From Washington to Maine: Building A House for the First Time: Updated Kitchen Photos - Fine Homebuilding

From Washington to Maine: Building A House for the First Time: Updated Kitchen Photos - Fine Homebuilding

Posted using ShareThis

From Washington to Maine: Building A House for the First Time - Fine Homebuilding

From Washington to Maine: Building A House for the First Time - Fine Homebuilding

Posted using ShareThis

My Review of Skil 5 1/2" Trim Saw

CPO Skil

5 1/2" Trim Saw. Left-hand blade design with 5 1/2" blade For maximum visibility . Precision cut helical gears For longer tool life . Built-in scales and cutting guide For accurate applications . Ball bearing construction For smooth precision operation

Skil 5 1/2" Trim Saw

The Only Circular Saw I Own

sjdehner Belfast, Maine 8/21/2009

 

5 5

Pros: Great Blade, Good Design, Powerful, Safe, Easy To Use

Best Uses: In The Workshop, Home Improvement, In The Field

Describe Yourself: Professional

Having built an entire house I cannot think of a single cut that required a larger circular saw. This little gem is compact, light and more than powerful enough for any job that comes to mind. I sold my heavier, awkward and less safe 7 1/2" circular saw to buy this little guy and have no regret. I highly recommend going "small" with a circular saw.

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my kind of cable

I wanted to teach myself cable knitting basics over the winter, but was somehow too busy...now that Shawn and I are working on the business together, instead of each working on a big project on our own (he on the house and me on the business), we suddenly have a lot more time!!

Here is my first attempt at cable knitting. The sock is nearly done, just the rest of the foot and the toe to finish up. The cables are like magic, so fun, and amazingly easy! Another brilliant engineering feet. I mean feat.

I'm so ridiculously proud of these!!

kind of bedraggled after 6 weeks of rain, but here's our second little garden in Belfast...and one gardener picking dinner salad greens!

Pemaquid Point Lighthouse.

Last year in the summertime we took a little "mini-cruise" out to some nearby islands to see puffin colonies, which have been brought back from the brink of extinction in the area (due to excessive hunting in the late 1800's) very successfully by a lot of hardworking men and women. On the way home, we passed by the Pemaquid Light, and we both wanted to see it. So on one of the first sunny days of the summer, a bit over a week ago, we took a picnic lunch and soaked up some much needed sun rays on the weathered rocks at this lovely, albeit very very crowded, spot.

the waiting game

We survived and are even smiling! And Penny magically turned her head, again, at the last minute.

Now we are just waiting for the sale to come along...we both hope someone will love this house and take good care of it and the land it's on. We may have changed our mind about staying in Maine, but we worked hard (HARD!!) and consistently with love (tinged only slightly with frustration at times) knowing that it was our good work that would someday sell this and send us home.

We've learned so much on the way. :-)

I'm glad we came.

again, a little more trim work was done before marketing, but here's a general sense of the essentially finished product...you can scroll back in time to see the way it looked last year this time or nearly....

These photos were taken in February before our trip south. There are a few things I notice that aren't done yet in this photo that now are...mainly some trim around the dishwasher (which we bought for resale purposes) and some crown moulding at the ceiling that we put up about a week before listing the house. This kitchen has been a real treat for us to complete. Not only does it beat doing dishes in a five gallon drywall mud bucket (hey, I did that for 6 months straight! I feel qualified to say! It also beats cooking on top of two saw horses with a leftover sheet of plywood from the attic sheathing!!). I still feel delighted to cook here every day!

This is also shawn's second set of kitchen cabinets...his third set will be a charm as he'll have two previous trials to have gained knowledge from. The next kitchen we're going to try our hands at glass fronted cabinet doors, which both of us have admired. We'll do mortise and tenon framing for that project...that's a ways down the road...have to sell this house first, get home, find land, build, and then we'll see!!

Here's a finished kitchen photo...It was worth it to wait. We custom built the cabinets from the floor up. The cabinet doors are made from edge and center bead (v-match). We used this on the ceilings, too. They are glued and then clamped together, primed, painted, etc. We used no plywood whatsoever in any of the kitchen, not liking the material and wanting to get away from it. The hardware we ordered from Lee Valley, still our favorite source for finish wear...Oh how we miss Vancouver!! :-)

The butcher block top came out beautifully. It was incredibly heavy and delivered in two pieces, one 8 feet long and one 12 feet long. Considering that our combined body weight is about 250 pounds (GO VEGGIE POWER!) we felt quite mischievous after hauling it in (through the snow, by God!). We stained it using John Boos mystery oil. The natural shine and depth of the maple is quite lovely. And the windows with all the wonderful light we will certainly do again in our next home. It'll be wonderful to stay next time around!!

Our little garden in Maine. This is how it looks from December through mid April.

the snow pile on our return home from Florida. We were gone three weeks and there were two ice storms and a blizzard while we were getting a sun burn on the beach. Ahhhh... maybe all the rain we're getting right now just needs to be put into proper perspective. Yes, I think that helps.

homemade steamed buns! Our first try! They were superb, if a little funny looking!!!!

it's funny to come across pictures from earlier in the process...this looked so "done" to us for so long! Now the earlier photos on this blog, from the big building process, actually give us the shivers, we had so much still ahead of us!

this is the view as you come in the front door. We tried to keep things symmetrical. Floors hadn't been cleaned completely...sorry about that smudge in the center there!!

from living room looking into dining

You can see a bit of the stonework for the hearth here...

window cleaning before putting the house on the market. :-) You can see all the gray I've gained in this process! Ha ha!! I even spotted a gray hair on Shawn the other night!! Aside from being a nice photo of me, it's a good close up of the trim work shawn did on the windows. We framed using two by six material so we could super insulate. When we bought the windows, we got them trimmed for two by four walls so that we could build them up and give them a framing that we liked better than factory offerings. We trimmed them out in clear pine, which has darkened naturally and really satin-ed up over the year quite nicely. The framing nailer is so clean that there were only tiny holes to putty and the effect of the trimmed window is stunning! We don't need any pictures on the walls...

and one last one from the road! :-) You can't see the for sale sign...but it's there

front view of the house. Early spring!

solomon's seal

dining room

dining room. Notice the bright sun?? That was in mid may. Sigh...haven't seen much of it since, BUT, it's forecast to come out again soon.

finished newel post, first floor main stairwell. This is the newel post shawn built based on an article in fine homebuilding. Earlier photos of it, unpainted, were featured on the online website for the mag earlier in the year! A real boost to our morale and a really fine way to start transitioning into the end stages of this phenomenal project.

one more!

One more photo of the attic stairwell. :-)

attic stairwell

Here's a photo of the very steep stairwell to the attic. We built the newel post for this stairwell, also and the cap for the newel post is, in fact, very special to me as it represents my very first work on the router!! It came out nicely!! The balusters we had trouble finding here, oddly (there have been a few things we've not been able to find in Maine lumber wise). So we ripped down material on the table saw, then sanded the edges, primed and semi-glossed the whole. Nice!

I really like this photo! The closets are all built-ins we did after the fact. We don't really have a lot of stuff, ourselves, (although it feels like we've got more than enough...and so we do). The closet we built in once we decided to sell since we realized that the absence of closets might be okay with us but not so great for people with more than a few things! Once we framed in the closet (there are now two closets in the main bedroom) we had a little extra space to work with and so built in some shelves for our books. It came out nicely! Through the bedroom door you can see our personal favorite part of the house. We built a steep, old fashioned style stairwell to the attic, which shawn finished over the winter (drywall, paint and wide pine boards, unfinished, for flooring). The stairwell was our first attempt at cutting and hanging stair treads with no help at all. We got the measurements bang on. :-) (Roy helped us measure and cut the stringers for the main floor - the measurements are tricky to take and take a little getting used to. So we learned!). Anyway, long story short, we created a little closet space (CLOSET SPACE!!!) under the stairwell and it has a wonderful old new england house look to it. We were happy with how it came out, and delighted when two different people (Marillyn, Shawn's grandmother most importantly, who grew up in a 1600's farmhouse in Mass, but also our friend Paul, a builder locally who built in Martha's Vineyard and that other now chi-chi island place in Mass whose name currently eludes me...).

We both think the stairwell upstairs to the attic is one of the masterpieces of the house! :-) Have to figure out how to build that into our next house...

Corner closet in bathroom. Sorry about the toilet sitting there...but hey. The drywall mud bucket we removed for sale purposes, too :-)

Bathroom vanity: Shawn built the whole thing with the exception of the countertop itself. The medicine cabinet turned out really nicely and though you can't see it, is Shawn's first time doing a mortise and tenon joint by hand! He drilled and chiselled them out by hand and it worked quite nicely. Please note also another fine appearance by the resident sneaker...Penny!

some photos of the completed work!

This is the stairwell to the second floor. Complete!!