Natty and pal (not sure if he’s a Nate or not) returned today to take advantage of the wet weather and start burning the huge brush piles created from all the tree clearing.

So far only one is lit, the one closest to the house.

The fire started off with a huge smoky plume, straight up into the air:

As it got hotter, the smoke started roiling and twisting:

Now it’s settled into a straight-forward looking flame with a little smoke on the side:

The guys are taking every precaution. They’re members of the Thetford Volunteer Fire Department, the ground and everything around is soaking after two weeks of rain, and they even made sure the hose is handy, just in case…

That’s how subtle and slight the changes are these days.

Mostly what we’ve been doing is painting, spreading grass seed, picking up rocks out of the yard, and, yes, watching for the grass to grow.

What? You want evidence? Ok…

Here’s the second coat of wall (and ceiling) paint in the upstairs bathroom:

What’s left to do is the trim (white) and the floor (I think it’s a bluish/violet color, but I honestly can’t remember right now!).

Here’s the first coat of paint on the guest room walls and ceiling:

What’s left to do is the second coat of this color, then the trim (white) and the floor (a moss green – the same color the floor used to be before it was traumatized by work boots).

When McKernon did the final grade, they did a “rough” grade, which meant they picked up the largest rocks. That left a field of smaller rocks (pebbles up to watermelon sized). We take a half hour here and there to pick them up and either dump them down the hill behind the house or onto a pile that we’re going to use to cover the septic pump vent:

And, honest-to-goodness, today I was down on the straw, looking for baby grass and I finally saw some!

You’ll probably want to go to the Flickr site to see this picture in a larger format so that you can actually see the darling little seedlings.

This picture also gives you an idea of how many rocks are still left to pick up. We’re paying Hyla 10 cents a rock, but it’s still not going very quickly…

Brian, Eric, and Mark were here at the end of last week, checking off as many of the remaining small interior issues as they could, and also finishing the exterior work.

On Wednesday, they dropped off the excavator (an old friend):

The first major landscaping task was to move this brush pile (next to the new driveway)

down the hill to the left of the house

so that it can be burnt later on (probably by Natty and other Nates when we’ve had enough rain).

Mark (excavator guy) also collected most of the large rocks and made some piles so that we can use them to build a retaining wall when we raise the grade for the front steps.

The other major task was to use the “york rake” (a big rake on the back of another small tractor) to pick up all the large rocks and smooth the grade. They did a nice job. Here’s the smoothed out grade at the back of the house:

We may want to have a little more work done here eventually to make this area more level, but that can wait. For now, we have a relatively smooth slope from the deck down to the apple trees.

Here’s the smoothed yard to the left of the house (to the right, if you’re standing on the deck/porch and looking out to the view):

As Michael noticed, if you start where those hay bales are (approximately where the house used to be), it’s a pretty long (and somewhat terrifying) sledding slope down into the newly cleared area.

Finally, they spread grass seed over most of the smoothed area. Around the house, they spread a hay mulch that they say has the grass seed embedded in it. We’ll see.

Around 3:30 pm, Eric and Brian loaded up the rest of their tools and extra scraps of wood, etc. and left:

Someone from McKernon will be back in the next week or two to finish a couple other minor things, but their work here is essentially done. In a way, we’ll miss them, but we’re ready to regain custody of our home.

Michael put together this panoramic photo of our new, opened up view.

Tip: To see a bigger version, click the image to go to Flickr, then click the “All Sizes” icon above the image in Flickr.

As I mentioned in the last entry, we have three tireless teenage boys cutting the trees down between us and our view. These trees all stood behind the barn that used to be here, and since the house was pointed in a slightly different direction, they didn’t really block our view before. Now, however, they were entirely in the way and, especially in Michael’s opinion, needed to be gone.

Unfortunately, I didn’t think to take pictures of the view (lack thereof) before all the cutting started, but here’s what things looked like from the deck earlier this week:

And here’s what it looks like right now:

And here’s some of next winter’s firewood:

For the camera, all I had to do was reformat the memory card.

This week was a burst of house renovation activity. Most days, we had between seven and nine people working here: two to three painters, two to three contractors, and two to three high-school students cutting down trees.

The contractors were McKernon folks, finishing up various details inside and out before the final grading and outdoor work is done (next week?!). The painters are folks we hired to do the 22 new windows and 9 new door frames — exacting, detailed work that would have taken us at least a year to do on our own. As it is, it’s taking the painters 2-3 weeks, nearly full time to do it for us. The high-school students are a neighbor’s son and his friends who love to clear trees during their spring break. Coincidentally, all three of these very tall, polite, meticulous young men are named Nathaniel….

Some photos:

Inside, McKernon has been doing finishing touches like sealing the slate tile (on the vanity top and under the Jotul wood stove), covering the downstairs bathroom vent with a nice, handmade grate:

It’s a small thing, but nice to see it done. Also in that room, the barnboard around the tub is done, and the tile, and the grout, and the caulk and… well, all that’s left to do is a little more painting!

Here’s what the tub looks like now:

In the upstairs bathroom, Eric brought some nice cherry to put on the walls next to the tub to finish things off there:

That yellowish swath of paint over the cherry is the new color for the bathroom. In the photo it looks tan, but in reality it’s a fairly pale yellow. Aside from painting, this room is pretty much done, too. For both bathrooms, we still need to find and install details like toilet paper holders and towel racks, but nothing that can’t wait another year… 🙂

While we’re upstairs, I can show you the final touches on the paint job in Hyla’s room:

This is Michael’s smart solution to the uneven edge we have at the baseboard because of old plaster — it’s nearly impossible to paint a straight edge because the plaster is so bumpy and uneven. So he thought of the waves to eliminate a straight edge, and, besides, it looks pretty cool. These waves currently go around the entire room except for the door; we’ll add them to the door when we finish repainting the rest of the door white.

In the new living room downstairs, the Morso wood stove installation wasn’t to code because the ceiling beams were too close to the stove pipe. McKernon moved everything back so that they are now a legal, safe 6″+ from the pipe:

And they also added a mantel made from one of the original, leftover beams:

We still have a small stack of old beams on the porch to use in other projects or sell. We also have scraps of extra “barn board” (mostly floor boards from the second floor of the original ell). This week, Brian put some of those barn boards to work finishing off the entry way to the new living room:

Things are moving along outside, too. Eric put a nice facing of brick around the two chimneys:

And Eric, Brian, and others finished priming the new clapboards:

Meanwhile, Brian built us some porch and deck steps. This one is off the short end of the porch:

And this one is in the corner where the porch and deck meet:

They also put the skim coat of plaster over the Eco-block on the foundation to give it a more permanent finish:

I’ll publish this entry now and update you with another one about the tree clearing after lunch…

I’ve been meaning to post, but I’ve been out of town a lot, not a whole lot is happening at the house AND the digital camera is not working correctly right now and won’t let me save more than one photo at a time. So this will be a quick update in words; I’ll add some pictures as soon as I figure out the camera problem.

A couple of weeks ago, the stove guys came back and finished the installation of both wood stoves. For the Morso stove, however, they said the installation was not to code because the pipe/collar going through the ceiling was too close to the beams around it by several inches. Unsafe. We had McKernon back last week and they cut and chiseled the beams back so that we now have a legal six inches of clearance all around the pipe.

At the same time, McKernon added the mantel behind the Morso. The mantel is a sawn off section from one of the unused ell posts. It looks very nice. Also finished that week was the barn board and trim for the soaking tub, some plastering (spots that still needed to be done or redone for various reasons), and several other small items on the interior punch list. We’re getting there…

This week, we have some painters working here to prime and paint the interior side of all of the new windows and door frames (something like 22 windows and 9 door frames). This is time-consuming, exacting work and we just weren’t up to doing the job correctly. We can do the big flat surfaces (walls and ceilings) decently, but were pretty sure we’d be unhappy with the results if we painted the windows ourselves. Money well spent. The main painter, Amy, is here every day starting around 8:30 and leaves around 4:00. She’s careful and nice, and loves animals. Amy is the first woman to work on the house (aside from me and Alix, of course), and it’s really nice to finally see a woman as part of the team.

Also this week, we’ve had one outfit come out to give us an estimate on raising the grade at the front of the house by building a retaining wall so we can get rid of the ridiculous set of wooden stairs and have just a few stone steps leading to the front door. The more we use those steps, the less we like them, and I hate watching poor old Phoebe trying to leap up them several times a day.

I believe we have another group coming to give us an estimate on the same project tomorrow.

In a way, there’s lots of activity, but not a lot except painting is actually getting done right now. I expect things will get busier again in the next couple of weeks when McKernon returns to do the final outside work and the last of the interior punch list.

More soon, with pictures…

Eric, our tile buddy, and Chad, our plumber friend, have both visited us in the past week and so we now have two working bath tubs.

Here’s the upstairs tub:

We had chosen a frosted version of the blue glass tile that forms a blue stripe around the shower walls. Whoever did the tile ordering, though, didn’t order quite enough of the frosted blue and we were about 8 tiles short. Eric and I found a box with nine leftover shower tiles, so we decided to use those to complete the tub tiling by placing the glossy tiles in random locations between the frosted ones. It actually turned out nicely, as you can see in this picture:

Here’s the faucet that was installed just today:

It’s funny. We had to choose so many different fixtures and faucets and tiles and this and that — neither Michael nor I have any memory of choosing this faucet. It sure looks fine, but is it what we wanted? Who knows. And who cares at this point! At least it works, and it looks nice, too.

Downstairs, the tub is nearly complete. The tile is installed and grouted (in a sand-like tan color that reminds me of the beach….) and old barn board (from the original ell) is now up on the sides:

The trim still needs to be finished, but this is overall what the tub will look like when it’s done.

Also this week, the wood stove installers returned (again) and got the Morso stove installed:

Of course, they didn’t have a piece they needed to finish installing the other stove, so they’ll be back in a few days or so to complete that. We have no cut firewood to burn yet, and the weather is turning quite springlike, but it’s nice to see at least one stove ready to go when we need it.

Container number 2 was just hauled away about 20 minutes ago:

This one was particularly exciting because the container was well frozen to the gravel driveway. The driver originally pulled up to the side of the container and hooked the chain to a corner and turned the winch on. The container didn’t budge. Instead, the truck was slowly being pulled toward the container.

The driver said he might have to come back, maybe even later today when the ground unfroze a bit more, but, on second thought, he really didn’t want to come back later on, so, instead he drove around to the front of the container (as shown in the first picture above), attached the chains to the end of the container, put the edge of the truck’s bed under it, began to raise the bed and BAM! The container reared up a couple of feet and nearly flipped over on its side. Of course, that was the point when I had my camera in my pocket…

Things calmed down after that and the container placidly slid up onto the truck.

So, now we have a clear (old) driveway:

Speaking of the landscape, I thought I’d share with you how truly lovely the yard is now that the snow is gone:

McKernon will be back eventually to clean all of this up, remove the big rocks, smooth the grade a bit more, and plant grass seed. Until then, though, this is the yard.

When I was outside taking pictures, I remembered that I hadn’t taken a picture yet of this beam:

which is leaning up on the porch, awaiting its transformation into a mantel above the Morso stove. The stove folks were supposed to come this week to install both stoves, but a part was on backorder so we’ve rescheduled to Monday.

Eric, on the other hand, did come by earlier this week to finish tiling the tubs. Here’s the upstairs tub with its blue tile on:

He still needs to come back (soon!) to grout the tile, but this is a good step. The plumber can now come any time to install the faucet. Oh, and that orange (and white) wall will be painted a pale yellow sometime in the foreseeable future.

If you have time read something else, here’s a link to a story Michael found about a couple who is moving a house (in Maryland):

Howard house hits snag in its journey