If you give a girl a crowbar...

I'm starting work on our front room / former nighttime kitty jail / future crafty room of awesome. Much of the work has been really boring...cleaning, organizing, floor scrubbing.

But today, I started attacking with a crowbar! There is a bookshelf in our living room that was previously a door between the living room and the front room. We're reopening it!

The first step is to attack it with a crowbar. Bill hopes we're going to find some buried gold. So far, I've found a mirror.

I hope to report more exciting finds soon.

"You can blog about the oven if you want"

As you may recall, Bill finished his masonry oven a few weeks ago and we did a test burn. He found that he really liked it and yesterday he did a longer burn and some serious baking.

That's 4 pizzas, 6 loaves of bread, a dozen muffins (those were mine!) and some granola. Starting at about noon, Bill fired the oven for six hours, actively adding wood and keeping the flames going. Then he let it rest for an hour, without adding more wood, so the temperature could become more even throughout the oven.

The first thing to be cooked were the pizzas. They're done in about 3 minutes and can be cooked by both direct heat (from any remaining chunks of flaming wood) and the indirect heat that is radiating out from the very, very insulated oven walls.

Then he cooked the bread. I think it was done quicker than it is in our house oven, and the masonry oven has much higher capacity. 6 loaves were a piece of cake and Bill is confident he can probably double that comfortably. This is good because we like to eat bread!

The muffins went in next and then finally the granola.

As we were sitting there, daylight and oven heat fading, Bill said "you can blog about the oven tomorrow if you want." I'd been waiting to post an update about it in case he wanted to share his excitement with you. But, I think his mood is better captured in photos than in words. He's pretty proud of his work and glad to be reaping the rewards.

(That's an excited face. Not a creepy I-want-to-eat-your-head face. FYI. In case you were confused.)

The final stages of the process involved framing the dome in metal, plopping up some board stuff (the stuff that goes under your hearth - wonder board??), filing with vermiculite and adding a roof.

The very last bit is the decoration. Probably stucco on the top and bricks on the bottom.

Oh - and see that door? The wooden one?

Yeah, that caught fire.

Would...

This weekend's activities revolved around wood. We're preparing our bedroom for the addition of a wood stove. The first step involved the unprovoked torture of some very old wood. We had to remove the baseboard around the chimney and it was unwilling to be separated from the wall due to the massive number of square head nails holding it into the masonry.

Why, yes, that is an electrical wire we found under the molding.

This is is the current state of our new hearth. The cement board has been applied and is awaiting our slate tiles. Also, yes, I know our floor is not painted in the middle. Our bedroom was our first project when we moved in and I felt guilty about painting the unpainted wood. I enjoyed pulling up the old carpet and discovering the 3 different colors of brown paint that had been applied over the years and wanted to preserve the experience for the next inhabitants of the house.

To assist in keeping our house warm this winter, we purchased (gasp!) 2 cords of wood. A very nice man from Craigslist delivered it and regaled us with stories of lumber jacking. Would it be that we had enough time to chop all our own wood. Alas...

Upon doing the calculations, purchasing wood is a more efficient use of our time than chopping it. This pile quadrupled our supply of fuel. And it makes us very happy.

Gray, gray, gray.

This is our fireplace as it currently stands on this cloudy day....

We put up lots of cement board, which is boring and messy. So much dust!!

As we were preparing to mount the cement board, we discovered the chimney had probably been re-plastered at some point in time. The crown molding is not original as it runs continuously over parts of the living room that formerly had walls (there were originally two rooms where there is now one).

We can tell the plaster had been redone because it is much, much whiter than the plaster behind the mantle and the floor molding. It was nice to see the floor molding (is there a better word for that??) is likely original as there is no paint or wallpaper behind it. It seems to be quality wood and we're hoping to strip it later in life and return it to wood-colored wood.

We'll be working on the architectural slate tiles soon!!

Progress

If you are a preservationist who thinks all old houses should be restored to their original condition (except for the concession of bathrooms)...you may want to look away now.

Our fireplace when we moved in:


We discovered the mantle is not original - there was old wallpaper underneath it and the brackets don't quite match the exterior ones. So we don't feel too guilty about taking it down. Applying thinset to the floors and then drilling in monster screws took a lot of willpower though. I apologize to any future owners of this house who may (inexplicably) wish to replace the hearth we are working on. Really, really sorry. :(


But look how hot this is:


Grout to be applied tomorrow and slate facing up the chimney in September, after our new woodstove is installed. Progress makes Bill happy:

PPFFFFTTT!!!!!!

Seems like a good time to start to redo the fireplace. First step - demolish existing hearth. 3/4 inch thick marble tiles are nice on the front. On the back, you know, right next to the stovepipe that exceeds 1000 degrees, what do we find... Is that wood??? Why yes it is little Timmy! Plywood and 2x4s!!! Awesome.





Well, the bottom of the hearth looks pretty nice, looks like maybe they set the tile on another piece of plywood, laid that down... hopefully we can just pry it up and move it, right...?

Oh... They set the tiles directly onto the hardwood floors? Oh.... well. I guess at least we know the minimum size of our new hearth.

On a side note, she thinks my tractor is sexy!

Why?? Just....why???

It all started with the removal of this nail:


All night, this nail was staring at me -- my poor, lovely old mantle, whimpering at me like Aesop's lion with a thorn in his paw. So, in my first act of this-is-my-home-now-bitches heroics, I plucked out the nail...leaving, of course, a neat little hole in my 151 year-old wood.

I then noticed the 27 other nail holes pockmarking the face of my mantle.

Why?? Why, why why???

Why - when there are billions of non-invasive stocking holders out there looking for a home - would you do this? Did you feel a little pang of guilt as you swung the hammer? How many people were in the room, consenting to this ghastly wood-disrespecting event?

Is it awful to hope Santa filled those Christmas stockings with nothing but photos of dead bunnies?

This one simple question led to so many more (and this is when the reality of signing and initialing all those papers at closing starts to sink in). Why would you paint my guest room bright pink and install Cookie Monster Blue carpet?


Why is there more paint on my window panes than on the wood?


Why is my bathroom (10 foot walls and ceiling) encrusted with this wall paper?


Just....why?