Stripping woodwork, or the love affair I am currently having with my heat gun

Ooooh, heat gun, I like it when you get SO hot for me. (*of course not so hot as to create lead paint fumes....safety first!) Your blowy hotness makes that paint bubble so good, oh so good.

Maybe I am releasing lead paint fumes, and they've gone to my head. :)

I have been a paint stripping fool over the past few weekends. Which made for an interesting Thanksgiving, because we had a housefull of people and I felt compelled to explain to each and every one of them why our bathroom door looks like it's been sunburned and is now peeling. Why our kitchen trim is in various stages of undress (using it to test times/amounts of heat, etc.). Why there is a respirator rather than a centerpiece on our dining room table (I did move it before we all sat down to eat.)

No pictures--sorry, but when I'm stripping paint I become very focused. And later, when I'm not so focused, I want to stay as far away from my current project as possible. Tough to do when your current project is also the only room in the house in which you can bathe. But trust me, I'm bathing--I'm just trying not to look at the door when I'm in there.

Winterizing is a HUGE pain in the butt

Our house is drafty. We've no plans to insulate the walls and risk ruining our plaster and/or siding, since that's not where most heat loss occurs anyway, and for the time being we can't insulate the attic because the only access to the attic is a 16x22 inch cubbyhole. Try stuffing a roll of fiberglass through that!

Still, it's c-h-i-l-l-y. Plus, those trees that provide such lovely, cooling shade in the summer, provide the same lovely, COOLING shade in the winter! So, the falling leaves signal to us that we need to start winterizing for the cold months ahead.

First, we bring 24 bales of straw to insulate the foundation. This worked like a charm last year; we never had frozen pipes, even though our laundry pipes run through an uninsulated crawl space. The straw also makes a great mulch the following spring. This year, we bought extra bales to insulate The Ladies' coop. I don't know how much they appreciate it, but we figured that if we were going to winterize ourselves, we ought to winterize them as well. After all, they've only got feathers--and each other--to keep them warm!

Straw bales, check. Now for weatherstripping. Last year we did just the rooms that we used, and we closed off the rest of the house. This year, we'll continue closing off the unused parts of the house, but we'll finish the weatherstripping. Then, we'll put up those ugly plastic "storm windows" on every window in the house. Yeah, that's a treat. Next year we are planning to re-replace the horrid 1960s-era aluminum replacement windows with true divided-light double-hung wood windows. Hopefully, we'll do wood storms then as well. But until then, it's plastic all the way, baby!

Last but not least, we'll turn the thermostat down to 55 (not a typo) and break out the blankets! It's amazing how comfortable we can get when there's down somethingorother to snuggle into. The cats love winter, for just that reason. Down comforters and blankets are snuggly!

Good for the barn, bad for G and V

Well, we have gotten official word that the final roadway alignment doesn't call for the barn to be demolished. While I'm very pleased that the barn isn't in any immediate jeopardy, I must admit some disappointment that it won't be coming to live in our pasture!

[Heavy sigh]

Oh, well. We'll nab ourselves a great historic barn someday!

Black walnuts! (alternately titled, what I did with a mallet all day Sunday)

Our black walnut trees have been bombarding us with nuts for about a month now. At long last, it appears that the days of dodging and weaving are coming to a close for another year! There aren't many nuts left--which is a good thing because those suckers HURT when they make contact. HURT. Have I mentioned how much those buggers HURT?

We have been collecting the nuts in our little garden cart, and yesterday I began the thankless task of husking them so we can cure them in anticipation of some serious Black Walnut yumminess. Putting them on the driveway was the easiest dehusking method at hand, but we were a little iffy about actually doing it because the last thing we need is for a walnut to come hurtling from underneath our tire and take out a window, some siding, or our neighbor (whoooooooosh....d'oh! Sorry 'bout that, Earl!). So I thought I'd take the mallet to them. I started out strong. Two good whacks and I had a clean nut ready for the curing screen. About 400 nuts later, my hand was good and cramped, and it was taking more whacks than I care to admit. So I took the rest (yes, the 400 barely made a dent in the cartload) and dumped them onto our driveway. I guess if we send one flying at high velocity we'll just have to live with the consequences. And I'm really looking forward to having fresh nuts around! Mmmmmmm!

Ohpleaseohpleaseohpleaseohpleaseohplease

There is a possibility, probably slight but still a possibility, that V and I will be relocating a Mail Pouch barn onto our little farm.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This all came about in a very seat-of-the-pants way. I was riding home from a horse show with my trainer and her mom when we passed by a lovely historic barn (I wrote my masters thesis on barns so I'm always quite the barn looky-loo!) and I commented on it. My trainer tells me that the state DOT is going to torch or bulldoze it because they're doing a highway widening. My response was to beg her to get in touch with her contact and see what she could find out. So now we're calling the DOT and trying to find out what exactly they're planning for it. I haven't been inside, but it appears to be in remarkably good condition. My gut is that it's a timber frame rather than balloon, which will make it easier in some ways to disassemble. All things being equal, we might be able to take down entire bents rather than going beam by beam. That would make reassembling much, much easier--fewer parts to put back together! One of these days I'll brave the trespassing charge and take a peek inside to gauge the condition and check out the construction.

It may not be realistically feasible for us, but we're sure going to try to bring it home. Right now our plan is to probably disassemble it, load it onto a flatbed, truck it to our farm, and put it on pallets and tarp it until spring. This will A) allow us more time to get some cash together to get footings poured, etc., and B) allow us some time to figure out just exactly where we'd like to put it.

Please, everyone, keep a good thought for us. We have long wanted to do something like this, and it looks like this might just be our chance. Now we really need to find that buried coffee can of gold!

The Chicken Whisperer

Let me tell you about my pet (apparently) chicken. Lisa is one of The Ladies, as they are collectively called. She provides us with delicious brown eggs that are good enough to eat! Seriously, folks, if you have any room at all and want to make a big change in the quality of eggs you're eating, buy a few chickens. I cannot believe how yummy a hard-boiled egg tastes from these free-range, clover munchin', bug chompin' ladies. What a difference!

But I digress. Back to Lisa. We had five chickens--two Ameraucanas (Fiona, Stella, and Edie) and two Golden Comets (Mattie and Lisa) . All too sadly, Mattie died last month. It was heartbreaking. I will readily admit that I cried -- a LOT -- for that chicken. And since then, Lisa has seemed a bit lonely. Like she knows the other three are of a different breed, and she doesn't really fit in. They all get along and all, but Lisa is a little bigger and is a different color (can chickens see in color?), and I just think she feels a little out of place.

Enter me, Lisa's new BFF. We let The Ladies out to free range every day for anywhere from 30-45 minutes. They love to have new turf to scratch up and they are tremendously entertaining to watch. Lisa has taken to following me around . . . and if I bend down, rather than running away as she used to (and as the others still do), she will sort of crouch and wait to be petted. It's awfully cute to see. After a few strokes she'll get up, ruffle herself, and join her buddies in the scratching and bug chasing. But she never gets too very far away from me.

Sidebar: I was telling a friend this heartwarming, or what I thought was heartwarming, story, and he commented thusly: "I dunno, sounds an awful lot like Lisa is going into a breeding crouch for you. Apparently you're her boyfriend."

I will continue to think that she views me as a sister, or cool best girlfriend, or something. I'm no one's rooster.

Two whole days off--what house projects do I want to take on?

Someone wise once wrote that you know you're an old house owner when you look forward to vacations as time to work on the house. That's exactly what I'll be doing next week. After a particularly difficult couple of weeks (read: months) at work, I am going to take a Friday/Monday combo off. And the house better look out!, because I'm coming at her with tools in hand and a whole lotta determination.

High on my list:

• Whip out the heat gun and strip some trim and maybe a few doors while I'm at it
• Finish the two huge lasagna beds outside before it gets too cold...then they can just sit there all winter while we work on stuff inside.
• Start yanking up carpet.
• Start listing house-found items on eBay. It's time. We're tripping over ourselves, and we could use the cash! Our checking account is starting to look mighty pitiful.
• Finish the sweater I began knitting for V three seasons ago. The same sweater I have been promising to have finished by "the next cold season." Gee, I wonder why he's stopped believing that?

Since I am a chronic overscheduler, I figure that I'll be able to get at least three of the above finished. I believe I will plan to finish that sweater (honest!), strip the trim/doors, and begin eBaying my little heart out.

I'm so looking forward to having a nice long weekend to do nothing but house stuff. This has been a long time coming.

What kinds of plants I winter sowed

Here's a partial list of what I successfully grew from seed over the past three years. I had never, ever managed to grow something from seed before now.

--sunflowers (4 varieties)
--blanketflower
--daisies (several varieties)
--herbs (catnip, basil, chives, flat parsley, thyme, anise hyssop, rue, oregano, dill, cilantro)
--coleus
--black-eyed susans (a couple of different varieties)
--butterfly bush
--nicotiana
--perennial flax
--rose campion
--decorative grasses
--trailing lobelia
--forget-me-nots
--tomatoes (yes, tomatoes)
--calendula (which quickly became a HUGE favorite of mine)
--celosia
--columbine
--bachelor buttons (annual and perennial)
--impatiens
--scented stock
--marigolds (several varieties)
--red penstemon
--tons of poppies
--sage (purple and traditional)
--coneflower
--coreopsis
--allium
--chamomile
--tithonia ("Mexican Sunflower")

There are others, but without looking at my log (yes, I'm a dork, I kept a log) I can't list them all. These are just off the top of my head.

Gardening on the cheap--winter sowing!

You will not believe me. I understand that you will not believe me. What I am about to tell you, however, is completely true and is unexaggerated. You can sow seeds all through the winter and in the spring, you will most likely have more plants than you can shake a stick at!

I am a huge fan of a process called winter sowing. I was turned on to it a few years back by the kind folks over at the GardenWeb. There is a Winter Sowing forum that I was encouraged to check out. So many threads from people who were wildly successful with growing plants from seed. I had always thought growing from seed meant light setups, a greenhouse, and lots and lots of work. But the more I read, the more winter sowing made sense--think of it as doing what Ma Nature does, but you're just helping her along a bit. Plants typically go to seed in the late summer/early fall. Those seeds fall to the ground, where they stay until they're scratched up and eaten by birds and squirrels, or they germinate and grow.

To winter sow, you take containers of whatever kind (I use milk jugs, orange juice jugs, whatever I can find--bonus, it's recycling!!), take the lids off, cut the tops of the jugs partially off leaving a "hinge," put potting soil into them about 4" high, press seeds into the soil, moisten thoroughly, tape the tops back on, and set the whole deal outside to face the winter. You do not bring them inside, even when there's a blizzard on the way. Snow, ice, etc. will not hurt your seeds in their protective little homes (for a more detailed explanation go to wintersown.org) .Basically, you're creating mini greenhouses for your seeds. When the temperatures start to rise, you'll see your containers bursting with seedlings. :) My first year I sowed about 110 containers and had enough to entirely fill a 30x20 foot bed, plus I gave dozens of plants to friends, neighbors, complete strangers....you get the picture. Let's just say I was very successful. And my total outlay of cash was about 20 bucks for enough potting soil to fill all those containers.

The two best things about winter sowing (in my opinion) are that it is tremendously cost-effective--just the cost of potting soil and seeds, and sometimes you can get seeds from a friend's garden for free, and it's a good way to recycle all those plastic jugs we accumulate throughout the year.

If you'd like to have a huge, lush, full garden, I really encourage you to look into winter sowing. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised!

Here's to you, fellow bloggers!

I have been reading a lot of posts from fellow bloggers who have serious restorations on their hands. They are sharing living space with raccoons and other critters because their houses have no windows, or they are showering at the local truck stop every day because the bathroom is completely nonfunctional. Or they are attempting to have the semblance of a normal life while not one single room of their home is livable.

My hat is off to you, ladies and gentlemen. You know who you are. When I read your posts I am simply overwhelmed at the patience and care you display.

Keep on rockin'.

Walk-in closets....sigh...a girl can dream, can't she?

Here are sketches of our proposed addition. We are planning to bump out the existing kitchen/bathroom to the north about 10 feet and add a bathroom and laundry room on the first floor, then a bathroom and (gasp!) master walk-in closet on the second floor.

Feast your eyes on these babies! :) Aren't they beautiful?

The two potential layouts for the first floor laundry/bath...I'm partial to the one on the left because it has all that glorious counter space!
















And the two potential layouts for the second floor bath/closet....these are very similar. I think the only difference is that the room sizes change a wee bit from layout to layout.

Yippee! It worked better than I thought it would!

Aren't you just ECSTATIC when something actually lives up to its own hype? I know I am! Take for instance my ongoing quest to have sparkling clean white laundry. Between the minerals in our well water and the natural tendency of white laundry to become dingy over time, I thought I was fighting a losing battle. Optical brighteners didn't really do anything. Bleach just turned them yellow. Oxygenating detergents didn't do anything. Nor did copious amounts of Spray&Wash. Ugh. How frustrating.

Enter my book of old-fashioned/frugal remedies and simple country living. I flipped through to see if there was any information to be found on laundry. In fact, there was! Baking soda and white vinegar was supposed to do the trick. There were no real measurements listed, so I just took a bucket and put about 1/4 cup of baking soda in, then poured probably 2 cups of white vinegar. First of all, be forewarned: this stuff FIZZ-FIZZ-FIZZES and if you don't have enough "headroom" you could end up with quite the volcano!

After it had stopped making with the fizz, I simply immersed those pieces that were dingy to my eyes, let 'em sit for a few seconds, then tossed them into the washer. When I began pulling pieces out to put them into the dryer, I could hardly believe my eyes. All of the white laundry looked brighter. Every single piece. I guess from the soda/vinegar clothes swishing around with the rest of it. And the items that been dunked in the solution came out super white. Success at last!! I'm a believer.

Now if I could just find something in that book about how to do major home improvements --you know, like patching plaster, stripping wallpaper, repointing a foundation, stuff like that -- with baking soda and vinegar.

Good news on the cat front

I don't remember if I posted that our orange foofy cat, Romeo, has diabetes. He was diagnosed about 9 months ago, and we think the diabetes is a direct result of a steroid our previous vet had him on for a chronic gum inflammation. Fast forward to Romeo's first visit at the new vet--we had brought him in because he'd lost some weight pretty rapidly, and was also losing fur. Immediately (before she even introduced herself) she says to me "I think your cat is diabetic...have you ever tested his blood sugar?" I didn't think we had, so she drew blood and tested. His numbers were through the roof! Normal is anywhere from 80-100ish, and he was over 400. Still, she was reluctant to put him on insulin in the hopes that, once we stopped giving him the steroid, his diabetes would resolve itself. Nope. No luck there. His glucose numbers continued to be very high, he continued to lose hair and act lethargic, and we continued to worry. I really didn't want to start him on insulin because it's scary enough to use with humans, who are capable of self-testing and all that. We home-test Romeo, but the equipment is not as accurate for kitties as it is for people, so there's some worry there. More than anything I was worried about giving him too much because I made an incorrect judgement.

Deep breaths. Deep breaths. Deep breaths.

At long last, I'm overjoyed to report that his diabetes seems easily controlled with diet. No longer on free fed kibble, Romeo now gets two square meals a day of yummy diabetic canned food mixed with chicken baby food (OK, so he's a little spoiled. What can we say? We love the big lug.). His numbers are now consistently between 90 and 120--and he's not on insulin. We can definitely live with those.

Why I got plastered (AKA the before pictures of the Bathroom of Frankenstein)

Well, I finally got around to resizing these for the web. Behold, the before pictures! I cannot believe what condition our walls were in before I got down and dirty with lime. :-)

This is what it all looked like before demo. I wish you could see just how ugly and bulging the walls were. You also can't see the areas where the plaster had been reduced to simple sand that trickled out steadily into the bathtub (good thing the tub is too small to take a good bath in anyway...). Alas, those endearing aspects simply did not photograph well. But you can sure see the cracking, which had progressed far beyond the hairline stage.

I began chipping away small pieces in the worst spots . . .

And soon discovered that we had two full walls' worth of "worst spots"! ACK!

This picture shows what things looked like after the scratch coat and the brown coat. After these finished curing I ended up having to skim coat the entirety of both walls in order to get a decent finish. And, I'll admit it — I got uber lazy on the skim coat for the back wall. Since we put up a shower liner to avoid having rust stains all over the place again, I figured no one would really ever see that wall, so my efforts to really skim coat that smoothly and nicely were....ummm, shall we say less than robust. Still looks a whole heckuva lot better than it did, though! I'm not sure if I have any pictures of the skim coat before painting. Skim coating, for whatever reason, turned out to be an even filthier job than doing the first two coats!

I couldn't be happier that we're going on a couple of months, and the plaster seems to be holding up well. Rapping on the wall yields a nice solid sound, and it no longer makes that crumbly sound every time you accidentally hit it with your [insert body part here].

Ponderings on karma

Well, the appraiser has been through, and while there were no real surprises (we won't be financing our entire restoration from the sale of an old pair of pliers found in the crawl space...), the bottom line is that we have some very nice pieces.

Most of them will be staying with us, but there are some that V and I are really torn about. Like I mentioned in a previous post, the huge cedar chest is chock full of all sorts of lovely linens and textiles. What to do with those? We're trying so hard to be true to the original intent of the house and its owners...so what does that mean for the baby bonnets? Or the fine linen towels? I'd love for them to go to someone who can appreciate them and give them the kind of home they deserve. But would I just be asking for a heapload of bad karma if I sold them? Should they be donated to a museum, if I can find a taker? That wouldn't help the financial situation with the house, though.

Sometimes I wish I didn't love this house so much. Then I wouldn't give a rat's behind about what we do with the contents that we cannot use. I don't want to live in a museum, but nor do I want to sell or give away things that truly should stay with the house.

All that said, I don't think I've posted any pictures of what we found in the chest. If I've already posted these, my apologies but too bad. You'll just have to look at them again!

I'm too tired to really caption these with any care or accuracy. Hopefully the pictures will speak for themselves.
This is a Victorian (?) sash belt with enameled buckle. LOVE this piece, just love it. No idea what to do with it because it sure wouldn't fit around my waist! (it's about 20" give or take)

Scarf or runner of some sort? No clue.


An absolutely GORGEOUS child's dress.

















I was pretty clueless about this piece until the kind folks over at the eBay forums told me it's probably a piano scarf or a Victorian paisley shawl. It's about 6x6 or maybe 7x7 and is simply beautiful.


















And here's a link to the whole shebang--at least what has been photographed and/or documented in some way. Mostly linens and porcelain. If you see anything worth millions please let me know. ;)

http://s76.photobucket.com/albums/j13/ginam01/?action=view&slideshow=true

Would you buy organic (or at least natural ingredient only) dog shampoo?

My friend and I have been talking about ways to make some extra cash and hopefully in the process build up a business that is strong enough for us to cut back a little on the ol' work schedules as they are right now. Work just has not been fulfilling these last several months. I'm finding myself very apathetic about marketing. If I could do preservation work full-time, I'd love it, but it's a hard field to break into, especially for woman and especially in the trades. We aren't in a place financially where I can just leap into a complete career change, but the more time I spend doing things other than marketing, the antsier I get to make the switch!

I'd call what I'm going through a midlife crisis, but I'm not quite to midlife yet. I guess I'm having a pre-midlife crisis. Anyway, we came upon this idea to make earth-friendly, natural, as organic as possible, pet products: shampoos, detanglers, treats, even collars/leashes and sweaters and the like. Since she has a dog and we have the cats, we have our test subjects all lined up, and we have friends with ferrets, birds, and rats/hamsters/guinea pigs. So we basically cover the spectrum of common pets. We're going to start working in our test kitchen this week, trying to develop a good basic line that is expandable if the need arises in the future.

Any pet owners out there? Would you spring for stuff like that, as long as it was not prohibitively expensive? We're counting on you to say YES! :)

Bathroom of Frankenstein

Maybe I shouldn't say it that way. It's not really that bad. But our bathroom is definitely still not entirely up to snuff. The plaster work I did is still holding up, even the patches of the patches (see my earlier angst-ridden posts about my hard work on our plaster and the subsequent heartbreaking cracks that appeared . . . ), but there's still a ways to go.

It's been too bloody hot to break out the heat gun, and we have not yet knuckled under and actually purchased a Silent Paint Remover (it is on the short list, especially since we borrowed one for a time). Thus, the trim is still all canary yellow, which looks positively smashing against the rust-colored walls (rust colored to match the rusty mineral water from our well--if you can't beat it, join it!). There is one strip, about 2 feet long and 4 inches wide, that I stripped with the heat gun before our temperatures became like those on the surface of the sun. I just won't strip paint when the temperature is in the triple digits.

And then there's the area behind the toilet. We don't particularly want to take the toilet apart in order to plaster and paint behind it, so what we're thinking of doing is (shhhhhh!) a quick-and-dirty fix that will improve it aesthetically, but that won't require dismantling or moving of major fixtures. We're going to find a thin piece of plywood, paint it the appropriate rust color, slide it behind the toilet, and screw it into the wall. I know, I know, it's not the ideal way to go about things, but this bathroom will, very hopefully, be completely redone and enlarged in the next year or two, so I think we can make ourselves live with a quick fix. Most people probably won't even notice by the time we're done, and we have an over-the-toilet etagere because of our total lack of storage in the bathroom. The etagere will also hide most of our sinful coverup.

Don't tell anyone. I trust that my secret is safe with you!

Horse show or train wreck...you be the judge!

I showed in my very first ever dressage show on Sunday. What an experience! On Saturday, I had a final lesson with my trainer, who was very pleased with how well things went. I ride one of her horses, a fabulous Steady Eddie with just enough fire to be a fun ride. He's definitely been around the block and has shown most of his life. My trainer told me he'd be a little livelier at the show because they always give him an adrenaline rush. But I'd seen him at shows before; he was always very forward-going, soft, and just lovely. I was really looking forward to the show.

Then came show day. Suddenly my -- gelded, I should note -- Steady Eddie Arabian mount thinks he's a wild stallion roaming the desert gathering himself a harem!! The warmup ring was a joke. He just would not listen to me. Giraffe neck, not focused, uneven tempo to his gaits. Not good signs. We got into the ring to do our first test and things really fell apart. I'll spare you all the gory details, but suffice to say the judge was NOT impressed with our performance. Our score was pretty sad.

The second test went somewhat better. At least I felt like I had more of my Steady Eddie and less Walter Farley's Black Stallion. It still wasn't great, but it was better. We ended up placing second in our class, and I came home with a big pink rosette, which made me pretty happy. I have no idea what got into him at that show. Well, my trainer was right--he was definitely "livelier"!!!

More projects than money

V and I have been spending money like we have it lately. :) It's all for stuff we need (well, mostly), but boy oh boy is it difficult to watch that savings account self-drain!

Now we've got a ton of projects we want to work on, and no money! We're going to have to get creative and work for a while on things that require more sweat than cash. Looks like it might be time to start pulling wallpaper down, or carpet up! I'm itching to see what condition our first-floor hardwoods are in...if they're anything like the rest of the house, they'll look great. But you never know.

If there's anyone who follows this board and has splendoriferous ideas for no- or low-budget projects, by all means bring them on! I can only watch so much TV. I need to work!

Ye olde cedar chest

Well, our visitors had a great time, as did we. We really enjoyed the whole weekend, even though the temperatures were nearing Hades-like highs. And oh, the humidity! It was like breathing underwater. Under really hot water, no less. But still, we all had fun. The house sure did seem quiet on Sunday afternoon!

While they were here, we had a little fun time with the house. There are storage spots we have not yet gone through completely, either from lack of time or from lack of accessibility, or maybe just lack of knowing what to do with stuff once we find it, so why not leave it where it is until we catch a clue or two???

So over the weekend we sat down and decided it'd be fun to go through the cedar chest in our bedroom. This thing is mammoth--as wide as a full bed and at least two feet wide as well as two feet deep--and we've opened it but have never pulled anything out of it, really. Besides the parasol that was sitting right on top of everything (which we had seen the first time we opened the chest), we had no idea what we'd find. So what did we find? Tea towels by the dozen, some still wrapped in tissue and obviously unused; bed linens; table linens; a baby dress with home-tatted lace (at least that's what the note tucked into it said); fabric scraps from assorted wedding gowns and other important garments; several lovely handkerchiefs; and several pairs of woollen stockings that still had the original tags on them. They're beautiful, but it's very difficult for me to imagine wearing these on a daily basis! Talk about a different time. I whine and cry if I have to wear anything on my legs at all besides Sally Hansen's airbrush pantyhose (if you haven't tried them, do--they're fabulous!).