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!

Floors

In todays webisode, I'll be going through the floor we installed in this room. We got hardwood from Seneca Hardwoods, which is a cool local company. It's a nice place with good people, they are very tolerant of people wandering in and incessantly changing their mind about things. The store is actually an outlet store, they ship most of their stuff elsewhere for sale, but they're really good to people showing up at their place. Their place is a big empty warehouse with a tiny room in it that acts as the office. When I showed up to pick up the hardwood, I got there at about 10am, which as it turns out, is coffee break time. The guys found me a coffee cup and I hung around in the office for 15 minutes until the office lady came back. We discussed how to unfreeze the truck stalled in the parking lot (it was ~5 that morning) and how clear the birch was they had milled for me the day before. Suffice it to say, I'll be back! So I barely managed to jam 3 bundles and cherry and 7 bundles of yellow birch in the back of the Audi. Barely. For those who don't know, yellow birch is very hard and dense. It's about as dense as beech or white oak, and so lugging 7 bundles (~20 sqft/bundle) of this upstairs almost killed me. We let the wood acclimate for about two weeks up stairs and put it down in a long weekend. I spent about a day removing squeaks by rescrewing the subfloor down, patching holes, vacuuming incessantly, and finally putting down red rosing paper.
I taped up the seams of the rosin paper, primarily to make sure that it would be easy to keep the floor clean as I worked. The plan was to put a cherry border around the room 3 strips (9") wide around the room in a picture frame setup (woven corners) and doing he bulk of the floor with the birch. I started off the next day putting the first piece of cherry along the side of the room I was working from and started around the sides of the room. After a trip to the rental store, I brought back the flooring nailer. I was able to use the nailer on the second piece of flooring, which was far better than hand nailing things. I picked up the nailer around 9am and worked straight for about 12 or 13 hours. You get loopy after 8 or so hours of racking, cutting and nailing flooring.
Here I am just about finishing up. You'll notice it's plenty dark outside. I worked alone until about 2 in the afternoon, and then Julie bailed me out and started racking and cutting boards for me. The picture framed cherry I had oriented so that the tongues were facing the birch, but the flooring we got wasn't end-matched (no groove on the ends). So Julie took over the job of racking the pieces and adding the groove to pieces that abutted the cherry border. I had setup the tenoning jig on the tablesaw to cut the groove, and she ran the table saw all afternoon.
I wouldn't have finished in one day without her helping me with it. It was a ridiculously long day, but I was glad to just get it done. The next morning, I drove back to the rental store, returned the nailer and promptly picked up the floor sander. I was laughed at.
The floor sanded out really nice. I used one of the jitterbug type sanders instead of a drum sander. I think next time I will go for the drum sander. I know it's harder to control and much more aggressive, but the jitterbug takes for ever and all of your money goes into sand paper. The sheets of sandpaper are about 8x for the jitterbug, and so being a cheapskate, I end up using fewer pieces of sandpaper then I should. Either way, I did a fine job of producing massive amounts of dust and the floor sanded up nicely. We swept, vacuumed, swept some more, vacuumed a couple more times, and finally dust mopped with denatured alcohol on rags.
Once this dried, we followed up with a coat of sanding sealer (zinser sealcoat), and then the poly. I wanted to try to match the character of the original hardwood flooring downstairs, and I wanted to make sure the cherry darkened up nicely, so I used oil-based Varathane. I had a really tough time with the mop head applicator for the urethane and quickly abandoned it. I ended up on my hands and knees applying three coats of poly with a 4 inch brush. Thank goodness it was only 160 sqft!
Above is the floor with one coat of poly and below is with three coats on. The first coat was a little crappy, but I got better as went along and the third coat was pretty good. Hopefully it'll hold up well and I won't be repeating the process in 2 years.
Next, I'll show you the trim and the frieze boards I made for over the doors.

I've been lazy here for the last couple of months, so I'm going to try and play catch up over the next couple of weeks. We've finished up the room (though we don't actually have any furniture for it) shown in these pictures, but I'll just pretend it's not done yet here! This is the purple room, which is the room we replaced the windows in, an upstairs bedroom, we ended up taking it down to the studs, as we the wiring was pretty shady in there. Part of the walls were plastered, you can see the hallway walls in the picture below, which is drywall over plaster.
All the power in this room is on a new circuit, so the other bedrooms are less stressed as well. Of course, I also managed to run cable and cat5 up to this room, because I can't help myself.

Julie and I drywalled and taped the room over a long weekend. She was an animal hanging drywall, so in the next room, I'll be leaving all that to her. I'll just come in when there's painting to be done. I figured people would appreciate the complete mess of drywall dust that we had partway through the sanding, mudding cycle. You can also see the beginning of the "bay" window seat builtin. The window seat will have three small bookshelves in the front and hidden storage underneath, which will be accesible from the top via a trap door. You can see the three bookshelf boxes in the picture above, I'd just leveled them on a base and attached them to the floor and each other (hence the clamps hanging off of them). When I did this I was planning on building and staining pine face frames.
We painted the room kind of a sky-blue color. We're planning on doing white trim in here, so we wanted a rich color to set off the white trim. We want to do paneled walls with a plate rail in here, so lots of white against the blue. The walls actually came out quite good, which is probably a minor miracle and only took 3 mud/sand cycles. I was prepared for more, but we did a pretty good job, I think.
We found a hardwood supplier in the next county over that harvests and mills locally (Schuyler county), which was pretty cool. It took two trips by me and one trip by Julie, but we finally decided on birch with a cherry border. We had intially thought Oak, then I wanted cherry with a maple border, on and on. Finally, Julie really liked the look of Birch, and so we went with that. We used 3 1/4 strips, but I think I actually like the 2 1/4 better. The mill has also recently started making quarter-sawn oak and they're doing up to 10" wide stuff. If only I could get my hands on some unfinished walnut 2 1/4 flooring I'd be a happy man! Either way, I managed to just barely jam 160 square feet of birch and cherry hardwood flooring in the Audi, and I figured you'd appreciate the picture. Around every corner, the pile of wood tried to squish me, but I made it home! Snow and all!

A house warming!

This actually happened last November, which throws off the timeline a bit, but I realized that the pictures still haven't been posted and I wanted to share them. We invited the old gang over for a house-warming of sorts...Well, at least a way to help warm our house. The large walk-up attic was not properly insulated - there was only about 6 inches or so of old vermiculite. This did raise some alarms, because old vermiculite can contain asbestos and this was old vermiculite. We collected several samples of the vermiculite from different areas of the attic, some on the bottom and some at the top and sent it away for testing. Luckily for us, there was no asbestos in any of the samples. Which was good because our plan involved vacuuming out and hauling it down two flights and out of the house. And then re-insulating the attic with some thick R-38!
First the floorboards had to be pulled up and Adam was the first to arrive so he was "lucky"enough to help me and Nate pull up the boards and remove the nails. Next vermiculite removal - so Adam, Tom, and Nate (and eventually Rob) went to work shoveling and vacuuming vermiculite into large garbage bags and I helped by hauling the bags downstairs.



I didn't do much, but judging by what I saw, it was a lot of very hard work. And surprisingly, garbarge bags filled with vermiculite are HEAVY!


We would never expect our friends to work without food or drink and this seemed like a perfect excuse for our traditional turkey fry. On a side note, I couldn't find my turkey injector, so I made a puree of garlic and spices (sage, oregano, thyme from the garden) and a little EVOO and placed it under the skin of the turkey. Delicious!



We couldn't have done it without you guys! Thanks - let's do it again next year! (Our garage needs to be insulated next!)