That Time I Didn't Die

The best thing we have purchased for this farm so far is a bucket van.

It's a van. With a bucket.

We thought the bucket van would be a much safer alternative to a ladder when it was time to work on high up places, like the roof, or a chimney, or any of the second-floor-level exterior siding and windows. And it is.

The first thing you should know about the bucket van is that it's pretty fun. Ok, my sister didn't think so, and I'm pretty sure that Chris places it squarely between "better than a ladder" and "not nearly as good as solid ground." But I think it's fun to ride in.

This next photo was taken just before I probably would have gone to the emergency room if not for the bucket van.

But everything looks so calm...

See those two pieces of siding right below my crowbar? Under that siding was bats. I took off one piece of siding, and a little bat was staring at me like "hey, there used to be a roof over my head..." and then it flew away. Then I pried up the next piece of siding... and seriously about seven bats dropped out and zoomed away. And when bats suddenly come whooshing out of your siding... you jump.

Had I been up on a ladder, I am quite certain I would have jumped two stories down. In the lovely bucket van, though, I jumped about a foot, which brought me to the other side of the bucket, safely enclosed by the high sides.

Have I mentioned I really like this van?

Not only did the bucket lift help keep me safe, but it allowed us to make pretty short work of the rest of the siding on this end of the house. Just three more sides to go!

Things I've Painted So Far

Since these rooms aren't really done, I figured a quick process update would be enough. I painted some things.

First, I painted the upstairs back bedroom. It was in the best shape of all the bedrooms, and a fresh coat of paint cheered it right up.

Before

After

Soon the floors and trim will be painted, the light fixture will be installed, the window will be reglazed, we'll find a door for this room... and then it's all decor from there out!

The other painting project was the conclusion of the earlier project of revealing and sanding the floors in the master bedroom.

Scraped and sanded

Painting!

Painted floors

The floors weren't in good enough shape to refinish -- the wood was soft and pretty roughed up in a number of places -- and we figured that painting would have been a more durable and convenient coating "back in the day" than having to routinely wax and/or oil the floors in the private family quarters.

So, two painting projects down!

All Mod Cons

After spending the winter bucket-flushing our toilet at the farm, it is with great excitement that I reveal that we now have a true flush toilet AND hot running water.

All modern conveniences! Also, I need this sign.

This was not an easy task. First, we (well, Chris) had to do all the initial plumbing repairs in the basement. Then we dragged the old hot water heater out of the basement. Even after we realized it had been sitting there full of water for ten years while the house was empty -- and immediately drained it out -- the thing was still ridiculously heavy. There are no pictures of us pulling it out because we were too busy trying not to be crushed... in the end, we pulled it up the steps with the truck.

The next step was the easiest one -- we hired lovely people to come to our main home and do an HVAC overhaul, which included installing a new hot water heater.

We then hauled our old water heater up to the farm, wrestled it down the steps -- thank goodness for the slightly creepy basement storm door -- and Chris got to work reinstalling the pump for the house, installing the water heater, and fixing joints in the plumbing that suddenly decided it would actually be best if they were leaking just a little. Finally, everything looked good from the basement, so we took our new plumping for a test drive.

"New" water heater

The toilet flushed like it had been waiting for years to be properly flushed. I picked up some bowl cleaner, and got it a bit spiffed up. The toilet has a new seat coming to it still, but it pretty much got right to work.

And then we tried the faucets...

and got nothing.

The water was clearly pumping. We could even hear it move into the pipes. And then... no water. With some trepidation, we asked ourselves... "where is the water going?" There's not that many places water can go, after all, and it didn't seem to be running out inside the walls. We could get water out of the shower head, but not the bathtub faucet. We were left with only one possibility. The water was stuck in the pipes.

To test this theory, Chris opened up the faucet handle on the tub.

I promise, the coloration has been altered a LOT to make it look this grimy.

I've tried to change the tinting on the photo above so you can see a little more easily the gush of water that's coming straight out of the wall where the bathtub faucet used to be. The water was definitely flowing! Now we just had to find a better way to let it out.

We're coming to save you, water! Just hang on!

Fortunately, the previous owners had -- we think -- installed a new bathtub, which had necessitated cutting a hole in the wall between the bathroom and the master bedroom. To fix the whole, they had cut a piece of drywall and then, as far as we could tell, gooped drywall mud around the joints with their hands. Chris removed this panel, umm, rather easily.

And indeed -- the water was in the pipes! And the pipes... well, the pipes had been sitting for at least ten years in a house that had not been quite properly shut down. The pipes were clogged with dirt and rust and general gunk. After taking things apart -- not only in the tub, but in the bathroom and kitchen sinks -- and reaming out the pipes, putting them back, running a little water, then repeating the whole process a few more times, we had running water!

Yes, it looks like we have a magical chocolate fountain for a kitchen sink, but don't drink that.

 Ok, so then we did it all a few more times, and then let the pipes flush for awhile. That's more like it. And that is how we came to have hot and cold running water, a functional shower, and flush toilets.

Oh, look! Water from a faucet!

This Place is a Dump; or, What's Under That? Lawn Edition

So, one day, Chris asked me to fill up some buckets from an ash pile out in the lawn so that we could use the ash to fill in some holes elsewhere in the lawn. Yes, the lawn is incredibly uneven.

I started to dig... and it quickly turned out that this was not just an ash pile. It was a burn pile. As in, the place where previous owners dumped their garbage and then burned it, either in the days before or as a free alternative to municipal trash service.

The thing is that those previous owners didn't just put things in the pile that would actually burn. For instance, glass. I filled about two five-gallon buckets with broken pieces of glass, and that's only digging down about 3 - 4 inches in a space about the size of a twin bed.

And speaking of beds...

I also pulled out a boxspring? mattress? one excrutiating coil at a time, including at least two times when we had to hook a loop of metal coil over the hitch of the truck in order to pull it out from the ground.

This past weekend, Chris finally (and bravely) took a rototiller to that area, which -- in addition to evening the ground out quite a bit -- turned up even more broken glass and a few more coils of bed. Guess we'll be embarking on another archeological dig through the recent past soon. At least we don't have to come home, carefully wash it all, and then try to reassemble all the pieces in order to learn about the previous occupants...

Shed Flip-Flop

So far, I think this is the most fully completed project, in that it's actually all done and not just advanced to a new stage of needs-to-be-worked-on: Chris turned the shed around.

This, you may recall, was the shed as viewed from the road.

It was basically fine, but Chris decided that it needed a door for added security. And a lean-to, for added storage. And for the door to face the back of the property, for a bit of additional security and privacy.

Spoiler alert -- at no time did we actually move the shed in order to achieve these goals.

Flip-flopped!

 

Instead, Chris just took off all the siding on the back of the shed, moved it to the front, and vice versa. A relatively simple inversion! Then it was just a matter of building a door and lean-to out of scrap boards (of which we're gathering a fairly large collection) and putting up a section of fence to keep the neighbors from having to look at our storage.

Shed -- now with working door!

Building supplies -- now out of the neighbors' view!

View from the back

I think the new inverted shed looks a lot more put together now that you don't pull up to the house and immediately find yourself staring into its dark recesses. And I guess I lied just a little earlier -- the shed does still need a fresh coat of barn red paint, so it's not quite "project complete" just yet. That should only be a quick hour or so of work, so hopefully it's a project we can check off the list fairly soon.

Saving the Porch

Ok, it's been a long time since I posted last. The good news is that the delay means we've been working hard at actually doing things and haven't had time to write about them.

One of the things that got done is some work to keep that nasty crack in the front porch from spreading.

This is the crack.

And by "spreading," in this case, I mean "opening up even more and thus completely separating the front pillars from the rest of the porch, causing the whole thing to collapse into a pile of rubble and sadness."

To start off, Chris had bolted the porch together. We figured that at the very least, this should help us know if the porch was actively continuing to settle/fall, and at best, might keep any additional shifting from occurring.

Bolts!

Then my dad came up to help out for a day on the farm, and he and Chris got to work on the porch. The plan was to truss it all up, jack up the roof to take the weight off, and then use come-alongs to draw the two pieces of porch together.

Like so.

This did pull things together slightly, but it ultimately put too much pressure on the pillar at the corner, and we realized that if we pulled any more, we might just pull the pillar down. That would have been counterproductive, so we abandoned the rig before things went too far.

The good news was that during the assembly of this contraption, we had found that the front line of the porch wasn't actually that far out of plumb -- in other words, it had pulled away horizontally more than it had tipped forward. That allowed us to still feel pretty darn good about it when we moved on to plan B -- fill in the crack.

Mortaring the crack.

 By the end of the day, Chris and Dad had the whole thing filled in. Unsurprisingly, this made the porch look significantly less run down.

The braces are off now, and I have to say, this is probably one of the best things we've done so far. It also helps that the rock pile up front has dwindled significantly as Chris -- with the help of various parents -- has been steadily breaking up and carting away the former porch railings. Simply not having the porch look like it has a huge crack that's about to topple the whole thing down into the yard is a major leap in curb appeal -- and now we have a porch we really can feel good about sitting out on to eat lunch or take a break!