Bathroom Ponderings

We've started trying to figure out what to do about our green-carpeted bathroom abomination but have been struggling to fit everything in. The big problem is the sloped ceiling, as this room is tucked up into the roof in one corner of the house. I drew up the room in Sketchup, an export of the current layout is below. You can see the slope in the wall next to the window, at it's lowest point it's about 36" off of the floor, so there's a lot of un-useable space over there. The shower is a fiberglass corner install (next to the toilet), and is really too small. The counter (despite it's massive 5' length) only has one sink, and only about 24" of useable space before the ceiling get's under 6'.
Below is about the only thing I've come up with that I don't hate too much. It's surprisingly similar to the current layout, maybe there's only so many ways to lay things out in this space.


Somehow, we'll drag the whirlpool hottub out of there, and build a knee (shoulder?) wall at about the 6'6" height and put a double vanity against that. There's just enough room for a 22" vanity to fit between the wall and the window. The toilet stayes roughly where it is, it'll get pushed over an inch or two to ensure that we've got 48" for the shower. We had hoped to get one of these for a shower, but it seems like it will work less well up against the toilet. Instead, we'll build that as a solid wall and build a custom tile enclosure. We'll put a sitting tub next-ish to the vanity. I could only find a model for a 6' tub, and we'll be using a maximum 5' tub, so there will be much more space then it actually looks like. I'll move the knee-wall in as far as possible to allow the tub to be in there and put builtins into the knee wall.

I dunno, maybe this works. I'm not totally sold and keep waiting for an epiphany.

Anybody Want a Cat

This is Kitten's foot prints in fresh wet polyurethane. Any normal cat would have taken a couple of steps and gone "Ick!" and turned around. Kitten on the other hand, slip-slided her way all the way across the floor, right through the middle of the floor.
We forgot to mention the house's former residents stopped by a few weeks ago. He got into the house when we were closing up the chimney chase. He (or she, I suppose) probably crawled into the chimney from the top and we disturbed him with the heat. He came busting out into the family room and then moved on to orbiting the dining room for ten minutes until we succesfully created a multi-blanket screen to direct him out the front door.
Hopefully, he found a new warm place to hole up. We need all the healthy bats we can get here in New York.

When the dogs lay down with the cats

It must be the christmas season, when even the dogs are willing to allow the cats to snuggle up. Of course, Sweep will curl up with anything anywhere. Julie is more selective, but only a little.

We had some snow the week before christmas, so it was nice, everybody had a good time. Sweep did his best Christmas dog impression and Max ran around in the snow like an idiot. But he was a happy idiot, so it's always fun!









Lastly, the railing on the porch got started, but it work out there has largely been called due to cold, snow and laziness. We got most of the parts made and painted (which is always fun, painting in the basement, the sewing room, anywhere it's warm enough), but we've decided to hold off on finishing until things warm up. It should only be a couple of months! Either way, I figured you'd like to see some pictures of what it looks like! There's still a little yellow cross piece that needs to be added, but you get the idea. The panels are 3/4" PT plywood, cut with a jigsaw, and the panels fit into dado's cut in the 2x4 frames. It's relatively simple, but takes about 30 minutes to cut out a single panel. We've cut all of the full size panels and got about 1/2 of them installed.

Lastly, we got a ton of "Envi-8" blocks delivered today. They're basically giant wood pellets.
Each one is about 3"x3"x10" long, weigh about 8 pounds and they are just compressed sawdust and other recycled wood product, just like a wood pellet. I would like to see the monster that is used to smash these things into shape!They contain no filler, so they can be safely burned in a wood stove (even a catalytic wood stove), and since they are all recycled wood, they are a nice environmental compromise for a wood stove. My neighbor had bought them and gave a couple for me to try and they burn nice and hot and with very little ash. Unfortunately, I had to move a ton (no really, they came on a pallet and the unit of delivery is 1 ton), or about 600 logs onto the deck, through the kitchen and down into the basement. Ugh. The only downside to these is that the place we got these from they come in pre-packaged blocks of 8. Which is a little silly. So each group of 8 blocks comes in a little shrink-wrapped package? Heh? We'll get our act together better next year and try to get them w/o the packaging! Now I have this pile in my basement!

Hope you all had a great holiday!

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.