There is so much going on at the farm, we’re not sure we can fit it into one post, but here goes…
We’ve been busy working on building ourselves a little kitchen table, and a bench for the mudroom, both from boards we pulled from our stock in the barn. While we do have some power tools, and quite a few hand tools, we’re lacking in the area of cabinetry/furniture making tools, but Jenny was able to borrow some pipe clamps from one of the ladies with whom she swims in the mornings (whose husband is a carpenter), so we could glue up our table top. We began by washing down the boards (see below), running them through the table saw to even up the edges and make them square, cut biscuit slots in the edges, then joined them together. After curing, we used a hand planer to take off any edges sticking up board-to-board, then sanded and applied a satin urethane. There are few things in life more satifying than the feel of hand planing boards- feeling the blade cut into the grain, and peeling up a layer so thin you can nearly see through it. Most of the paneling in our home still shows the marks from Daniel’s planer back when he built this home 236 years ago. We just have to add skirts and attach the legs to both the table and the bench, but we got distracted by getting the kitchen chimney ready to be re-tuckpointed, lined, and capped.
This chimney, which used to be the summer kitchen fireplace, is in the wall between our kitchen and laundry room, and we will be using it for an exhaust fan over our stove. We just have to wire up an outlet and install a fan/hood. The chimney, being wide open all these years, has allowed rain to drop in and run down to the beam below the kitchen floor, so we now have to shore up that beam, and add a couple of lally columns down below to support the wall and chimney.
Our mason came Friday morning to re-tuckpoint the top three courses of brick, which had come loose. After he had finished up, we had him cover the top of the chimney with plastic as we were expecting rain Friday afternoon/evening, and it was a good thing, because, it RAINED!
The rain started around 1PM, and came down hard for a couple of hours, then let up. Jenny and Allie had given me a weather station for my birthday, which I set up on the back deck to calibrate once the storm had let up. When the rain started again around 7PM, the weather station was indicating that it was coming down at rates of up to 5.5″ per hour. We could hear the rain coming down the chimney (which we found out was due to holes in the plastic put up by the mason), and we also discovered that the outlet pipe for our sump pump in the basement was broken and taped together, so every time the pump would discharge, it was spraying back onto the dirt basement floor. We put a bucket under the leak, and we set our alarm for every hour to empty the bucket. We did lose power for a while, so the water was just building up in the basement. Our basement is only under a small portion of the house, and the walls are just stone boulders, so with the ground so saturated from all the rain we’ve had, it’s just running through the walls and pooling on the floor. We then heard Allie screaming frantically that there was water coming through her ceiling, which we found out later was from a missing shingle on the roof. So between cleaning up Allie’s room, the sump pipe, the chimney, and everything else, it was a very long, stressful night. We later heard our area had received about 9″ of rain in 12 hours. This was on top of very saturated ground because of weeks of nearly daily rain. When morning broke, we began to see how lucky we were, as we tried to get to the town dump (we do not have trash service out here), all the roads were washed out, people’s driveways had been destroyed, and we heard of many people with water in their basements, including an antique house up the road from us with three FEET of water in the cellar. We feel fortunate that we didn’t sustain more damage than we did. We’re so thankful we had the gutters installed last fall, and have been working hard to address any water issues around the house and barn. Here are some images of the storm damage….
The next morning, after finally making it to the dump, we ran to Home Depot for repair supplies. When we got back home, we fixed the sump outlet, and we covered the missing shingle area with plastic (so we can let the roof dry out before installing a new shingle). We also covered the chimney with a tarp in case of any more rain before the mason returned on Monday to finish installing the cap.
We finished painting the hearth room, with the exception of the paneled hearth wall. At some point (likely this winter), we want to pull the paneling off the hearth wall, strip the paint, and apply a glossy urathane to both preserve the wood, and reveal the marks from where the boards were hand-planed by Daniel. Once our contractor finishes repairing the structure under the floor, and we lay down new (salvaged) antique floor planks, we’ll finish the room with a couple of cozy wing-back recliners in front of the hearth, and a small drop-leaf dining table and chairs on the far side. The trim is the same taupe as we’ve used in most of the house, and the walls a soft green, but we may repaint in a darker, olive-y green. At some point, we also intend on pulling down the ceiling to reveal the beams that we’re reasonably certain are there.
With more resources than we had planned for now going to save the barn, we made the difficult decision to hold off on a full bathroom remodel for now. So we began with the intention of just repainting the main bath to brighten it up, but that quickly snowballed once we decided to open up the partition wall, and we discovered the window sill was badly rotted. We ended up taking out the window completely, and using an old growth hemlock plank we found in the barn, we milled ourselves a new sill. Once the weather dries out (hopefully today or tomorrow), we’ll install the new sill, along with new trim, and reinstall the freshly reglazed and painted sashes. We installed new trim around the tub, and reused some of the bead board to build a wainscoting to cover the front. We also stripped the paint from the wall behind our vanity, as it is an original plank wall (the bathroom was originally one of the two bedrooms). Revealing the grain and story of the old planks is always such a treat. These boards reveal shadows of split lath, so this wall was covered with plaster at one time. Back in the days when this house was built, they used to take a thin board, and using a sharp tool (typically a “froe”), would split the board on one side (but not all the way across), then the other, and so on, until they had split the board into a fan, or an accordion. They could then apply that to the wall, and plaster over it. We have revealed the back side of this type of lath in our front hall closet. We’ll cover the stripped plank wall with linseed oil to preserve it, and the rest of the bath we’ll paint “Dove” on the walls, and “Perfect Taupe” on the trim. We’ve used these colors elsewhere in the house, and they are not only appropriate, but they really brighten it up. Here are some images of the process so far… the bright yellow paint will be gone by the next post!
We currently have a very large excavator in our yard, or what’s left of our yard, as we have a contractor here removing all the old stumps from trees that have fallen the past few years, as well as the ones we had removed last fall. We’ll have a full before-and-after story in the next post, but here’s a little preview…
We’re going to take a couple of days off now to help Allie finish packing, and tomorrow we’ll take her off to college! Yikes!
We’re supposed to have a few sunny days ahead, so hopefully things can dry out, and we’ll be back to work on Saturday to finish up the bathroom. More to come, as the next couple of months are going to be very, very busy!
Thanks for following along!
Leave a Reply