merry merry

Merry Christmas, y'all! We're off to Washington in the morning. Look for us in those inevitable news shots of bleary-eyed holiday airport travelers!

J and C

Snow

Not much to say. Just a couple of pictures of our driveway. The snow and wind make for some really incredible snow dunes. Enjoy.
Joe

Drywall

I know the picture does not look like much, but this is my first try at patching drywall. I came inside this morning and the therometer said 40 degrees. Which is the first time our house has stayed above freezing overnight. So I figured it was a good a time as any to start on the drywall. I figured I would start small with the small patches, and work my way up:

I'm not sure what was going on with all of these holes. There are several of them though. Most of the drywall damage is from the house moving itself though. Lots of cracks around the doors:

and tape that has peeled at the corners:Guess what? Patching drywall is acctually kind of fun. Not as much fun as say... making pots, but enjoyable none the less. Certainly more fun than tearing out old plaster ceilings. Which I apparently have more of in my future. More on that latter.
Joe

sparkly snow day

We spent the day working on getting the house and gaping hole to the basement closed in ahead of another snowstorm. As you can see, we have a few inches on the ground already (disguising a layer of ice underneath), and the weather folks are predicting up to 10 inches tomorrow. Joe is quite the ace winter driver, so he gets to slide around in our little rear-wheel drive pickup, while I putter to and from my get-us-through-the winter job at granny-speed in the car. The snow on the ground now is light and fluffy and sparkly. Just right for Christmas. The storm front coming through tomorrow is supposed to bring heavier snow. Just right for a cross-country skiing base!

Christy

Warming it up.

Just like "Kris Kross" tried to do in the early ninety's, we are now trying to "warm it up". So here's the story. Our house had a mud room off the back of the house. We tore the old mud room off as it had fairly large issues with rot. Our basement was poured with space for a new mud room. We can't enclose this section of the basement and build a new mud room, until the cement man has poured our basement floor. The plumbers laid the underfloor plumbing in and we were all ready for the cement man a week or two ago. We called him and he said he would be out soon. We called him again today, and he made it quite clear there was no way he was coming out to work on the basement until next spring. He actually hung up on Christy! Our cement man is quite good with cement, but unfortunately he's not so good when it comes to dealing with people.
We still need to warm it up though. We can't live in a hotel forever. Once as we get the basement warm the plumbers can start running the water into the house. Once as the house gets warm, we can hang the dry wall in the bathroom, and start patching drywall else where.
So Christy and I spent yesterday sealing up the upstairs to get it all ready to be heated up. Christy had to work today and I spent the day getting the basement ready to be warmed up. Here is our temporary "wall o' insulation" sectioning off the mud room portion of the basement:
I'll tack up some plastic on the other side to keep the drafts to a minimum.

Here we closed in the gaps in the basement sandwiching insulation between two pieces of plywood:
And here is my favorite part of the house:
The one thing we really splurged on. A Jotul stove. It's going to be our only source of heat for a while so we figured we might as well get a nice one. We are both looking forward to the day that we can sit around the warm fire with a good book. Maybe next year?
Joe

Serious brick haulin

Usually I get annoyed with forwarded emails, but Mark Hewitt just forwarded me this video.... pretty incredible.



And I felt all macho carrying nine bricks at a time this summer with our brick tongs.... Christy and I both could have used some of those skills this summer.
Joe

slow progress

The bathroom has turned out to be more of an undertaking than I had first thought. I tore up the hardwood floor, and replaced some of the sub floor which had rotted underneath where the tub was. I laid down plywood on top of the sub floor with the hopes of tiling the whole thing before the tub and toilet get moved in. Neither Christy nor I can really figure out the history of the house, but the bathroom has definitely been put together after the house had been completed. The bathroom was wall papered. After removing the wallpaper we found out that each was finished differently. One wall was simply masonite with wall paper over it. One wall had two layers of drywall. I'll spare you the details on the other two walls just know that there were many forms of plywood like substances used. While removing all of this, all the acoustical tile on the ceiling fell. Well not quite all of them, but enough to warrant pulling down the rest of them. Above the tiles was a plaster ceiling which had a wall size gap in it. That's my guess at least. That the gap in the plaster is where an older wall was, somebody moved the wall and didn't want to bother with the plaster and stapling acoustical tiles was easier. So here is what our bathroom looks like. I should have gotten pictures of the floor.... but I didn't. There is still a small amount of metal lathe from the plaster that I need to remove. I'm glad to be able to finally start building instead of simply tearing it all down. I need to add a couple of 2x4's mainly to support the drywall. Then hopefully we'll drywall the ceiling, walls and tile the floor.
The electrician has been working on getting the power back up and running. Some of the wires were cut off at the basement, presumably to sell the copper. I pulled new wire through for the electricians. Whooo... steep learning curve, I've never worked on a house before. Everything seems to take so much longer when compared to this summer of construction.

Christy's been working six days a week these last couple of weeks. In all likelihood her job will be over come Christmas. I'm not going to make any predictions as to when we will be moved into the house. We are planning on having another firing in march though, so hopefully we'll have at least a couple of months to make pots for the firing. I'll be nice to make pots again. First things first though.
Joe

A little winter time house work

I've been working on various odd jobs around the house getting it ready to live in. I hung some interior doors, put up some trim around the windows. I'm now moving on to the one really big job we have: the bathroom. Luckily the bathroom is the exception not the rule. Most of the house is in pretty good shape. The house was built with hard wood floors through out the house. It's quite beautiful in most of the house. Not so much in the bathroom. Most of the bathroom floor is rotten.The plumbers showed up yesterday! They roughed in the underfloor plumbing. Now our concrete guy can pour the basement floor. After that we can finish closing in the basement. Once as everything in the basement is above freezing the water can be hooked up. Not sure how long it will take... hopefully not too long. We'll see.
Winter has defiantly arrived. This morning's weather report said 'sunny and 7 degrees'. Pretty chilly. It's been a while since I've lived some place with a real winter. I'm actually kind of excited. It's been snowing the last couple of days.
Joe