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:
There are a bunch of new pictures over in the picture menu on the right. Here are a few highlights:
Once the house gets a bit more organized we'll take some more photos. Until then, thanks for reading.
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:
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.
Well it’s been about a month since my last entry. I haven’t written much because I have been busy shoveling snow and digging out my snow boots which I had shoved into the farthest reaches of the closet. Oh yes, spring has arrived in New Hampshire, and with it, cold temps and a fair bit of snow. It is not snowing right now, on May 1st. That would be ludicrous (but not unheard of, and frankly, not that surprising). But we have gotten more snow in April than I care to remember. Here is a picture from April 12th:
Yeah, that snow is still hanging around in shady patches and on the north side of the house, which will henceforth and forevermore be referred to as Far Siberia. This hopefully will help to illustrate how spring in New Hampshire is like a box of Happy-O’s. Happy-O’s are our grocery store’s generic equivalent to Cheerios. They are in a similar box. They are round, and made of oats. They have a hole in the middle. And, they cost a fair bit less than Cheerios. It is easy to get fooled by the oh-so-persuasive Happy-O’s. Heck, how different can they be? They look the same. Similar ingredients. They are even next to each other on the shelf. Why not buy them, and save a few bucks? So you do.
The following morning, your error in judgment strikes you squarely in the palate. The Happy-O’s instantly become a soggy beige mass of fibery gunk that looks as if it would do an admirable job patching holes in plaster. And the taste is…off. It is just not right. In short, there is little to be happy about with your big box of Happy-O’s. I scatter a few on the ground outside and even the birds are smart enough to not eat them. They approach, cock their heads quizzically, and then I swear they shoot me a dirty look before flying off.
So the lesson here is not to get fooled by the calendar. Trusting in early spring to be warm and sunny is like trusting generic Cheerios to provide a fulfilling breakfast. It’s just not going to happen.
Aside from bitching about the weather, and fighting off a never-ending cold, we have managed to make some progress on the hillside. We are basically at the point where most of the tasks are being done to get ready for plumbing and wiring. That means building interior partition walls, adding some insulation here and there, and cleaning out our wreck of a basement. The insulation has proved to be interesting. We decided to continue our efforts to go as green as we can, so we purchased some recycled cotton insulation. It costs much more than the regular fiberglass stuff you usually use, but it is completely safe to handle, and there are zero harmful chemicals. It is mostly made from recycled denim scraps from blue jean production. The insulation is primarily being put around doors and windows. We will also insulate the walls of the bathrooms, for sound-deadening purposes, since some things should really remain private, if you catch my drift.
The interior walls were another challenge, the main one being deciding on a final design and sticking with it. The two small bedrooms were pretty straightforward, but when we got to the master bedroom and bathroom, and closets and pantries, it was like a G7 summit. There was bargaining, give and take, compromise, stonewalling, bluffing, capitulating and good ol’ wheelin’ and dealin’. When all was said and done, we came up with some good solutions to some tricky problems, and I think we are both satisfied that the layout meets all of our needs gracefully. Once things were decided, I could go ahead and construct the walls, which are now done for the most part. Upstairs is a warren of studs and headers, but if you know what to look for, you can really see the space defined. It is pretty cool to have finally made it this far.
Next is plumbing and electrical. This week I will be getting together with our electrician to map out our strategy. The plumber has already been through once to tell us what needs doing before we are ready for him. Luckily, it was not much, the biggest task being to actually buy our tub, shower, toilets and faucets. Then he can get started, and the hillside will be that much closer to completion.
Today I learned a valuable lesson about advice you read on the internet: there is always the slight chance it may kill you. I guess I knew that, somewhere way back in my brain. But an event this morning brought it rushing to the forefront with a bang.
Recently, I have been having problems with my cordless drill. This is an 18-volt Milwaukee, a serious piece of toolery that has bored many a hole and driven thousands of screws. Always reliable, it never failed. Until now. The last few days, it seemed the batteries were not taking a charge anymore. This happens after awhile, but I felt it was a bit early in its lifespan for this to happen, so I was puzzled. But, I did use it a lot in the dead of winter, so I chalked it up to overuse and environment. Somewhere, in the back of my head, I was thinking about how odd it was that all three batteries should go at once, especially since one was much newer than the other two. But I didn’t entertain this thought for too long and I began to research the cheapest place to buy a replacement battery on the internet.
While reading Amazon’s user reviews, it seemed many folks were lamenting how crappy Milwaukee batteries are, which is such a shame because the tools themselves are top notch. As I skimmed through them, resigning myself to the $50-60 I was going to have to shell out, I came across one reviewer who reported a quick and easy way to revive an old battery. All you had to do was take a regular 9-volt battery, align its positive and negative terminals with the corresponding terminals on the drill battery, maintain contact for thirty seconds, and voila! The drill battery is wiped clean and will now accept a charge again. Simple as pie.
Have you ever made a pie? Not so simple, especially if your crust is from scratch. But I read on, and another reviewer said he tried it and it worked great. This is awesome, I thought to myself. I have to try this. So I grabbed a 9-volt from my guitar tuner, matched up the terminals, and counted to thirty. I then plugged in the drill battery into its charger, fully expecting it be as good as new and take a charge. The red light went on, and 1 minute later, it went off. Damn. It didn’t work.
Ok, maybe the 9-volt was too weak. Plus, I didn’t run down the drill battery completely. I knew I had a brand new 9-volt in my tool bucket on the hillside, so I figured I would give it another shot down there. As soon as I arrive, I take the drill and clamp the trigger in the ‘on’ position, and let the battery run down. This doesn’t take long. In the meantime, I grab the new battery. In an uncharacteristic flash of foresight, I also grabbed my safety goggles. These are pretty cool as safety goggles go, orange wraparound ones that sort of make me look like Bono. So I put on the goggles, grab the two batteries, touch the terminals together, and begin counting. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5…twenty one, twenty two, twenty three, twenty four, twentyBAM! I jumped about three feet in the air, dropped everything, and counted my fingers. All there. Looked at the drill battery. A little singed, but seemed to be ok. Found the 9-volt battery—toast. It had exploded, shooting some undoubtedly toxic goo across the room and leaving a trail of plastic shards on the floor. As I stared at it, it popped again, and I jumped again, and promptly opened the door and kicked the battery into the snow. Holy cow. Once my heart rate returned to a semblance of normal, I tried to piece together what had happened. Over the course of the workday, I think I figured it out.
You see, the problem with the drill doesn’t seem to be the batteries. I think it is with the drill body itself, specifically where the body connects with the battery. It doesn’t seem to be drawing power from the batteries like it should be, accepting only a trickle at a time. This proved out when the drill would not work until I banged it against something, thus confirming my suspicion that certain pieces were not meeting up like they should. This would explain all of the problems. The batteries seemingly to be out of juice, but not taking a charge, was really the drill not accepting the charged battery. Thus, when I tried to charge the battery, which I thought was dead, it was actually almost fully charged, which was why it wouldn’t accept a charge from the charger. So when I thought the battery was discharged, it really wasn’t, it just wasn’t working with the faulty drill. This leads to me trying to jump start an almost fully charged 18 volt drill battery with a 9 volt battery, but electricity doesn’t work that way, evidently. What actually happened was the 18 volt battery was sending a lot of juice into the little 9 volt battery. Ergo, the explosion.
So what have we learned here? Trust the little thoughts in the back of your head. Trust logic. Don’t mess with electricity. If safety goggles are cool and make you look like an international rock star you are much more likely to wear them. Conduct experiments that have a chance to go horribly wrong outside of your brand new house, not inside the future dining room. And, most importantly, beware the misinformation highway. It’ll put your eye out if you’re not careful.
The entire house now being completely fenestrated, we seized the opportunity to test out our passive solar gain. One of our hopes is that with the windows and doors installed, the interior of the house will stay warm enough to work inside comfortably. This should prove to be true on sunny days, and it will be interesting to see how it works out on partly cloudy days. We have a kerosene heater as a backup, but I figure since we have been working outside all winter, even a slightly warmer house will be an improvement.
To test our theory, we brought our indoor/outdoor digital thermometer to the hillside and installed it in the house. Over the course of a few work days, the results have been surprising. It seems that when it is quite warm outside (around 55 degrees F), with the sun shining and the windows and doors closed, the house stayed cooler than the outside temperature. I had expected it to be warmer, with the windows magnifying the heat intake and the insulation trapping it in. Not so. The inside temp stayed about 10 degrees below the outside temp. The next day, when we opened the windows to let the warm outside air in, the inside was markedly warmer, with the temperature differential between outside and in about six or seven degrees. On both of these days, however, as evening approached and the outside temperature dropped, the inside temp held constant, eventually becoming higher then the dropping outside temp. And yesterday, with the outside hovering around 35 degrees F and no sun in sight, the inside was a constant 7 degrees warmer than the outside temp (making it a balmy 42).
So it seems that I don’t know what the hell I am talking about. I thought that with house sealed, and our south side with plenty of windows letting in lots of sunlight, the inside would heat up markedly, and make the inside warmer then the outside. This doesn’t seem to happen when the temperature outside is above 40 or so. In one way this is a bit depressing, as I was looking forward to a warm early spring of inside work. But it does seem to bode well for a hot summer, where the house will stay relatively cool, which is a good thing, considering the whole global warming issue.
On a side note, it is amazing how much a window can make a structure look more house-like. The transition from gaping holes in the side of the house to finished and regulated openings is quite dramatic. It is one of those moments when you feel as if you are turning a corner in construction.
