Triumphant Return

During our trip south, we acquired a lot of new STUFF for 83 Durant. We're pretty excited about a lot of it. This picture shows the new and improved front room. We've acquired a new tall bookshelf (from my Mom, formerly from my Dad's parents' house), a blue checkered couch (from Gloria, one of Mom's friends) and the piece de resistance, an amazing old desk from my Great Aunt Sis. Check it out:


The desk is older than our house, dating from roughly 1850. Here's what happens when you open the top:

It's chock full of nooks and crannies! We love it.

In the realm of more contemporary purchases, we finally got a carpet to cover the plywood floor in the PINK room. It is not pink, as you can see:


Since we are hoping to change the PINK room's color sometime (when?) we got a carpet that looks OK with it, but that will hopefully go with a new, less PINK color scheme in the near future.

83 Durant Garden Edition, Issue 2

The 83 Durant Garden is coming right along. We've had some great weather for it so far.

Today there was a very exciting development: strawberries! I picked and ate two delicious red shiny strawberries off of our very own plants. The plants are still looking a bit scrawny, but we're hoping they will develop and bear lots more fruit for us.

This tomato plant is coming along -- check out the flowers! And the lettuce is looking great, too!

And then of course, there are the parts of the garden that we love, although we can claim no credit for, namely, the lovely flowers, particularly the clematis and the roses, which are growing like weeds:




83 Durant, the blog, is going on a week-long hiatus so we can visit our families. Upon our return, we look forward to finding:
1) exponential garden development
2) a dry basement (we hope!)
3) a bunch more projects to start and resume

Destruction!

We knew this was coming, but it's still a bit shocking. Yesterday we demolished the spare bedroom.

This picture gives you a good sense of some of the problems:

There are lots of massive holes in the plaster (see white patches on blue area) and the plaster that is there is very soft and broken under the thick coat of shiny blue paint. The ceiling is made up of some very ugly white cardboard tiles; in several spots they are broken and stained, adding to the ugly. That red area is actually paint over wallpaper. Check out the texture:


There is no way to get that shiny paint and wallpaper off without doing further damage to the plaster. Thus, demolition! [Also, it's an opportunity to 1) improve the insulation and 2) see inside our walls, both for curiosity and to see if there are any problems.]

We at 83 Durant are incredibly thankful to our friends, Elizabeth, Ian, and Mike, who gave up their Saturday to break our house with us. It was a long, dirty, and at times dangerous job, and they were awesome! Thank you!

We started with the ceiling, and made our first exciting discovery: someone put the tiles in OVER the old plaster:

This actually works out well. We're going to leave the old plaster and the newer nail boards, and just have the drywall done over that. Less mess. We know (from being in the attic) that there is plenty of insulation above there, and it seems best to let it be.


Red balloons be gone! Also, this picture begins to give you the sense of the DUST we raised. It was really, really, really dusty & dirty.

Here's Ian uncovering the chimney:

It seems, from the circular patch of cement, that there may have been a woodstove in this room long, long ago.


This is the closet after we've removed all the plaster -- those lathes will also go, but we think they look pretty cool.


Another exciting discovery was the true nature of the built-in shelves: they are not original! Here's the pre-demolition situation. On this wall, we have a closet (to the right) and a built-in shelf (to the left):

Once we got through the plaster, we realized there was some rather modern framing around the thing:


Inside the new framing was the original built-in, which is identical to the one directly downstairs from it, in the pink room:


Elizabeth and I went to town on the dry wall behind the area formerly known as the built-in. We will probably put full-width, floor-to-ceiling shelves into this nook:


Here is a scary discovery, though not exactly something we didn't know about already:


It's not a great picture, but what you're seeing in the middle there is our next door neighbor's house. Yup, you can see outside from inside. This is the spot where the fascia boards meet the roof. Someone ripped out the oldwooden gutter and put up new fascia, but for some reason, didn't bring the fascia all the way up to the roof. The gap here, which runs the length of the house, is something our roofers mentioned, and they're going to fix it (hopefully soon). But it's a bit shocking to see it from this side!

Here's an example of some of the completed demolition:

It's roughly the same shot as the first one on this entry. Scary!

Here's a shot of the wall between the bedroom and the bathroom. It was easier to deal with because it didn't have any insulation at all, but it did have the plumbing and the electricity, so we had to be a bit more careful. We did manage to blow a fuse by incorrect handling of the lightswitch box, but no one was injured.


We cannot believe the tremendous pile of trash that this project created. Who knew that all this stuff could fit in the room????



Today we have some cleaning to do. Tomorrow we seek out some drywall contractors, and sometime before we schedule them, we need to install insulation. We have some leftover from a previous job, but we'll also need more. It has been a very busy weekend! Thanks again to Mike, Ian, and Elizabeth -- we couldn't have done it without them.

The Flowering of 83 Durant

There was once an ugly brown vine thing hanging over our fence. We thought about ripping it out, as it just looked like dead vine. But a neighbor said that it had lovely white flowers on it, so we left it to see what it would do. And there it is, with really spectacular white flowers blooming on it! They're covering the (otherwise rather ugly) fence, which is great. My aunt said that it's a clematis, and a well-established one.

After the forsythia bloomed all yellow and lovely, the color moved on to this next bush. We don't know what it is, but we like it:



We also noticed three green bushes with tiny white flowers on them. We wondered what they were, until a few days ago we noticed some interesting details. Check out the photo:


We think they're blueberries!! That would be awesome. (Feel free to comment if you think they're something else -- go ahead, crush our dreams of blueberries in our yard.)

Today I did a little bit of front yard clean-up and pruning while I waited for our roofer to stop by with an estimate for fixing our messed up gutter. He was across the street, giving an estimate to the agent of the people who want to buy the brown house directly across from us (where Dmitri and Junior and the duck live, sadly). He came over, as did the lady, and the lady said: "Our home inspector was here on Friday and pointed out some problems with the roof. Then he pointed to this roof (pointing to our house) and said THAT'S what a roof should look like." It was most gratifying to hear this.

Yard Work and Questions for Readers

Today we joined millions of Americans celebrating Memorial Day by doing yard work. We didn't do a lot, but we did accomplish a few things. I started by trying to mow the back yard. Here's the situation:


That grass is tall. Too tall, in fact, for our humble push mower. It couldn't do a thing. So we went to our friendly neighborhood Ace and bought a cheap weed eater.
It did the job.

We had one large, ugly pile of debris in the yard from the demolition of various fences. Jake split it up -- one pile for wood, one pile for metal, and also hacked down a fair amount of the wood to more reasonable sizes.

This brings us to READER QUESTION NUMBER ONE): How does one fix (or get fixed) the power cord to a power saw, if, say, one might have used said saw to cut through said power cord? Please feel free to suggest your answers in the comments. FYI, we are quite aware of the hilarity of this situation. And the danger.

So now we have two piles of junk. We're hoping to find a scrap metal/scrap wood place so we don't have to just throw them in the trash. The piles are now on the other side of the yard, and it's somewhat less unsightly. Here's a before and after:





Carter seems to enjoy this new spot, but he also seemed to enjoy crawling under the pile. We think he needs a doghouse, which perhaps we can make for him sometime.

Next problem: the hose by the garden (in front of the kitchen). It's a mess, as seen here:
And here is our solution:


The hose roll-up thing (with seat!) is a nice addition, but you might be wondering about that blue bucket. The problem is that the faucet drips. And it's this weird frost-free kind.

Which leads us to READER QUESTION NUMBER TWO) Does anyone know how to fix such a faucet? We can turn off the water from the inside. Jake tried turning that little screw in the center of the plastic handle, but it didn't seem to do anything other than hold on the label. It's a NIBCO Frost Free. (I'll try to get a better close-up image of it soon.) We're leaving it alone for now and hopefully the bucket will do its job.

And finally, here is our READER QUESTION NUMBER THREE) What should we do with these hydrangeas?

They are definitely getting new growth on the lower parts, but the woody stems look pretty ugly. Some of the old woody stems seem to have new buds and growth on them, while others seem thoroughly dead. Should we cut these off? Does anyone have any expert pruning advice for hydrangeas?

Finally, as an advance thank-you for all the thoroughly helpful comments I'm sure we're about to get, here is our 83 Durant Cute Overload photo:

Those are two of our neighbor kids and their duck. That's Dmitri, Junior, and Big Bird. Or, as we like to call them, Junior-Junior, Junior, and Junior Duck.

83 Durant Garden Party Edition

These awesome flowers have sprouted up in front of the house. When I was a kid, we called them gear shift knobs. I like them a lot.

We've just had a lovely weekend here at 83 Durant with many of our Western Mass friends coming out for a visit.

The garden is looking good. Check it out:


There are lot of little sprouts popping up. We decided that the large leafy thing that sprouted on its own was a weed (not rhubarb, as we had hoped) so Jess dispatched with it quickly, as seen here:


Here are some of the ladies relaxing under the deck. You can also see our two lovely hanging baskets, which we bought at the Northampton Farmer's Market.



We moved the grill to the front yard and had quite a lovely time -- thanks to all our guests!

Plumbing Project #3

Once again, we let the professionals do their thing. It seemed wise, given that this job involved a new hook-up to the drain system as well as soldering. Open sewers and open flames are two things I really don't think we want to try working on without proper supervision & heavy-duty "do-it-yourself" insurance.

The problem: the washer hookup


Our nice new washer was hooked up in a rather Rube Goldberg contraption sorta way. Check it out:

The series of hoses seemed ripe for bursting, and the drain into the sink was less than ideal.

WIth the expertise and kindness of My Reliable Plumber (that's really their name), we now have this:

I'm very pleased. The washer now sits in what was once the floor of a shower. It makes for a backup drain system, and also a much more stable floor (hence less vibrating) than where it was before.