Mi Casa Es Mi Casa...

Well, as you can see by some of the earlier posts, the house is looking more and more like a house, and there are now about a million little details of inside finish work to worry about.  Most of the big stuff has been chosen, like granite and marble, flooring, doorknobs, sinks and faucets... but trying to ponder interior colors is making me nuts.  We have too many woods, too many stone surfaces, too many windows, and almost no walls at all, so I'm going to just think about something else until the last minute.  Something will suggest itself!

It's spring now (rumor has it) and planting season is well upon us... We're really late, actually.  No seedlings are started yet, and the bare root trees that we bought a month ago are begging to put their feet into a permanent home.  We got several of them planted on Sunday, and that was about all we could get done in a weekend.  Doesn't sound like much, but it took all both of us had in us to get even that much done!

But the project I'm eager to get back to is the sweet little cottage.  And the old garden shed hasn't fallen down yet, so Bruce has agreed to let it be for another season... and by then I hope to have a new clear "sun roof" on it, and maybe a couple of braces to help it stand up for a while longer.  But back to the cottage:  This is my project, with a little help from Bruce, and eventually it will become a little artist's retreat and/or guest cottage.  It needs everything done to it... new interior, new exterior, new roof, gutters... new window at the back, new little powder room, new French doors on the front...  And the exterior soil level has to be lowered also, plus a backhoe job to pull old ivy and blackberry roots.

So, without boring you with the written details of this job, let me bore you with a video about it...  This is the first installation of many, as I get started with the major stuff...  I'm loving this work, actually.  It's really fun to be utterly destructive in such a constructive way!  Totally therapeutic.  Enjoy the film.  It's about two and a half minutes!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLLlv-UIKyQ.

It's not all about the house

Much interior work getting done.  The HVAC guy has done his thing.  The monster heat exchanger is not set yet but all the interior stuff is done including mounting the air-handler under the house in the crawl space.  Ducting is done as well.  Electricians have been in there for the last 10 or 12 days.  All the ceiling cans, fan mounts, vent fans (there are 5 in the house for some reason), outlets and switches, main panel, sub panel, all that stuff is in.  Exterior boxes to mount the door lights, floods, hot tub outlet, and probably 10 other things I can't think of right now are in.  But it is not all about the house.  Dee and I spent the weekend prepping the

Where have I been?

I have been derelict in my blogging responsibilities.  There has been much progress in the two weeks since I last updated the blog but as I said earlier once the structure is up  and enclosed, progress is less visible.  Nonetheless our crew has completed the siding, roofing, most of the trim

A roof over our heads

In a previous episode we saw that the roof membrane was installed.  This helped keep the rain out of the house to a point but it is not a finished roof.  This week the standing seam sheet metal roof material arrived and