Home Improvement Version 28.212

The big old house we bought years ago keeps insisting that we do something about her sagging good looks, and this summer it's the kitchen that's getting all the attention.  The poor old kitchen, with its 50's style metal cabinets, the plywood paneling "improvements" to the door and drawer fronts, and the poor lighting and electrical setup, has been crying out for years to be upgraded.  But nothing has bugged me more than the wonky floor that dropped more than an inch just from one side of the back door to the other.

The floor culprits were several--stones and cement packed between the joists on one end that over time heaved up the floor, and on the other end plumbers and electricians who sawed away joists to nothing.  Add to that the fact that the kitchen was at one time expanded out over what I think was a little porch that sloped away from the house.

Nice mix, huh?  So now I'm at the stage where the floor is (mostly) flat and level, with the subfloor in place and electricians on the wait for me to put in new joists for the ceiling.  Cool.  It's been slow going, with lots of other stuff going on, but we're getting there.

Note that we'll also enjoy some warmer floors in the kitchen, so notorious for being cold in the winter!

Stones and crumbled cement are now removed from the inner wall and work continues on planing joists to even them out. 

Note the light colored areas where new joists are in place or old ones planed to level them out. And insulation!  

Solid floors, 3/4 inch tongue and groove wafer board, glued and solid.  No squeaks!  

Now on to the ceiling!

House Project Progress

A colleague of mine mentioned that the photos of our nearly completed room look like a French New England mansion.  After taking some ribbing from his listeners for the odd combination, he insisted that the colors and finish of our dining room suddenly put the wife and me in some kind of elite "golden" status. See for yourselves.  We are just putting the final touches on it before we bring the furniture back in.

The wife and dog touching up paint. Compare this picture to the one below that shows the dark green trim and ornate wallpaper.  

Wallpaper, dark green paint, paneling, built-in plywood cabinets.  All gone.  

Still some paining to be done, but the corner looks a lot more inviting now than it did in the photo below.  

Those deep cabinets were good for storage, but they made the room and that passageway feel so small.  The doorway was like a little tunnel.  

Zoom in if you can and look at the floor in the corner to your right.  That seems to be an indication that there was once a doorway there as the fellow told us he remembered when his grandparents lived in the house.  Look below at my earlier post and you can see the outline of a former doorway.  

I found some cold air leaks that I was able to patch and make the room much warmer.  And that cold-air return?  A home-made remedy, courtesy of a 40 cent piece of expanded metal from the local metal recycler.  

We like it.  

Thanks go to our home's previous owners for saving so much woodwork and keeping the house in order.  They did a lot of work on the house themselves, and I hope they enjoy seeing the progress we make in turning it into our home. Thanks too go to DeLon Mork, whose gift of access to the old Mason's building in town gave us much of the woodwork and flooring that we used in the renovation of the room.

If It's December, This Must be Another House Project

We're working on the dining room, trying to get it up to speed.  We had taken the carpet out back in August and it's been a mess since then.  Now we're making a push to finish it up.  The floor in there was a nice maple, long covered by carpet and glue.  It's looking pretty good now, patched, stained, and finished.  I removed the false ceiling and fixed the holes in the plaster there.  I'm currently working on getting the east wall, long covered by wallpaper and paneling, into shape.

One of the improvements will be putting vintage mop boards and chair rails back into the room.  They are long gone, but it's clear they were part of an early version of the room.  We're interested in how the design of the room has changed.  In the first photo below, you can see outlines of where trim surrounded an old doorway, and the discolored panel to the right shows where there appears to have been another door.  But lath and plaster reveals that those changes were made LONG LONG ago.  

The wife is choosing colors to make it pop, and trim from the old Mason's building downtown Madison will surround the doorway and provide a new, vintage mop board.  It's going to be much nicer.

We are also refinishing the oak floor in the entry way.

The doorway from the kitchen to the dining room is opened up.  

Repairs needed on the east wall.  Cracks!  The chimney creates a little trouble.  

Once we took the carpet up, this glue hid the wood.  

Penny does NOT like the floor.  

Partway through sanding.  I had never used a big sander before.  

Sanding the edges.  

The completed floor, patched and stained.  I don't remember if this photo came before or after the final coats of poly.  

Tree Fall (pt. 1)

This summer has seen several trees come down at the mercy of my Stihl chain saw.  It's never a happy thing to cut a tree, but these were sad, sorry, aged trees that were on the verge of falling into the yard or driveway, or--worse yet--onto a house where they might hurt someone or damage the house.

So, we cut down a tree that had a big branch come down off it and expose the rotten core, so that it only had about half of the outer bark even available to keep it upright.  Our friends Amy and Phil helped on an early Sunday morning when we thought the fewest cars would be out trying to get by on the typically busy street that runs by our house and where we would be dropping the tree.  But the, as the two women stood on the street blocking traffic, and as I made the final cut to drop the tree, a woman in a red SUV exclaimed (at about 7:15am), "I can't be late for church!"  She then zipped around our guards and continued on her mission from God.  And narrowly escaped the tree fall.

Once we had that tree cut up and hauled away and cleaned up the driveway, we had a little breakfast.

Then we journeyed to Phil and Amy's to cut down their tree, one split down the middle so that every breeze opened and closed a long crack on the trunk.  Theirs too, had rot down the center.  We dropped their big ash tree into the street, cut it up, hauled branches and twigs away, and then hauled the firewood back to our place.  Six or so hours and we had the two trees down.

But yesterday was another story.

Dog Sitting

We're watching our friends' dog for the next few days, and so far, so good.  I was concerned this morning that it would want to be at my heels during my morning routine, but so far, an hour later, the pooch is still on its bed upstairs as she and the wife sleep into the late hours of the morning (it's 6:30am now).  The wife is much more a dog fan than I am.  Not that I don't like dogs or pets in general; it's just that my attitude is more laid back than some of the people around me whose affection for pets is more pronounced.  They do sometimes amuse me, though, such as when this hound becomes engaged with the monkeys on the TV screen.

Father-Son Roofing Teamwork

Here's a late note on one of this summer's projects.  We got a new roof on our giant porch, courtesy of son Casey Nelson and some hard work.  It turned out to be an easier project than I had feared, and it gave me and Casey a chance to connect over working side by side for a while.  We also got a chance to  cruise around town looking for stuff to gather from the city-wide cleanup (mostly bikes) and to knock down Grandma Rose's rickety shed in the back yard, helped by my brother Jim.  It was an excellent visit and I look forward to the next one.

Standing There with the Fridge Open

Freezing rain and snow this morning has closed places all over the state, and as I sit comfortably in our "Red Room" on our comfy couch with a considerable amount of coffee in a cup, I'm hoping my students are not slipping and sliding all over the road trying to get to my 9:30 class.
The grass was just beginning to turn green.  Lilac buds were heavy.  Frost, like our spirits, was rising and disappearing from the ground.  My heavy coat was getting its first few days of dust.
Forecast today?  Freezing rain and sleet.  Tonight?  Snow and sleet.  Tomorrow?  Snow.  Tomorrow night?  Occasional snow.  Thursday?  Snow likely.  Thursday night?  A slight chance of snow.
In all, it might be as much as four inches of snow.  Highs in the 20's.
There's always something to be said about the weather.  We'll get to that point in the year when it's good words, but for now, we can only say we're tired of this winter and wish it was leave us a little more spring.  We haven't had much yet.

Our Rain Gauge Runneth Over

Cherry-sized hail

 Waves of rain-clouds traveling above Madison yesterday dropped a whopping FIVE inches of rain, with some hail mixed in.  Thunder, lightning, wind, rain, hail, darkness.  Reports indicate that the little docile creek that runs through town overflowed its banks and caused trouble for residents nearby.  Collapsed or flooded basements? We're going to cruise through town to see what we can see.

Long Tall Tree, Long Hard Day

The pine beetles seem to be plaguing the long-needle pines in Madison, including the old-timers in our yard.  Two have gone down already, and a third fell today to the chain saw.  Wind from the west made the call, since the old tree was brown and tilting westward toward the house.  My friend JH came over to provide ballast and direction to the tree fall, and it came down just where my mind's eye had laid it.  The wife and I humped it to finish up, and now scrap is at the tree dump, little logs are in the wood pile, and big logs are stored for drying.

House History

After noting in the Lake County Historical Society's newsletter that I was trying to get some information about the history of our house, I got a call from a man who used to be a neighbor to the house--Pete Hortle, now of Sioux Falls (winter) and Lake Madison (summer). He lived two houses west from 1939-1946, while Lou Coppersmith lived in our place. Pete thinks they rented.

A Rapturous Sunset

The wife and I are still here, it seems, but the sunset through our living room window is heavenly enough for me today.  Rapture comes in many forms.

Our Old House--1935, With a Sailor-boy

On Sunday afternoon a brother and sister, Dean and Colleen Holst (I'm not sure of Colleen's married name) stopped by with these pictures, which featured our house, front and back porch especially.  The upper shot shows Dean in his little sailor outfit in 1935 on the rock pillar in our front yard.

The lower photo shows Dean and his cousin Marlene Baker, probably in the mid-1940's, with his grandmother Coppersmith and her two sisters on the back porch (now gone) of our house.

I love getting these old photos of our house and the people who lived and visited here.

Getting Those Gourds to Shine

We took a bit more leisurely approach to our day today, after the activities of the past week, culminating in our prize-winning float and a trip last night to Sioux Falls to see Dave Eggers, the writer, and Valentino Achak Deng, the subject of Eggers' "autobiography" of him.  It was the highlight of the South Dakota Festival of Books.  

The wife zipped over to Winfred to her folks' place while yours truly spent some time grading papers, and she came back with this sign of fall--a collection of gourds that her dad found hidden in the cow lot.  A little veggie oil, and these things look ready for the hearth!

I also entertained some folks who knew our old house as children, when their grandmother, Christina Coppersmith (if I remember rightly) lived here back in the 1930's and 40's.  They brought some pictures and offered some comments on how the place has changed since they knew it.

Our Own Recovery Plan--Completed

Our home's previous owners Francis and Nancy decided their dining room furniture looked just fine in their previous home, so when they gave us call, we jumped at the chance to put furniture and dining room back together. But we wanted different covering on the seats, so a trip to some "fabric barn" in Sioux Falls got us this nice print, and we transformed the chairs with a little elbow grease.

Apple Tree Planting

The wife and I put an apple tree in the ground tonight to replace a tired old fellow who died last year and will never blossom again. Here, however, is how you deal with that. Plant a new one.

May 4 Morning

Here's what morning looks like from our red-room window in May.

40 years ago today four students were killed and nine injured when National Guard troops shot into crowds of students on the Kent State campus. They're holding commemoration events to remember those who died and were injured.

The days keep turning. Morning comes again. While I went off to swim this morning, I set my Perios time lapse software to take shots every 30 seconds. Here's daybreak to remember those kids.

Why Didn't They Stop for Coffee?

Part of the plan for the day includes heading to Aurora, SD, for some landscaping plants, and when I checked out the route there (52 minutes by car, over 3 hours by bicycle unless the wind is howling like it is today), I noticed that the Google folks had driven by taking photos.

By all signs, they came by last fall (after our mailbox was annihilated but before the snow flew). Thus, here we are, our house newly shingled and painted, largely obscured by trees and plants just the way we like it. But, peeking through, the peak of the grey lady, working on her second century.

Tiling Done, Fire Blazing

We got the stove back in tonight after finally laying the tile.  There's still work to be done on the stove situation, but the stove is in and no damage to the new tile.  

Thanks to Justin and Pat for helping move the stove out.  Thanks to Justin for helping move it back again this evening.  Thanks especially go to Donna (who helped pick out tile and grout colors), Joe, and Megan for coming and helping lay tile.  And of course, many thanks forever to the wife, who laid into the grout last night and had a vision of what it all could be.  

Clearly, Walter is thankful too.  

Soon the carpet will be tacked down, trim and mantel put up, and (hopefully) tin will be laid behind the stove.  

Caught in the Act

Old one-day winder cuckoo clocks aren't all that accurate, but ours is currently running close enough to the satellite alarm clock that I know when it's going to go off, so here I was able to capture the clock in action, complete with its little noisy bird, its beak active as it sticks its head out the door. Sorry. It's sideways. Deal with it.