urban canoeing / Happy Halloween

We've had a bit of gorgeous Massachusetts weather, so we've taken a break from house work to enjoy the last gasp of pleasant outdoor adventures.
Happy Halloween! We had quite a few neighborhood trick-or-treaters, including two cats that showed up at our door and looked in to check things out.

leaves, leaves, leaves

We have a lot of leaves. They are piling up all over the place. Today I cleared a bunch of them off of the back porch, and we also did some winter-preparations of the porch, including taking down the sun screens, bringing in the chairs, and vacuuming up all of the nasty paint chips. It looks quite nice out there. These pictures show the side (door leading to the pink room) and the back (sliding glass door leading to the kitchen and windows leading to the dining room. We get great afternoon sun on this porch -- and now even more sun since the leaves are down off the trees.

I'm still working on collecting the piles of leaves. That's what fall is all about.

Minor Project Updates

We've been busy with school and Halloween lately, so not much time for projects. We've done a few small things, like putting up lightswitch and outlet covers in the basement. We also put up a nice paper lantern in the kitchen. The photo shows it here attached to the ceiling fan in the kitchen. You can also see our lovely pressed tin ceiling and cheerful kitchen curtain on the window over the sink.

I also did a bunch of weatherizing, including the gaps in the door to the pink room. But that's not really photo-worthy.

The painters are all finished with the outside. We're pleased with how it looks, but a bit frustrated with the contractor. We have paint chips and paint drips everywhere. Time to bust out the shop-vac. The painting contractor is supposed to put up gutters for us, but we haven't heard from him in a while. We are learning that it's hard to get house jobs done. Sigh.

Wet Paint!

It's a wet day for our wet paint! Yesterday there were a dozen men here scraping and painting. I can't believe how much they accomplished in one day. The house is very close to completion! We're going to get the door painted "colony red" (it's kind of a maroon color) and they're going to put on gutters. They also still have to do some touch-up work (you can see some of the trim on the front door is falling apart). But we're very pleased with the colors

Staging the Painting

83 Durant Street (the house, not the blog) is about to get a whole new look. Well, at least a slightly new look. We're keeping the colors roughly the same, but the paint will be fresh. The painters set up the staging today. We're hoping for clear, dry weather so we can get that paint on. Stay tuned for updates throughout the transformation.

Plumbing Project #2

After our first bad experience with a plumbing project ("shower head melee" as I like to call it), you'd think we would have learned. A few days after we moved in, we discovered that the washing machine hoses were put on wrong -- the hot water input was cold and the cold was hot. This wasn't a huge deal, since we could just set the dial to the opposite of the water temperature we wanted, but it meant there was no cold water rinse (since the machine didn't have a setting for hot water rinse).

So we've been talking about doing this for a while. Today, I decided to LOOK at the washer and see what this might involve. I noticed that the connectors at the point of the washer were kinda old, so I put the slightest bit of pressure on them, just to see how they were connected....and a trickle of water appeared. ARGH!

Jake found the wrench and worked the connectors back into place. Then he went back to the other end of the hoses, where they hook up to the water, and switched them at that point. He is a bit wet after this, but thankfully, he caught most of the water with his shirt. And lo and behold, it works! No plumber needed (so far, fingers crossed) and I just completed a successful load with the new set-up.

Hooray for Jake!

Stained Glass Glory

Today we covered the window in the downstairs bathroom with this film that makes it look like stained glass. Some of you may remember seeing this kind of stained glass in earlier pictures of our house. Unfortunately, the previous owners took it all down when they moved. But we liked the look of it for the bathroom, so we did that here.

Weatherize This!

On Friday, a kind man from the gas company came to help make our home more energy efficient. So today, I went around putting in new light bulbs and sealing up electric outlets. I don't really have any pictures of this, as it was not exactly a very exciting home project. Oh, but I did weatherize the mailslot (unfortunately, our mail gets delivered to the front door, not through this adorable mail slot). Just wait til we start putting up weather-stripping! Oh the excitement.

But what is exciting is that we've gotten the front room into working order. We still need many more book shelves, and we need to do something about the plywood floor. But Jake's in there playing bridge right now. Check out the lovely photo:

It looked simpler on paper.

The basement pantry needed some shelves. I needed some justification for owning a power saw. Here's what happened:

Top shelf

I made the shelves out of 2x4's and these handy little 2'x4' panels of plywood that Home Depot sells. That's me on a finished shelf above.

I decided to make the shelves twelve feet long, so the final assembly had to happen in place:

Shelves in progress

Surprisingly, this all went pretty smoothly. I only had to make one trip to the hardware store mid-project.

Finished!

Highly satisfying nano-project

It's so small it doesn't even count as a mini-project; thus: the nano-project. [I believe this qualifies us for some NSF funding. -jb]

Around the back of the house, outside the basement door, there are these four mysterious holes. They go under the wood floor of the basement, and into the crawl-space-area under the house. They seem like a prime access point for any critters that want to get into 83 Durant Street. At this time, however, we do not wish to host any of nature's furry creatures. So today's project was to put screen covers over each one. One of them had a beat-up and ripped old screen; the others were completely open. But with the help of my hand staple gun (I heart my staple gun) the project was done in about fifteen minutes

Woo hoo!
What a sense of accomplishment.

Meanwhile, Jake is still working on our shelves -- they are going to be HUGE! Stay tuned.

Yard Work!

There are so many leaves. But I will conquer them. Here is leaf pile, round one:

That's the composter beside the leaf pile. We got it from the city of Lowell. The other picture is the side yard of the house, featuring some lovely masonry work and a path that I cleared of acorns and leaves today. The little green bunches of leaves have lovely purple flowers on them in the summer. I don't know what they are, but they are all over the place around our house. If anyone knows what they are, or how to take care of them (will they come back next year?) let me know.

I did two entries today. They are about leaves and shelves. I kept messing up the spelling, and notice that both have funny plurals: leaf/leaves, shelf/shelves. Why? I know this isn't strictly house-blogging -- sorry!

Basement Pantry Shelves in Process

It has been an exciting day!
We started with an always exciting trip to Home Despot, where we purchased LUMBER! You can see it on top of our car here.


Jake is a madman with that saw. These shelves are going to be HUGE! The plan is 12 feet long and 6 feet high, with three long, deep shelves spaced two feet apart. Jake finished one shelf and the leg supports today. They stand at the ready in the pantry right now. Tomorrow (we hope) will be the last two shelves and final assembly!

Basement Pantry Project

We have a lot of kitchen stuff. A LOT. So we need some auxillary storage for some of it, you know, things like the pasta maker, the ice cream maker, the coffee maker....

So we're going to use the little room immediately under the kitchen, which was (when the previous owners lived here) a teenage boy's room. The previous resident left us this cryptic message on the wall.

Basement Floor Painting Project!

This is the basement floor. I just finished painting it (Sunday). It's still wet. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I know it looks like it's red and white, but the white area is actually a very pale blue.

I did the red area a few weeks ago. We had already painted the basement pantry floor red, and there was some left over, so thought I'd do the main room while I was at it. About halfway into the main room, I realized that there wouldn't be enough red to cover the whole area, so I had some fun with painter's tape, and decided to use up the remains of some blue floor paint left by the previous owners.

Pictures of our House!

Welcome to 83 Durant Street. If you click here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jakeb/sets/72157594230710889/
You will find lots of pictures of our house. We took a lot of these before the house was ours (and right after moving in) so some of the stuff in the pictures isn't ours. We'll try to upload new versions once we've set up the rooms a bit more.


Front of House
Originally uploaded by Jake Bridge.