Little House on the Hillside

We were never too enamored with the cabinets that came with our house kit. They are perfectly functional.  Oak and plywood, nice hinges, cheap drawer slides, thin doors, but what can you do? They serve the purpose. But they never looked right amongst the stainless and slate. They needed some zip.
Well zippity-doo-da , gimmie a hey and a hoo-ha! After many meetings, confabs, bull-sessions, tete-a-tetes, tea parties and fireside chats we decided on a color. I must admit, the idea came from sister Carrie (not Sister Carrie, my 4th grade French teacher, but my sister-in-law Carrie, of the Brooklyn Carries) who suggested a terra-cotta. Until that point, we were leaning towards green, and sister Bridget (not Saint Bridget, the patron saint of Sweden, although she is ethereal) was lobbying for black--I think she was sniffing turpentine. Anyway, cooler heads prevailed, and we chose a deep red that looks great against the slate counter and adds a sense of depth to the kitchen. A few knobs and pulls later and we were in business.

    Meanwhile, tension between the cats and the wild turkeys runs high. Although there has been much posturing from each side, no strikes have been launched. Independent monitors are on high alert and will report any instance of fowl play.

     So we now have this great little house. We are very happy with how it came together: the layout, window placements, functionality. The tile looks great, the kitchen is primo, the floors shine like a waxed turtle (???). Then, we filled it with all of the tag sale cast-off third hand furniture we have acquired over the years. The pull-out couch with the tattered arms. The papasan chair that no one can sit in without going ass over teakettle. The loveseat we received from my sister on moving day (which is actually the nicest thing in here). The knocked-together shop class bookshelves next to the undersized coffee table beside the rickety student desk. We are bringing a whole new meaning to shabby chic.
We do have a few cool things. The old oak dining table is a perfect fit. The wild blue dresser somehow works. Our bed is comfortable. But I do not know what we would do without the modern-day savior of cash-strapped design-on-a-dimers everywhere, the slipcover.
Two tannish slipcovers, one for the couch, one for the loveseat. Just like that, we were back in the game. A couple of colorful pillows, a boldly patterned blanket and a few strong cocktails later, our rooms aren't looking too bad. A good save until we marshall the resources for some new furniture. Of course, the best thing we did was to jettison the papasan. Goodbye, dorm room--hello, showroom!

The next big step will be to agree on paint colors for the trim, cabinets, wainscoating, etc. Then the next even bigger step will be to actually apply that paint to the aforementioned surfaces. Then we will have what my mother-in-law refers to as 'Pop!' As of now, I guess we only have 'fizz.' But look out 'Pop!' I'm coming for you. And tell your buddies 'Snap' and 'Crackle' that they're next.

     Ok, it wasn't exactly a pound, it was the Monadnock Humane Society animal shelter. But it was furry, and I'll be damned if I wan't going to somehow make this title work. Anyway, this all points to one thing--actually, two things: cats on the hillside.
We finally got settled enough to go find a couple of cats to make our home even homier. After a few hours of looking, we chose two 1 year old boys, named Finbar and Frodo. How cool is that? We didn't even have to rename them! (truthfully, Finbar was known only as Finn, but we decided to make him a bit more formal and celtic-warrior sounding).
They are hilarious, get along very well,  and pretty much beat the stuffing out of each other every waking hour when they are not perched on laps. They are exactly what we were looking for.

The only bummer is that now we cannot name our first child Frodo, it would be way too confusing. Well, there's always Gandalf...

OK, a lot has happened since the last post, the major event being our actually living in the littlehouseonthehillside. Yes, it is 'finished', after a fashion, and life is grand.
What is decidedly not too grand is the status of this blog, which is very much like an ambitious vegetable garden. Started in spring with the best of intentions and energy, it showed great promise. Then, you fall a week behind in the weeding. Then another week. Soon, it is a cumulative disaster, and you couldn't possibly ever catch up, so you just sort of walk by the garden with guiltily averted eyes. What was once ordered beauty has become  a tangle of dandelions, dead flowers and rotten zucchinni. Yes, my blog has become akin to rotten zucchinni.
It would be futile to pick up where we left off, so I think what I will do is just give you a little update on how things are going right now. Later, I'll try to fill in what happened over the last three months or so in a series of flashbacks, much like the hit TV show 'Lost.' If I'm really good, each entry will end with a cliffhanger, leaving you anxiously awaiting the next entry. Or, when my riveting and hilarious building experiences are converted into a quirky yet poignant independent film that becomes the sleeper hit of next summer, the 'lost journal entries' will become part of the DVD extras, and you can find out what happened that way. Or, just give me a call and I'll just tell you what happened. At any rate, here we are:

Our little house is cozy, comfortable, and---a complete mess. We still have boxes everywhere, and as of yesterday there was a pile of lumber in the front hall. We work every day to get it a little less cluttered, and it is slowly evolving into a semblance of order. Art is going up, meals are being cooked, shelving and clothes rods added. But as the temperature begins to drop and we see the first couple of snowfalls blanket our woods, it feels absolutely fabulous to add another log to the woodstove and not have to be up on a roof attaching a ridge cap.
There are a bunch of new pictures over in the picture menu on the right. Here are a few highlights:

     This is a cautionary tale. It is a story of mice and men, of fur and plastic and, ultimately, tragedy. It begins sometime this past spring.
     I had been doing a fair bit of cutting inside the house with the chop saw, creating a sizeable amount of sawdust. Time to break out the Shop-Vac. We hadn’t used it since last fall, I think, when we were sucking up water from the basement before we had the roof on. I dragged it out, , plugged it in, and turned it on. Holy socks, why is it whining like a jet engine? And what is that burning smell? And where is the suction? Ah, I forgot to change the settings and filters from wet to dry. No big deal. So I swap the filters and make the adjustments. Same result. I dink around with it a little more, become frustrated, and put it in the corner, resorting to the broom and dustpan.
     A few weeks later I had an odd hour or so left at the end of the day. Wondering what to do, my eye strayed over to the vacuum. Ok, let’s rock, I thought (how embarrassing that I actually think in these terms). Over the past few weeks I had dug out the manual and fiddled with it a bit more, all to no avail. That day, I was determined to make it work.
     I started to take it apart, piece by piece. After removing a few covers and plates which clearly warned ‘DO NOT REMOVE’, I finally could get a little view of the motor, which to my novice eye, looked fine. I flipped it over and peered into the intake area, which was a bit obscured by some protective caging. Hmm, looks like some string or something is wound up in there. Maybe that is the problem. I get a long drill bit and start to pull this grayish fluff out from the innards of the vacuum motor. Man, what is this stuff? It almost looks like…hey, is that a tail? Oh, crap.
     Through some careful extraction and forensic techniques, I think I can paint an accurate picture of what happened to the Shop Vac. At some point in late fall, perhaps early winter, a mouse snuck into the house, looking for a warm place to bed down. It sees a long tube, crawls up it, and ends up in a cozy den. What a perfect place to sleep and store food. So he does. All is well until someone decides to turn on the 12 horsepower motor. Then, all is not so well. Frankly, things are decidedly unwell. But, at least he didn’t have time to ponder what was going on. Based on the position of the remains, I believe death was swift and humane, and probably beat being eaten by an owl or fox. Thus ends the tail.

     Just don't ask about the snake.

Here are some pics from the last few months, to go along with last week's entry.

     The list of things left to do is as long as my arm attached to another arm, which in turn is attached to another arm. That’s right, sing it with me now, ‘Hands across America.’ There. I feel better. Don’t you?
     I’d feel a lot better if I had written at least one entry in the past month, but circumstances were beyond my control. Late nights on the hillside, Irish music, a great wedding and a lost weekend in the Catskills all add up to a candle burnt at both ends, a low-grade hangover, and , alas, no journal entries. But it’s time to remedy that, so I am going to make like Heinz and do some catchin’-up. I will attempt some type of chronological order but I wouldn’t set my watch by it. However, according to Mr. Einstein, time is relative, so theoretically, it will be impossible for me to write things out of order, since there is no order to begin with. Nice. I’m off the hook.
     I am happy to report that the wiring is, for the most part, complete. Rick donated some more time before jet-setting off to Greece for three weeks, and by the end I was pretty confident in my ability to wire switches, outlets, and circuits in general. Anne became extremely proficient at actually hooking up the receptacles, and did probably 95% of the outlets in the house. I approached wiring with a bit of trepidation, but once you get the hang of it, it is not too bad.
     Once all of the switches and outlets are in place, the walls can begin to be covered up. In most houses, this would mean drywall. On the hillside, if you haven’t yet noticed, things are a bit different. We are doing a lot of wood sheathing, 1x8 tongue and groove boards. There are a few advantages to using wood over drywall. One is that I already paid for it and it is sitting in a big pile in the future driveway. Two is that it goes up fairly quickly, and is extremely dent/puncture/disgruntled teenager resistant. Three, there is no joint taping involved, which is tedious and messy work. The downside is that all of that wood can become a bit much to look at. So we have decided to do a bit of drywall interspersed with the wood, just to keep things interesting, and to break the monotony. The sheathing is going well, with some random walls in different parts of the house completed.
     It is I, Plumbob. That’s how our plumber answers the phone when you call him. It’s also how he greets you when he calls you. Sometimes, he says it when he walks into a room. In a world of grumpy old plumbers with no sense of humor, Plumbob is a very cool anomaly. He came out to the site for his first visit, and proceeded to drill very large holes into our very nice floor. The things we do in the name of hygiene. He spent the day laying out where pipes and drains will go, drilling holes, and convincing me to run radiant heat underneath the entire first floor. He then gave me a list of things I had to do before he came back. One of which was to run the radiant tubing.
     I am ecstatic to report that the tubing is done! Anne and I tackled it a few days last week and did a marathon day yesterday to get it done. For the uninitiated, radiant tubing is basically flexible plastic tubes that run underneath the floors. Hot water or antifreeze is pumped through them to produce a warm, even, efficient, dust-free heat throughout the house. Plus, you can walk around barefoot in the winter. The end result is very nice, but the work it takes to get there is not so easy. Anne and I spent hours unrolling tubing, drilling holes, and stapling it into place. Of course, as I have mentioned ad nauseam, we can never do anything too simply on the hillside, so we used an extremely wide (7/8”) tubing for our radiant.  That may not sound wide, but no one I talked to around here ever uses it, and the guys at the plumbing store laughed at me when I brought it up. It is not very pliable, so bending it around joists and threading it through holes was what an optimist might call a ‘learning experience.’ After the first disastrous day, which involved kinked tubes and little progress, we decided to unroll the entire length of tube, to get it straight as possible, before running it through the joists. Of course, the tubes are coiled into two hundred foot long rolls, so where to do it posed a challenge. We ended up rolling it out all the way down the driveway, and then slowly snaking it in the bulkhead door into the basement as we needed it. It sounds crazy, but it worked extremely well, and we were able to finish the work by late yesterday.
     Why run such thick tubes? Well, I purchased the radiant supplies last year and didn’t know that 7/8ths was extremely thick. As far as I knew, everyone was doing it. Not so. Also, when your tubing is that thick, it carries much more heat a farther distance, so it is in actuality more efficient than running smaller tubing. Not easier, mind you, just more efficient.
     But the most significant achievement of the past month has nothing to do with wiring, sheathing or heating. It is all about color. Namely, we have finally chosen a color for the house. After 13 samples, four trips to the paint department, many long and fascinating discussions, and having so many test boards of different hues nailed to the side of the house that it resembled a pack of Zebra Stripe gum, we have made our decision, and actually purchased the stain. I’d tell you what color we chose, but at this point I forgot. But stay tuned, for I am sure you will be seeing it soon right here. Speaking of pics, none for this entry, but hopefully will put up a bunch this week so you all can see what I am talking about.
     So, with both shower units in, the wiring done, the plumber on his way back, a color chosen, the radiant tubing installed, a kitchen faucet purchased, some lighting already chosen, and the squeaks in the first floor fixed, that leave sonly 3,895,674 things to attend to before we move in. So close, yet so far.
     On a side note, congrats to my brother Mike who just finished the Trek Across Maine to benefit the American Lung Association. He biked over 180 miles across the state of Maine and raised over $1,000. Good job, bro!  Of course, he blogged the whole experience.

     Our good friends Simon and Nicole have just returned from a 14 month research trip in Rwanda. They are some of our dearest friends, and we took a day off over the weekend to see them. Simon is a handyman by trade, and generously offered to come up for a day and help out. Great, I told him. It should be easy. We’ll be mostly pulling wire and drilling holes all day, no big deal. A nice easy day to get you back in the swing of things.
     Simon arrived early this morning, and after giving him a tour, the first order of business was to get our new one-piece tub-shower unit to the upstairs bathroom. This thing is not overly heavy, but very awkward. We carried it around to the back door, slid it into the hall, and that’s about the last thing that went right for the next three hours. I had assumed since the house was new construction, with a staircase that met code and was yet to have a railing attached, that this guy would just slide right up. Not quite. I’ll file this experience in my ‘Never Again!’ drawer, right next to the picture of me swilling cheap tequila from a plastic bottle on a beach in Mexico (don’t ask). You can see where this situation is going. And for the record, the aforementioned drawer is getting quite full these days.  
     So it quickly becomes clear, as we slide the shower into place that it is not going to go up as is. We’ll need to take a tread off. Ok, no big deal, the treads on the stairs are temporary anyway, until construction is complete and I can put on the nice oak ones. So I unscrew one tread. That gives us another inch and a half. We need…oh, I don’t know, roughly…a hell of a lot more. Crap. We wrestle the unit in and out, try turning it this way and that, all to no avail. I need to cut into the center carriage of the stair.
     If someone had told me last month that I would one day soon be hacking off pieces of my painstakingly constructed staircase, I would have called them a dirty name. But out came the Sawzall. I told Anne the other day, as she was working on something downstairs and I was cutting out a misplaced stud upstairs, that at this point in the game, if you hear the Sawzall, you know something has gone wrong. Truer words were never spoken.
     I sawed off half of one riser. We moved the tub back into place. Still not enough. We moved the tub out of place. I removed another tread. Moved the tub back. No good. Moved the tub out. Took off a floorboard upstairs. Moved the tub back. Nope. Moved the tub out. Cut another riser. Moved the tub back. Damn! Moved the tub out…
     It went on and on all morning. By the fourth riser I am going a bit crazy and Simon has blown a major gasket from leaning over and holding the weight of the tub form above. We know it will go eventually, and after about 3 hours, it finally does. We lift it up what’s left of the stairs, swing it around in the upstairs hall, and slide it into the bathroom. Voila. It fits like a glove, standing there next to the toilet. All of the sudden we have the makings of a bathroom.
     We spent the rest of the day running wires, but we were pretty spent, so we quit around 5:30 or so. Simon hobbled back to his van and sped away, only after erasing my number from his cell phone and requesting that I do the same with his. I haven’t spoken to him since, but his lawyer seems quite nice, and I’m sure we’ll settle out of court.

     For the last week or so, I have been wiring the house. It feels weird to say it, since it is something I have little to no experience with, and it would be an untruth to say I have done it alone. But like most other projects on the hillside, this one started with, yet again, a large amount of homework.
     I spent a few days studying my wiring book Wiring a House by Rex Caldwell. He covers every aspect you can think of, from choosing a panel, to grounding, to installing a dishwasher. I certainly didn’t get everything on the first pass, but that is certainly no fault of his. This book has become my Bible over the last week, and probably will be for the weeks to come.
     I also had a few consultations, one with a local electrician, Harvey, and another with my future neighbor Rick (he of the guerilla daffodils, see below).  Both had keen insights and supplied me with critical information before I made any mistakes from the get go. Harvey is going to mount the meter on the outside and set the grounds, as well as hook up to the power company when the time comes. Rick has been over for a few days already, fine tuning my layout, showing me how to strip wires and hook up circuit breakers. Without him, I may still be standing there with my wiring diagram and a blank look on my face.
     The wiring diagram is another one of those things that takes up a bit of time but is pretty essential to keep everything straight in your head. It is basically a floor plan with outlets, switches and light fixtures penciled in, and then lines going to and from switches to fixtures to show which switch operates which light. It can get confusing very quickly. I would suggest to anyone out there who is contemplating this do it in pencil, and to have a big eraser handy.
     First thing you do is nail up all of the outlet and switch boxes, so you know where to run your wire. Then you figure out which outlets and switches will be on which circuits. Finally, you figure out how the wire is going to get to these boxes and remain hidden. This is where, on a First Day Cottage, or on any other timber frame structure, things get a bit tricky. In most houses, there are 2x4 studs covered by drywall from floor to ceiling, as well as drywall on the ceiling. Hiding the wiring is an afterthought, since every surface has a cavity you can work in. But on the hillside, I have spent a truly disproportionate amount of time thinking up clever trim details, deciding where I will add wainscoting, and generally pulling my hair out deciding the best way to run my wire. The house is designed with the idea that you run most of your wire on the outside of the house, an idea which always shocks people when they hear it. I have managed to avoid a lot of outside runs, but still use the technique in a few key areas. I spend more time standing in the center of a room, mumbling to myself and tracing imaginary wiring paths in mid-air, than I ever thought possible. I feel a bit like Gandalf, but with bushier eyebrows.
     By now, the first floor is mostly done, thanks in great part to Rick donating some precious hours to the cause. I hope by the end of next week to have the bulk of the wiring completed. Then I can turn my attention to something I actually know how to do, like putting up trim, staining siding, and drinking gin and tonics.

Many of my friends from NY wonder why I decided to live in such a rural place. Here are two quick reasons:

1. The animals
          Anne and I were taking a walk at dusk the other evening when we saw a large bird fly overhead and perch in a tree. It immediately began calling out a familiar call. It was a barred owl. We stood and whispered, trying to get a good look at it in the failing light. It obliged us by flying to a closer tree, where it continued its calling. Cool, we thought. It obviously had the same thought, because it decided to fly even closer so it could check us out. By now we were within spitting distance, and it kept calling at us. I am not sure what it expected us to say, so we said nothing. Eventually, evidently bored with the one-way conversation, it flew off, to find someone more polite to talk to.            The other thing that you cannot miss at this time of year is the sound of the Spring Peepers. These are tiny little frogs with BIG voices. Their calls can be heard from over three miles away, and these guys are smaller than my thumb. When it is a warm night and you are near a wetland, the sound is deafening. It is awesome, and I mean that in the true sense of the word, awe-inspiring, as opposed to the modern ‘like, totally’ sense of the word. Take a listen:

2. The people
         Our soon-to-be new neighbors on the hillside did some guerilla-style planting last fall of some daffodil bulbs on our land, and we are now seeing the results. They decided to plant some daffodils from their yard in an undisclosed location around our driveway, and just like that, the landscaping of the hillside has begun. A welcome splash of color, and a warming sense of neighborliness.