Snow!!

No real work done on the house latey, we've been too busy working on the Woodbury house.

We got about 3" of snow here yesterday.

House Painting

The weather was so nice outside yesterday that I decided to go out and work on finishing up the house painting. You may remember that I began painting the house back in May.

I got the right front side done and most of the left side.



I still have to finish the Porch, the back 2nd floor of the house, the left side kitchen, and the right side laundry room.

Putting up sheet rock in the guest bathroom

Wow! I went back and searched to see when the last post on the upstairs guest bathroom was and found that it was from November 2007!

I haven't done anything on the house in months as we've been out at the house in Woodbury most of the time. We're about to get a construction loan and will soon be going full tilt in the hopes of getting it livable by summer.

Anyways, we can't do anything more on Woodbury until we get the loan so I decided to do some work here.

Several months back I raised the ceiling joists up like I had done in the master bathroom, unfortunately I cant find the pictures of it.

Today I finally decided to get back in there and get the greenboard up. I was going to use the tongue & groove boards that I took down from the old second floor porch but in the end I decided against it and went with the green board.

First I put up insulation in the rafters on the sloped part of the roof and then put up the green board over that:

I can reach the flat part of the ceiling from the attic so I'll insulate that area later. Here is the completed ceiling:



Next I cut out and reframed the opening for the attic access:


The area's not very large but it will be nice to store small things and for access the plumbing and electrical.

After that I began insulating the walls and installing the green board over that:


That was as far as I got today, I'm going to need more insulation and a few more pieces of green board. Hopefully I can get this room completed soon...

RIP Sailor

Well, Sailor died in recovery after surgery today. She went into cardiac arrest and did not respond to any of the emergency procedures they tried on her.

She will be greatly missed.

Please help save Sailor!

I haven't gotten any work done on the house lately because we've had a bit of an emergency here. We foster dogs for our local humane society. Last week we got in a very weak and emaciated American Bulldog from the animal shelter. she had been left tied to a pole outside the shelter.


We took her in and began her rehabilitation. Things were going great at first but soon she began throwing her food back up and started getting lethargic. Christmas morning she didn't even raise her head to greet us and we knew then that something was seriously wrong.

We spent the day at the emergency animal hospital. it turns out that she has an intestinal blockage that requires emergency surgery. The vet has agreed to perform the surgery but the Humane Society does not have the amount of money required to pay for it.

We have decided to setup an online fundraiser for Sailor to try to raise the money ourselves. Here is the link to the site:

http://www.fundable.com/groupactions/groupaction.2008-12-25.6311233069

If anyone can help out it would be greatly appreciated! It only takes a few seconds to donate and even $10 will help out greatly. If you know anyone else that can help please forward the link to them.

Thanks in advance for everyone that can help, Sailor thanks you!

Hall Tree

This is a small project we worked on last year but never completed. It sat in the Laundry room since then. Recently I moved it out into the Breakfast room and then just yesterday added the hooks to finally finish it off.

It's a Hall tree made from a heavy old door from a textile mill and some old, reclaimed boards. The seat lifts up for storage underneath.


In other house news, I've been working on stripping the stair railings, it's slow, boring work. I also added some low-voltage lighting to the front yard. No pictures of either project yet.

Woodbury house

I haven't gotten anything done on the house lately because we've been over at Woodbury house for the last three days. I'm trying to get the electric redone so we can get power on over there.

2nd floor porch, new front door.

Work has been progressing slowly but I have gotten some work done. I finally finished rebuilding the second floor porch. There were two very small areas that were leaking but they were letting a ton of water in. This has caused some of the beadboard on the first floor porch ceiling to come off. Great, another project.



While I was fixing the leaks I made a design change that had been bothering me ever since I first built it. In the picture below notice the 2x4's running left to right, they are what the decking attaches to:


Notice anything wrong with this setup? There's nowhere for the water to drain! It will get between the floor boards then be trapped behind the 2x4's. I don't know what I was thinking when I did this. It's a really stupid mistake. This wasn't what caused the leak but water would have pooled and eventually caused rot.

The way I fixed this was to pull up the 2x4's, take some 6' fence panels and rip them in half lengthwise to make 8 6'x3"x3/4" pieces, then lay them front to back. Then I placed the 2x4's on top of them. Now the water can drain. Sorry I didn't get a picture of it but I think I described it clearly.

Anyways, while I had the 2x4's up I took the time to add another layer of some heavy duty roof cement to the sub floor. I also used a ton of roofing caulk wherever I thought it might be a possible leak area. We got a good bit of rain the next day after I did this and no leaks!

I went ahead and primered and painted the railings before I reinstalled them since it's much easier that way. Here's a few shots of the completed second floor porch:




I went out on the porch roof this morning to get these next two pictures without realizing that there was ice on the roof! Of course I didn't slip until I was about 8 steps out and turning around to take the pic. That could have been bad...


One of the things I did a few months back that I never got around to posting is the Dining room mantle. This is how it looked when we first got the place:

This is as far as I got on it last Winter:

I finished scraping the paint off of it then sanded it 3 times with progressively smoother sandpaper. Here it is after the final sanding:

Then I applied 2 coats of amber shellac:


I still have to scrape the paint off the tiles, repair the hearth tiles, and put up oak trim around the hearth (the original was removed for the 70's shag carpet).

We found a beautiful door at a flea market out in Alabama last month. We picked it up for $50! It's a wonderful Victorian door with a purplish glass inset. In the pic below I'm test fitting it into place. I had to trim about 1" off the bottom:

The mortise for the lock was on the wrong side, I would have just hung the door the opposite way but I've already installed all the light switches on the left side of the door. The outside of the door is different so I couldn't just flop the door around. So I had to make a new mortise on the other side of the door and fill in the old one. I took heavy paper towels and packed them in the mortise as hard as I could then used wood putty to fill in the rest.

Cutting out the new mortise by hand was a real pain in the ass! I used a drill bit of the same diameter as the mortise lock and a chisel. Old school... I also had to cut out the area for the hinges and fill in the area where the hinges were.

There were also a lot of small holes where things had been nailed into the door over the years and even a 9" long chunk of the edge that had come off. Also someone had gouged a rough hole in the door for an old doorbell at one point. All this had to be repaired. Once it was repaired I installed the hardware, I used the door hardware off my old door. Here is a shot of the test fit after all this was done:

Then I put on a coat of amber shellac and a coat of satin poly:



I think the wood putty is a bit too noticeable where the old door knob and door bell had been. I may strip those areas, stain the wood putty to match the rest of the door then re-shellac and poly it.