Wednesday, July 22, 2009
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!
Saturday, July 11, 2009
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!
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!
Monday, June 22, 2009
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.
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.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
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:
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. |  |
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.
 |  |
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
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.
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.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
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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Max is fast when he wants to be!
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Sunday, April 19, 2009
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.
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.
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