Work on the back has begun

Back of the house that is. Although, I think my own back could use a little work too. Of the chiropractor sort. Something has been feeling out of alignment for the past few days and I think it might be due to all the time I spent bent over while I was staining shakes over the weekend. Need to come up with a pain-free method of staining, especially since it takes about 3 1/2 hours to finish an entire box. But I think I'll take the cheap way out - who needs a chiropractor when there's a pre-opening party coming up at our friend's new bar this Saturday! A few cocktails and a little dancing should set everything back in alignment! Or at least make me forget about it for a while!

Ok - enough about my aches and pains...on to the latest house news. Our carpenter has been making huge strides in the back of the house especially since there were quite a few rainy days last week that set everyone back a bit. I'm sure this will be done in another few days.


And here's an interesting picture that I took. It's the condenser for our central air, but focus your attention on the nice cedar box that our carpenter built around the exterior control panel for it. We have mentioned to him on more than a few occasions that we are just obsessed with copper. And we are - it is/will be all over the house in some form or another... so he fashioned a copper roof for the top of the box. If that's not attention to detail - I don't know what is!! This guy is phenomenal!


The masons have moved on to the front of the garage now, so I'll be posting a few more pictures of that progress later on.

Happy Birthday to me!!

So today I turn the big 3-1! But not until 5:12pm so I've got a few more hours of being 30. But I don't even feel 30, nevermind 31! Honestly I feel like I'm still 26 and that's all that counts anyway - right? And that's not bad considering that's how old I was when I had B. So that gets me thinking...if I've spent the past 5 years raising B but I don't feel any older than I was when I had him, that means that I must not have aged one bit during his busy (and let's face it, sometimes downright frustrating) early childhood years. That's probably a good thing though, because something tells me that the older they get, the more challenging the issues become and the faster you will age! So hopefully I'm already ahead of the curve. So that's how I'm spending my birthday...working out mathematical "mental aged-ness" calculations. Now if I could just get my body to follow suit with my mind and stop it from aging as well, well I'd probably be a millionare because I will have found the secret to staying young forever!!

Rainy day = Quiet day

It's a stormy, rainy day here so that means no work can be done by the masons or carpenters. It's strangely quiet here at the house which has made for a good work-at-home day. No banging hammers or clanging stones. Just me and the cats. Nice!

It's a welcome quiet though. The masons were full steam ahead yesterday and the progress is quite evident in this latest picture I took after work yesterday. I just love the color of those stones!

And I was about to turn off the camera and head into the house when I stepped on the front porch by the blocked off kitchen door and saw the new ceiling the carpenter put up. These were the V-groove boards I stained last week! And they look beautiful up there if I do say so myself.

Pooch Pampering to the extreme

Ok - as a deviation from the usual renovation updates, I thought I might post something that really made me chuckle the other day. I was on my way to pick up B after work when a truck with a trailer pulled out in front of me. I just started laughing when I saw this. Which of course prompted me to pull out the ol' camera phone to snap a picture of it.


I really shouldn't have been too surprised since I was in a rather upscale town (WH for those of you familiar with this area) but I have to say, I've never seen anything quite like it!

One busy weekend

It's Monday morning and although I'm back at work, after this past weekend, going to work feels more like taking a break than anything else! It has been a whirlwind weekend for the past few days at the house. I knew we were in trouble when the masons said they were coming back to start putting up the stone on Saturday, but I had no idea they planned on working on Sunday too! Thankfully we weren't stepping on each other's toes since I still had a lot of wood to stain, 2 windows that needed one more coat of paint and J was busy installing the electrical boxes for the new lighting fixtures on the front of the house. Things were going great until a freak thunderstorm hit on Sunday afternoon that forced the masons to quit what they were doing and call it a day. I was happy to see them go, but not happy to see that they did not clean up all the mortar mess that had fallen onto the driveway during the course of their work. J and I spent the next 2 hours hurriedly cleaning it up before it set and become a permanent part of the driveway! It was only after that that I noticed the 2 upper windows had not been covered in plastic and now had a bunch of stratches on the aluminum casing. Nevermind the large scratch on the glass of one of the upper sashes. So a whole weekend of feeling good from finishing a few major tasks came crashing down - I am officially pissed. I understand during the course of major work, some stuff is bound to happen, but when we repeatedly told them to please cover the other windows BEFORE they start working near them and then realized that stuff happened because they blatantly DIDN'T do that, well I think I have a right to be just a wee bit angry. So last night the hammer came crashing down. No more stonework until all the prep work that we've asked them to do gets done. Ok - I'm done venting. Breath in...breath out...

Here's a picture of the progress as of late Saturday afternoon, which unfortunately isn't the most recent. I was too ticked off last night after shoveling dried mortar to take any pictures.

In other news - I would like to take a moment to wish a very Happy Birthday to my dear friend sj! And may the planets align properly sometime this week or maybe next so that we can get together for our annual "double birthday" dinner celebration (our birthdays are exactly 1 week apart!)

2 Carpenters + 3 Masons = Full House

Well it's been a week since my last post and while a lot of things have happened since then, there are only a few picture-worthy items of note. The rest is just stuff that had to get done. Since last week the carpenter has completely finished siding the front of the house.

And I love the detail he added at the top of the front door. Not sure if I mentioned it in the past, but the front door will not stay that color. I'm staining it (as well as the other 3 doors we're replacing) a dark cherry color, but that probably won't happen until closer to the fall when the weather is cooler and definitely a lot drier.

Over the weekend, we spent all of Sunday cleaning up the yard in preparation for the dumpster to be hauled away. It took hours to get all the debris from the backyard into the dumpster with me on the wheelbarrow and J on the tractor. And thank goodness for that tractor! We used the backhoe bucket to compress all the wood that was already in the dumpster. Without doing that, there was no way we could have added all the other debris. My reward for doing all of this clean-up - one nasty sunburn on my back!! And that's after using sunscreen. Go figure...

On top of that work on Sunday, I was also busy scraping paint off the 2 awning windows on the side of the garage. They're in good condition so I figured let's clean them up, paint them dark red to match the other windows and we'll be good to go. Plus now's the best time do it while there's no siding on that wall yet. No need to be ultra careful - who cares if I get paint on the Tyveck! Yeah...well that's until J decided to push on the glass to open them up (they were a bit stuck after not having been opened in years) and the bottom glazing on one of them completely broke off. Great... So now I have to repair that before I can paint it. Then I looked at the other window and noticed that the glazing was cracking and breaking away on that one too. Ok - back into the house to Google "re-glazing windows" to find out how to fix them. Thankfully it was a rather easy job. Just needed some window glazing and a putty knife. And I already had the putty knife! LOL So Monday night I painted a coat of primer on them. Tuesday night, coat #2 of primer. Wednesday at like 6am (yes I am an early bird, but it was also so nice and cool out this morning I couldn't resist) I re-glazed both windows so now I just have to wait for that to set and in a few days, I can paint 2 coats and they'll be done. Pffeww! One more task that will be done off the list that is slowly growing to be several pages long. :-o

Also on Monday - the stone masons set up their scaffolding to start prepping the walls for the stone.

Just a few of the many (9 or 10 I think) pallets of our lovely CT weathered fieldstone.

News from renovation central...

I am very pleased to report that the new siding is going up really fast! Here are some pictures of the progress from yesterday.

As of this morning:

As of this afternoon:

And I'm very proud that we have installed our new front door handle and lock - even though we were working on it until 11pm last night!

The inside view:

The outside view:

And of course what would a blog about 2 black cats be without a recent picture of at lease one of them, right? Here's my girl Hailie sniffing through the debris.