This is the percolation basin, after an hour of draining. When I peeked at it through the window, the whole lower level was full, but that was when it was still pouring out.

For some perspective, here is the strawberry bed, which is above the percolation basin. Part of why everything was so flooded was that the emergency overflow on the water tank had triggered and the sprinklers had basically been running all night and day.

In fact, they had not been able to keep up with the flow of water from the sump. The tank was overflowing dramatically, and a large lake of water sat alongside the house.

We now recognize the sound of the tank overflowing -- a splashing sound right outside the bathroom. The cure is to disconnect the hose from the sump and run it out into the yard. When the tank has been run down a bit by the system, we can turn off the irrigation system until the rain dies down.

It's a little involved right now -- we do need to come up with a better overflow system that is more failsafe. But there's no real danger involved in it not working for 24 hours, so there hasn't been a pressing need.

Anyway, the trees are liking the rain. Even with high winds that whipped water through the sides of the roof and into our dining room (we have no roof leaks, but there is that gap where the wooden gutters rotted away), the blossoms on the apricot are intact:

And the nectarines seem to be doing well, too. Though I'm getting a little tired of having to go out and spray them with copper every other day after the rain washes the previous application off.

Technorati Tags: automation, flooding, flowers, fruit, irrigation, rain, roof, trees, water, weather

Time to prune off that funny branch that started growing straight up this year. Also, notice that I've been out killing Bermuda grass with Roundup during our brief dry spells.

This week has been all about moving the pile. Well, when I was not in San Jose for a convention, that is. Here is some perspective on the pile of wood chips:

In one afternoon, I moved a large chunk off the streetward side, enough so that Noel could fit his car in the driveway, too. But there's still plenty to work through.

But apart from the pile, we have the spring blooms beginning. The first nectarine blossom was at the way top of the tree, so no picture, but let's take another look at that magnolia:

And out back, the species tulips are opening up. These are "Lady Jane," plus little fuzzy bee friend.

It feels like a really early spring, but that's not surprising given how wet and yet surprisingly warm it has been this year.

Technorati Tags: bees, bulbs, flowers, gardening, magnolia, mulch, springtime, trees, weather

It was all over in a few minutes, and now we have a smaller facsimile of our late, unlamented dirt pile.

That pile is bigger than my car.

Of course, we're in the middle of yet another rain storm here, so the pile has just sat in the driveway all day. It has started cooking, though: steam is rising off the pile, along with the most amazing pine scent. The rain is due to continue tomorrow, so we'll see whether I get much of it spread around before the weekend. But yay for soon-to-be unmuddy paths!

Technorati Tags: mulch

Hah, just kidding. Actually, today was a rare break in the rain storms that have been buffeting us for weeks. In fact, just yesterday, while I was off wrestling with sheep in the central valley, it poured cats and dogs and chipmunks and otters while Noel was trying to get a small part of the hay field that had taken over our lawn mowed into submission (he had to break out the gas mower, the lawn was so deep). I'd tell you how much it rained, except that it rained so much in January that my rain gauge pot sprang a leak. All I know is we're over 15 inches for the season.

Today we went out and repiled the compost heap (the chickens knock it over regularly). Then I spread out some straw in their yard. Noel had dumped some cut grass in there yesterday, to keep the mud down (muddy eggs are no fun), but it needed something more.

In the meantime, I let the girls out and Noel mowed the rest of the lawn down. It's been very very wet out back, so it was slow going, but the lawn is a lovely green.

Things are starting to bloom again, which means it's time to get some tomatoes started. My benchmark for getting them sown is Valentine's Day.

Anyway, for those of you snowed in or about to be snowed in, some blooms from this afternoon's gardening work:

Here's my contorted quince (an ornamental, but apparently with proper cross pollination they will produce fruit). It's actually been blooming one branch at a time for a several weeks now. I think I need to give it a heavy pruning this year.

This year I have my first ever volunteer Heliophila longifolia, right around the time when I'd usually pop off to Annie's to buy a couple in pots.

The anemone bed under the Asian pears is coming to life, and we have a little pink bud:

A real stunner, the bloom phase of my Lapeirousia oreogena. Last year this just looked like a little weird grass stalk. I just potted it up, ignored it, and look what came up? Gorgeous. Totally worth it, despite the boring look when it's not going to bloom. I'll feed it in a week or so, then nothing else.

A more mundane bulb we're getting to see is my scattering of crocuses around the garden. Every now and then you'll be walking along a path and this little bit of purple will jump out at you. They're great.

And shortly behind the crocuses come the species tulips, which should be good this year.

Then we'll have tree blooms happening, and then it all just explodes at once. Look at these buds on the quince, fattening up. I just sprayed it with copper for fireblight last week (I'll give it another spray this week, because of all the rain).

Finally, we have some lemons hanging on on the variegated lemon tree. I've fixed their irrigation situation, so I hope to get some decent lemons this year. Also, we did just get a large Meyer lemon tree in a container that should put the fear of competition into this guy.

Technorati Tags: bulbs, chickens, compost, flowers, fruit, gardening, lawn, plants, quince, rain, springtime, trees, weather

Nonetheless, there is garden news. On Saturday we drove up to Sebastopol to see a friend and go to the Redwood Empire chapter of the California Rare Fruit Growers' scion exchange. It's good clean fun for fruit collectors, and we picked up a couple new figs (Blue Celeste and Bourjasotte Grise), 3 plums (Old Green Gage aka Reine Claude Dore, Transparent Gage, and Reine de Mirabelles), and a pluot (Flavour Supreme, one of the few whose patent has expired).

The tables are arranged with bags of scions sorted by fruit type and then into large alphabetical chunks, so it's not too hard to find a specific variety you might be looking for. The real catch is that you have to rely on others to have labeled their bags properly.

This year I brought scions to share for the first time. Some Winter Pearmain, Akane, and Cox's Orange Pippin apples, a couple of Asian pears (all gone by the end of the day; next year I will bring more), and some Black Tartarian cherry.

They also have tables with grafting experts who will answer questions and do grafts for you. I had one of the experts do my four trees that needed grafting, so I could get a better idea why my grafts keep failing. I talked to three different grafters and between the three I think I know what I'm doing wrong (keeping my scionwood too long, not adequately protecting it from drying, and grafting too close to where dogs might be knocking against the tree and damaging it).

The chapter sells rootstocks for a nominal price -- I bought four for $10, an exceptionally good price although the choice is obviously limited.

It was pretty crowded, but not the total mob scene I heard happened in Berkeley this year. By noon, when we left, the figs were mostly gone, the grapes were ravaged, and the very rare fruits had been wiped out. I'd wanted to get some kiwi cuttings, but the mob around there didn't die down until they were all gone. (Probably just as well since I don't technically have anywhere to plant them.)

Today the rain broke and I dug my holes. I'm planting the four plumlike trees in a line along the front path. You may recall that in October I dug out the many many lavender plants that lined the path. Since then I've been spraying with Roundup to kill the Bermuda grass as needed (it was remarkably easy to do it this year, I don't know why). It looks terrible, but today I got my holes dug and managed to sift enough soaking wet compost to amend the soil somewhat, and got the new trees in the ground:

It's supposed to rain tomorrow and the rest of the week, so I'm counting on that to wash off the pathway for me.

In keeping with the general philosophy of intensive orcharding, I planted the trees very close, so they will form a wall. I'll have to prune them pretty heavily to keep the path clear.

I expect they will make a mess of that concrete walk in ten years' time, but by then I hope to have removed the path and replaced it with something a little more attractive, and I can do a root pruning when I do that.

So, happy new trees. (The figs are potted up to root in the laundry room. Booooring.)

Other things I did between rain showers over the last week include laying down a layer of hay in the vegetable garden:

And this afternoon, I put down some cardboard to start killing grass for a nice planting bed along the chicken shed:

Mostly because we had a bunch of cardboard that was just sort of piled in the hallway and it was time to get it out of the way, but also because it would be nice to get a planting bed going in that part of the yard.

Everything is really soggy out back right now; the sump makes the lawn sprinklers run every hour or so which is a pretty substantial amount of water when you add that to the rain. So mostly I'm staying off the lawn so as not to make a mess of it. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

Technorati Tags: bare root, bermuda grass, digging, fruit, gardening, grass removal, herbicides, invasive plants, paths, plants, propagation, plums, trees, urban farming, water, weather, weeds

Anyway, a few months ago Noel built this handy stair block. The dimensions are sized to our stairs and our ladder, but the concept is pretty simple: you just raise the height of a couple stairs up enough to make a level platform.

The block is very firmly screwed together with 2 1/2" wood screws. You want a very sturdy piece of material to do this job; a ladder puts a lot of force on the surface it is sitting on both directly down and sideways. If you just made a loose piles of pieces of lumber, they could slide and destabilize your ladder pretty easily.

On the other hand, there's no reason to get too fancy with the block: it's a tool. Ours is made of scrap lumber.

(As you can see, I had a Bad Case of Animals while I was taking photos.)

In the back hall, I've finished washing the plaster I can reach easily from a standing position, and today I set up the folding ladder as scaffolding. Schwa helped me test it for safety. I believe he approves, because he's been on the thing all day.

I find the scaffolding configuration a little more manageable for long periods of time, and it is certainly easier to move around on it, as opposed to having to climb up and down the ladder and drag that around all the time. We have a board that fits nicely over the upper rungs to make a platform.

Do I have a picture of that? Hmm, yes:

As I said, the scaffolding is very popular with the cat.

Technorati Tags: carpentry, construction, plaster, renovations

I spent some time cleaning this stuff off the walls. I've called it wallpaper paste in the past, though it also fits the description of early indoor paints. Whatever it is, it needs to come off the walls so we can repair the plaster and repaint.

As usual, there was a lot of writing on the walls. Most of it is clearly working notes from the people who put up the wallpaper in 1899. I'm not sure what this was. Now it's gone; it came right off with the grey stuff when I scraped it.

I'm sparing you the before and after photos of the grey walls turning yellowish. They're kind of subtle and not very interesting.

Noel had his own bit of madness today: he attacked the last remaining bit of wallpaper in the stairwell. We'd been avoiding it because it was just out of easy reach from below and above, but with the helpful addition of a little stair block to help hold the ladder steady, he was able to reach all parts of the stairwell.

And a few hours later, we had paperless walls. Not clean walls, mind you; that's still waiting for me to get out of the back hall. But there's no wallpaper on them.

Technorati Tags: plaster, renovations, wallpaper

There are about five relatively distinct spaces, as you can see here (I added some labels to make it easier to describe where I'm working).

My plan is to start in the back hall and work my way forward to the entry, then up the stairs to the upstairs hall. There are two really hard bits to do, one of which is in the back hall (I'll show you in a second), and the other of which is in the stairwell, so this nicely splits up the worst work and puts some nice large expanses of easier (if boring) work in between.

Here's my starting point today: the back hall, partially cleared of the tools and stuff we dumped there while working on the dining room.

While I work on the hallway, Noel will be stripping the paint from that pile of woodwork there. And then moving on to the stuff that is in situ.

The hard bit in here is going to be this place where the ceiling plaster failed due to the former (now sealed up) leak in the roof.

We've dithered and discussed this quite a bit, and I think what we're going to do is cut in a drywall patch and call it done. This back hall ceiling will actually be lowered slightly when we redo the upstairs bathroom, to accommodate the drains, so it doesn't have to be anything fancy.

Much of the hall has patches like this bit of the Eastern wall, where the plaster keys have failed and the wall is spongy (and has fallen off in great chunks where the previous owners lowered the ceiling). Those are not quite a piece of cake to repair, but they are pretty predictable and I know what to do with them. The trick is to get the plaster sufficiently clean that the repairs will work.

And then there's the total cakewalk repairs, which are these nail holes. OK, yes, there are way more of them than seems reasonable for the average wall, but they are easy to repair and require no thought whatsoever.

I had been thinking of the archway we uncovered as being tricky, but basically it just needs its corbels replaced. Since we haven't yet chosen corbels for the house (I'd like to match the only remaining ones -- in the front bedroom), we're just putting up little blocks of wood to cover the holes left behind when they were removed, and leaving it at that for now.

Now to get to work scrubbing the thick layer of gunk off the wall (we're pretty convinced it's an early form of wall paint). Whee!

Technorati Tags: construction, paint removal, plaster, renovations

And because Noel didn't think it was nearly as funny as I did that we had 10 projects in 2009 and I could only come up with 9 for 2010, thus totally missing a terrific title, I padded the list a bit.

1. Finish off the hallway

We need to wash the walls, repair the plaster, and paint in the hallway. This is going to be our first project of 2010, because it's the largest and the one that is a gating factor for many other jobs we want to get done. That's because Alameda now requires any permit closure to include an interior inspection of smoke alarms in all required rooms, no matter whether the work has anything to do with the interior at all. And we have some large-ish holes in the plaster in our hallway that are just asking for trouble. (Any non-code work that is uncovered must be brought up to code, and I can guarantee you that none of the original framing in this house is remotely close to code.)

Because scrubbing sucks so much, I'm going to try using a scrubbing device. Isn't that a terrific idea? It may suck, it may fall apart in a few days, but if it saves me one day of scrubbing at the walls it will be worth it.

We've also decided that when we get the walls done, we can reward ourselves by replacing the little fixed window that used to be over the front door (it's filled in with plywood now). So there's a lot of incentive to get it done.

2. Kitty room

Our new kitty is a lot more active and bouncy than our late kitty (he's 3, she was 18), so now that we have the roof repaired and there is not as much water in the attic, we want to make the little dogproof room he uses for his litter box and food area less drafty and dirty (bonus for us: cleaner kitty to play with). So we're going to put up partition walls between that space and the rest of the attic. That will also make it a little brighter in there when the light is on.

3. Fixing the walls in the back parlour

When the foundation happened... oh, you've heard this story a million times, haven't you? Well, the walls in the back parlour still need to be repaired. We figure this is a good time to get it done, which fits well with our plans to a) get one or two kittens to keep the aforementioned kitty company, for whom we will need to kitten-proof the house, and b) do something with the floors, for which we will need to move all those bookcases. When we finish repairing the walls we can go right to the floors.

So yes, we will have 2-3 cats and 2 dogs and 5 chickens. We also have about 10,000 worms, but somehow nobody thinks that is animal overload.

4. Fix up the floors

We'd planned, until we talked over our plans for the next year, to just jump right in and rip up the dining room floor next week. But getting the hallway walls done is a higher priority for us, because it's keeping us from getting an inspection on some electrical work.

When we talked about the dining room floor, though, I told Noel that what I really wanted was to rip up all the weird plywood/vinyl tile flooring in the hallway, too. And he pointed out that once you do that you might as well rent the sander for a week or two and do all the floors downstairs, even if it does mean moving two pianos into the kitchen. So that's a pretty big project that we're planning for later this year, after I've made a mess of the existing hall floors by repairing the plaster and painting the hall.

(I'd love to also attack the kitchen floors (there are two of them, one on top of the other), but I know they run under the cabinets so there's no way it's happening any time soon. I'm an idealist but not insane.)

5. Stripping paint from the woodwork

A continuing project.

6. Build that arbor in the side yard

Because the passionflower vine is growing out of control and the dogs keep knocking its little trellis over. Also because it would look awesome.

7. Finish roofing the chicken yard

We started working on this last summer and got 1/3 of the way through. Basically, we ran out of convenient materials and didn't bother with getting/producing any more. But the roof we have is so nice that I'd like to finish off the job. And maybe put some gutters on the chicken shed, to eventually run into a rain barrel or two.

8. Put an electrical panel upstairs

This is associated with the larger project of getting rid of all that scary wiring. We've been planning for a while to put in a subpanel in the upstairs hallway, or rather in the part of the former upstairs bathroom that will be a hallway. And that is associated with the next job, which is:

9. Get started on the upstairs/under stairs bathrooms

It's not a hard job, it's not necessarily too expensive (since we will be doing the trade work ourselves and we ca go cheap on fixtures). But it does require drawings to the city and a willingness to get into a really messy project (quite literally, as part of it requires tying in to the sewer connection). We're finally at the point where we're ready to take out the permits and just get this done. I guess seven years of walking the entire length of the house to go to the bathroom at night finally got to us.

The first step in this project, amusingly enough, is to order a replacement print head and band kit for my large-format printer, the disrepair of which has kept me from printing out the plans. That is the stupidest reason ever to have put off the work for a year. Please do not remind me that print service bureaux exist.

10. Finally close the foundation permit

I think I've said enough about this over the last few days, but suffice it to say that after more than five years I'm ready for that project to just be done.

Technorati Tags: construction, organization, planning, renovations, resolutions, schedule, ten year plan, victorians

Anyway, this was a decent year for house work getting done, but a great big batch of things didn't get done because a certain thing has not yet concluded, and even as we thought we had reached a conclusion it turned out to not be as concluded as we had hoped. Anyway, that event has been the limiting factor on how much money we could spend on the house for a while, and because of that we were not able to get as much work done as we would have preferred.

Even so, we got quite a bit of work done on the house, especially when you consider that we did a bunch of things that were not on the list.

1. Finish the Parlours

We started the year by finishing our work on the front parlour.

First we took down the drywall and wet insulation put up by that moron, Contractor A. We put in new, encapsulated insulation and drywall, and then I undid a bunch of taping I'd already done, which was a real treat.

I spent what felt like forever mudding:

March 15, 2009 : Et Tu, Drywall?
March 16, 2009 : Mudding in the Ceiling of the Bay
March 21, 2009 : Second Coat
March 22, 2009 : Home Stretch

And then we were able to paint:

March 23, 2009 : Priming
March 24, 2009 : Testing Colours
March 24, 2009 : More Pink!
March 25, 2009 : Fancy Paint

Because of the awesome qualities of Benjamin Moore Aura, we were able to move a bunch of stuff into the parlour before we got around to the final coat on our accent area (the pseudoplace, as I call it).

And I wrote a detailed review of the Aura paint (suffice it to say we'll be using this paint extensively in the future).

March 26, 2009 : Benjamin Moore Aura Paints: A Review

So that's one of two parlours down.

2. Electricity and water to the shed

Noel dug the trench out to the shed in one marathon session, we connected pipe over an extremely hot weekend, and there you have it. It's really nice to have a light in the shed, and to have a hose bibb on the far side of the yard.

3. Dining Room

It didn't take long for us to expand the scope of this project to the hallway. That happened in late January, when Noel drilled a hole in the hall ceiling and discovered a ceiling medallion hidden above the front entry.

Then we invited everybody over for a big party to tear down the ceiling. The night before we cleared out all the spaces we were going to be destroying and took some reference pictures. Then a large group of friends and blog readers who are new friends descended on the house and tore down hundreds of square feet of dropped ceiling (and brought us presents!).

The result was pretty impressive. Also, check out the stuff from our ceiling.

With the ceilings down and paneling removed, and most of the upper layer of wallpaper taken down, we began the long, slow process of stripping wallpaper from the plaster. Under the paper we found more interesting messages from the past.

But mostly it was a week of solid work to scrape off wallpaper. We did discover that you can use a clothes steamer to remove wallpaper pretty effectively, which will come in handy now that we have hardly any wallpaper left in the house. Much of the paper came off in a couple of marathon sessions, including one where I left the house for a few hours and came home to find the hallway piled with stripped wallpaper.

In early April, we said goodbye to the last of our fake wood paneling. With paneling gone, Noel turned his attention to the real wood. At some point this winter, Noel reached pink saturation. Since the hall was already in chaos, he began stripping paint, too. He used both a heat gun and the Silent Paint Remover borrowed from our neighbor, and made real progress by working a little every day.

We did one little fun paint removal project, which was stripping the pink paint from the stairway niche.

The summer was a hard time for getting anything done, with a lot of travel for family and other purposes, and the unbloggable event coming to a turning point. When things calmed down a little and we'd had time to assess the condition of the plaster in the dining room, and it just had to go. So we had another work party and took down the plaster ceiling in the dining room. (There was more fun stuff in the plaster ceiling, too.)

Noel made one small wiring change that made a mile of difference while repairing the faulty or ancient wiring in the room, and then we put the drywall up in one long day of work.

After that it was all about the plaster repair and mudding the drywall. We hadn't planned to host Thanksgiving, but when our original hosts had to leave town for family reasons, we threw together a meal and then in a panic threw together a dining room

And at that point we had Christmas looming over us, because we did plan to have a dinner for that day. We tried some paint colours (see the comments for a very helpful set of hints on choosing paint colours from our friend and dinner guest David), then worked our butts off, getting the room painted and cleaned just in time for a terrific Christmas dinner. We'd been prevented -- by the holiday -- from going out and buying a new lamp at the last minute, but a couple days after Christmas we took ourselves and some Christmas gift cards to a few stores and came home with a chair for the library and a fancy new light fixture.

It's not perfect, and the molding still needs work, but we're calling the dining room done.

4. Upstairs subpanel
5. Bathrooms

Because of a hundred things, this project didn't get done or started in 2009. But it's definitely on the list for 2010.

6. Greenhouse and anti-dog fences

We kind of dithered on the anti-dog fences, until late May when Noel made a prototype. When that worked well, we went into production mode and made a bunch of panels. They worked pretty well, but we still need to figure out a better way of getting in and out of the garden.

We didn't build the greenhouse, because of aforementioned financial contractions, but I did build this awesome potting bench from salvaged materials. I love it.

7. Finish the siding
8. Side stairs
9. Deck
10. Close out the permit for the foundation

These four projects are all related, and the reason why they didn't get done is also related. They're what we need to get done to finally finish the foundation job, but we don't have the money to do them. We hoped to get them done in 2009, but for reasons we cannot yet blog about, that just didn't happen. We've moved them to 2010, but there's a lot that is out of our control about these projects and their schedule, so I'm not banking on it. We might be able to get the deck built (it's designed and the drawings are ready to take in to the city), but since it is tied to the larger foundation project in many ways it doesn't make sense to do it alone.

Technorati Tags: renovations, resolutions, ten year plan

Without further ado, our Ten Year Plan review. (If it's stricken without comment, we finished it in a previous year.)

1. Paint exterior of house
2. Finish living rooms
   I can safely say that we have gotten the front parlour to as done as it's going to get for the time being. Not bad.

   We started by taking down the grossly inadequate and incompetent work done by our former foundation contractor, the ugly red-faced bully who showed up on the job site drunk.
   January 3, 2009 : Why We Caulk

   I spent some time talking about how I choose colour schemes for rooms.
   January 17, 2009 : Choosing Paint Colours

   Then it was powering along on the drywall work.
   March 7, 2009 : A Dusting of White
   March 10, 2009 : Going Back to Go Forward
   March 15, 2009 : Et Tu, Drywall?
   March 16, 2009 : Mudding in the Ceiling of the Bay
   March 21, 2009 : Second Coat
   March 22, 2009 : Home Stretch

   And painting
   March 23, 2009 : Priming
   March 24, 2009 : Testing Colours
   March 25, 2009 : In Which We Move the Piano, Again
   March 25, 2009 : Fancy Paint
   March 24, 2009 : More Pink!

   We've been living with the front parlour mostly finished for much of the year, and I can safely say we love it. The aqua blue is perfect for the northern light we get there, and while the grand piano does dominate the room, we have enough room to have had our dining table in there much of the year.
   

3. Foundation replacement
4. Remove Fright Box under house, redo plumbing
5. Redo upstairs bath and add half bath under stairs
   We wanted to do this this year, but it was not in the cards. The deciding factor was money, and the economy has been such that we did not have tons of spare money kicking around. What we did have we spent on more critical parts of the house, such as the roof.
   
6. Remove chimney, replace furnace thing
7. Install gas fireplace in living room, upstairs
   This is not exactly a high priority, and we didn't plan to do anything with it this year.
   
8. Re-roof
   We'd planned to have certain events wrapped up this summer in time to do a decent re-roofing job on the back of the house. However, those events didn't wrap up, and without them being wrapped up we didn't have the money required to have somebody else do the work, so instead Noel and I studied up on roof repair and then he got up there and did the job.

   Noel applied sealant along the gap between the lower roof and the upper roof
   October 18, 2009 : Battening the Hatches
   October 20, 2009 : Flash and Goop

   Then he removed and replaced the improperly installed shingles on the bay roof
   November 30, 2009 : Fun on the Roof
   December 2, 2009 : Shipshape and Watertight

   So now we are set until we're ready to put on the second-story addition on the back, sometime in the (hopefully not too distant) distant future.
   

9. Insulate crawlspace and attic
   This is actually not far from the top of the list, since it should be an easy job. It's just a pain in the butt, and involves getting covered in fiberglass strands that itch.
   
10. Remove fake wooden panelling, stabilize plaster, and repaint all rooms
    As of March 28, there is no more fake wood paneling in any of the main rooms of the house (some remains in the closet under the stairs).

    It started in January, when we decided to have a ceiling-dropping party. When we drilled a hole in the hall ceiling and found good plaster under there, we expanded the scope from the dining room to include the two dropped ceilings in the entry hall and upstairs hall, as well.
    January 27, 2009 : Monday Night Fever

    In March we held the first of several construction parties and took down the ceilings. It was amazing. It was the best fun we've ever had on the house. Our friends are awesome.
    March 27, 2009 : Another Start
    March 28, 2009 : Hard Day's Work
    March 29, 2009 : It's Dark in Here

    Then it was a long slog of wallpaper removal and paint stripping, still partially in process.
    April 1, 2009 : Misuse of Household Appliances
    April 2, 2009 : The Legible House
    April 4, 2009 : Working Boy
    April 5, 2009 : While You Were Out
    May 5, 2009 : Our Lives Are Full of Scraping
    May 16, 2009 : Peeling Away

    As usual, we got a nice large collection of random junk from the ceiling (the ceilings in the back of the house are full of stuff that fell into the cracks between the floorboards in the attic).
    April 14, 2009 : Stuff From Our Ceiling

    After a brief hiatus to work on garden projects and deal with a death in the family, new chicks, and the one thing that has been occupying much of our time and financial resources for the last few years, we had another event and took down the dining room ceiling.
    October 24, 2009 : Ceiling Fall Down Go Boom

    Where we found more interesting stuff:
    October 27, 2009 : Out of the Ceiling

    Then it was a rush to get the wiring repaired and prepare to put up drywall.
    November 5, 2009 : The Smallest Changes

    Which actually went quite quickly, given the weirdness of our framing.
    November 8, 2009 : Walls Once Again

    We hosted both Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners in our dining room, so the work expanded and contracted around those dates. But by the end of the year we had a dining room.
    November 30, 2009 : Fun on a Ladder
    December 20, 2009 : Three Squares
    December 22, 2009 : Nothing Like a Dinner Party to Motivate You
    December 23, 2009 : Look! White Walls!
    December 24, 2009 : Watching Paint Dry
    December 24, 2009 : We Call It a Room
    December 26, 2009 : Happy Christmas
    December 29, 2009 : Let There be Light

    We're taking some time to rest and get over winter colds before tackling the floor, then it's on to the hallway so we can strike this one off the list completely next year.
    

11. Block air infiltration around various doors (as done as it can get)


12. Replace window sashes (Moved off the 10-year plan because of logistics)
13. Strip ugly pink paint from as much woodwork as possible
    I think this might be the first time we can actually report good news on this front. Noel began stripping paint with a heat gun and a radiant heater. It's slow going, but we are revealing more and more actual wood under the pink paint. We also stripped the pink paint out of the niche, though it still kind of looks like hell.

    May 5, 2009 : Our Lives Are Full of Scraping
    May 16, 2009 : Peeling Away
    

14. Remove linoleum from floors/refinish wooden floors
    We didn't get to any of this this year because we were working on the walls. But in 2010 we will take up the dining room floor, which with luck will not be a total mess and can just be refinished with a sander and some polyurethane.
15. Remove the concrete driveway extension into the back yard


16. Related landscaping/gardening


17. Repair front porch/re-rebuild front steps
18. Repair side porch, remove steps, and turn into a conservatory
    The stairs for the side porch are going to remain, after all, but we didn't have the money to replace the crappy construction stairs put in by our incompetent foundation contractor.
    
19. Draw detailed plans for the Day of Glory
    We worked out the arrangement of the back of the house this year, including a rear staircase (I prefer to have two staircases in a house like this in case of fire) that goes all the way into the basement. The detailed plans are still in progress, but the skeleton is all worked out.
    

Technorati Tags: construction, demolition, renovations, ten year plan, victorians

We actually considered, at 7pm on Christmas Eve, trying to find a new fixture before dinnertime the next day. Fortunately, every hardware store within easy driving distance was well closed by that time, so we dined by the light of a single bulb.

Over the weekend, though, we went out to find a decently bright light fixture. It had to meet three criteria: 1. cheap, 2. bright, and 3. not totally offensively wrong in the space. It turns out that's harder than you might think, but we finally found a $60 fixture at Home Depot that would take five 60W bulbs (which meant we could put 5 1300-lumen fluourescents in it for LOTS OF LIGHT).

Noel did the wiring part and I assembled the bottom, then he attached the two parts.

We hung it fairly low, because it will be over the table most of the time. But it can loop up for dances or if we have indoor dog wrestling events. Or when we move all the furniture out again so we can rip up the floor.

We just need to patch up the gap in the ceiling.

Technorati Tags: electrical work, light, renovations

It was also nice to have nine of our friends over for dinner. The smell of cooking ham made a nice change from the smell of stain-blocking primer and drywall mud.

We had two other guests, Candy the big black lab, and her little sister, Kjersten. It didn't take long for crazy dog play with our two girls to wear Kjersten out, and she spent much of the evening socked out on various laps.

Next up, we move all the furniture out again (believe it or not) and rip up the floor. But for now, a brief rest period.

Technorati Tags: dogs, puppy, christmas, renovations

And it's a good thing we did, too, because we got perilously low on wall paint and Noel had to go out and find a place that sells Aura and was open on Christmas Eve. There's just a lot more wall in this room than in the Front Parlour (it's several feet larger in each direction, and has no enormous pocket door).

(By the way, these pictures convince me that a dramatic crown molding would look really wrong in this room. I'd like a picture rail for the ease of hanging art, but how to put it into this space will be a challenge.)

The real setback of the day was when we were untaping the ceiling, and the primer just started peeling off. A cursory search of the net gives us a few possible reasons: damp walls (there might be some residual moisture from the leaks, but it would have to be from last winter), plaster that was too smooth (but the peeling happened over the drywall mud), insufficient drying time for the paint (can recommends 8 hours, we did more than 12), too thick a coat (definitely not the case here). I'm thinking it may be some of all of the above.

This is where the worst of it happened, right where the eternal seeping stain was over the arch. That brown stuff is tannins from the wood.

The paint didn't just flake off; it came off in great sheets: this one was 16 inches long.

We took down what would peel away, then just painted over the bare patch and hoped for the best. At this point we were tired enough of the painting that we're willing to redo it if and when it peels again.

We have one more coat of paint to put on the fields, and then we can take the masking tape down and call it a room. Of course, right after Christmas we're going to rip up the floor and see what happens, so maybe we should not be so cocky about this room yet.

Technorati Tags: painting, plaster, renovations

First, we have the ceiling taped off for painting. I used to try to freehand the edges, but I've gotten a bit smarter about my own limits lately and now everything gets masked.

And here we have it with the ceiling painted. We still have to do some touching up, but we're ready to move on to the walls today once that is done.

In protest over all the dog pictures, this one includes a guest appearance from Schwa, our new kitty (he's been here just over a week). Schwa is about 3, male, and full of spit and vinegar. He's getting along with the dogs very nicely, thanks, but finds stain-blocking primer a bit off-putting.

Technorati Tags: cats, painting, renovations