Opening Doors

When we first looked at the farmhouse, one of the things we really liked is that it still had a lot of the old fixtures and detailing, including the door hardware. The downside to this was that this door, going from the front porch into the parlor, was unopenable. We weren't sure if the door was just totally jammed shut, or if it was locked using the skeleton key (which we didn't have anyway).

Antique security system: the doors just don't open.

Then, this summer, we discovered that Chris's father had a whole bunch of skeleton keys that he'd picked up over the years. This made the strategy of randomly trying keys to see if they'd fit the lock seem a bit more reasonable -- or at least less like we'd have to start by purchasing a whole bunch of keys that probably wouldn't work. So, off I went, keys in hand.

I started out trying all the keys, but it seemed like there was potentially some issue with the lock mechanism itself -- a few keys felt like they were trying to push against something, but the lock wouldn't budge. So, I decided to go back to the option of brute force, just in case that worked. It wasn't an especially humid day, which was good, because it turned out that the answer to "why doesn't the door open?" was just that it was swollen (and a little bit painted) shut. A little finessing and scraping, and then some mighty shoving, got the door open.

Probably the first time in at least 15 years this door has been open.

Now the door was open... which put the pressure on to find a way to be able to lock it again before I went home. Fortunately, with the door open, I was able to take out the lock and discover why it wouldn't work: it was full of dirt and rust.

Ewww.

This was a problem for WD-40. I had that. In the end, the entire lock had to be taken apart, cleaned, lubed up, and put back together... at which point, it turned out that one of the keys in the Random Bag O' Keys actually did fit our lock!

With this success under my belt, I took apart and cleaned the lock on the door from the porch into the kitchen -- it was also disgusting inside, and the same skeleton key fitted that lock. In fact, the same key also opened our interior doors, like the door to the upstairs. There's still a bit of work to do on these -- the striker plates don't line up well with the door mechanisms (not sure why... are these door handles actually replacements?) and the doors still need some planing before they'll open well during the worst of summer heat and humidity, but we now officially have keys to the house!

In Which We Very Nearly Finish Something

Good news for anyone who wants to come help work on the farm: we now have a guest room, so we can hold you hostage and ensure you don't leave until the work is complete. You won't have a door on the bedroom, but you won't care because you'll have the whole upstairs to yourself. And you'll have to walk through the construction staging area that's the upstairs hallway in order to get to the bathroom at night, but that's just part of the experience.

Or you could just look at these pictures.

So, a long time ago, we had done the baseline work for the back bedroom: painting the walls and the floor.

Not featured: the floor paint

Well, now we've finally made real progress in this space. For one, you can see in the picture above that the baseboards in this room were incomplete. They were also unpainted 2x4s. All the rest of the upstairs has the wide baseboards you can just barely see behind the paint cans in the hallway. So during our Fourth of July week at the farm, we broke out some wide boards and finished the baseboards for that room.

Cutting mitered angles is the worst.

 We went with the process of "measure twice, overthink about whether or not you're cutting the right end of the board, measure a few more times, cut once, dry fit, measure again, trim down."

Oooh! Wide!

That little bumped out bit was a little tricky because (of course) it isn't smooth, which is probably why the previous folks never bothered finish the baseboards. Once we got the boards in place, it was time to paint and caulk the trim. I have to say that one thing I've definitely learned from our farm projects is that nothing makes a job look quite as complete as some well-placed caulk.

Houston, we have baseboards.

At this stage, we had a complication. The goal was to put a queen-sized bed in this room. We did the measuring, and it would be a bit tight, but doable. So we got a bed... and then realized that taking a queen-sized boxsprings up the steep staircase with a low header was so tight as to not be doable at all. My dad suggested taking first few stair treads off, but when we tried that, it quickly became apparent that we'd actually have to take off about half the staircase worth of treads.

Seriously, this van is the best.

So, we took out the window, put rope around the boxspring, and used the bucket van to take it in through the window. Ridiculous? Maybe. Effective? Absolutely. Since we had the window out, we went ahead and repaired the sashes, reglazed the glass, etc. Now we have something that's looking like an actual bedroom for actual people to stay in!

Never fear -- we have since added pillows.

You can't quite see it in this photo, but we still need to get the light fixture in place (but we have one) and then the aforementioned door needs to be painted and hung, but this room is awfully close to finished! It's actually more finished than the master in some ways... maybe we need to start sleeping up here while we paint downstairs.

In Which Life Happens

So, the chimney topple featured in the last post happened in September of 2017. After that, a whole lot of things happened. At the farm, we continued painting on the exterior work already featured in the Curb Appeal post. But a lot of what happened wasn't at the farm at all.

In November, we went to Arizona to visit Chris's dad for Thanksgiving.

This house is in much worse shape than the farm. Nice view, though.

In December, we went to Maryland for Christmas with my sister, where I repaid her for her work on the farm by helping to re-tile the backsplash in her kitchen.

This is the nicest kitchen you'll ever see on this blog.

In February and March, I built my sister a Cyberman head for a cosplay she was working on.

Inspiration.

What happens when you give me bad weather, Styrofoam, and craft paint.

Also in March, I got diagnosed with breast cancer. In April, I had a bilateral mastectomy. The good news is that they believe they got all the cancer. The bad news, at least for the farm, was that I spent a lot of the spring recovering strength and stamina.

In May, the whole family got together in Shenandoah National Park to celebrate my parents' anniversary. I hiked to this waterfall and immediately regretted it, realizing that "recovering strength and stamina" thing was still very much in progress.

Lovely. But not worth it.

And by then, it was basically this summer, which was largely spent patching plaster in the upstairs bedroom (which you already saw). Oh, and then I had sinus surgery, because you can never have too much surgery. So then I was on lifting restrictions again for a few more weeks.

One nice farm-related thing out of all of this was that we also spent some time actually just up there enjoying the farm. We took the cat with us and spent the week of July 4th at the farm, working on some projects, but also getting out into town and just relaxing.

Remnar at the farm.

There are a few more projects from this summer that I'll still update you on, but sadly, a lot of the past nine months or so were spent mostly focused on non-farm issues. Now that we're finally picking up the pace again, the nice weather is fading fast, so we'll see what else we're able to get done before winter.

Then The Chimney Fell Over

Just to stay honest about the timeline here, the following incident occurred almost exactly a year ago, in September of 2017. We had gone up to the farm, but didn't have much time to work on things... and we discovered this:

Santa's not getting down THAT chimney...

This was especially not good because of all the chimneys you see here, the one that fell over is the only one that actually gets USED. The one to its right isn't even attached to anything; the one to its left is still kind of an unknown quantity. But this chimney belongs to the wood stove that keeps us from fully turning into icicles when we're working at the farm during the winter.

Unfortunately, we really didn't have time to deal with the chimney, so we stuffed rags down the hole to keep out critters and went home to make a plan and gather supplies.

The good news with this project was that nothing substantial was actually broken. The chimney had a number of guy-wires stabilizing it, and those wires were not even remotely an appropriate strength. After many years of service, they'd just given out, and without the extra stability, the chimney blew over. While a few tiles got a bit cracked, there wasn't even much damage to the roof.

The bad news with this project is that chimneys are heavy and tall, and there was absolutely no way that puny humans standing on the lean-to roof were going to have the strength or leverage to lift the chimney back into position. Fortunately, these puny humans have a bucket van, and we were able to get a strap around the upper part of the chimney, attach the strap to the bucket, and then maneuver the bucket to lift and position the chimney. A bit hair raising? Yes. Ultimately successful? Also yes.

Standing tall

With the help of some new -- much more substantial -- guy-wires, the chimney got secured back in its place, where it will hopefully stay for years to come.

Curb Appeal: We Have It (Now)

So, when last I was posting, I believe the exterior of the farmhouse looked about like this:

Already better than when we bought it.

Since then, a LOT of things have been done to the outside of the house, and I have to say, it's looking pretty darn spiffy. For one, my dad painted us a faux-window to even out the visual balance of the big window into the parlor.

Symmetry. It's a good thing.

We also got the weird bit of siding over the front porch primed and painted so it would match better with the actual siding.

We also got the lean-to painted to match, and repainted the trim. But the biggest improvement is that my dad rebuilt the porch steps, using the old stones to create new pillars. It was a huge job -- the old steps had to be broken up with a jackhammer, and there was a LOT of debris to clear away -- but the result makes an amazing difference.

So nice!

That sidewalk was an unexpected bonus -- while he was clearing out the porch debris, my dad uncovered the pad at the bottom of the steps. It looked like it kind of disappeared into the grass, and after a lot of digging, Chris discovered a sidewalk that goes all the way around to the lean-to!

Just recently, we were at work on the porch again, but this time, we were just cleaning. Cleaning the cedar siding along the back wall of the porch had probably last been done... never. So just a little elbow grease made a visible difference.

Unwashed on top. Washed on bottom. Yes, that's a backward way to clean.

This past weekend was sunny and warm, with no rain in the immediate forecast (it's been a surprisingly rainy summer this year), so we were able to get out and seal the wood -- the walls and the new steps and the porch swing -- and the masonry, which will hopefully help protect the mortar against future weathering.

It's like a real house!

We're pretty pleased with how things are looking -- and so are the neighbors. We've had a lot of comments about the snazzy new porch steps, and everyone agrees it looks a lot less like an abandoned, haunted house than when we first bought it.

Freshening Up the Kitchen

In other projects, we got the kitchen cabinets painted. As you may recall, previously, the uppers and lowers weren't the same color (of course) and the hardware was on the ugly side. Around the end of last July, we started painting the cabinets a clean, slightly-creamy white.

Looks cleaner already.

The doors and drawers got a similar treatment, plus new handles. Much like the window in the last post, this is a project that started last summer, and finally got wrapped up this summer, when I finally put the lower cabinet doors back on. Oops.

Things are getting surprisingly matchy.

Still needed: doors or curtains for the cabinets right under the kitchen sink. And, you know, literally everything else in the kitchen.

Then I Remembered There Was a Blog

Well. It's been... roughly 14 months since I updated this blog. So that happened.

A lot has happened since last summer, and some of it was even at the farmhouse. I'm not even sure where we left off with this thing...

{Reviews the footage}

Ok. The automatic backing up of my phone to Google photos tells me that about the time of my last post, my lovely sister came out to visit for a week to help with some farm projects. That's actually kind of a perfect starting point, because one of the main projects we worked on was removing, repairing, reglazing, and reinstalling the window in the upstairs bedroom.

Sister. Destruction. Nothing to see here.

Why is this a perfect starting point? Because what we actually achieved on the window project was just the removing, repairing, and reglazing. And just this past weekend, Chris and I fully reinstalled the window. Yes, over a year later. Don't judge.

In between, we did a lot of other things to this room. Not things that make it actually finished, but things that make it look less like it did in the picture above and more like this.

All the walls are the same color. Progress.

This actually isn't even a totally updated photo, but it gets the point across. It definitely looked even worse before it got better, though. When you put paneling up over plaster, and you drive a bunch of nails into said plaster, those nails don't leave dainty little holes like they might in drywall. Combine that with 100+ years of existence, and you get plaster that was a bit on the sad side. Not as sad as we initially feared, but definitely in need of some love... and a LOT of patching.

So much patching.

This was followed by a lot of priming. The ceiling took two coats of paint to go from mustard yellow to normal ceiling white. Fortunately, my mom volunteered a day to come help us out, and she took care of the first coat of paint. The walls and ceiling were so dry that they just sucked up paint, so even just priming the room felt like it took forever.

Chris takes a turn priming.

For now, the room is still sitting in primer. The ceiling is finished, and the window is back in its casing -- now with all the trim pieces reinstalled! Wallpaper has been purchased, and the guide-lines are set on the walls for easy (knock on wood) wallpaper installation. Right now, that project is just awaiting slightly cooler weather (or a rainy day when we can't be working outside). So, hang some wallpaper on the top halves of the walls, install some wainscotting on the lower parts of the walls, paint the trim, install the light fixture, paint and install the door... we're (not even a little bit) practically finished!

More posts to come. I promise.