Summer Shower(s)

A drop fell on the apple tree,
Another on the roof;
A half a dozen kissed the eaves,
And made the gables laugh.

- Emily Dickinson

The sun peeks through the branches after a wallop of a storm...

Hear ye, hear ye... summer is back and in full force. If you have any doubts, just take a look at your local weather report. If you live anywhere near the northeastern seaboard, you will most likely see a 10 Day forecast with 90% + humidity, chance of daily thunderstorms, and temperatures that could cook your Sunday roast. And it's been that way, week after week...after week.

Summer, we get it! You're here, you love to oppress us with your ridiculous humidity levels, so just cool it and give us a few decent days of weather! You're raining on my renovation parade, literally. (Apparently I complain about the weather in both winter and summer equally... I need to pick a side!)

At least all of this rain is good for our hedge wall!

So now that school is out and unemployment is in for the summer months (and hopefully not much beyond that...) I see no reason not to update this blog as often as possible. After all, who doesn't love new pictures?! So it's time to do a brief recap of our last few visits to the farmhouse with Tony and Co.

While the summer showers were slowing down my painting outside, Tony was facing down an entirely different sort of shower. As of this month, Tony finally began the...

Bathroom Build-Out

That's right, people... work has FINALLY begun on a bathroom! A real bathroom, with a shower, and a sink, and... be still my beating heart... a toilet. Our plans for the downstairs bathroom include a Victorian tile floor and a subway tiled walk-in shower with two large glass doors. First on our to-do list: research and then build out the shower pan, customized to fit our glass door specifications. But how does one build a shower pan, you might ask...

With a little positivity and a lot of mortar, that's how!

Building a customized shower pan begins with a little old fashioned wood framing, as you establish the size of your shower and the height of the curb on the floor. There's a million tiny factors to keep in mind as you frame it out, especially if you're using pre-made glass doors like we are, such as the width of the tile, and where the framing sits in the walls so you'll have something to attach your shower doors to. Tony spent hours measuring, remeasuring, and adding in bits of framing to the walls here and there to make sure all of our fixtures and doors will have a secure place to latch onto when it comes time for the install. Once the framing was set up, it was a multi-step process to turn our wood floor into something concrete and waterproof; Tony achieved it by creating multiple layers of rubber membrane, sand mortar mix, and roofing paper, with a dash of ingenuity and love thrown in for good measure. It was a bit like building a lasagna, except it required a trowel and wasn't nearly as delicious.

The end result was basically a mortar block in the corner of the room with a center drain... not exactly the most exciting thing ever built, but boy did that change when we started to build out the shower walls! With cement backer board up behind the shower and throughout the entire bathroom, we discovered we had a room with walls... real walls! If you've been following this blog closely you'll know walls in this home have been a sight unseen for some time. Finally, the time had come for...

Bathroom Tiles

Before we knew it (aka after many days of hard work), Tony had the bathroom looking like this! As hard as it is to believe, this is the first room ever built in this house with the intention of truly serving as a bathroom. The Victorian era was delightful and all, but give me indoor plumbing any day.

There are days when it feels like this renovation is taking forever, but it's always uplifting to look back and see how far we've come. When I look back at photos of the old pantry and compare them to this newly tiled room, I am just ecstatic!

Summer 2010: The downstairs bath was a rotted out pantry with a gaping hole in the floor, a leaking roof, snakes in the ceiling and slanted walls.

Summer 2013: Hoorah! So clean, so classy! A temporary design for the floor has been laid out... 

Tony and I are heading up to Vermont for an entire week of renovation fun starting tomorrow, when the bathroom build-out will shift into high gear. Stay tuned for even more impressive photos in the weeks ahead!

Painting

Oh, painting. You were once the apple of my eye. That was two years ago, when I never imagined I'd still be sanding and priming in 2013!! Now, depending on the day, we are enemies.

So goes the love/hate relationship of renovation. It's just crazy to believe that two years down the road, I am still getting a face full of lead dust every time I climb a ladder! I try to comfort myself with the thought that we really are in the final leg of this "painting prep" race, but it does seem to be taking forever. This is due mainly to the fact that the last corners of the house that still need sanding/priming are highhhhh, high up and require me to get help every single time I need to move the ladder more than 1 inch in either direction. Just painting around the attic windows requires moving the ladder (and lifting and lowering the rungs) no less than 5 times. All of that added work  = time killer!

Not my favorite place to be...

But, with that said, things are looking UP in a big way!! Tony and I have finally bit the bullet and signed up for a week-long rental of a 34' personal bucket lift. We were hoping to avoid such a rental because of the cost, but at this point time is money too! Finally, this painter will be headed straight for the roof peaks in comfort and safety. With the mere touch of a button, I will be able to lift myself in any ole direction I please, without having to worry about a long fall or bugging Tony every 20 minutes to move the ladder another 1/2 centimeter.

We have some pretty lofty goals for the coming week: have ALL of the peaks and ALL of the rooflines not just primed but painted too! I'm talking about a finished paint job, complete with accent colors and everything. Tony will also use the safety of the bucket lift to repair all of the rotten wood along the roofline. Personally, I'm much more comfortable with him wielding a Sawzall when he has a protective railing behind him. Man can those things gyrate - not a good situation at 30+ feet!

Looking lovely on a summer's afternoon!

It's a big to-do list for one week, but we are going to give it our all. I've already told Tony we can get a basket pulley system ready to send my lunch up in, because I am not coming down from that lift until this house is painted!

Looks like I might be up there for awhile...

We've been up to more than just painting and bathroom building at the house too, so please check out our slideshows for more photos! Click here to see the us finally take on the gable over the bay window and Tony's build-out of the shower pan, and click here for our 4th of July slideshow when we declared war on blank bathroom walls, switching out muskets for trowels and subway tiles!

This house never gives us a shortage of things to do! There's always...

Windows! Slow and steady wins the race, or in this case slow and steady prevents the 100 year old glass from breaking. We're finally all caught up with our window glazing, and are waiting on the return of Sues Merkel to continue with her masterful glass removal skills. Once the glass has been removed, we can sand them down and prep them for glazing.

In the meantime, we have a few window frame paint colors in mind that we plan to test this weekend!

The basement! What a delight it was to discover ungodly amounts of condensation dripping from all of the support beams and ceilings in the basement during our 4th of July visit. Seemingly all of the rain and humidity have caught up with our damp home. Mairim and Alastair got to work on emptying out the basement ASAP, and Alastair has plans to grade the land downward to a drain by the front of the house. Anything to help get that moisture out of there! This will definitely be a bigger problem we'll be tackling in the coming months.

Thanks for reading, everyone! Hope you're all staying cool out there, and come back soon for more photos and updates!

Until then...

Happy Summer!

Con ⋅ ti ⋅ nu ⋅ i ⋅ ty

Continuity (noun): Uninterrupted connection, succession or union.

After finally returning home following a very, very late Vermont-to-Brooklyn drive this past Tuesday night, I decided to hop onto the computer and peruse the old world wide web for awhile before enjoying a well-earned sleep. I went to Country Living's site to check out the most recent house tour in their Home and Decorating section (a favorite activity of mine), and was moved by a quote from the homeowner of this month's tour. This couple recently finished a years-long renovation on their upstate NY farmhouse. The article concluded with the following quote from homeowner Paul:

"The man who built our home is buried across the street," says Paul. "We own this house now, but eventually, it'll belong to someone else. Living with history provides a feeling of continuity. It puts things in perspective." 

Paul's view on their homeownership really moved me, as this idea is something Tony and I have talked about often. Our connections to the family who built this house and called it Home for over 100 years are very strong. Thanks to the nature of this small town, whose residents have known each other for generations and take great pride in both their history and their present, we have come to know so many details about Wales Cheney (the builder of the home) and Florence Crowninshield, Wales' granddaughter and the last official resident of the house.

Florence the Fashionista

So, what can we tell you about Florence? Well, she was well-loved by everyone, and she baked the meanest angel food cake in all of Jamaica. Her husband Marcus was a farmer and managed the family dairy. Her favorite room in the house was the living room with the bay window; she loved to entertain guests there, and placed her Christmas tree in the middle of the bay window every December. Her bedroom was at the top of the stairs, and is now affectionately referred to by us as Florence's room. We have some lovely plans for decorating it, and I like to think she'd approve!

Marcus and his oxen next to the sugar shack

Her grandfather Wales was a Civil War veteran and cabinet maker. In 1861 at the age of 25, Wales enlisted in the Union army. He fought in a series of battles until a gunshot wound to his right knee received during the Second Battle of Bull Run led to his honorary discharge. After living through the horrors of the Civil War, I can't even imagine what an unbelievable reprieve it was to come home to the Green Mountains. Also, it is beyond me how a man who endured a gun shot to his knee in the 1860s (I'm quite sure battlefield surgery isn't quite on par with the quality of care you'd receive today) had the personal strength to go on and build not one but two different houses for his family. After just a typical day of laboring at the farmhouse, I'm achy all over and have no problem complaining about it. This Wales must have been one heck of a human being.

Wales and the family dog during the early days of the house 

Owning this house is a healthy reminder about the passing of time. Three generations of the Cheney/Crowninshield family lived in this farmhouse. They put their love, positive energy and hard work into the soil and the home itself. Their mark can be seen everywhere you look. If anything, I find this knowledge to be comforting; put good things into the earth and they will last well beyond your years.

I feel Tony and I are achieving 'continuity' with every project we finish. For now, our family is the caretaker of this lovely home. We have planted trees that will someday grow to be giants, and an orchard that will give fruit for years to come. We are shoring up this house so it can survive another 130 years. While there are days when we feel this renovation has beaten us, that it's simply too much work, most days I know that we are incredibly lucky to have this opportunity to build something lasting.

Pre-snowblower... yikes.

According to Marlene, Florence's wonderful granddaughter and a huge supporter of our project, Florence used to fill the lawn alongside the now-extinct side porch with flowers. Every spring, tulips still bloom there; her handiwork continues to be seen to this day. This small act truly sums up what this farmhouse restoration is about; creating something lovely that will be enjoyed for future generations to come!

Please enjoy this amazing slideshow of original photos of the house and its former owners, courtesy of Marlene. Here's hoping we can restore this house to its former glory before another hundred years pass!

Tony and I have just completed a five day work marathon this past week, so expect another update soon with new photos and exciting changes to the home. In the meantime, let's take a moment to enjoy this glimpse back into its past :)

- Melissa, current caretaker of the Cheney/Crowninshield/Dallaryan Homestead

"Mud Season" to Summer and Back Again

Apparently summer has just been itching to return to Southern Vermont this year! Mud season, the infamous post-winter period that plagues New England in the weeks after the snow melts, seemed to forget to clock in for work this year. The typical VT landscape for April, a cornucopia of varying shades of taupe,  was looking surprisingly green when we ventured up there in late April with family and friends in tow. The 45 degree days we were accustomed to for that time of year were replaced with 65 degrees and sunny. These early warming temps might be a scary sign for summer, but for the moment we're happy to take what we can get.

All is green, all is bright...

After our late April visit, we had to take a month-long break from the farmhouse while I finished up my LAST MONTH of graduate school! Now, as a proud but unemployed graduate from the Global Institute for Public Health at NYU, I can focus my time the way I'd prefer - all things farmhouse!

The Merkel parents joined Tony and I for a week-long work marathon the week after graduation. To say it was family fun for people of all ages would be a misnomer, but the four of us left there feeling very accomplished, if not a little exhausted (aka physically broken). Between the past two visits, we've checked a few big items off of our to-do list. Let's take a look!

The Side Porch

She was ugly on the day we bought her, and she was ugly on the day we took her down. The side porch has been one (of many) aspects of the outdoor property of this house that has taunted me for 31 + months. Its rotten roof, its missing floorboards, its haven of spider nests... I have been dying to see the day this thing disappeared. With the help of Steve, Meredith and good ole Artie Merkel, that day came and went this past April.

My hopes that the snow would demo the roof for me... gone.

As with all things in this house, it was built too well for its own good. Taking down this seemingly rickety little side porch was, of course, a chore and a half and took far longer than any of us expected. What seemed like an hour or two task at best was practically an all-day affair. Marlene, the granddaughter of Florence Crowninshield (the last woman to live here), brought by an amazing set of photographs of the house and its residents last week, dating all the way back to Wales Cheney's Civil War days. One photo of the house shows the side porch looking rather elegant and extending all the way to the back of the house. Therefore, this excuse for a side porch was just a sad shadow of its former self. With that bit of information went any guilt I may have felt at tearing this bad boy down. It was time for her to go.

The Sawzall solves all

What was left of this porch was still so well made that it put up one heck of a fight coming down. Hours passed as we slowly (and awkwardly) dismantled the roof, the flooring, the ceiling joists and finally the porch post. Much to our dismay, we discovered Mr. Cheney had been so confident that this porch would withstand the test of time that he built the porch floor INTO the house foundation. Our dismay doubled when we discovered, as we took floor beams out, that the foundation sills in said porch corner were also rotted through. Was it wrong to hope that the rotted sills Tony replaced two summers ago on the right side of the house were the only ones?

Yes, yes it was. I actually wouldn't be surprised if all of the house sills are rotted through, a fact that we hope to blissfully ignore as long as we can leave the foundation untouched elsewhere. For now, the corner support of the house near the bay window is M.I.A., and poor Tony will have to find the emotional and physical strength to take on replacing another rotten sill beam at some point this summer. We wish him godspeed.

Donezo.

The Hedge Wall

Oh, the hedge wall...

When Tony first suggested the idea, I was not on the pro-side of that wall. My great hope was to build a stone wall that ran the entire length of the lawn, but as Tony rightfully pointed out, this would be insanely time consuming and also a guaranteed death sentence for our spinal health. Tony's idea was to end the stone wall at the small creek, and on the opposite side create a hedge wall that would run along the road until the woods creeps in. Once I realized the hedge wall was yet another opportunity to get creative and design something, I got behind the idea 100%. 

And so began my obsession with landscaping. Shrubbery, to be specific. I researched the hell out of shrubs and hedges, even investing in a lovely guide titled "Native Plants of the Northeast" by Donald Leopold. In doing so I discovered the amazing array of native plants that exist and thrive in our little corner of the world. After coordinating shrubs by spring blooming color and fall foliage (and after much discussion with every kind and patient friend who would listen), we settled on three: Mt. Airy Fothergilla, the Highbush Blueberry and the Gray Dogwood. The blueberry bushes will give us actual blueberries in the summer, and the mix of these three shrubs will provide us with a rainbow of oranges, bright reds and maroons when fall arrives. After hunting these plants down via Amazon, it was time to get planting.

Hole digging 101

When Meredith and Steve came to 'visit' in April, they helped get the hedge wall going. We have decided on doing four Blue Princess Holly bushes partnered with Red Twig Dogwood bushes as anchoring points for the ends of the hedge wall. We are also going to install a wrought iron gate near the far end of the wall, so trucks heading up to the maple orchard can pull onto the property. These gates (leftovers that we found in the backyard) will be attached to two lovely wood beams from the basement. We laid out the dimensions for the gate and planted a set of holly + dogwood bushes on either side as the final two anchoring points. These will provide a lovely bit of color in the dreary winter months!

Tony putting the 'edge' in hedge

The Mt. Airy Fothergilla will be the star of our shrub wall. For every one Highbush Blueberry or Gray Dogwood bush we have, we have two Fothergillas. As long as our little shrubs manage to survive the coming summer (and a few summers and winters to come), we will have an impressive shrub wall that delights in both spring and fall in just a few years. Perhaps by then the house will finally be painted haha.

Tis a wee hedge wall for now...

We are waiting on a few remaining plants from Amazon to be delivered, and once we receive those we will be in business! Fingers crossed they come soon because it certainly isn't getting any cooler out there, and we don't want those baby shrubs to fry in the July heat.

Painting

The saga continues! There is not too much exciting news to report on this front. After taking down the side porch during our previous visit, I took to the ladder and sanded and prepped the second floor on that side of the house, along with the porch corner. Artie Merkel, master painter and primer, took to the rungs and got the entire side primed in one day. Unfortunately, we have to leave the upper corner of the house alone for the next month, give or take flight time, as I discovered a nest of baby birds chirping their little heads off in the far reaches of the roofline. With momma bird in a pure panic nearby, we opted to leave that corner alone until the younguns take to the sky. Wikipedia tells me this should take about 5 weeks. Let's see if they're right! Oh the things restoring a farmhouse will teach you... even the growth cycle of sparrows.

Artie Merkel in his element

My grand plan for this coming weekend, when we'll be spending a whopping four straight days at the house, will be to put on my brave pants and climb to the highest reaches of the peaks to sand and prime up to the very top of the house. Our new ladder is a sturdy one, so I shall place unwavering faith in its ability to also not waver, and we'll see what comes of it. As long as no birds or bees attack me at 30 feet up, I'm anticipating the yellow will be GONE from that side of the house by Sunday evening.

 Up, up, and awayyyy

The Foundation

It's like a bad cold that you just can't seem to kick. It's the gnat buzzing around your head. It's my accruing student loan interest. Foundation work... it's annoying, and it never goes away. Just when Tony thought it was safe to get out of the basement and up into the light, he was pulled back down by more crumbling brick walls. Truth be told, we knew this work was coming but didn't want to acknowledge it. The main foundation wall under the library, which connects to the wall Tony replaced last summer, was buckling in at the corners. This wall also had some bricks knocked out so the new pipes for the oil tank could be run through it, which required patching anyway. Add to that the need to rebuild the wall where the new basement windows are going in, and you have a foundation wall not worth keeping. Taking down a brick wall in an afternoon? Why, that's just old news to Anthony Dallaryan.

The most handsome bricklayer in all of Vermont...

During our week-long visit two weeks ago, Tony managed to take down and rebuild the entire brick wall in a matter of days. The end product - perfection! We now only have the back left corner of the house left to do, which should be a piece of cake for this young man, and rebuilding the areas around the new basement windows. Tony will have it all done in no time flat! We believe in him.

Done and done.

Other Happenings...

 The Windows! Sues is keeping at it with window repairs. I haven't had the heart to count how many are left to clean out, re-peg and glaze, but suffice it to say... plenty. We're making progress though! Fingers crossed the entire first floor is done and glazed by summer's end.

The Orchard! Here I am, gettin all down and dirty with the orchard trees. The orchard plan has been finalized. We now have a total of 15 trees, with plenty of variety to go around: peach, nectarine, plum, 2 kinds of pear, 2 cherries and 6 varieties of apple.

Anyone care for a homemade fruit pie? We'll have plenty of fruit to share!

Well, people, that is everything for now! As always, tons of pictures are stored away on our Photobucket page. Check out our album from late April, when we demo the side porch, or our latest week-long priming, gardening and brick building extravaganza! We'll be back at the house in a mere two days, and with so many beautiful summer weeks ahead, you can expect many updates!

Until then, Toto Merkel just has one question...

"When will this all be over???"

Thanks for reading! Until next time!

- Melissa

Third Time's the Charm!

Out of curiosity, I had to go back and look...

April 20, 2011 - I epically claim, using a picture of Scarlett O'Hara defiantly reclaiming her decimated family farm for visual support, that we will NEVER be cold in our Vermont house again.

March 19, 2012 - A direct quote... "This abnormally early and warm spring feels like a little gift of sympathy handed directly to Tony and I. We will no longer have to toil in aching cold. Even though I said last April we'd never be cold again, I mean it this time!!"

February 3, 2012 - If I created a word cloud of our previous post, words like 'cold', 'uncomfortable', 'frozen' and 'human icicles' (a personal favorite) would just be jumping right off the screen and smacking me upside the head for my inability to ever learn the rules of renovation.

Three winters in this house, and three winters without heat! Is it even remotely sensible to claim that we will NEVER be cold in the farmhouse again, after three straight winters of a swing and a miss?? I don't know, but all signs point to a heating system at some point this summer, so here I am, I'm going to say it...

After working through three winters with NO heat in the farmhouse, we WILL have heat by next winter! We will NEVER be frozen in that VT farmhouse again!

Well isn't this a familiar sight...

There, I said it. But in the meantime, let me tell you about how cold we were during our last visit and about all of the fun and miraculous labors we managed to pull off despite the snow drifts and frozen fingers and toes.

Interior Repairs

Interior repairs continued to be the name of the game, as I was obviously not getting any sanding or painting done with a foot of snow on the ground. Tony and I went up to the house in mid-March hoping to see little to no snow on the ground. How disappointed yet unsurprised we were to find the yard covered in a nice new layer of fresh snow, and the interior temperature of the house hovering somewhere in the 'below freezing' zone. After pouting and cursing these endless VT winters for a few minutes, we lit a fire in the stove; while Tony developed a game plan for the weekend, I was equally busy letting my pants catch on fire/work boots melt as they warmed up next to the wood stove. Apparently I've spent too much time away from the house recently as I seem to have forgotten some basic rules, such as - don't leave your clothes to warm directly on the stove for as long as you well please. One way to take care of the winter chills up there? Flaming pants.

We've finally reached the LAST of the rotten beams...

 It's been a long haul, but it looks as though we are finally reaching the last of our major interior repairs. Aside from a little window work (installing the upstairs bath window, and switching the small window in the dining room with a full-size one in the kitchen), we were really down to one last repair - changing out the rotten corner wall studs that framed out the doorway to the back hall, but more importantly support a load-bearing corner of the roof. This is what this corner looked like when we first bought the house:

At the time I was completely intimidated by this gaping hole into nothingness. I didn't know what had caused it or how we we'd go about repairing it. Little did I know then that every single wall would be coming down eventually... no walls  = no holes = no problem!

When we took the plaster down last summer, we discovered a crazy amount of wood rot thanks to an old leak in the roof, which has since been repaired. Now that Tony has become a master rebuilder of rotten door frames, we assumed this would be an easy fix once we got around to it. After taking some photos in order to speed up the rebuilding process, we cut out the rotten wood. Boy was there plenty of it...

Out comes a giant conglomeration of wall studs...

So far, everything was going according to plan. Then, as we went to take some measurements for the new framing, we realized one unfortunate fact. This entire corner support has been sitting on... nothing... since some time last year. Specifically, since Tony and I cut out the rotten wood downstairs and installed that wood beam running across the dining room ceiling. The same 16 ft. beam we sadly realized we'd have to take down because it wasn't wide enough and had already begun bowing in the middle, therefore offering absolutely no support to the ceiling above. 

With heavy hearts, we realized that rebuilding this doorframe just became harder. Way harder...

Before we could put this framing back in, we needed to take down the 16 ft. beam downstairs, and somehow manage to install our new 16 ft. long, 6 inch wide beam... by ourselves, with no help. The same beam that we had cut at the sawmill last summer which required 3 burly men to lift just to get it on top of the car. Here we stood, the two of us versus this monster; unless we found a way to get this puppy up in the air and in place, we couldn't move on to do anything else. And so, we strategized...

Brute strength was not an option, so we had to rely on the power of our ingenuity. Tony created a new plan for notching the giant 16 ft. beam with the lovely aged barn beams we currently had holding up each corner of the old, flimsy support beam. He made some lovely custom cuts, and with a hammer and chisel we put some sweet notches into each end of the beam.

Then, mixing strength with some well-placed pieces of furniture, we slowly propped the beam up higher and higher into the air, raising it in turns just a little bit on each side. We eventually got it to look like this, and were beside ourselves with pride:

Lifting this beam was our Stonehenge

With the beam propped up in the air, we used house jacks to help finish lifting it (not seen in this photo) and also to keep it securely in place while we hammered the hell out of the side support beams. Getting these beams into a level upright position took hours of hammering and lifting of the ceiling with the house jacks, perhaps with a curse thrown in here and there. By the end of Saturday evening, we had made one serious mess but had the beam securely in place. Somehow we had made the impossible, possible! I was beside myself with pride at what we two crazy kids can pull off when we put our minds to it. Do, or do not. There is no try.

She's up and she's here to stay!

Having this giant, faded, hand-cut beam running across the ceiling looks amazingly awesome, but is a little hard to appreciate seeing as how all you see is wood EVERYWHERE you look. Once we have drywall up and leave these wood beams exposed, it's going to be a stunner, mark my words. 

Click here to see a slideshow of our big-beam weekend!

Unfortunately the next day was basically spent cleaning up the mess we made downstairs installing that bad boy, so we didn't get around to installing the wood framing upstairs. What started out as a seemingly simple repair once again turned into an epic feat of restoration, in classic If You Give a Mouse a Cookie fashion, but it was well worth it. The next and last beam will be installed near the back of the kitchen once the plumbing is all finalized. Now that the weather is thawing, we hope to get our plumbers back in the house asap to finish their repairs so we can finally get some water flowing into this house!!

 We'll be returning to VT next weekend with family and friends, where I will begin doing a little handiwork outside while Tony finishes up some of these repairs inside. Expect another update shortly! With grad school finally coming to a close in just ONE month, our time at the farmhouse should pick up significantly in the near future :)

For now, we bid a fond farewell to another Vermont winter and ready ourselves for the warming temperatures and budding trees of spring! I'll welcome these beautiful snowy days in another 7 months when I have a warm and toasty farmhouse to ramble about in.

Be gone, you charming, snowy days...

Stay tuned for lovely spring photos where the color palate won't be comprised of brown, brown and more brown. Until next time, thanks for reading!
- Melissa

A Winter's Nap

Today's temperature in Jamaica, VT: a balmy 20 degrees! All in all, that is actually pretty warm for this time of year. Winter has been fairly 'mild' here in Brooklyn... 'pathetic' might be another word I'd use to describe this lack of snowfall and warm temps! Indeed, Old Man Winter has made a poor showing thus far, but 20 degrees is still cold enough to make two people in an ice box of a house with no heat pretty uncomfortable.

That's right, no heat! Updating the blog has been delayed for the past few months thanks to grad school, which fills up my time with writings on public health challenges and community building, but leaves little time for much else. While I haven't had the chance to update this thing in awhile, we did work on the house the entire fall season. Some big changes have happened, including... PLUMBING!... but unfortunately we ran out of time to finish securing the basement before winter set in. Without a properly closed up basement, the pipes for the heating system would have frozen almost instantly, so it made no sense to run the heaters.

She's entered into hibernation mode for the next few months...

After two years of waiting, the prospect of a heated house during the winter months seemed so close! Instead, we once again find ourselves shivering in front of the woodstove like two human icicles. While another winter with no heat was a disappointing blow (I believe it was spring 2011 when I swore never to be cold in that house again), we've decided to shift gears and approach working on the house differently this season. Our new game plan is... don't go! Basically, it's just too damn cold to be inside that house for very long, especially when there's no hardcore demo'ing left to do. As unpleasant as it was, at least knocking down ceilings and walls kept our body temperatures up. With the inside of the house in fairly decent shape, we've decided to tuck the farmhouse in for a long winter's nap, and will continue to check on it every few weeks until the weather thaws a little. Worry not, though, we have plenty of house-related work to keep us busy on the weekends down here, which I will talk about in a bit. In the meantime, let's get to updating on what we've accomplished since August!

Perhaps it's best to start with our most exciting and visible change from 2012...

Painting Progresses!

 Yellow? What yellow?

Flashback to May 2012. My painting goal at the beginning of my summer vacation: sand, prime and paint the entire house by October.

My adjusted goal once reality set in, October 2012: stop making completely unfeasible goals for myself!

It's amazing that, after owning this house for over two years, I am still surprised by how long things take. This should be a mantra running continually through my mind every weekend we are up there. This work just takes time, LOTS of time, especially when you don't have a huge team of professionals helping you crank it out. One girl with a paintbrush and a small team of dedicated friends and family who make appearances up at the house cannot sand, prime and paint an entire two-story Victorian house in 3 months. It's just not possible, especially when you're doing the majority of the work only on weekends.

Thanks to a lot of tag-team efforts, we got a huge amount done on the house, and came SO close to having the entire thing at least sanded and primed! As you can see from the photo above, we fell short on the right side of the house thanks to the section above the 1st floor bathroom. We still need to replace the siding along the new roof, and repair some rotten wood along the roof life. It was too much work for one lady to do alone, so Tony and I plan on tackling this corner together as soon as the weather warms. We also got a nice amount sanded and primed on the left side of the house, but ran into a few issues here and there. Painting over the bay window proved to be a bit tricky, with ladders balanced on a block of wood and a prayer, but so far so good. Before we finish sanding and priming this side, I'd also like to take down that sad excuse of a side porch. It isn't safe to stand on and worst of all, is a preferred nesting ground for the monstrous spiders that take over our house in the summer. Once it's gone, we can properly finish prepping this side of the house for paint.

Maybe that giant pile of snow will finally demo the side porch for me

The only heartbreaking thing I must mention is... it was only this summer that we realized we needed to cover all of the nailheads in aluminum paint before putting on the primer. Therefore, I have to go back and redo the entire paint job on the front porch and front of the house :( It's almost too sad for me to even think about, so I'll just put that thought off until May or so, when I will have no choice but to face the music.

In other news...

Plumbing!

While these pictures are far from the sexiest thing around, plumbing might be the most exciting thing to happen to this house in awhile. In November our talented plumbing team came in and ran all of the lines throughout the house. We also got our oil tank and water heater installed down in the basement. Barring a few errors and unexpected complications here and there, everything was in pretty good shape! Seeing everything laid out did show us a few changes that needed to be made to our own plumbing plans, but unfortunately none of the changes could be made before winter set in. I think it's safe to say plumbing installation is about 75% complete at this point, and will be all wrapped up before summer. Hopefully, if Tony and I have all of our radiators sandblasted and painted by then, these brawny plumbing men can have the pleasurable job of hauling those babies up and into the house for installation.

Verrrry early stages of the master bathroom

In the meantime, Tony and I would like to have some of the fixtures we'll be making/restoring for the bathrooms (because we hate for things to be easy, and won't buy anything unless it needs work) done so they can be properly installed. That includes our 3 vanities, one of which Tony will be building from scratch. The above photo shows the rough layout for the master bath, including our vanity in the 'before' stages. I've purchased antique hardware to match the hinges and latch already on this old dresser, and we have a nice large slab of marble sitting on top that will need to be properly installed. Thanks to the terrible shape this thing is in, I should be able to take some kickin before and after photos!

Other Fixes 'Round the Farm

Plumbing and painting aren't the only things we've been up to! There's a million big and little projects we've been keeping ourselves occupied with aside from the two big Ps. It'd be too boring to list them all,  so I'll let these photos do the talking...

Finally, a basement door! Tony installs and secures our sweet new basement door. One less way for furry woodland animals to find their way into the house, and it keeps the entire place a heck of a lot warmer. No more gusts of freezing wind coming up from the basement!

So... 30 windows, double hung, 2 panes per window =  120 panes of glass to that need to be carefully removed, cleaned, reinstalled, and then glazed so they can face another 100 years of bad weather. Sounds like a big job? You bet it is! Good ole Momma Merkel and Mairim have been tackling this job for months on end. Susie slowly scrapes out the old caulking, removes the glass, cleans the frame, and then passes it off to Mairim to be reinstalled and glazed (a heartier form of caulking). And considering how fragile antique wavy glass is, it's a miracle when just one window is finished without cracking. To say we're halfway there would be... optimistic (or an outright lie).

 And who could forget about our old friend, the foundation??? Tony has turned into a true master mason, and after taking down that hot mess of a wall he and I constructed together last fall, he redid all of the brick work in the back. By October, the foundation was done!! We'll still have other small foundation fixes to do next summer, but this guy definitely has bricklaying down to a science and should get it done in no time flat.

Insulation is back! On probably the last decent weekend of the year, Tony and I brought another sprayfoam insulation kit up to the house and went to town on the first and second floors. We finished the library, living room, hallway, and almost all of the second floor. With only two rooms to go upstairs, we should have the whole house insulated before too long! As soon as the weather warms (if I had a penny for every time I said that...) we'll finish up the insulation and have this place all nice and cozy :)

And one final bit of big news...

Tony and I are no longer just the boyfriend and girlfriend with the crazy farmhouse project in VT! We had a proper Vermont engagement at the farmhouse with a proper antique engagement ring purchased at our favorite antique auction in Townshend, VT. Now, on top of everything else... time to plan a proper VT wedding! We certainly like to keep busy :)













Thank you all for reading this VERY lengthy blog update! As always, we've been keeping track of our  progress by taking tons of photos. The slideshow function seems to be disabled on the Photobucket website currently, but check out links to all of our new albums!

#33 - Primed for Fall and other major happenings...

#34 - A fond farewell to the outdoors

#35 - Plumbin' and insulatin'

#36 - Enter the plumbing inspection team!

#37 - A New Years visit

Here's to hoping that I find a little more time to update in the coming months! We won't be spending too much time up at the house, but hope to use our weekends to finish some of these furniture projects we've taken on, including one big one. Since we are aiming to leave our mark on every inch of this house, our brave master carpenter has decided to take on building custom cabinets for the entire kitchen! Tony is finishing up the kitchen layout and then intends to start laying out plans for building the cabinets. Hopefully his know-how and the cabinet book I bought him from Home Depot should leave him well-prepared for this gargantuan task :) Here's a peek at the layout he is currently building in a program called Sketch Up. He's only just getting started but it looks pretty awesome already!

Love that giant dining table... can't wait to fill it with friends in our warm and beautiful dining room!

Thanks again for reading! We'll be back with another entry soon! Happy 2013, all :)
- Melissa