Shingle bells.

That's not as clever a title as I hoped it'd be. Anyhow, we left off with the front bay of the house needing to be re-shingled (since our painters proved not to be carpenters, which I guess is ok as long as they don't try to be carpenters). We hired carpenter friends from the North Bennett Street School who did a beautiful job putting up the new shingles. It will be a shame to paint them, really.


Here she is, stripped of her old shingles. This green stuff is the original paper beneath the shingles. Also note the pump jacks they built for themselves.

New tar paper! Now she's definitely waterproof.

Here they go, starting bottom up.



It took them a long time to get this bottom portion done because of the curves and corners, but look how beautifully they overlapped the corners and fitted everything together.

The inner corner between the bay and the porch. Each piece had to be custom fit to the curve here.

And done! Also, it smells so good - just standing next to the house you can smell the cedar in the breeze.

If they are brave enough, they will also repair our porch roof.

LIVE THIS SUNDAY AT THE WORCESTER CENTRUM

SEE THE MONSTER TRUCK BATTLE OUR FRONT LAWN!!!

So here is the set-up for a productive weekend:
1. Hire your cousin to regrade your front lawn.
2. Let him rent earth moving equipment.
3. Leave town.

We hired my cousin Doug who runs a landscaping business to go to town on the yard. First step was to regrade the front and back. However, the last time we were a part of a project of this scale with Doug, he broke two bobcats. So rather than stay and fret, we went to Philadelphia for the weekend.

Doug happy, move dirt.

Front lawn begins to resemble my hairline.

This is what I always imagined would happen if we ran afoul of a repo man or something. While we are out of town, somebody shows up in an armored attack vehicle and comes in through the bay window.

Here Doug is removing the remains of the trees we cut down last fall. In order to do this kind of work you are supposed to call Dig Safe before you dig. We did. They came and told us that our water supply ran right under this stump. Then we dug.

Looking pretty great, no? Who wouldn't want to look out their front windows onto a dirt farm. We are hoping to have a Grapes of Wrath party soon.

The dirt removed from the front was deposited into the vast lowlands in the back yard.

Those of you who have been reading this blog from the start will be familiar with our monolith. It showed up the first time we tried to mow the lawn, and has not moved much since. Moving this 2,000 lb. block of granite presented Doug with a great opportunity to bust a piece of expensive equipment so he jumped at the chance.

Build a better mousetrap......


This rock was in place less than an hour before the neighborhood kids showed up to try and kick it over. Bon Chance!

Painting done! (Almost)

The painters finished up with the house this week, except that we have decided that the front bay of the house needs to be re-shingled. So they will have to come back to paint that when it is done. But otherwise it looks great! The colors look good together, and the trim helps to break up the house and bring out the details a bit more. Check it out:

Isn't she cute?

This is the bay that will get re-shingled during the next week or so by our friend Chris Carrot (not his real name).



The porch roof still needs to be repaired and we have to do some other fixings to the porch, so that's why it still looks like crap. But hopefully it won't for too much longer.

Chaos.

Our poor little house is currently in chaos. We had some down time, thus no new updates, but with the warm weather everything has started at once. The house is getting painted, and all of this week and some of last week, the painters have been out scraping it down and patching it up. Here's what it looks like so far:

Of course, the intermittent rain has prolonged the painting of the house, but it should get done by mid-week next week. Hooray! You can see the darker color for the clapboarding below, with the ivory trim, and the lighter yellow above. Reagan actually visually color-matched these colors to what she found in early layers of the paint chips on the house. So we're being somewhat restorative while keeping with the yellow history of the house.
Also note the removal of the shutters...we realize they'd been on the house for a long time, but they're not original, so we took them off.

You can see that they started repairing and replacing some of the shingles. This has been a bit of a problem that Reagan actually lost sleep over. Just in case you're wondering, this is NOT how to replace shingles:


New shingles should not look like the battered, shrunken old shingles - i.e. like they are British and haven't had braces. And they shouldn't be nailed down in the middle of the exposed shingle. Thankfully, the painters are bringing over a carpenter to do a better job next week. Yikes.

In more exciting news, we got our kitchen cabinets delivered! We decided on the beige Ikea cabinets, and they arrived yesterday in a billion pieces. Amazingly, though, we got them organized last night and already have some upper cabinets installed. Also amazing - they fit!

Here they are going in. Also note the newly installed ceiling fan!

The cabinets fit pretty much perfectly across the top of the wall. We were impressed that we managed to get these up in an hour. (An hour past Reagan's bedtime, but still...) We'll put the wall cabinets that go just below these in tonight. Soon...storage! What a great idea for a kitchen!

FANCIER floors!

We have an actual floor in the kitchen! We finished installing the floating cork floor last night. Not only does it look really nice (especially compared to the lovely plywood floor that we had been living with), but it is soft and sounds nice. Since it's a floating floor, it'll still float and move a little bit until we get the baseboard down.

But now, nothing stands in our way of putting in our cabinets! Except for maybe the fact that we haven't ordered any yet.


Underlayment (foam) for the cork. You can see the metal edging strip we put down to frame the cork against the adjoining wood floors.


The cork going in...once we got started, it went pretty quickly. It just took us a while to figure out just how this very simple click-together system worked.


Adam did some very intricate cutting in order to get the panels to fit around the moldings. (Reagan's brain couldn't handle it.)


Halfway done last Sunday.


Lookin' pretty good, no?


After Monday night's work...which was done all by Reagan's self. (Yes, I even got it under the stove.) This just goes to show how easy this stuff is to put down.


After complete installation last night! Fiver likes the new floor, too.

It's especially good for wrestling.

Now we have to get another coat of sealant on it, then we can put the sink back temporarily. Trying to wash a large stock pot in the tiny bathroom sink has been a larger challenge than putting down the floor.

Fancy floors.

We got the central area of the dining room floor refinished this week, as well as the floor of the coat closet. Both of these are the original pine that is the same as what was refinished in the two rooms upstairs, and it's just a gorgeous warm, red color.

Since one would always have a fancy carpet in the dining room to go underneath the table, they used cheaper wood for the area that wouldn't be seen, and saved the better wood (in this case, the oak) for the edges. We think it actually makes a beautiful and interesting floor the way it is. We plan to strip the rest of the woodwork in the room and hopefully bring the trim and mantel all back to that warm pine color.


The newly painted walls and the refinished floor of the coat closet. It is now a much nicer home for our outerwear. (Try to ignore the scratch marks on the interior of the door on the right...we have no idea how they got there and prefer not to think about it.)

Paint!

After a grueling day of hard work with 3 parents' help, we got the kitchen painted (and 2 closets!). It's very exciting! (We're also a little high from all the paint fumes.) The woodwork still needs a second coat, but it's all clean and pretty. We really couldn't have done this work without the help, so thank you thank you Barbara, Mary, and David. Here are some photos of the progress:


Mary (Adam's mom) working on the walls.


Adam and his precision brush.


Mary (with added height) and David (Adam's dad) slaving away.


Barbara (Reagan's mom) hitting the trim.


Reagan getting frustrated with the edge of the cornice molding.


Light and bright! The colors, off-white and offer-white (a light tan), work well to make a bright and airy kitchen.


The ceiling looks awesome, if we do say so ourselves, except for the one spot that David missed. Next time we'll take the photos with the hanging lights off so they don't make the room look orange.

Additionally, the coat closet in the kitchen and the guest room closet on the 2nd floor got new paint jobs. We decided it's too gross to store our clothes in a musty, dusty, dirty little room. So we fixed that. The coat closet was no big deal, but the bedroom closet was a lot more difficult than expected. This was largely due to the tendency of the paint on the walls to wash off. Calcimine paint is common in historic homes, and it is basically made of chalk and glue, which, by itself, will not peel, but anything you put on it will. That's why all of our ceilings are losing their paint.

Anyhow, so it was a messy process to prep this closet, but we used the leftover paint from our bedroom to brighten it up. Hopefully it will not peel off until after we have moved out...


Barbara working in the closet.


The closet primed, but still fairly unsightly.


Painted with the shelves put back in.


Ok, so this is an unexciting photograph, but how do you capture a closet, really? But it's nice and clean, and we feel much more comfortable storing things in there now.