Rock on

Progress on the front yard garden wall continues. Here are a few shots:





Work continues tomorrow. Updates as warranted.

The Wall...day, uh, something

OK, so I've lost track of the exact timeline of the wall project, but I thought I would post an update. The project has now grown in scope. Seeing as we had Roland here, and since he was clearly doing a bang-up job, we thought perhaps we should have him take a look at the OTHER rotting timber wall, this one in the front of the house. We've known for a while that it was rotting, and in fact, Jake had recently re-attached the steps that lead down from the deck because they had rotted out. It was a bad scene, with some serious dangerousness surrounding not only safe passage from the deck/kitchen down to the garden, but also, the wall was clearly host to various critters of the sort that like to eat wood. Given that they were having quite a feast on the rotting timber, it was only a matter of time until they started munching on far more important wood, like our house.

So we signed on to have Roland take out the rotting timber walls around the garden, and replace with a stone wall. He'll also put in new limestone steps. These will be much safer. There is one downside -- Carter will lose his wallow, the space under the wooden steps where he would sometimes hide on hot days. But we'll have to build him a doghouse replacement, because this is a better solution.

I haven't been able to get out to the back to update you on the backyard project, but here's the status of the garden wall (or, as you can see, lack thereof):


Wow, I always wanted to see a cross-section of the ground underneath our house! Yikes! (that's where the steps were)


The guys have promised that the plants above the wall (like the hydrangeas and lilies) will all be fine. They also know to protect the rhubarb and a couple of tomato plants, as well as the herb garden section. The strawberries, though, are taking a beating. Oh, and the Jerusalem artichokes were ripped out. But the thing is, they were becoming a bit of an infestation anyway, so we're not too worried about them.
The team should be back on Monday to put down gravel here, and also to finish up with the rock building out back. It's all very exciting. Stay tuned.

The room formerly known as the Pink Room

You may recall that we live in a house that has a BRIGHT PINK room. You may also recall hearing me say that I saw the PINK ROOM in the photos of the house way before we bought it, before we had even seen the house, and I said "I can't live in a house with a pink room." We bought the house anyway, and I figured we'd change it immediately. But for numerous reasons, we had not gotten around to doing anything about the pink room. For one thing, it's right in the middle of the house, making it a bit of a hassle to take care of such a project. For another, the room is old horsehair plaster with wallpaper, and then paint over wallpaper, and then a wallpaper border over that. It was going to be a project. A big one. And today, that project began.

Here are a few before shots. I'm not putting a whole lot of them up here, since I think most of our readers are well-acquainted with the pink-ness in question. If you're not, take a gander at some of the older posts (like this one or this one) or at our flickr pages, where you're sure to see shots of the pinkness in action.




If you're wondering about the wallpaper that was under the hot pink you can check out a small patch here:


Last night we emptied the room of all its worldly possessions.


Every other room in our house is now over-stuffed, and things are a bit nuts, but the pink room was empty, and ready for the arrival (at 7 am today) of our plastering team.

We're very happy with the work Brian Daly and his two workers did for us today. He was recommended to us by our good friend Matt, who's quite an expert carpenter and house restoration expert. The coolest part of the job was the fact that two of the guys wore stilts to do the job.

Our ceilings are 10 feet high, so this was kind of necessary. Lucy was fascinated by the stilts. I think she would have preferred to stay home from daycare today to just watch them working.

Here's a mid-project shot:


The drywall (before it was covered with plaster) was this dark blue-gray color, and we actually liked the way it looked. We're thinking of a dark slate blue as a possible color for the room (but we really have no idea what we're going to do color-wise).

The last time we did a drywalling project was for Lucy's room, but back then, we actually demolished the plaster. That was an incredibly dirty and trash-producing job, and we swore then we would never do such a thing again. This time, we sensibly decided to just put the drywall right over the plaster, making it an easier job for us. It did make things a bit tricky though, since the wallboard had to go on top of the bottom molding. We could have removed the molding, but this too would have been quite a project, and quite possibly would have ruined some of the molding. We think it turned out pretty well.

We're especially pleased with the ceiling, which had a lot of cracks in the plaster and is now nice and smooth:

Here you can see some of our nice, sharp corners:


As you can see, there are still some PINK spots, as illustrated here on the medallion. We're hoping to be able to paint over them. The guys did a nice job of trimming the drywall around the medallion, and bringing the edge right up to it. A few pieces broke off, so the guys suggest that we spray paint it, since it's in pretty delicate shape.

The room is filled with dust and smells funny, but we're pleased with the job. We have to wait at least a week, and probably two, for the plaster to completely dry before we can paint it. So we have a pretty much empty room in the middle of the house, which Lucy is really enjoying.

Do you have a color you'd like to suggest for the room formerly known as the pink room? Do you have a new name we can call the pink room, besides "the room formerly known as the pink room"? We look forward to hearing from our devoted readers!

By the way, I wrote most of this post on Tuesday, but didn't have a chance to get it finished. So all the "todays" here refer to Tuesday, June 23rd, for those of you documenting and keeping track of such things.