BATHROOM

So, with nine days off (actually ten, which included my vacation plus two weekends, one containing Memorial Day), I decided to get three projects under way as well as close to finishing. I'd paint half of the bathroom, the entire bedroom, and wrap the stove and dishwasher in varnished longleaf pine in a board-and-batten design.

It shouldn't take more than a day or two...

stripping the bathroom walls

I can hear you thinking 'HALF the bathroom? Why HALF?'

Well, look at the picture above. One half of the bathroom has the tub, which will need tile and a glass enclosure. I have Masonite 'tile' and duck curtains. I am poor. I cannot AFFORD real tile or a glass surround at this time. So I worked from the right side of the toilet around the left side of the room, ending at the unseen corner to the right.

Because of the tight time schedule and because I am cheap, I thought I'd just prime the wallpaper and roll on a few coats of paint I already had.

Well, you know how I am.

I started, didn't like the peeling and tears in the wallpaper, so I wet it down and began to scrape. I cringed at my foolhardiness.

The walls aren't made of drywall or plaster in this room. Like the kitchen and studio ceilings, they are sheets of homasote, a type of lightweight fiberboard popular from the 1940s through the 1970s. It's weak, porous, and stinks when cut with a saw. They supposedly still sell the stuff, though Grok knows why. My ceilings in the kitchen was sagging, if you remember . So when I started the stripping of wallpaper, I expected trouble.

Wallpaper comes in two varieties; paper and vinyl. If you wet the paper, it separates and a flat blade can scrape it off easily. Vinyl repels water and usually requires scoring with a sharp utility knife for the water to soak through. I prayed I would find no vinyl; I knew the first layer was paper.

Luck be a lady tonight!

The sink wall

I lucked out! The first layer was backed with plain paper, as was the rest of the wallpaper. I didn't have to score it; merely wetting it with cheap automotive blue windshield fluid (yea, that stuff is Da Bomb) made it easy to remove. It will only take off a layer at a time, but it works like magic. The big fear I had was the last layer.

Homasote is SO porous that anything glued to it would likely have penetrated to the point of causing my scraping to gouge the surface. I might end up pulling out the walls themselves. So much for three jobs in nine (ten) days... 

The last wall, where the refinishing of the walls would end at the left. Note the Masonite 'tile.' As well as the horrific blue-blue on blue-blue of the bedroom beyond.

Surprise at the sink wall

I whooped for joy when I got to the wall itself. It had been painted with two coats of the same sickly blue-blue as the bedroom, and the finish was semi-gloss. The paper came off easily while a good wash with soapy water and a scrubbing with a plastic scrub pad did the rest. I removed the crappy tape joints. I could do a lot better.

The sink wall stripped. I did not strip the bottom three feet; I intended to put wainscot there. I'd already wired in the vanity lights a few years back.

The ceiling is also homasote, and I decided to keep the one lath strip rather than remove it for taping and floating. I did wash off the mildew spots, though, revealing the other tape joints as whiter stripes. They're not joints, they just cover nails.

I still don't know what this feature was. Apparently someone cut out a twenty-eight by fourteen inch rectangle, then replaced it and floated it very badly. I don't know why; there are no pipes or electrical lines there, other than the ones I put in myself. And I know I didn't do it. Too high up for a body. Hidden treasure? It'd have to be a small treasure; my interior studs are live-edge slabs of pine and chestnut eight inches wide by one and a quarter inch thick. Snaking the wires through a one inch space was fun, let me tell you.

I taped and floated the homasote, a new experience for me. Note the pencil marks, these are tiny  holes and discrepancies in the float work. So much for just slapping on a coat of paint. Once I get into something, I dive perty deep. After floating, refloating, filling small holes and sanding out lines, I rolled on a mixture of 2 parts drywall mud to 1 part white latex paint. This gave a heavy orange-peel texture that evened out the fibbrous walls, the tape, and the entire surface.

I knew I wanted  a light teal or aqua for the walls, as it would add a cool element to the warm, deep orange-red of the heart pine wainscot below. Being the cheapskate I am, I went to the paint store and asked to rummage through their off-mixes (very inexpensive) and recycled paint (free). I found a few colors I liked and intended to mix them with others to tweak them. In the end, I found this green that suited nicely, though I would have preferred it to be semi-gloss, which holds up better to moist bathroom air. The trip to the free bin paid off twice, though, as I found a red I wanted for the windows and doors for the bedroom.

The sink wall wainscot, still being trimmed. This beadboard was a small amount left over from a job while I was milling heart pine at DCAM, where I worked for three years. I took home a lot of cast-offs, and will thank Brian Cooper for allowing me to add them to my project. Reuse, reuse, reuse! Hey Brian!

I precut, sanded, and finished the boards in my shop; varnishing in the house will leave the taste in your mouth for days.

After the lights and mirror went in, it began to look like a nice bathroom. I still had to add the cap to the wainscot and put in a new floor. Note the hinges on the door; the pins are on the inside, and both this and the door where I'm standing open INTO the tiny bathroom. No wonder they never put in a sink.

The bedroom door after I removed it, took it to the shop to scrape, sand and prime, then rehung it to swing OUT. This is a colonial era door, and as you can see from the bottom rail, has been trimmed extensively. It is unlikely that there was a door there originally. The bathroom was a part of the long room that is now the studio and served as three tiny bedrooms when The Izbickis lived there. Indoor plumbing wasn't installed until the fifties, and the bedroom wall to the left has lap siding under its drywall. The bedroom is a 1950s addition. Note the new, unpainted stops on the frame.

The hardware, including screws, keeper, latch bar and guide, thumb latch and handle. The handle was wrapped in blue tape to keep it from overspray of the steel. It is pewter.

Very old and very heavy hinges, one stripped and cleaned, the other still needing attention. Not typical Colonial, but vurry vurry nice. The pins do not remove. Note that they are not as wide as today's hinges; Colonial doors such as this one are only an inch thick.

I did not strip all the paint, as it was far too thick. I sanded it, patched it, and removed as much of the chunky stuff as was necessary.

  

Note the still-painted strip to widen the door at some point in the past. The area near the latch needed the most attention, but I did not completely patch the scratches above the thumb latch, which have been deepened over the centuries by many a thumbnail.

Well, well! This door has been reversed before! Note the mirror-image screw holes for the hinges. Nothing ever changes.

Except the direction of this door.

       THE CRITTERS OF SPRING

The next bunch of posts are continuations of NINE DAYS OFF, which started in May around Memorial Day 2018. So you will be taken back to late spring and Summer, which was a real bear this year. To prove it, I present the bear below.

The wooly bear caterpillar is  a predictor of the weather, or so say the old-timers. If, in fall, the black sections, usually at both head and tail, are particularly large with a small area of orange in the middle, it indicates an early freeze followed by a lot of cold, then turning to a mid-winter warm-up followed by a frigid late winter. If it is nearly all black, you'll not remove your long underwear ever, including during bathing. So it was in 2015. Go back if you want to see what Cold looks like.

I didn't believe this when I first arrived, but I'm sold now. And the bear above is a perfect example. This was taken in April, which was cold enough to have two small snowstorms last year. This bear predicts a very hot summer followed by an early winter and practically no fall. And though our summer was a bit hot, never topping 93, the humidity was high enough (70% and higher for four months) to make everyone miserable, especially me. I HATE the heat, and high humidity makes me sluggish and cranky, especially when it interrupts my Farm Restoration Schedule. And this was NOT a year for delays.

My five-year balloon note to the Izbicki Family was due on November eighth, and though they certainly didn't want the house back, neither did they want to be stiffed for over sixty thousand bucks. So I had a LOT of work to do through the summer to insure a decent appraisal and keep any inspectors happy.

And yes, the wooly bear is not necessarily a predictor of humidity, but it did warn me. And it was right.

This is also what convinced me to finish the flying beam system in the attic before the real heat set in and to move the remaining summer operations inside.

My hummingbird feeder outside the kitchen window. Usually frequented by a few female ruby-throats and one dominant male that drives virtually all the others off, I found it different this spring.

A few girl birds check it out, keeping a wary eye for the male.

 A few more join them.

A whole gaggle of girl birds show up, and to my ultimate surprise, after a confrontation or two, the male is driven away by the females. Maybe this really WILL be the Year of the Woman!

The girl birds settle in.

Holy hell! There's an awful lot of them! And they choose to share rather than compete.

Some squabbling occurs when there's not enough spaces, but no single bird takes over. Hmmmm….

I decide to pull the other feeder from the attic and load it with sugar water, putting it in front of the living room window twenty feet away. I never did this before, as the male simply took over both feeders to where the ants and yellowjackets were the only one besides HIM to get any sugar water. Typical male. Both feeders are inundated with girl birds. The males stay the hell away.

I ain't NEVER seed this befoah!

And it would continue all summer.

The dwawgs, when not sleeping in cool dirt outside, take refuge in the fireplace, cleaned out specifically so they can enjoy the brick hearth. Marley takes it over, being the hottest-natured.

They continue to bring me treats. Apparently I'm not eating enough.

This young possum might have made a good meal, but I'm just not that crazy about stewed possum. I keep thinking about Pogo. Also about how disgusting possums really are. I fed it to something in the woods.

 

Speckle claims the Dog Deck.

Marley, satisfied that Dad has enough to eat with her Possum Offering, digs a hole in the moist dirt and occupies it.

                            BEEN A WHILE, ADN'T IT?

                                                                             

Norwich harbor on the Thames River looking south to the Thermos Factory in the distance. This is the deepest harbor on the east coast, over three hundred feet deep near New London eight miles downriver. Or so they say. I haven't measured it. We are all waiting for things to look like this again, green trees and no ice. This river NEVER freezes, though. Too deep.

I've been perty damn busy this year with improvements as well as refinancing the Farm. I lost my insurance, took four months to find other insurance, came down with a rouser of a head cold that went to bronchitis and two months later is still infecting one half of my head. It's okay, it's the half I don't use. Just last week I got laid off from my job of the past fifteen months. So now I have no excuse for not posting what I did last year.
To my chagrin, I have so many pictures that were taken at different times and that also need to be posted chronologically by the job that it will take me days just to upload them in the proper order.
So bear with me. Those that still read this thing, anyway. All one of you.

HALLOWEEN MESSAGE FROM SAMARA MORGAN

Well, I managed to crawl my way out of the attic where this cretinous 'human' keeps me. It wouldn't be so bad up there but for this nearly invisible old lady that talks about stamp collecting and fabrics. Can't see her all that good, but she does go on. At least it's dry up there. In most places, anyway.

It's nice to get some fresh air, anyway. And that horrid well is gone. Nothing but bad memories there.

I'd wish you all a Happy Halloween, but as you know, that's not my style. I do like the climbing nightshade in this front garden, though. Keeps the moles at bay, along with anyone else who comes in contact with it. Who would plant such a toxic thing? Maybe the 'human' isn't so bad after all. At least he grew a couple of pumpakins and surrounded me with dying flowers. That's nice. I hear he's going to let them freeze all the way down. Cool.

Stupid fuzzbag of a dog doesn't even know I'm here.

A TOUCH OF AUTUMN BEFORE THE BIGGEST POSTS OF THE YEAR

This was written the first week in October, when it was pouring every other day (just drizzles every third day now), and the temps were still in the eighties. Autumn has finally descended, and the colors were vibrant for about a week before the most recent noreaster took the leaves down.

So let's go back a few weeks.

It’s been raining here since late August, with soakers drenching New England seven and eight inches at a time. All from storms with colorful names like Florence and Michael. Might be a Delores or Minerva in there somewhere, I don’t remember. It’s the wettest it’s ever been since I’ve been up here. We look up when the sun occasionally shines and say, “What’s that bright thing up there?”

This on top of the most humid summer anyone can remember. Eighty per cent humidity was the norm, coupled with high eighties of July, August, and most of September. I had mold growing on my lawn mower gas canister, for chrissakes.

I’ve sprung a couple of leaks in the roof, one above a previously restored ceiling, and though I am (hope to be) close to closing on the refinance of this place, I won’t get a new roof for a few weeks at the earliest. But it’s gotta happen soon.

So, before I can post the finished stuff, I thought I’d do a little Octobering.

 

I’ve written very little to add to this blog in the past few months, and that’s because I’ve been scrambling to refinance this beast, else I lose it.

That will not happen. The refi is almost complete, and when it is, and all the papers signed, I will be allowed to live here in the house that the bank owns, rather than the family from whom I bought it.

Actually that’s bullshit. It will be MINE. I’ll give you all the details of both the refinance (not enough to bore you but enough o thrill you into considering doing this yourselves before the Corporate Government decides to grab everything you think you own, including the rights you used to have) in the next post.

Okay, enough of that.

I’ll also have, as usual, a long post showing what I did to the Standish House this summer, both to get it further down the Road to Total Restoration, but also to make it appraise for enough so I could get the house refinanced. Trust me, it was tough, but it was very much worth it.

I hope to post more often now that I’m almost out from under Damocles’ Sword.

So.

 Hows about a ghost story?

 

A G-G-G-GHOST??!!!!!!

 

I tole you about the strange thing I saw at Captain Grant’s Inn when I was scoping this area for homes back in 2012. A normal-looking guy walked before me at this very fine bed and breakfast that I hope you will check out while in the area (Hey Carol and Ted!)  . He disappeared as he walked around a corner, and I mean DISAPPEARED. Turns out people come to Captain Grant’s specifically to see ghosts. Who knew? Not me. I went for the great price, fantastic ambiance of a 1754 house, and for the breakfast.

The breakfast!

Droooool drooooooool….

Sorry (wipes chin).

I also tole you of the feeling of a female presence I encountered the first time I entered the house on that same trip. The feeling was strongest in the attic and I’ve always thought there is a benevolent presence of the female persuasion in this house.

And people, I am the biggest skeptic in the world. I should be from Missouri; it’s the ‘Show Me’ state.

But I’m from Arkansas, and we HATE Missouri.

In the same story, I related that I asked Jim Izbicki, the youngest of the four siblings that sold me this place, if there were any ghosts. This was before I’d bought the place. He assured me that there were none.

But as soon as I moved in, he came over and asked me if I’d seen the spook yet.

DAMN!

He, without prompting, related a sighting of a filmy vapor at the foot of the bed in the room in which I sleep, and he was sure it was female. I told him of my feeling, and we agreed there must be something here after three hundred years.

All this was reported in a couple of previous posts entitled ‘A G-G-G-GHOST?’

This brings us full circle to the present day.

 

PART 3

 

I’d been living here at Standish Farm for just under a year when I had my first encounter with the strange sounds. I’ve been restoring homes for a long, long time, and I’m familiar with the sounds old homes make, especially when temperatures change. The wood expands, pops and cracks, and creaks and groans that might be mistaken for some lost relative looking for a drink can be explained by simple physics.

What happens here at the Standish House, however, cannot be explained by simple physics. Complex physics of a variety we don’t yet understand? Possibly. Probably. I don’t believe in ghosts, even if I have seen one. If that’s what it was.

My living room is very, very comfortable, and I like to sit and watch movies or read from the same position Granny did before me. Bertha Izbicki, the matriarch of this house since 1938, is still known as Granny to her kids, especially when talking about her to the younger set (such as me, nearly 60 years old). Her chair is in the same corner as mine in the living room and she put her teevee in the opposite corner, where mine is.

 

I don’t watch teevee; I have a small flat screen in the kitchen that gets two PBS stations, and that’s it. I haven’t watched cable or satellite since 2005, and network? Early nineties.

But I like movies, and so have a mid-sized flat screen in the living room.

I very much like to read, though, and do it often. When I read, I have no other sound going on in the background. Maybe that’s why I sometimes hear what I hear.

It also extremely quiet up here on this windswept ridge, especially at night.

Four years ago, in late spring, I was sitting in my comfy chair reading, my smallest pup Cheerio curled up in her bed on the table next to me. A full blooded shit-zoo, she’s just big enough to get a job as a potato bug, but controls both the Giant Pup Speckle (her baby) and Marley, the quiet one. She sleeps on the table because she likes to be close to me as well as on the same level.

As I was reading this particular night, the unmistakable sound of a tennis ball falling to the wood floor directly in front of me was heard. It bounced, then bounced again, then dribbled across the floor as I listened. It’s an extremely familiar sound in this house. Cheerio, the Ball Playing Dog of the household, awoke, pricked up her ears, and lifted her head, eyes following the sound of the ball as it rolled across the room in shorter and shorter bounces, as tennis balls do before coming to rest.

I leaned forward and looked at the floor.

There was no tennis ball. I knew there was no tennis ball, because I made sure to PUT UP the tennis balls in the house after Evening Playtime. If I leave a tennis ball around, Cheerio is likely to find it, pick it up, and initiate a sleepy game that distracts me and she’s not really into anyway. So there is a net bag in the mud room filled with tennis balls of different degrees of filth and dismemberment.

She likes the new, fuzzy ones best, and I only keep the naked, raggedy, or halfway torn-up ones around for times when I cannot FIND the fuzzy ones.

I stood up, looking for the nonexistent ball, and Cheerio jumped down and sniffed around, unable to find it.

“That was weird,” I said.

The exact same thing happened a few weeks later. Mirror image, carbon copy. Same sound, same reaction from Cheerio. Except this time the other dogs came in from the bedroom to check it out.

Now it wasn’t weird, it was interesting.

The sound wasn’t unknown to me; I often bounce the ball along the floor to get Cheerio into the game, and she takes it from there. Our ball-playing seldom lasts more than ten minutes before she gets bored (she’s not obsessive, nor is she a pup anymore at age eight), and I don’t leave balls lying about the house for fear of stepping on one and falling to my death (I am not a pup anymore, either).

So I have a house that records sounds and plays them back. I’ve heard a number of examples.

Dog feet tromping across the floor, complete with rattling knickknacks (before I reinforced the floors).

Growls and sneezes when the dogs aren’t in the house.

It almost always seems to center around the dogs.

I think it’s interesting that the dogs are as involved with this phenomenon as they are.

I have had no visual expressions or sightings, no vapors, no filmy images, no wails from the attic.

At least, I hadn’t until earlier this month.

And like my ghost sighting at Captain Grant’s Inn (go back and read it), I suffered a typical case of temporary amnesia directly after the incident. In fact, I didn’t think about it at all for three days. Then it came back to me like a hot kiss at the end of a wet fist.

Sorry, that was Nick Danger, Third eye. A quote.

The temporary amnesia I suffered has been experienced by a number of others I know, and is a repeated phenomenon in the circles of those who research such things. Ghosts, UFOs, skunk apes, and other forms of impossibilia are often forgotten directly after sighting, only to be remembered all at once in the very near future. I think it’s a coping mechanism of the human mind, meant to keep from having one’s head explode.

This next encounter did the same thing; I forgot about it until late the next afternoon.

Again, it happened while I was sitting in my comfy chair.

“No! Not the COMFY CHAIR!!!”

The Spanish Inquisition can be SO cruel. Or so I expect.

 

“NOBODY EXPECTS THE….”

Aww, YOU know.

Anyway, I was sitting in my chair, surrounded by the myriad pillows that support my terrible injuries, when a small black sphere the size of a ping pong ball zipped silently across the room. Sporting a neat little hole in its center, it left a streak of black behind it and also seemed to follow another dark line as it traveled quickly across the room.

It was silent and was gone in the blink of an eye.

It took a few seconds for my mind to register just what I had seen, then I sat up in wide-eyed wonder.

“What the hell was THAT?” I said loudly. Only Cheerio lifted her sleepy head for a second before laying it back down. The two Big Dogs never stirred, though the trajectory of the thing, tilted slightly downward, looked to hit them straight on.

If it did, they never felt a thing.

I swore I’d remember this, the first visible ‘spooky thing’ I’ve seen in the house, but within minutes, it had slipped from my memory, only to come suddenly back many hours later.

I’ll let you know if it returns.

And, due to popular demand down at Barb’s Place, I have again placed Samara Morgan out in the front yard, though sans well. Too much trouble to build, and besides, I never do the same trick twice. She’s standing on the front stoop, surrounded by a small pile of pumpkins and a lot of dead geraniums. Reaching out to passerby to ask for help. Or latch on…

Dead geraniums?

 

Are they REALLY dead????

 

BWAAA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!

 

NINE DAYS OFF

So I have been left in the lurch (what the hell does that mean? What's a lurch, other than a tall butler that lives with the Addams Family?) by my mean old boss Steve. HE is off to Maine for a week of fun and sun and worrying about shutting down his business for a week while his wife forces him to take some well-deserved time off. I jest about him being mean; he's a great guy and a pleasure to work with/for.

But I am also forced to take time off.

From my job.

You didn't think I would take time off from THE FARM, didja?

I took a day off this January (it was fifty degrees!) and felt terrible every minute I wasn't working on the Farm. Haven't taken another. I have no idea how to relax, mostly because I have to get this thing to a certain level of restoration before I refinance it later this year.

THEN maybe I can take a day off. It'll still take me forever to learn to relax.

So.

For the past two months, I made my plan, got the materials together, gathered and milled the wood I needed, bought paint, and found all my interior restoration equipment, put up two years ago when I finished the kitchen ceiling.

I planned for this Nine Days, knowing that I'd be doing it at the hottingest part of the year. So I made sure to be able to beat the heat by again setting up in the cellar. Last year I spent a number of evenings there, having made a small sitting area with chair and lights and table so I could listen to radio or old cassette tapes from the stereo upstairs, piped into the cellar by the magic of Speakers B. Yes, I have those (cassette tapes, I mean)! Don't smirk! It's seventy down there when its ninety five outside. And it was just that for a week and a half until just after Independence Day this year. I was more ready than last year. I put one of my seldom-used 24" flat screen TeeVees down there, hooked it into my giant rooftop antenna, and BOING! I get two PBS stations. All I can handle.

Then it got cool and I haven't been down there to watch. Don't worry, I will. Most of July and all of August (not to mention the first half of September, a summer month up here)

But not this week!

I be working!

I'll post a few times, rather than saving it up for eight months like last time.

I spent some time this spring building doors for the garage. I want some measure of security as well as some curb appeal. I lightly sanded some eighteenth century white pine floorboards with up and down saw kerfs and a nice chocolate patina (no, they HAD those, I didn't sand them with them!), then made vertical doors from them. Those sat in the garage for a few months until I got tired of them not doing their job, then I put them to work. I liked them so much that I decided the cinder blocks at either side were a sore sight in comparison, so on the Fourth of July (and the following eighth), I did something about it.

This is the reason I had to hide the cinderblocks. They were likely red at one time, but red fades to orange, my most unfavoritest color. First task; pressure wash the moss on the roof! Or off the roof. Half done in this pic. Trust me, I finished, and it looks magnificent.

This is the side facing the street. I do my large makeup work in there; doors and windows, big pieces of wood that need cutting, and all my sanding. My smaller machine shop is too crowded with...machines. That shop also gets over a hundred twenty in the afternoon, and this one is shaded. Yes, I planted trees on the south side of the machine shop, but give them time. Sheesh!

The first real task was to pressure wash the cinderblock. This was done the day before; notice most of the orange is gone. I should have primed it, but I'm lazy and cheap. Mostly cheap.

Now you can see why I had to do something with the cinderblock. Doors, YA! Walls, NEIN! The doors are not complete, and though they lock from the inside, they will, by winter, have interior battens to keep out the wind, as well as an exterior latch/lock and an astragal. That's the piece between the doors that makes them a single unit when closed. Look it up.

Even before I pressure washed the walls, I had to dig a drainage trench to divert water that has flooded my dirt floor garage since before I moved here. I will eventually put a Zurn-type drain in, but the trench will do for now.

Because I work alone, I must use certain techniques to compensate for my preferred lack of yucky human companionship. This is one; a Third Hand. Holds the lintel trim board in place as I nail the other end.

Don't forget to glue the back of the lintel trim board! I'm only nailing to the wood frame, and most of the trim rests on the cinderblock. no, I didn't backprime it. You'll see why. I framed the opening for this set of doors in November of 2013; it was one of the first tasks I did after getting heat, water, and my furniture into the house proper. Took me long enough to do this!

 

The board was slightly warped, so I used one masonry screw to bring it tight to the wall. It's countersunk, and I'll fill it with Durham's Water Putty (a great product, and I highly recommend it) and color it in with ineldible India ink later. Ingullible. Inedible. That's it. Inedible. I know, I've tried. Tastes terrible. Turns your tongue brown for a month. EEEEewwwww.

Cutting a large rabbet (or is it a dado? I think it is) with a circular saw. This allows the side trim to ride over the strap hinges. Oh My!

Strap hinges. It's the square part I need to ride over. Well, the trim, anyway. And pardon the dangling preposition, and those that climb about on their own, as well. The white stuff is silicone, which is an excellent adhesive. I used masonry screw to attach the pressure-treated 2x10s to the cinderblock back in 2013, and despite modern PT lumber's tendency to cup, it did no such thing. Silicone holds it in place very well.

Knock out the wood with a straight claw hammer and clean it up with chisel. Learned this technique in '77 as an apprentice carpenter to Mike Foerster. He instilled me with my  love of craftsmanship. Hey Mike! Give me a call! Haven't seen him since 1979...

BTW, all this white pine, which was likely milled in the 1740s and was prolly three of four hundred years old THEN, was already sanded and coated with an oil-based clear coat thinned 2:1 with paint thinner so it would soak in, repel water, and not look shiny. One coat did it.

Ugly, in't it?

Finally trimmed out. Just needs one more thing…

Tools for the job. I junked the crappy towel for a better one I'd been saving for such an occasion, and the results showed that this was a better choice. I've had that hawk (called a hock in England) for thirty years.

California Stucco is a pleasure to work with. Though it's only made of lime, sand, and Portland cement, it costs fifty dollars per 94 lb. bag. Took a bag to do 1 side. Worth it, though. It was 93 degrees and eighty per cent humidity on Independence Day in Preston Connecticut. I'm sure there were thousands sweltering ten miles away on the beaches of New London, Stonington, and Misquamicut RI. You can have that. I'd rather be in the shade, splattered with cold water and stucco, and doing something useful. Besides, I gots red hair and fair skin. Me and The Fat Old Sun don't get along so good. That Fat Old Sun was westering heavily, and I ached liked I'd just emerged from Dead Dog #2 (the most dangerous and challenging cave in Austin Texas), so I cleaned up and called it a day until the next weekend, when I'd finish the other side.

Meet my little fren'. Thirty inches wide, it blows a hurricane. Five bucks at The Annual New London Unitarian Church Tag Sale. Hey, Sher! This fan's for you!

I've seen a lot of critters around my house, but this domestic turkey was a new one on me at coffee on the following Sunday morning. Took the pic through the screen. Some of my neighbors keep chickens, and I suppose this must be an addition to those. It strutted around the front yard, paying no attention to the seeds scattered at the foot of the bird feeder. The dogs went apeshit, screaming and barking and calling 911. But the thing was very comfortable, and didn't seem fazed at the dogs' uproar. Eventually even THEY quieted down, apparently getting used to it (or realizing their barking did nothing to intimidate it). It paced and gobbled, clucked and warbled. I went out to see if it would come to me, and it did. I beat a hasty retreat back into the house. I have no treats for such a thing, and trust not a bird in the world. Especially one this size. Birds bite. A small dark rectangle can barely be seen on its breast; a homing device, perhaps. It was gone in about an hour.

That's better. I'll paint the hinges a flat black and the stucco a cream. Prolly use a dark brown for the scallopy wood above. When I have time....HA HA HA HA ha ha ha !!!!!!! Ohhh, my.....

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TRIMMING OUT THE KITCHEN, DEMOING THE BATHROOM, AND PAINTING THE BEDROOM AN UPPER BATHROOM WALLS. AND MAYBE SOME BATHROOM WAINSCOT...

VERY, VERY SOON.