The Pressure is On

We have just found out that in the Aug 14,15,16 2009 our community is hosting a community reunion called "Come Home to the River" That means that many people are coming from all over the country to come back to their roots to see family and friends. The organizing committee is busily preparing different events for people to do while they are back home and have asked us if we would host some events. Just about everyone in the community at one time or another had worked at the homestead. It at one time had played a very important part in the community and so it was only fitting that it be available during the Home Coming. We had decided to host two events, a coffee and dessert social on the first day (this was organized by Clarke's mother and two sisters) and a story telling session on Saturday evening. We also said we would have the house open for all 3 days so anyone who wanted to come back to reminisce could do so. Family that would be coming from a far will need a place to stay.

We came home from the meeting to take stock of what we needed to get done before August. Are we going to be able to do it?

The bedrooms above the kitchen looks like this

The kitchen looks like this

Never mind the dust that is everywhere through out the house........no time for doubts.......there is no turning back now.

Nancy

Resurrection

Do you remember or post about the sentimental attactment to the "old red shack" http://wilsonfamilyhomestead.blogspot.com/2007/05/old-red-shack.html. I really didn't think that old building could be saved but again Clarke suprised me with his ability to bring, what most people think can't be saved, back to life. It went from this




to this

The front needed to be replaced but the back was brought back into position and the blocking replaced. It is now a perfectly good shed. We could have never replaced that building for time and money it took fix it. Now it needs to be painted red and it will last another 100 years.

Nancy

Recycle & Reuse

Clarke noticed that a neighbor had a pile of cedar shingles that the neighbor had recently removed from his roof. The cedar shingles had been under the asphalt shingles on his roof and they were in remarkably good shape. So we swapped some firewood for the shingles and brought them home to put on the outside of the barn.




We just flipped them over and they looked like they were always on the barn. They have another 100 years in them. We got enough shingles to finish two half walls and we still lots of shingles left.

There is so much joy in bringing back something that someone previously thought of as being worthless.

Nancy

Chicken Little Was Right.....

The ceiling is falling. I have already talked about redoing of the china cabinet. http://wilsonfamilyhomestead.blogspot.com/2008/04/china-cabinet.html. The upper part of China cabinet was purchased and placed on a bottom cupboard. A tin sheet was tacked to the bottom cupboard before the top was placed on.

It was painted and not in good enough shape to save so we decided to remove it. But in order to remove it we had to take the top part off. Which wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be, however once we did that the ceiling began to fall down. So we had to tear that out as well.

Crumbling plaster is really dirty business. At some point I would like to put back together instead of take apart. I guess that is for another year.

Nancy

It Drew Me In.........

One evening I was sitting on the veranda and looking around. In several places the paint is cracking. So I absently started picking......first I started with my fingers....then I got a scraper....then I got the heat gun.....then I pulled out the silent paint remover. Oh dear look what I started..........

If you notice that there are hinges under the paint. This part of the veranda has door that once was part of the "fridge" when there was a store here. Once when to door was operational, meat , milk & butter where keep cold with a spring flowing into a puncheon that was behind the door. . The meat hooks are still there.

Clarke was able to take the hinges off and we moved the door for the first time, in I don't know how long. Clarke said he couldn't remember the door ever being open in his life time.

We would like to be able to recreate the "fridge". It could never be exactly like it was because the spring has been diverted years ago. That will be one of our many projects.

Boy I opened a can of worms just by picking a little bit paint. Now I have another unfinished stripping project.

Nancy

How Many Tools Do You Have in Your Toolbox?

With this project we seem to always need one tool or another. One tool that came to mind was one to help us with the amount of lumber we would need. What was the tool of choice...a WoodMizer Sawmill. Living in a wooded area it just seemed the most logcial step was to purchase a portable sawmill to help with all the lumber we would need.

The first year we had it we keep it outside but that made it unuseable in the winter months. So Clarke set to work a build a building to house the sawmill so we could keep sawing the lumber we needed for the projects we were doing.

It is a large building but most of the lumber has been sawed on the mill. The wood was cut off our own land so it has saved us quite a bit of money on the construction of this building. It takes a little longerto build when you have to stop and saw out the boards to board it in.

It is not quite complete yet but should be boarded in by the time the snow flies. Now that is quite the toolbox!

Nancy

We have been busy else where

Since my last post we have had to refocus our attentions in another area. We don't live in the old farmhouse so that means that we have another house to up keep. Most of the time I love the fact that I don't have to live around the mess I am creating, where I can just close the door for another day. But there are times when trying to work and maintain 2 places is difficult. I think the house we are living in must have felt like it was being neglected, after all I never talk about it here. So it decided to draw attention to itself and spring a leak......behind the wall.....behind the shower that is glued to the wall.....under the flooring....and ruin the drywall......in the bathroom. So we had to gut the bathroom to ....fix the leak......install new drywall......new flooring.......new shower. So since this is a blog about (whisper) the other house that is why there hasn't been any updates. (I can't type too loud because I am sitting very close to the bathroom). I hope the bedroom doesn't have similar insecurities.

Well with that explanation out of the way and can say we are back at "The Big House". I think things got worse while I was away. I truly believe that the paint alligatored worse than it was before with big pieces of paint just falling away.

It has rained here for over a month so maybe that is what is making it worse. Since there is a moment of summer, I figure I have to strip paint while the sun shines, so I picked 2 windows that looked really bad.

I have come to the conclusion that stripping a 100 coats of paint is the easiest and cleanest stuff to strip. Varnish is hell, one coat of paint a pain but alligatored paint another whole story. Some of it just pops right off and other parts are stuck like glue. So you end up with whole sections clean with islands of paint speckled through out. This poses a problem, can't use the Silent Paint Remover because it covers too big of an area and the clean wood turns brown very quickly, a heat gun has a similar problem. Although with a heat gun, it is easier to do a heat sweep. You know, not letting the heat stay in one place too long, just sweeping it over the area. That sometimes releases the paint enough to scrap it off. The rest needed to be done with brute force. Since I don't have much brute force capabilities I call in........Clarke. He has the strength to just scrap, the unable to budge, no matter what I do, stuff.

They don't look too bad with a new coat of paint.

Oh no is that rain clouds I see..............

Nancy

China Cabinet

My new stripping project is the built-in China Cabinet. This cabinet is kind of neat. It spans two rooms, a small room that was probably the pantry part of the old house, which is probably why it is so named and the dining room, so you can put a plate in from the pantry side and take it out on the dining room side. The drawers do the same. There is also two doors that at one time they slid the food from the pantry to be served in the dining room.

The outside of this project too is varnished. I haven't yet stripped much paint (not counting the porch), just varnish. This doesn't have layers and layers of varnish. It looks like only one layer that is in bad need of removal. One thing I have learned is that stripping is actually easier when there is many layers, one layer doesn't give you the long crispy strips it just kind of gets crumbly. After cleaning it with Methal Hydrate it often looks like this.

With much picking, scrapping. The doors and drawers look like this.

These to will be stained with Minwax Ipswich Pine and I will post the results.

Nancy

Down in the Depths

Clarke began his adventure into the basement to begin our newest challenge of shoring up the beams. As with just about every job we have taken on so far, before you can even begin you must clear out 100 years of garbage. So once that is done you can begin the task you set out to do.

It is obvious that when this part of the house was built, there were no building codes. Each beam in the basement was small by today's standards, 2 x 5 and was riddled with holes from the multitude of wires. He supported each of them with a 4 x 4 hemolock beam. (always helpful to have a sawmill in your backyard for such projects)

He had to replace a supporting beam that was broken and twisted with a 6 x 6 beam. It is really amazing how strong even a broken beam could be because it had supported a very heavy wood cookstove for years.

After the tedious task of shoring up all the beams and figuring out good wires from old, the kitchen no longer bounces when you walk on it. The sag went from 2'' to almost level . Maybe I can put ceramic tile under the cookstove!

Nancy

Digging Deeper

When we started doing the kitchen we at first didn't think we would have to tear it apart but as the further we got into this restoration the more we saw that it would be a more complete job if we remove the drywall from the ceiling instead of just covering it over with new drywall. Then we decided that the walls also needed to come down to run new electrical and heat to the living space above that its only heat source was a hole in the ceiling of the kitchen. So basically the kitchen is gutted.

One very important thing we discovered by removing the ceiling was that the small 2 x 5 inch joists were not strong enough to hold up the floor above and there was a sag in the center of the ceiling of 1 2/3 inches. Which has begun the research into how to best shore up those joists. We are leaning toward placing a steel or lamenated beam perpendicular to the joists the length of the kitchen and then cover them and try to make them look like they belong.

Maybe we shouldn't have been suprised by this because we knew that the kitchen floor was sagging because of a broken, literaly twisted main beam and those same small 2 x 5 joists riddled with electrical, telephone and whatever that needed to go through them, but we felt those were the reason for the the floor sagging. The joists for the second floor have none of those problems and it is sagging. So before we can continue in the kitchen we have to correct our bad case of the sags.

Nancy

Working Smarter?

After spending months stripping one wall of wainscotting I really wasn't looking forward to the other wall which is about 10 feet long. One day Clarke decided to take some of the wainscotting off the wall and send it through the planer. Eureka! Cleaned it up perfectly. It took off all the varnish without taking much wood, leaving no sticky mess.

In a matter of 2 hours we had the 10 feet done and all the door casings.

I at this point have mixed emotions. Joy because of how quick and easy that was and that I didn't have to spend hours stripping it but also grieved me because of the hours that I had already spent.

I think this is just something I am going to have to live with as we go through this adventure.

Hey but we are on a roll....just a small one don't get too excited!

Nancy

Ok I have been bummed

Over the last few months I didn't feel I had anything to blog about. I felt that every entry would be the same. .... Today I stripped the wainscotting, still on the same wainscotting, you know that wainscotting I am still at it. It just seemed never ending and didn't seem very interesting. It just seemed that everything had ground to a halt.

This piece of wainscotting is about 20 feet long with many layers of varnish. Clarke had wanted to just sand it and re-varnish but I said no that it had to be stripped to look any good. We had decided to strip it still attached to the wall because we weren't sure that we could successfully remove it without ruining it. I was using a heat gun because I didn't feel I could manouver the silent paint remover with the wainscotting still on the wall. When I began to strip the boards I would get a crispy strip of varnish but then there was a layer of some very sticky stuff left on the wall. At first I thought it was the varnish just getting sticky from the heat but the more I was fighting with this sticky mess more distressedI was getting. Thinking that I was in way above my novice capabilities and that maybe Clarke was right and we should have just sanded. After researching some solutions to this sticky mess I began to think that maybe what was so sticky was shellac. Many blogs suggest using Denatured Alcohol, so I set out to find it. Well I don't know if you can find it in Canada but you can't find it in Fredericton New Brunswick. Every place I went and asked for Denatured Alcohol the response was always the same, nope never heard of it. I am pretty sure that some clerks thought I was making it up. So I began to search for what I could use to replace Denatured Alcohol and I found Methyl Hydrate, bought a jug and brought it home. Low and behold it got rid of the stickiness. So we began a cycle of strip, strip, wipe, wipe and finally the wall was clean.






I was sooooo excited because I began to truly believe that I would die stripping that wall. I then stained the wall with Minwax Ipswich Pine. It turned out so nice.


It is kind of hard to see how beautiful it looks but believe me it looks very nice. Now we are trying to decide if we are going to varnish. Presently varnish is a dirty word to me.


I am offically unbummed.

Nancy