New versus Old

I've always thought building a new house would be too intimidating. You have to decide everything! There is nothing set in stone (other than budget, of course, and even that has a way of flexing when you thought it couldn't or shouldn't). Floor plan, mechanical systems, fixtures, finishes, materials, it all requires weighing and choosing. I'm a good planner and researcher, but a terrible decision maker, so all that just seemed like too much.

Welcome to my "too much"! Our previous old houses have required some repairs, renovations, and remodels, but nothing on the scale of this one. We love that the farmhouse has so much potential, but that's also code for "lots and lots of work (and money)". I'm starting to realize working with a historic building (or any existing structure, for that matter), can be much harder than just starting new. Lots of people say that, but I never believed it. Now I do!

Take for example our heating and cooling decisions. No, we still don't have central heat and air. It was suppose to go in around November. But then we couldn't get the electrical and plumbing changes we needed for the kitchen done, so it had to wait. The ductwork will take up a lot of room in the basement and crawl space, so we have to think through all kinds of other wiring and plumbing decisions. Will we want extra plugs in the living room one day? Can we still get under there if a trunk line is in the way? Should we do it now instead of wait?

What about the size of the unit? Is 3.5 tons big enough for downstairs given our high ceilings and leaky windows? Too big? Should the cold air return go in the hall and use up our understairs storage? Or should we put it in the dining room but have to go in there just to set the thermostat? Should we go with a heat pump? Or will we be happier with the quick heat of a gas furnace? If gas, should we stick with propane or run a natural gas line? If we switch to natural gas, should we stay with our existing copper lines or install black iron to avoid regulators on every appliance? If we run new black iron gas lines, should we add a line to the firebox for gas logs eventually, since it will be hard to get into the crawl space later? If we're running new lines anyway, should we try to move the water heater out of the back entryway? Where would we put it? If we can't find a place, should we upgrade to a tankless hot water heater? But the natural gas company gives us a free regular water heater just for switching; what would we do with that one? And if we switch to natural gas, what do we do about the propane tank we just spent hundreds to fill? Can we use it up in the next month? Since they charge so much to pump it out, can we just give it to someone? If there is a chance we might do a heat pump and stay on propane, should we lock in rates now for next winter?

All this doesn't even include what brand unit, what efficiency, what installer, etc. regarding the actual HVAC equipment. That would be all we had to think about with a new build. But those questions come with their own issues, like what crew do we trust with our old house and what rebates can we get if we upgrade to higher SEER units and such.

So if you check in on the blog and wonder at our slow progress sometimes, it isn't just because so much of the work is DIY. It's often because I've spent months researching, debating, gathering info, interviewing contractors, calculating costs, weighing options, and am struck with indecision! I'm glad Jeff makes the final call on everything, but when it's thousands of dollars and he's asking for my input, I'm afraid I'm rather useless despite all my facts and data gathering!

(The good news is that indecision is a pretty funny topic and I found plenty of good cartoons on the subject!)

House Lights

I'm happy to say one more box is out of the shop. I'm even happier to say it's because we finally got the new porch light installed!

I had purchased a matching flush-mount porch ceiling fixture when I bought the lamppost light several months ago. But with all the other work on the house, a little detail like switching out a light fixture was at the bottom of the priority list. But Sunday was a pleasant, sunny day and we felt like being outside (but close enough to the house that we could enjoy the NPR program "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" on the radio). So the porch was the perfect work environment.

As with all things old house related, it's never as simple as it seems. The new hanging bracket did not match up with the old junction box, so Jeff had to do some finagling. I scraped errant paint off the sidelight glass while he worked, with the happy surprise when I turned around that he got the task accomplished. We like it so much, we may try to figure out a way to put matching lanterns on the four front posts!

Before and After:

After:

While we worked, we were serenaded by a lovely little song bird in a near by tree. We went to get a closer look, and to our surprise, the bird didn't fly away. We stood directly under the tree and watched and listened to him (or perhaps her) for several minutes. If anyone knows their bird species, I'd love to identify this happy little avian!

Hurray for Dr. Jeffy!

A big congratulations to my smart and successful husband! He was honored yesterday at the E Week banquet (it is National Engineers Week, for those of you not familiar with the hoopla, pomp and circumstance, and general festivities that accompany this geek week)!

I was able to attend the dinner and award presentation as his guest. While enjoying our Beef Wellington, I had the opportunity to meet several of his coworkers and students. After dinner, we heard Dr. Michael Griffin, former (and perhaps best) NASA administrator, give an address. Awards were then presented, with Jeff receiving the Outstanding Junior Faculty award for the College of Engineering! I'm so proud of him.

The Dean presenting Jeff's award

In good company: awardees for outstanding senior
faculty and lifetime achievement were also given

He left for work this morning with the plaque in a plastic grocery bag and the comment that he really needs to take a hammer and some nails to the office so he can hang all these awards. That is a nice problem to have, Darling!

So Good it's Wicked!

Jeff took me to see Wicked in Birmingham! I've been wanting to see the hit Broadway musical for some time now. The catchy musical numbers are out there ("Defying Gravity", "For Good", etc.), and I also heard great reviews from the Malones. The intricate story line is the parallel tale of the Wizard of Oz, focused on the misunderstood and maligned Elpheba (who becomes known, of course, as the "Wicked Witch of the West"), and the much adored Glinda (the "Good Witch").

Jeff tolerably enjoys movie musicals (Rogers and Hammerstein and the like), but he really does like musical theater. We saw Les Miserables a few years ago, and he still hums some of the numbers. We didn't know much about Wicked (other than the little I mentioned above), so he was very pleasantly surprised by the humor, quality songs and singing, and overall message of the show.

Because it was a Tuesday evening show down in B'ham, Jeff worked from home so we could be flexible and leave early. I made a light frittata for lunch and we ate outside in the sunshine.

Late afternoon, we drove down to Cullman to visit an antique store I've been wanting to see, and then had an early dinner at a (regionally ;-) famous steak restaurant we've been hearing about. The location on the fourth floor of an old bank building afforded a view of the downtown skyline (such as it is in a small Southern city).

We ordered the Chateaubriand for two and enjoyed our meal very much. Jeff was quite enthusiastic about the steak in particular, but it came with rice, baked potato, roasted tomato, mushrooms, asparagus, pearl onions, salad, and a dinner roll. Followed up by their famous sweet orange rolls, of course, as an after dinner sweet.

An easy drive down the interstate found us at the Birmingham Jefferson Convention Complex. Parking was a little tricky, but after I stood in a parking place to hold it until Jeff got the car through the narrow, convoluted, and uni-directional lot, we had ourselves a decently close, free space. We walked a few short blocks and happened to enter on exactly the correct side and entrance, which made finding our seats in the orchestra section painless.

The iPhone doesn't capture it well (and the house lights were still up), but we had a great view of the stage and thoroughly enjoyed the show!

Entrenched

We had a productive Sunday this weekend. We got all the paneled doors off the SubZero fridge, I sanded them, and even got the first coat of paint cut in around the molding.

Naked fridge


Painting the profiles first

Jeff opened his new Dremel set and began exploring all the bits and accessories. We even managed to squeeze in a little basketball watching during lunch (Jeff has been wanting to see Jeremy Lin play).

After that small reprieve, Jeff got the edger going (I bought it used on Craigslist for just a few dollars, so it needed some tweaking).

He used it to mark the digging line along our walkway, then we shoveled and hoed out a nice, deep trench where I can plant the monkey grass and daffodils, and hopefully the landscape lights, too. It was good practice with the edger because I'm hoping to use it to bury the cable for DaVinci's inground fence one of these days.

The trench looks a little drastic for just some plants and low voltage
wiring, but I want to replace some of that awful clay with good
topsoil and amendments.

Discoveries

I have been searching for a windowseat-like object for a few months now. I had a guy who was suppose to be making me one, but that was way back in December. He only does it on the side, so it takes a backseat to his other work. When it became apparent I wasn't going to see one anytime soon (or perhaps ever), I starting looking around for something else that would work.

I was excited to find a small cabinet at our Habitat for Humanity Restore that I thought would work. It was quite cheap, so I dragged it home and Jeff helped me carry it to the shop. When I explained the painting, hardware, door, molding, and interior changes I wanted to make, he pointed out that perhaps it wasn't quite worth all that effort. I was disappointed, but knew he was right that we didn't have the time to take that much on at this point.

A day or two later, while cleaning up one of the upstairs rooms, I saw again a piece I had forgotten about. It was a left behind trunk of some sort, one of the multitude of items we inherited when we bought the house. Most of the things have been junk and we've been making regular use of our town's "large item" trash pick-up. But this raggedy piece had seemed sturdy and perhaps useful storage, although an asthma attack waiting to happen from the dusty, tattered fabric enshrouding the wooden sides and top. I decided to investigate what it would take to reupholster it by grabbing a loose fabric corner and giving a hearty pull. I was thrilled with what I found underneath!

A quick trip downstairs for my upholstery tack remover and a measuring tape, and I soon had a naked, clean box almost the right size for my windowseat! It's still a bit low, but I can add feet and properly upholster the lid with foam and batting to increase the height and comfort. I wish I had a "before" photo, but here is my new/old piece with a velvet flocked linen remnant I had in my stash.

I love the original label on the front! It even has the shipping sticker on the back when it was sent to Albany, AL, a town just over from us that only existed from 1887 until 1927, which really helps date it. Since the original builders of this farmhouse owned and farmed hundreds of acres around here, I wonder if their crop seeds came in this very box many decades ago!

Wonderful Wildlife

Spring is arriving, and with it returns the appearance of the animal kingdom. I saw an egret on the pond yesterday:

And Jeff zoomed in on this cute chipmunk outside our kitchen window:

Boot Scrapin' Boogie

We have had a mysterious object at the farmhouse under consideration. We first noticed it when we were cleaning years of accumulated leaves and debris off the front steps. It was a black wrought iron piece of barstock twisted around with each end planted firmly in the concrete. We thought perhaps it was the remnant of an old handrail support, but it didn't make any sense. We've seen old black and white photos of the house and there was never anything mounted to the steps.

But life goes on and gets busy and we forgot all about our iron oddity. Until watching an episode of "This Old House" on PBS. We love the show, although Jeff calls it more of a "what's possible" show rather than a "reality remodel" (their budgets must be astronomical, they never live in the house through the renovations, the detail and craftsmanship is beyond the scope of any other crew, etc.). Well, they were wrapping up a whole house restoration project and went to a local handcrafted blacksmith's shop for a few final detail pieces. One was a door knocker; the other was a boot scraper. As soon as Jeff saw what the craftsman was making and how it would be mounted at the front stoop, he said that must be what our mysterious piece was. I saw immediately that he was right!

So now that we have a name for it, here is a picture of our vintage, original, handcrafted boot scraper (that makes it sound much grander than it is, but it's nice to have an explanation for the otherwise random bit of metal sticking up on our steps)!

Day Trip

I've been sick for the past week. It wasn't too bad most days, but I did have the "it gets worse before it gets better" experience. Saturday and Sunday were the most symptomatic and unpleasant, but I seem to be over it now. Jeff had a little something similar a few days before I came down with it, so he blamed himself as the carrier.

I'm glad I'm all recovered now, since I had plans today. Some girlfriends (or womanfriends, since they are all a bit older than I ;-) went down to a cute little historic downtown area for lunch and some window shopping and browsing. They swung by to pick me up, and stopped in the farmhouse to get a peek at our progress. We are all friends from the Master Gardener class, so I was almost more anxious about the exterior and landscaping appearance than the interior!

We had lunch at a fun little eclectic cafe. The decor was all over the place! It looked like an old fashioned soda shop/antique mall/junk store/storage barn. There was "stuff" covering every surface with mismatched tables and chairs in a maze of rooms. It sounds a bit overwhelming, but it was a fun place for ladies that lunch.

More interestingly, at least to me, was the bathroom decor. Each gender had its own single bathroom (as opposed to the multi-stall version). When my friend needed toilet paper, I sneaked across the hall and borrowed from the men's room. Little did I know what I was in for when I opened the door!

Yes, that is the toilet tucked over there behind the pine tree!

I guess you could hop up on a barstool and
enjoy a drink after making room in the bladder!

I had to take a photo just to show Jeff! He always jokes how the lady's room has sofas, nice art, decor items, etc., and the men's room never does. I'll came back to the table remarking on a restaurant's bathroom appearance, and Jeff will go to the men's room only to find a bland, sterile interior. I now know just where to take him for our next meal out so he, too, can enjoy the toilet retreat!

Behind Door Number One...

I have a big kitchen decision to make. Not that I haven't had a lot of large ones up to this point, but this was an unexpected cross-roads.

I had been planning to reuse the existing kitchen doors. This entails sanding, reworking, painting, and hanging. The first snag was that I couldn't just swap out old hinges for new self-closing ones; the holes nearly aligned, but not quite. So I either fill, patch, and drill for new hinges, or I use the old and install magnetic closures. Not the end of the world, but disappointing. Then the decision to add glass panels to a few doors became complex because my existing slab doors are just thin plywood. Still doable, but not so simple. Lastly, my idea to rip the eased edges straight and add flat stock molding to all the doors was revealed to be more labor intensive and expensive than I had thought. So I would be investing a lot of time and a decent amount of money into cheap, simple doors that would never quite look as good as I hoped.

I decided to get a quote on new, unfinished cabinet doors. I hoped it would either be sky high (and clearly out of range), or so affordable it was a no-brainer. I sincerely doubted it would be the latter, but you never know. Well, the quotes are surprisingly reasonable, but not so low as to be the obvious decision. So now there is more weighting, considering, thinking, planning, and budgeting. In the meantime, I can move most everything back into the open cabinets, it just looks really messy!

Buns in the Oven

My very first products from the newly installed range were a big batch of hard-boiled eggs on a back burner and a sheet of wheat dinner rolls. It's so nice to have warm, fresh, homemade bakery goods around again. The first thing Jeff said when he came home was that he could smell bread!

Hot Flashes

The stove deprivation is officially over! As the saying goes, now we're cooking with gas! Firing on all burners!

You can tell I'm excited about the installation of my Thermador range. I really, really dislike electric stoves, enough so that it was the main impetus for the kitchen remodel at our previous house. And I have been cooking with nothing but electric since we bought the farmhouse seven months ago. Over half a year with a single, nonresponsive burner, dealing with slow heating times, long cooling periods, slippery coils, temperamental controls, etc; all of this on top of a rather dysfunctional kitchen. Jeff has praised and petted me regularly for making do under these conditions (never mind the fact that was my dream to buy and restore the farmhouse in the first place; he's just kind and understanding that way)!

My BTU (Beautiful Thermal Unit)


All systems go!

I have such a list of delectable delights I can't wait to cook and bake now that I have four powerful burners and a large oven at my disposal. Jeff has requested a batch of homemade granola, and I'm thinking about fudge and marshmallows (both of which require precise burner control). Now that we have heating under control, if only I could get a fridge and ice maker incorporated into the kitchen work triangle!