We Also Did Some Finish Work

At the farm, there is pretty much always something that you could paint. This year, we have painted...

The trim in the living room

Yes, it's basically the same color as the old trim.

All sorts of exterior trim

Love that bucket van

And, over Labor Day weekend, the back wall of the dining room and the doorways!

Blue!

We also painted the ceilings in both the living room and the dining room, which was an absolute nightmare. In the future, remind me how much I hate painting over my head.

We also got some new furniture, which is at least exciting for us.

In the master, we found a dresser at a barn sale and some nightstands in my best friend's storage unit.

Now we don't live out of suitcases. It's like we're civilized or something.

That allowed us to move the little dresser up to the yellow bedroom, which is now pretty overnight-guest-worthy.

Who's coming to visit me?

We also got a barrister bookcase for the living room, which I apparently don't have a good picture of. And then... we got a wardrobe.

The thinking with the wardrobe is that in the bedrooms upstairs, there isn't really any good storage space -- there are no closets, and the room you're seeing above is the big one -- the others are going to be lucky to get more storage than a nightstand. So we figured one wardrobe in the hall would give some shared space to hang things up, etc.

We measured. Then I went out to Massachusetts with the aforementioned best friend to do some antiquing. We found many fascinating things that were not wardrobes.

Not a wardrobe

Perplexed Bigfoot is not a wardrobe.

Terrified goat head is not a wardrobe.

Garden-art velociraptor is not a wardrobe. I don't know how this didn't come home with me.

I don't know what this is, but it isn't a wardrobe. I hope.

 Then, after much searching, I found a wardrobe! It was the art-deco style Chris likes! It would fit in the space! And that was when my BFF said "well, if THAT'S the kind of thing you're looking for, I have one in my storage unit. I actually have two."

So then I came home and bought hers. And we measured it. We really did. And we decided it would just barely fit in the space... and then we got it up to the farm, and into the living room... and decided we weren't actually sure how to take it up the stairs.

After some false starts, during which we each ended up having to climb onto and over the wardrobe while it was half in the stairwell, we took off everything that would come off.

Now with 100% fewer doors and drawers!

At that point, we were just barely able to carry it up the stairs, slide it along the hallway, and shimmy it into position, where it is, as measured, a perfect fit with roughly one inch to spare.

Narnia not included.

So now if you visit us at the farm, you could hang things up, if we had hangers up there, which we don't. Note to self: take a few hangers up next time.

Gutteral

Another big-ish project for this summer was that we installed gutters. Well, gutter. I don't have a lot of pictures of this one because it was the kind of project where you're busy getting everything laid out and measured and dry fit and then actually fit, and then you have to try to figure out how to hold the stupid gutter with one person on a ladder and one person in the bucket van, and then you finally get it attached and then it leaks anyhow and you have to take it apart and reseal things.

You can barely see the gutter, but the downspout is kind of visible?

But eventually, we think we got the gutter sorted out... just in time for the bucket van to start making a kind of terrible noise that eventually required me to scramble out of the bucket onto the porch and the rest of the day's projects to revolve around Chris trying to fix the van so that we could retract the bucket and get the van out of the lawn. If he wants to eventually add in what was actually wrong and how he fixed it, I'm going to let him do that because honestly, I don't really remember what all was involved. It was broken, but he fixed it. Then he was able to figure out what parts it needed and fix it more permanently the next weekend.

We're still hoping to run a gutter along the north side of the house (in the picture above, you're seeing the corner where the south and east sides meet). The hope is that this will help get water away from the foundation and a) keep the foundation sturdy and b) maybe help keep water out of the basement.

Bonus Roofing Project

Once we were in the groove and had figured out the slate ripper, Chris and I got up on the roof one more time after the Huge Chimney Deconstruction to replace some other tiles that had long been cracked.

Out with the old

One of the things I've enjoyed about this farm project is that we're having to figure out and learn skills -- like repairing your own tile roof -- that most people, even sometimes the people in the modern version of that trade, no longer have. And as a bonus, we're on our way to a pretty sweet looking roof!

Look how nice it can be!

Chim-Chiminey, Chim-Chiminey, Chim-Chim-Cheree

One of the very first projects we anticipated when we bought the farmhouse was taking down the extra chimney. From what we could tell, it maybe wasn't in great shape, and more importantly, it served absolutely no purpose.

The chimney on the left is purely decorative

At one point, the chimney may have served a cookstove in the kitchen, and we know that it once served the wood burner that's still in the house. But prior to our ownership, the wood burner got moved to the dining room and got a new chimney (which featured in its own blog post last fall). To keep the chimney from collapsing into the house, the previous owner decided to just put in a small closet, which is clearly to code.

We almost did this project last summer, but the threat of rain coupled with some indecision about exactly HOW we were going to get up there and remove the chimney when the roof is fairly steep and also you can't step on it because you'll crack the tiles. That meant that by THIS summer, we'd had a full year to prepare our game plan and gather supplies.

And it turns out... that actually paid off.

First, we got ladder hooks, which are pretty much what they sound like -- they attach to the ladder and allow it to slide up the roof and hook over the ridge, distributing the weight of the ladder. Like so.

Testing the ladder hooks

Then my father brought up ladder jacks, which look like they should be used as bear traps or something, but actually attach to the ladder and allow you to set boards across the two ladders to make a flat, stable platform. For added safety, we had harnesses tied off to the bucket van. So from there, dad and I were able to spend a morning up on the roof, trying to gently take out the chimney without dropping bricks or loose mortar onto the roof tiles. Chris took the hard job of trudging up and down ladders all day to haul down the bricks and mortar we removed.

The actual taking down of the chimney was not significantly harder than playing Jenga. A fairly light tap with a hammer was enough to loosen up most of the chimney, and bricks came out with basically no effort.

By the time we were reaching through the roof into the attic, however, the whole chimney was swaying significantly every time you touched it. That didn't seem great, since we didn't really want to knock down ten feet of chimney into the attic. When we regrouped inside for further demo, Chris and Dad rigged up a couple boards to brace the chimney a bit... and then the rest of the chimney was also super loose and in about the same amount of time it took to measure, find boards, and screw in the braces, they'd taken down the chimney past the point where the braces were helpful.

Good-bye, chimney.

Soon enough, we were finding the tools that had been dropped down the chimney earlier, shockingly well-preserved bird skeletons, and a lot of years of soot and dust and dirt and general nastiness that had to get scooped out. But eventually, we reached the kitchen!

Yes, this is the "closet" that was supporting the chimney.

I'm standing in the kitchen, looking up to the hole in my roof.

So then the chimney was gone, and we were left with a hole in the roof, which is the downside to removing a chimney. Fortunately, this was easily remedied.

No more skylight!

This was the point where we decided to be smart and let this be a two-day project. The next day, we were sore, but back at it. After a little aerial YouTubing, we figured out how to use a slate ripper, which is a tool that looks like it's not going to do anything, but somehow manages to slip up between roof tiles and rip out the nails so you can remove a tile without having to remove every single tile that overlaps it. Then we set about taking out the partial tiles, installing new tiles... and fixing the tiles we accidentally broke with the ladder. Oops.

New tiles!

Finally, it was time to splice in some new metal over the ridge, re-attach the lightening rod assembly, and ta-da! -- a totally fixed up roof!

Roof, now with less chimney!

From up close, it's pretty obvious which tiles are the new ones, but from the ground, it's like the whole chimney never even happened.

No chimney!

All in all, this was one of the more rewarding projects. Once we took the chimney down in the attic, for instance, we were able to get in and finish up the insulation project from the last post. Having the chimney out is also going to let us (hopefully yet this fall/winter??) move ahead with putting a wall back in between the kitchen and dining room. So I guess the "reward" here is more projects, but it still felt really good to get this big one done.

The Attic Smells Different Now

It seems almost impossible to believe that we could have started this project in February, but Google assures me that I took the initial photos for this project on February 16, and who am I to argue?

And the project is... insulation in the attic! I know, I know... we're so cutting edge.

Chris stapling the insulation

This took longer than you'd imagine.

The easy part was adding insulation to the lower walls of the attic, although even that seemed to take forever, mostly because there's all this stuff in the attic, so we had to keep shifting all the attic-stuff from wall to wall in order to get at the next section to work on.

Then the hard part -- sorting out the ceiling. This occupied most of the next work day at the farm. We decided that since the ceiling is so high and we're not actually using the space for anything other than storage, to build a kind of false ceiling for insulation batting to rest on and be draped across. Like so.

See how the peak of the roof is actually beyond where the insulation is?

We figured this way, there would be a clear cold zone, plus we wouldn't have to try to deal with getting the insulation way up to the roof peak. That makes it sound like this was less work. It was not. It's not that it was terrible, but insulation is one of those things that isn't heavy, it's just totally awkward and floppy, like trying to string a slinky across a gap.

We did eventually get it all in place, and then took a break from installing insulation over our heads in a place where we could stand up... in order to install insulation underfoot, in the "real" attic where you have to mostly crouch down and try to keep your balance on the joists lest you go crashing through the ceiling and suddenly create a lot of plaster work for yourself.

And by "we," I mean "Chris." I'm usually not claustrophobic, but that attic makes me want to scream.

So fluffy and warm!

But eventually, we got back to the big attic to add the finishing touch -- craft paper to cover the interior side of the insulation and keep it from dropping strands of fiberglass all over everything. This, too, turned out to be rather more involved than initially hoped, but it also took up far less of the roll of craft paper than I was expecting.

Speaking of pillowy...

The unexpected bonus of all this work is that now the entire attic smells like brown paper bags, which is, at least in my opinion, an improvement over the previous smell of... whatever it is that old houses smell like. Old wood, guano, and dirt? In any case, brown paper bags is definitely better.

This summer never got super hot -- we never even bothered install the window air conditioner in the bedroom at the farm -- so it was hard to tell if the insulation was helping to keep the house cooler. But hopefully this winter we'll notice some benefit!