Merry Christmas!

Store Progress

Our store has windows! Hooray! Look how beautiful they are! We also have lights! Both exterior:

And interior:

The lights are SUCH an improvement over the old fluorescents, which only worked spottily, buzzed annoyingly, and didn't fit with the historic aesthetic we are trying to achieve.

House Progress

I have been working down in the basement. Here is the exterior door to the basement.

This is the inside of the little basement door structure. You can see that it used to be much shorter than it is now. We think the roof was probably raised in the 1950's around the same time the porch was built.These are the steps from the kitchen down to the basement - very steep and a bit rickety. I have heard more than one person say they thought they were going to die every time they have to go up or down these steps.Here is a picture of basement rafters and the underside of the original floor. My job has been to dust all the cobwebs and dead bugs out from between the rafters and to start pulling down the junk that has accumulated up there - old curtain rods, wire, nails, and broken light fixtures . Here are our washer and dryer, all hooked up in the basement. You can see the inside of the stone walls, covered in a coat of paint or whitewash. In the lower part of the picture you can see the cement wall that was built to help support the stone wall.
And last but not least, we have a new back door. It's a very pretty birch door which we plan to seal with Danish Oil. I think the new kitchen will shape up to be a very cozy room with great views of the park.

Stone Wall Progress

Here is the south wall of the summer kitchen in progress. Ryno got the last bits of old mortar chipped away from between the rocks. Then we swept and vacuumed out all the dusty sandy stuff left behind in order to make a good surface for the new mortar to stick to. Ryno did a great job patching some areas where the rocks had either fallen out or been removed, and then he and Aaron started replacing the mortar - the dark grey lines in the picture below. To apply the mortar they used a bag similar to the one a cake decorator would use for frosting, followed by a combination of trowels and brushes to pack in and smooth down the mortar.The mortar has now dried to a handsome light grey and it looks GREAT.

Christmas Presents

Our good friend Jaime sent us a box of presents from Puerto Rico. William got a Gold Mining kit. Here are Papa and Owen and William mining gold. They found EIGHT pieces of gold (aka pyrite) and had a great time. Owen got a detective kit which he is very excited about. Thank you, Jaime! Ryan got a fly fishing fly tying kit and a very useful book. He says thank you too. :)I got an extra fancy corkscrew and wine bottle topper. I used the corkscrew for the first time the other day, or more accurately, I tried to use the foil cutter it came with. I struggled with it for a bit, wondering why it wasn't working as well as it looked like it should. I finally got the "foil" off, only to discover that it wasn't a corked wine bottle at all but was instead a capped one. Oops. I have to say, the foil cutter did a remarkly good job of cutting the top off the cap.

Merry Christmas!

Hi Ho, Hi Ho, It's Off to Work We Go

Ryan and Aaron have been busy putting new windows in our summer kitchen while Ryno and I have been chipping away at the old mortar between the now-exposed stones of the South wall of said kitchen. Living and working here, our work always seems close, but this takes it to a new level. Now we don't even get out the back door and we are already at work. :)

Removing the mortar is dusty work. Very dusty work. Here is a picture of my gloves and tools. The color of my gloves, according to the manufacturer, is "Dusty Rose". I believe I will just call them Dusty and forget the overly romantic bit about the Rose.
Here is a tableau I call "House Interior Adjacent to Construction Zone, with Elvis". As you can see, the construction zone is trying very hard to encroach upon my house interior. Out, damn stone! There is dust on the floor, on the furniture, in my hair, up my nose, and just about everywhere else you can think of.

Here is the wall in question. Once a sufficient amount of old crumbly dirty mortar has been removed, Ryno will replace it with clean new mortar, making the wall stronger and more attractive.Here are Ryan and Aaron framing in windows.

Those boys sure build nice windows, don't they?

And here is Elvis. If we leave him in the house he mopes to be let out with us. When we let him out he mopes because it is cold and the ground is covered in frozen snow. Poor, pathetic Elvis.In sad news, our chicken Dude has passed away. The Dude no longer abides. We are not sure what the cause of death was. We hope she had a good life. Despite being requested to do so (I hope it was a joke?) I am not going to post any post-mortem pictures of her on this blog. Instead, here are a couple pictures of the park in winter.

Snowballs and Stonewalls

Snow Days