sometimes, you like to throw mud on the walls

shawn got all the mudding done (the first coat that is) in the living room today. It looks good so far. The neat thing is that we have finally really gotten the mudding technique down. It's pretty awesome. The mudroom and front hall way are the first areas that we really seemed to get it down to the point that it looks really professional, as in no lumps or scratches or anything. It looks awesome, we're both impressed. This whole housebuilding experience has been pretty incredible. It really does give you the feeling that you can do pretty much anything, if you work slowly, patiently, well, and using your best knowledge - and if you don't try and get too ridiculous about things! (I mean, we couldn't build a castle with a mortar foundation and turrets all around it!) Anyway, it was a good day. Now it's time to build the fire and make some risotto for dinner! Thanks for reading!

here's the mudroom ceiling in. This is the coolest room in the house as it's on the north side, and it's much warmer with the ceiling in. no reason to heat the "attic" space in this room! We really like the way the wood ceiling looks against the white paint. Really pretty!

hi there! we couldn't get a great shot since the middle ceiling light is still a dangling temporary till we make it down to get an overhead light for the kitchen, but at least a nice one is over the sink. (Even though the sink itself isn't there yet!!!) The panelling of the ceiling is done in the kitchen! It came out beautifully, there are a few spots to sand just slightly, and a few of the nails we need to sink individually with a tiny hand sinker, but that's it. Amazingly, the panelling worked out to exactly the end of the kitchen, didn't even need to rip it down with the table saw we don't yet have! Great!
We also got most of the mudroom done, and it looks way better. Winter is loosening her grip here, truly! Yesterday on our walk we saw a big flock of robins in the trees, starting to scope out the still white fields. (It was near 40 yesterday). Last night was cold, around 5, and tonight will be eight, but it will be warm all next week, with a couple of days in the forties (the upper forties!!) and the lowest low of the week is 19 (which as I have mentioned, feels subtropical to us now!). The best news is this! We let the fire go out around midnight yesterday. It was 73 when we went to bed. This morning, the sun was shining (has been all day) and though it only reached about 19 (when we took our walk today it was 12! Good thing for hat and muffler, those things WORK!) we are only just starting a fire NOW, at 4:45 PM, and it's 68 degrees inside! We are really loving this insulation! It's amazing!

Penny helping. She watches transfixed!

We made it to around the ceiling fixtures last night before calling it quits for dinner! Shawn hung the lamp over where the sink will be someday. :-) I'm laughing as I write this because it's really funny how used we are to the bare essentials. Housebuilding is REALLY fun! I can't believe I'm writing this and truly feeling this after our depressing December when we first moved in and felt totally overwhelmed, but I love doing this! I was musing yesterday, it being Valentine's Day and all, that painting and hanging a ceiling with my sweetie was one of the best ways I've ever spent a V-Day! :-) And that's enough sap from me. Ugh, I can't stand it! :-) Seriously, though, the ceiling is looking beautiful! Finishing work is fun!

installing, hanging, laying, the ceiling...

Here we have started putting up the ceiling in the kitchen. It's really quite easy, and fun! Since the kitchen requires wider panels to go up, we do it together, shawn takes up one side of the panel, and I the other. Then we pass the pneumatic hammer between us. Penny generally watches us as closely as she can. Penny doesn't like to be on the floor while we are up on ladders, so what she does is use me as an intermediate launch pad for getting on top of the refrigerator. And from there, she watches, totally amazed!

It's looking really pretty and goes fast, we expect to finish it up this afternoon, and then work on the mudroom ceiling.

Next purchase is a table saw...the thing we didn't want to buy till absolutely necessary. We'll use it for the flooring too and much of our trim work. But in the meantime, another photo or two and then it's time to get to work!

kitchen painting is done...it looks a little weird in the picture but the color in real life is quite pretty, sort of springy. It will look gorgeous with the wood floors, when we build the cabinets and get them painted with a high gloss white cabinet paint, and the whole ceiling is in! More pics of THAT to come!

oh, the dust!

Here is Shawn, suited up and doing the final sanding in the mudroom. We both feel like we've really gotten the hand of the sanding and mudding by now. It's really neat! This room was a great one! It came out so smooth and beautifully, with nice crisp corners. Shawn finished the sanding a couple of days ago, then I primered it two days ago and yesterday got the paint on, it looks beautiful! We moved the washing machine out of the kitchen and put it back in its proper place, and despite the fact that the kitchen has no cabinetry built yet (except for the barest substructure on the floor), it's surprising how crowded it can feel if you stick a washing machine in the middle of it! More pics to come...

laying the tile backer board in the mudroom. Note the drywall mudding is done, and shawn's awesome work hair. He'll be glad I drew your attention to this! :-) The place where the piece of one by pine material is laying is where the bench and wood spot will be built in.
Have a super super tuesday! Ciao mein. goodnight!

Let me try this again...the last post got deleted by a gremlin.
We're really happy with the way the light fixtures look! The ceiling is just about done (the panels are cut, we just need to nail them up - shawn's loving his new pneumatic hammer, it is amazing for finishing work...next house we build we'll use a pneumatic framing hammer instead of hand spiking the whole thing, which even brought a look of amazement to the somewhat jaded face of one of the electricians! We're thinking the bathroom will look great with the spring green walls, white moldings (obviously in absentia currently) and the natural wood ceiling! And what a treat to have a real fixture up there in stead of the fluourescent bulb dangling from the wires on the temporary hanger!

painting the scene green!

It was a sloppy, sort of snowy morning, and seemed a good day to take off from work on the business and work on the bathroom instead! I got the painting in the bathroom done, and it looks great! I like the color, although at night with the compact fluorescents on, it doesn't look as nice to me as during the day. But we've banished incandescents so that's just the way it is! Besides, it's gorgeous during the day and I think the finishing moldings will make a big difference too! There was only one area of the drywall that was slightly lumpy, and that was a seam we were worried about as it was one of the first we hung and a lot butted up there. Fortunately, the lumpy spot is behind where the mirror for the vanity will be hanging, so if we had to make a strategic jointing error, that was really the right place to do it (sheer luck!! Love it when that happens!).

Wow, a nearly finished room! Awesome!

The kitchen is completely primered, now, as well, and we are using the same color in there. It's so nice to see some color and warmth in the dead of winter like this! The ceiling we'll finish hanging tomorrow and then we can get ready to finish up the plumbing hardware for the tub and get a shower going! We haven't had a ceiling to hang the rest of the hardware from, it's funny what a lot of steps you have to take before you can get to the finished product. What a great learning experience. Can you believe we want to do it again with all the we have now learned?! :-) We are reminded often of the chinese adage that so well describes how we feel about things..."When he runs out of work to do, man dies"

I'll post a few more pics of other things going on...

Shawn's just finishing screwing down the tile backer board for the mudroom floor. We'll tile it (he lays the tiles and mortars it in, and I grout it), and then build a bench out there for storing boots, and changing shoes, etc. Shawn's going to build in a small area to store wood so it's got a place to stay before being burned, besides all over the living room! What else? We'll soon also send photos of the painted kitchen. We got our siding estimate today so are on a savings rampage to try and get it saved for (we're one third of the way there) before leaving for our long anticipated vacation to the west coast to see all the things and people we are missing so much!! :-)

More soon...thanks for reading! Your comments and emails really keep us working hard!

Still dusty after two full hours

Well, there it is, that's the one half of the bathroom (it's a BIG bathroom!) with the dust of the grout still showing. Should be able to get that cleaned up tomorrow. It turned out wonderfully! One more room to tile, and then tiling is behind us. That last room is the mudroom, and we won't get to it for a while still. Which is fine. We need to decide on a good tile for it.

Drywallin' the day away!

Well, we must be getting crazy, as we are excited that we might be getting more snow! And we're starting to have a lot of fun with the drywalling. The dust isn't too bad, and though it's not the best part of building, it's kind of fun because we are seeing great progress and doing well at it! Shawn put the second coat of drywall mud up in the kitchen today, and then put the first coat up on the walls of the first floor bathroom. The corners, which we dreaded so deeply, have turned out to be the best part of drywalling with this product we are using. The stuff is great! It's called Ultra Flex No Coat. What it is is the basic drywall paper tape with a bit of metal reinforcement in it that allows you to press it easily into the corners. It works magnificently! Finally a time saving gimmick that actually works like crazy!

I also finally got the grouting done in the upstairs bathroom. That's a heck of a big bathroom! The grouting is fun. First you have to chisel out all the extra mortar from setting the tiles in the first place. That's actually a lot of fun, it's a patient sort of job, but allows for a lot of thinking on the side, which is nice. Then we mixed up the grout and I spread it in nicely. It started to freeze up toward the end, so I had shawn run back and forth a couple of times adding a little extra water for me to finish the job. Worked out fine. Then I went over it with water and my big grout sponge, and got the beginning coat off. Now it just needs to finish curing, and then tomorrow afternoon I'll make time to clean off the final bit of grout from the surface of the tiles and it will be time to grout seal and then it's done, and we can replace the toilet, paint, etc! And then we'll have a room done! The painting I can do, while Shawn is building in the rough frame work for the kitchen cabinetry. We're going to mimic the counters (wood) and cabinet doors that he made for the last house, because they looked so beautiful, I loved them! It's exciting to be getting so much accomplished again. Now we just need a little snow to get us back out on our snowshoes! Who would have guessed after a crazy snow amount in December that we'd be wishing for snow! We have a snow advisory for up to six inches the next two days, but local radio says up to an inch. We'll probably get a foot, and good old Mother Nature will have baffled us all again.

Good Night!

On to the kitchen!!

Aloha from Maine...sorry to mix metaphors like that. It was a glorious day today, bright and clear and sunny, cold but no wind. We had an amazing walk this morning. A clear cold winter day with lots of sun must be one of the best gifts of winter!

This afternoon I had a knitting class in town for a couple of hours (beginning lace, it was super!! I've got a washcloth under way and it's really coming along! Fun class). We started the first layer of mud in the kitchen this evening, and it went really well. We've got the bathroom ready for paint, and the ceiling is going in (v-match pine planks, looks neat!) Tomorrow I can grout the bathroom floor, so post some tile pics soon as well.

It's late and time to do a little more knitting! More soon!

Thank you, Colleen and Jim!

We got these beautiful photos of our Point Roberts garden our last year there in the mail yesterday from Colleen and Jim. Thank you so much!! Not only do we love the painting you did of it (we didn't know you painted that!!) but loved the picture immensely. We miss Point Roberts and all our wonderful friends there so much! And we miss the garden as well! This was such a wonderful taste of summer in the midst of winter that it's hard to say how it delighted us! We put it right on the fridge where we can see it often!

may all your drywalling dreams come true

Hard to get a good photo of this. But this is where we'll build in a vanity soon enough! It's still drying and not fully sanded, obviously!

drywalling

Well, it's true that drywalling is not every couple's dream come true. Dreaming and drywalling don't tend to cross paths. But we've hung all the drywall in the house now, except for in the basement. Now we have started mudding the walls. This process we were dreading, but we talked to the folks at the hardware store (and we've been talking to everyone else we can about it, too) and came up with a good solution to the drywall dust related to sanding. It's a vacuum attachment that Roy originally told us about. You hook it up to the dryvac and it's as easy as that. The vacuum attachment is fitted with sandpaper at the end, and as you sand, about 95 percent or more of the dust goes right up the hose! It's awesome! We were planning to leave the mudding and sanding till spring, and maybe hire someone to do it, but this is working out. It's going to take some time. But shawn's working on the bathroom mudding now, and we just have one last touch up coat to put on, along with some last cosmetic sanding to do. Corners are not bad, with a special corner product shawn found. It's going well! The ceilings won't be an issue at all as we are doing a pine panelling on the ceiling called v-match. We bought enough for the bathroom, and it's been conditioning inside for over a week. Hopefully, next week we'll install it. It should look gorgeous!

I'll add a couple of last pics of the drywalling process in the bathroom (which should bore you to tears, no matter HOW faithful a reader you've been) and then sign off for the night. Dore, you can see that the loom has made it safely! Ann would be glad to know! Please overlook the fact that nothing's warped on right now. I plead too much to do, for now!

snowshoeing through our neighbor's fields

Our neighbors have spledid open fields (over 60 acres of field and woods) that we also can snowshoe in. It's fun to take a break from woods snowshoeing and get going across the open fields. Beautiful! We could use another bountiful snowfall to get us back out on the shoes. Since our last foot on the 14th, we've had some melting and some rain, which has melted off the snow (well, to a certain extent) and made a not so fun crusty topping to it). It's been great walking weather lately, though.

winter wonders

winter wonderland! We snowshoed back to the river, what a wonderful way to get around in winter. Silent shoeing, the snow muffles all the sounds, and it's so quiet and fluffy out there! Beautiful. The river remains unfrozen. Curiously, this year seems to be an odd one. The snow came all at once and in huge volume, so that the ground has had serious insulation on it all this time. Despite the cold, this year the ground is only frozen down about 4 inches or so! Snow has marvelous insulating capacity, birds and small mammals burrow under it and can stay up to forty degrees warmer than the outside air temperatures. That's pretty amazing! One of those little creatures is a little white weasel that lives in our wood pile. We've seen him just a couple of times, but he is white as can be and seems quite at his leisure out there in the snowy white outdoors. And frankly, his insulation is as good as ours!

View of the snow and hills from Keene Farm at the end of the street.