" - the earliest of the new hybrids. The corn is starting to come up and even my green beans have begun. The only casualty so far is the green peppers - the one's I started from seed were eaten by slugs! Oh well, I bought some green bells from Lowe's and we'll see if they survive.

Nate put landscape fabric down in the planting area and boards to mark off the walking area. It has been working out really well. No weeding!

Bat in a Box

Our extended family paid another visit last week. We are slowly becoming more efficient at capturing and releasing the little buggers. Julie didn't even have to knock the bat, herself, or me unconscious catching this little guy. I've been working in the upstairs hallway with the attic door open a lot, so I assume he snuck in there at some point. He (or she) came swooping out of the bathroom as we came up for bed.
I took some time to play with my new pond last weekend and it's fully functional now. We migrated all of the fish into the new pond and I got rocks around about half of the pond. The skimmer, filter, and waterfall weir are all working, if not completely hidden. The fish seem happy and it's really nice to be able to sit on the lower deck and look out at the fish!
Progress is slow on the hallway, It's still all hand nailed, and I've got two more entrances taken care of. I've gotten the first diamond in, and two of the miter corners are all set. So all of the components are in, at long last.

Summer Weather

Our iris that were planted last year are in full bloom this year! They came in like monsters this year and have lots of blooms, we found out this year that we have two colors. We only got purple ones last year, this year we have a lot of these red-orange one.
Before I talk about anything else, I should mention that we do continually to actual finish things! I've been working on the faceframes to the built-in closets that I made late this winter. I found a new mill to get wood from and they had a bunch of butternet, which is different and quite pretty. It cost me 3.00$/bdft for 4/4 stuff, all S4S and ready to go, so it ended up running me about 80$ for all the lumber for both frames. I put a picture of the raw cabinets and then finished up. I used danish oil to finish the frames and polyurethaned the plywood carcasses.



I loaded up the closet this evening and had plenty of space for everything, so I think it worked out fairly well. I had to do mine first so that we could unload the baby's room closet, I'll still need to stain and polyurethane Julies closet.
In more foolish news, I give you this:

I tore up our hallway over memorial day weekend. Every year, the hallway has gotten lumpier and lumpier with certain humps coming up in the summer and others coming up in the winter. On top of that we had nasty stained cathair-attracting carpet, and so I decided it was about my last chance to go ahead an pull it before the baby arrives. Putting down new subfloor and sistering joists is dirty, dusty, noisy work and I really don't want the baby breathing the nasty fine dust that comes out of opening walls in this house. Let alone, ALL of the bedrooms are accessed through the hall, so it can't stay out of commission, so it was a long painful one day job. I tore out the carpet and old subfloor, sistered the joists (primarily to reset level-ness) and dropped new subfloor. I came up one sheet of subfloor short and ended up finishing at about 6:30 in the evening without getting flooring down on the extension that hangs over the stairs. You can see the sistered up joists in the picture below, same nonsense as always. The only difference was that I had joists from the baby's room coming in on one side of the joists already, so I didn't have any choice about where to put the sisters. The goal here was just re-setting level in the floor, no so much strengthenin things.

I've only started putting down flooring here, the final floor will be a mix quarter sawn white oak and black walnut (all 2-1/4), but I've just started setting the edges and getting the junctions with other rooms flooring lined up. The goal is to get a seamless transition from the hallway into the rooms. The hallway has 7 entrances in it (4 bedrooms, 1 bathroom, 1 closet, and the stairway), so I'll need to be patient getting going. I've got the stairway and baby room threshold worked out and it looks pretty good. Many more to go, unfortunately.

Schluter, Pebbles, and Shower Panel

When we were planning our bathroom, the original plan included a one-piece steam shower (something like this . But we weren't sure if it would look a little crazily out of place in our fairly old-fashioned looking house, so instead we decided to build a large-ish custom shower and put a nice shower panel in there. However, this meant I needed to make a 4'x4' waterproof room. I went with the Schluter system, which is as close to a shower room in a box you can get. The kit contains a pre-sloped polystyrene base, a drain that integrates with the base, a polystyrene curb and plenty of waterproof membrane to cover the walls and floor. You just cut the base and curb to the correct sizes (it's just foam), mortar them in place, and coat everything with the orange membrane.
Here you can see the shower room after I coated everything. The membrane (called Kerdi) is about the weight of tar paper, with one side covered with a fleecy material. You just spread thin-set (unmodified) onto the wall (backerboard or fiberglass-faced drywall like DenseArmor) and bed the fleece side into the mortar. Then you basically treat it like wallpaper and use a large trowel to squeeze any excess mortar out from behind the sheet and get any air bubbles out. You overlap all of your edges by at least 2" and they provide you with pre-made corners, so you don't have to figure out how to cut things that fit into the corner. I can never cut the squares in the right way to flash corners, so those were very nice. It only took me about a day to figure out what to do and do the whole shower, so I'm really pleased with the Schluter stuff. Since we didn't install a steam generator, I didn't have to kerdi the ceiling, but I wanted to show off our shower light.
I have always wanted to use the pebble tile and the 12 sqft of our shower room is about the only place I can afford to use them, so I went for them. Installing them is fairly easy, grouting them is hell. Ignore any recommendation about grout coverage guidance and buy the biggest bag of grout you can, you'll need all of it. You'll also need about 10 sponges and as many buckets filled with water as you can find. Then prepare yourself for a mess.
I've heard of advice to use your hands to put the grout in, but I think those people are crazy, that sounds even messier. What worked for me was cleaning as best I could with the float and then letting the grout dry longer than you normally do. I think the quantity of the grout makes it dry slower, so I had to let it set for 45 minutes or so before I could start working it down to where I wanted it. It was firm enough I had to scrub a little bit in order remove grout, but that made it relatively easy to get to the exposure that I wanted. I'm pretty pleased with the outcome. Before you grout, you'll want to seal the pebble so that the grout comes off a bit easier, I used the Dupont Stonetech Sealer, Enhancer, and cleaner. The seem to be really good products, pricey, but good. The difference between this sealer and the spray-on sealers is night and day. Water beads on the grout in the shower, and no water condenses on the grout on the walls, it's pretty impressive. I also used strips of the pebble tile for an accent strip (about 4" wide) about halfway up the shower wall and a strip of little 1" tile just below the ceiling. We used a faux-travertine tile for the walls, as we wanted something low maintenance in there.
Here is the little cubby I built in. It's a bit.... cramped. I made the hole the size I wanted, then I boxed it in (-1"), then I membraned (-1/2") and tiled (-1"). So now it's a little small, but it still works to hold razors and normal size shampoo bottles. We'll have to add an aftermarket shelf to augment the storage (http://www.raficreations.com/existing_tile_installation.html).

Lastly, here's a picture of our showerpanel. It's red and fantastic (if painful to install). A word of warning, these things mount REALLY close to the wall, so cut your stub outs and install threaded (male) adaptors that just barely come out of the wall before you membrane or tile anything. I didn't do that and had a hell of a time getting things to fit.
It was a lot more work than a steam shower (which requires plugging in), but it came our really nice. We'll install a frameless glass door at somepoint, they're expensive and the shower curtain works fine for right now. But otherwise, it's ready to go and a pleasure to use.

Max Herding

As promised movies of Max running around like a fool after sheep. This was at the farm where we got Sweep, they are very nice people and seem to be willing to indulge Julie's whims.




Max is fast when he wants to be!


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Porch Goodness

Our porch languished over the winter in a structurally sound, but unattractively partially finished state. It was a little depressing to pull in the driveway everyday to see the exposed 2x10 headers and 4x4 posts.
This was a welcome sight last December after the great header replacement operation, but those bare posts got old over the winter. I had started working on the railing last December, but winter got the best of me. I was out there futzing with the railing in blowing 15 degree weather when I said the hell with it. Now that the weather has warmed up (I think it broke 70 yesterday!), it was time to get back to work. I finished installing the railing about a week ago, I'm particularly proud of how the stair railing came out. I think most people will think we're crazy for doing the railing the way we did it, but I think it looks wicked sharp.

This past weekend, I tackled boxing the headers. I got S4S 1x10 hemlock from a local mill, and got everything laid out in the driveway to prime and paint everything. Two coats of exterior primer, one coat of paint on the the ground and one more once everything was up. I ended making good use of the flush trimming bit in my router in order to trim the ends to make everything relatively neat. It looks like a different porch once the boards were up, but it does accentuate the busted up drip edge trim and the pieces of aluminum trim. I won't burden you with my ranting about aluminum trim, but it sucks. It's ugly, it doesn't work, and it generally sucks.
The first blooms have opened, our star magnolia opened up late last week. I thought we might have lost the blooms, as we had 20 degree night last week when the blooms were about to open. I was worried the blooms might have frozen, but it proved hardier than that. Apparently there is a reason that tree does so well here, it does not appear to be impressed by the cold weather.

We did a fair amount of moving tulips around as well, but we've got a couple more weeks before they'll open though we think we'll probably have fewer blooms than usual. A lot of the transplanted bulbs don't look like they'll bloom this year, but that's OK.

To completely change gears, Max had a herding lesson today! Amazingly, he didn't suck! We have some movies of him tearing around chasing sheep, I'll figure out where to post those. We'll probably stick them on YouTube or something, they're pretty funny!
We took him to Fetch Gate Farms, which is where Sweep came from. Generally speaking, Border Collies of unknown breeding and who aren't introduced to sheep at a young age are hopeless. Amazingly, Max actually appears to have the instinct. He was interested in the sheep and understood what we was supposed to do. He was a little spazzy, but everyone was amazed at him. Poor Sweep on the other hand was hopeless. He didn't know where the sheep were, and couldn't really do much. He was really glad to see his former owners though, which was cool. As many people know, he doesn't really dig strangers, so we were glad he remembered his previous owners.