Let It Rain

The shed roof is shingled!

Even without addressing the siding, it's already quite an improvement over what it looked like when we bought the place:



Up next will be giving new life to the stack of barn siding we salvaged a couple of weeks ago.  It makes a deceivingly small pile when neatly stacked, but I know how much area this siding covered on its old barn and I'm pretty confident we'll have enough here for our project.

And in one more "let it rain" bit of news, at right was the view out our bedroom window Thursday night. 

Previously, the sump pump and gutters were all tied into a 4" footer tile that empties into the creek near the springhouse.  While it did okay in a gentle rain, in downpours it quickly became overwhelmed causing water to come through the basement walls, particularly at the northwest corner of the house.  It also became a problem during the flooding at the end of February when the creek rose high enough to cover the outlet of the footer tile, meaning the sump pump and gutters could no long drain.

The new tile is a 6" solid tile  that is supposed to be impervious to blockage by tree roots.  It empties into the creek at a point about five feet higher than the footer tile (high enough that it would not have been submerged even in this spring's flooding).  The sump pump and all of the gutters from the stone part of the house are tied into the new tile.  The old footer tile is still in place, and the contractor we hired thinks that with the pump and roof water all now directed to the new tile, the old footer should again be able to handle its load. 

There's a chance of thunderstorms later this weekend, and I've got fingers crossed that the new roof and the new tile both pass their first test.

Kim On A Hot Tin Roof

I developed a couple of plans during the week for finishing the shed roof,  but it didn't take long today for me to realize that if the rest of the old awning roof was going to come off I would need to scrap my plans, conquer my fear, and climb onto the roof. 

And I did it. 

Definitely pushed my limits today, but I was in prime DIY (destruct-it-yourself) mode, and it feels good to have this part of the job done.  (Although I suspect it might not feel so good tomorrow morning...)

Anyway, after working from 10am to 7:30pm today the shed has gone from this:

to this:

Possibly doesn't look like much change for a whole day's work, but believe me it was a whole day's work.  And typical of most jobs, the last little bit of work was among the most difficult.  The screws holding the rafters to the barn roof had been drilled in so far some of the heads were almost a 1/4 inch below flush.  Of the 13 rafters, 9 came out with moderate difficulty.  Two came by vise grips (only after repeatedly hammering a drill bit into the screw heads and s-l-o-w-l-y backing them out just enough to grab).  And in spite of my best efforts the I managed to completely strip the last two screws without raising them enough to grab with the vise-grips.  Charles came to my rescue by taking a hand saw to these last two rafters and cutting a 'v' around each screw until we were able to work the rafters loose.

Tomorrow's forecast is just about perfect - sunny and 72 degrees - but I think I'll take a break from the house and take the kids on a field trip.  Mohican State Park was my first thought, but depending how much walking I feel up to that may be amended to Kingwood Center.

And one last piece of news for this post - the general contractor who worked on the house in 2009 and 2010 brought ten sheep for our pasture today.  The plan is for them to spend the summer with us.  They kind of make the place feel like an actual farm.  : )

"Plans are only good intentions...

...unless they immediately degenerate into hard work."  ~Peter F. Drucker

2010 was quite a year here at the Einsel House. Here's a selection of scenes around the house from the beginning of 2010:

By December things looked a bit different:

And if we can accomplish half of the projects I have planned for 2011 then things should look different still by next December.

So, what’s in store for 2011 you ask?

The Shed

This poor little building is long overdue for a little love. The picture at left was taken in October of 2009, but it basically looks the same now.  Our plans for this spring/summer are to tear off and replace the rotten awning, recoat the metal roof, wrap the entire building in tar paper and then cover it with salvaged barn siding.

The Stone Bridge

This is perhaps the most intimidating project on the horizon, but given the rate the bridge is eroding I know we should not put this off. The plan is to rebuild the bridge in 4 sections, starting with the northern half of the west side. I suspect this may be a four year project.

The Springhouse
Although the springhouse was the focus of much attention in 2010, the work on this little building is not yet finished. I want to replace the windows and finish work on the roof, as well as plant some ivy or other ground cover around the new stone walls in front of the springhouse.

More Masonry Work
We’re saving our pennies so that we can have our masonry contractor return this spring to repoint the east side (back) of the house. The previous owner of the EH repointed the north side of the house, and our mason did the west side in the fall of 2009 and the south side in June, 2010. Once the east wall is repointed this spring/summer we will save up and hopefully be able to have the chimneys rebuilt sometime in 2012.

The Kitchen
I'm quite excited about my plans for this room and predict I’ll dive into this project sometime before January ends. More details should be coming in a post soon.
The Yard
The yard here is currently a blank if somewhat bumpy slate. My (perhaps overly ambitious) plans for this summer include clearing a small area along the creek for a stone bench that Charles’ parents gave to us last year and planting a vegetable/herb garden in front of the kitchen wing and surrounding it with a picket fence. And of course more general leveling and stump clearing.

So here’s to twenty-eleven. Do I think all of the projects outlined above will be completed a year from now? Probably not. But we’ll have fun trying!

Grumpy

I'm going to spend this post whining.  I'm apparently also going to spend this post being blunt.

Last Wednesday
5:00pm - With trick-or-treating only 24 hours away, I settle in at the dining room table to make Neil the ghost costume he requested.  I've got white sheets, scissors and some thread.  How difficult can a ghost costume be?

8:00pm - Very difficult.  Thoroughly frustrated, I drive into Walmart and come home with one of the last Super Mario Bros. "Mario" costumes left in the store. 

(Highlights from the three hours in between include Neil posing in a perfect billowy ghost costume followed by Neil walking smack into a wall in our dining room because the eye holes in said perfect billowy ghost costume kept shifting so he could not see where he was going.  Followed by me deciding that instead of two small holes, I would cut one big hole for Neil to see out of.  Followed by Neil posing in a perfect billowy Muslim hijab head covering.  Not what I was going for.  Followed by me deciding that I would put two eye holes in the pillow case and hope that would stay in place better than a whole loose sheet.  Followed by Neil posing in a perfect KKK costume.  Definately not what I was going for.  Followed by the trip to Walmart.)

9:00pm - Neil (never one to like change) announces he doesn't like Mario and isn't going to wear any costume.

Last Thursday
4:00pm - At my aunt's house for a hair cut, Neil announces he does not like Mario and isn't going to wear any costume.

4:30pm - Neil does not like Mario and isn't going to wear any costume.

4:45pm - Neil does not like Mario and isn't going to wear any costume.

5:00pm - Other kids (in costume) start appearing on the sidewalks outside my aunt's house, empty plastic pumpkins and pillowcases in hand.

5:05pm - Neil decides Mario might not be so bad.

5:15-6:45pm - A rather enjoyable, if somewhat cold, hour and a half follows.

7:30pm - Finally back at the EH, Charles and I begin packing for a weekend camping trip. 

Last Friday
7:45am - Frantic activity at the Einsel House.  Last minute packing for the camping trip.  Costumes into bookbags for the kids' school Halloween parties.  Packing a lunch for Cecilia's fall harvest day field trip.  More last minute packing for camping trip.  Everyone is at least 10 minutes late leaving the house.

2:00pm - Aunt Flo decides to join me for the weekend.  (I debated including this detail here, but you know what, this little bit definately fits into a  post titled "Grumpy".)

4:15pm - Meet family friend Adam and all pile into the van to begin the drive down to Lake Hope State Park.

6:00pm on a Friday night - not the best time to be in Columbus attempting to merge from Route 23 onto Route 270

6:20pm on a Friday night - still not a good time to be in Columbus attempting to merge from Route 23 onto Route 270

8:00pm - winding our way south somewhere in Vinton County, Neil announces "I need to use the restroom."

8:05pm - Neil: "I really need to use the potty."

8:10pm - Neil: "I REALLY need to go potty!"

8:12pm - Neil: "I CAN'T WAIT!!!"

8:13pm - Charles pulls off onto some steep stone road.  The three passengers of the van who are able to pee standing up exit the van and line up on the side of the road.

8:15pm - We pull into the drive for Lake Hope State Park and locate Cabin #14.  We unload the van and all go straight to bed.

Last Saturday
1:15am - I wake up.  With a stomach flu. 

9:00am - Avoiding me like the plague, everyone else leaves the cabin to enjoy Lake Hope's ROAR Day activies (ROAR stands for Rural Ohio Appalachia Revisited).

10:00am - Cecilia is dropped off back at Cabin #14.  With the stomach flu.

Mid Afternoon - Charles reappears at Cabin #14.  With the stomach flu.

Thanks to my parents and Adam, Neil is able to enjoy the ROAR activities and has a very busy and full day. 

Last Sunday
8:00am - I wake up feeling weak and a bit shaky, but no longer nauseous.  Cecilia wakes up chipper and joins Neil for a game of Jr. Monopoly.  Charles wakes up feeling weak, a bit shaky and still nauseous. 

9:30am - Since Charles clearly isn't up to any hiking, my dad and he leave to head back north.  The rest of us finish packing up the cabin and take off for Rock House State Park.  The kids have a blast hiking and crawling around inside Rock House.

8:00pm - Finally all back at the Einsel House, I do some basic unpacking but the house is still very disheveled at lights out.

Monday
6:10am - My nose feels cold as I hit the snooze button on my alarm clock.  I snuggle down under the covers thinking how good it is to be home. 

6:10-6:40am - ...I hit snooze a few more times...

6:45am - Finally downstairs, I notice Cecilia is shivering when she gives me a hug.  Hmmm.  I walk over to the thermostat.  It's set at 68 degrees.  The house is 59 degrees.  Damn.

9:00am - I'm half an hour late getting to work and the house is still mostly trashed, but a technician from the company that installed the furnace is supposed to stop by sometime during the day to look at the furnace.  The furnace they installed barely seven months ago.  (Just how much abuse could the thing have taken between the months of April-October anyway?)

2:00pm - Furnace tech calls.  Some gas valve is the problem, he'll get a replacement and install it tomorrow.  In the meantime he overrides the thermostat so the heat pump will continue running despite the cooler-than-a-heat-pump-prefers temperatures. 

5:00pm - My dad leaves a message on my voicemail telling me we're in the dog house for giving he and my mom the stomach flu.

7:00pm - I call my parents to apologize about the flu.  Mom sounds rough.  She tells me family friend Adam now has the flu too.

10:00pm - Kids in bed and the house 1/2 put back together the heat pump kicks in.  LOUDLY.  No wonder they don't suggest you run the thing in temperatures below freezing.

Tuesday
6:10am - Noting with relief that my nose is not cold to the touch, I hit the snooze button on my alarm clock.  I snuggle down under the covers thinking how good it is to be home.

6:10-6:40am - ...I hit snooze a few more times...

7:45am - It's school picture day, so the morning has been another frantic one, but Charles and the kids are out the door on time.  I'm heading through the house one last time to turn off lights when I stop suddenly in the dining room, staring in disbelief at the rug underneath the table.  Apparently Tiny the Cat has the stomach flu too.

8:50am - I'm 20 minutes late getting to work and the house is still 1/2 trashed.  What remains of the four puddles of diarrhea on the dining room rug are soaking under wet rags.  Larger dry rags are shoved under the rug to protect the newly refinished hardwood floor underneath.  I'm beyond caring what the furnace tech will think when he comes to repair the furnace.

2:00pm - The furnace tech calls to tell me the wrong part was shipped for our furnace and they won't get the correct part until tomorrow.  He hopes the heat pump is keeping up in these cooler temps.

5:30pm - I eat two chocolate fudge poptarts for supper while shopping on-line for a new dining room rug.  Stupid rugs are expensive.

6:00-8:00pm - I derive a perhaps undue amount of pleasure from the writing of this post.

But I really should stop now and finish cleaning up the mess in my dining room...

Operation SOS - Part 4

Lots to update here, but it's finally stopped trying to rain and I should head back outside, so I'm going to rely on pictures more than words to show what we've been up to around here the past two days.

First - the springhouse after the work earlier this spring:

 

Our masons did an amazing job making and installing the new door:

Tuesday we kept busy clearing overzealous trees and branches away from the building.  I spent much of my time sanding and priming while my mom removed several areas of rotted wood.  Here's the sill of the back window just before she removed it:

This back window had one original sash still in it.  When mom removed it she noticed that around the edge a thin strip of the original paint color remained.  We were both thrilled to see that it is very similar to the color I am putting back on the springhouse's woodwork.  The old paint is on right edge of the sill in the below picture (the door frame in the background has the new color on it).

Springhouse with door and window frame primed and painted:



Yesterday's work was backbreaking.  The first few hours I spent beginning to remove the plaster ceiling in the springhouse:

I had walnuts (and heaven knows what else) falling on my head until my dad arrived with his backhoe and we switched to a different job.  Here's a picture looking along the front of the springhouse before my dad began digging:

Over time, erosion has carried so much dirt down this hill that the ground was about 2 feet higher than the threshold of the springhouse door.  The plan is to dig out a walkway level with the springhouse floor, and build a stone retaining wall to hold back the higher ground.  So the digging began:

Once the backhoe had done it's worst, mom and I set in with shovels.  Here's my mom working on the trench for the drainage tile:

We tackled tree roots:

And we tackled rocks:

Lots of rocks:

The barn kittens kept us company on a nearby stump:

And, finally, here's a picture with the drainage tile in place, just before we quit for the night:

Still here

I've had several comments over the last couple of weeks about the lack of posts here. I suppose this should make me feel guilty for being a lazy blogger, but to be honest it actually feels rather good to know that people enjoy reading here and miss new posts when I'm on sabbatical.

Since my last few posts featured Einsel scenery and Einsel wildlife, I thought those readers still hanging around would perhaps appreciate an update on the Einsel House itself. So last night (just before a round of storms blew in) I headed outside and took some pictures.

Below is the same shot of the house, taken in September, 2009:

I miss the chimneys. Other than that I'm happy with the improvements. Charles took care of getting our internet connection and TV programming installed. Thankfully he was able to have the new satellite dishes installed at the back of the house, so they no longer mar the historic feel of the house as you pull up the drive. (The gas grill outside the kitchen takes care of that job now.) Unfortunately for Charles, a nest of wasps had taken up residence in one of the old satellite dishes. Just as Charles yanked the dish free from the ground the wasps swarmed out to inform him in no uncertain terms that they did not appreciate having their happy home disturbed. Unfortunately for the wasps, stinging Charles on his bottom was not a successful negotiation method. The wasps had only about a minute and a half of celebration before Charles returned with a can of Raid. Their former happy home went to the local scrap yard a few days later.

Below is a closer shot of the south side of the house. This is the side that our masons repointed this spring. They also replaced the lintels above two windows on this side of the house.

A similar view from last fall:

And a view of the front of the house:

(I suppose I should have moved the vehicles for a "cleaner" picture,
but I guess I was feeling candid. Or lazy.)

The most recent change to the exterior around here has been the addition of a swing set/play house for the kids. This was a Craigslist find:

Here's Cecilia and a friend enjoying the new playhouse, with Bubbles the Guard Dog on duty:

Interior pictures coming in a later post.......

A Few Pictures

No great theme for this post - I've just got a few pictures that I hadn't posted yet and figured I'd put them up before they're completely outdated.

First, a couple pictures from the south side of the house taken after the masons left for the day on Monday:

At left above shows the joints ground out and at right shows repointed.

And a quick shot of the kitchen island, with three coats of finish but still sans top:

When You Got It, Flaunt It

As alluded to a few post ago, I've left a certain project unmentioned here on the blog. Until today. Let's start with a picture showing what the stairway looked like last November:

And

(drumroll please............)

What the stairway looks like now:

Isn't that simply delicious!?

As this blog chronicled, last fall we (temporarily) uncovered several interior stone walls here at the Einsel House. As time passed, we became increasingly determined to find an interior stone wall somewhere in the house that we could leave permanently exposed. I mean, the stone construction is one of this home's most unique features, so why not embrace it? The difficulty was in choosing which wall to expose. It was my mom who first suggested the wall at the top of the stairs. And from the moment we decided that the top of the stairs would be it, mom was champing at the bit to bust into the cracked plaster. When she finally began attacking the old plaster (in early February of this year) she practically giddy with excitement.

Frankly, I'm not sure which made her more happy - the stones she was uncovering in front of her, or the fact that she found something other than sanding woodwork to do that day. (This was early February, remember.)

Here's the wall at the end of that first day:

And later, looking up the stairs, sans plaster:

And from mid-February to mid-May, that's basically what our stone wall looked like. It looked great even in that rough state, but there were a few issues that the slightly fuzzy picture above doesn't show. First, at the very top of the stone wall are some pieces of fuzzy yellow insulation.

They are there because where the stone stopped at the top of the wall, it revealed about an inch of unfinished lumber with small gap of varying width between it and the plastered ceiling over the upstairs hall. Bat droppings came out of this gap as the plaster came down. So we stuffed in pieces of left over insulation (both to keep the house's heat from escaping into the attic, and to keep the attic's bats from escaping into the house.) That worked until earlier this month, when my uncle went upstairs and found one of our attic friends hanging from a stone near the top of our exposed wall. With that, finishing the stone wall moved up rapidly on our "to-do" list.

We called in our mason who has done such wonderful work on the exterior of the home and springhouse. (Who I realized just last week is "Jason the Mason". At which point my mom interjected to say, "That's probably why he goes by Jay.") But when we asked him if he could finish and point our interior wall, for the first time ever our mason hesitated. Of course he could do it, but he felt the wall was beautiful in its unfinished state and his heart clearly almost broke at the thought of altering it in any way. I could see his point. But I could also see bats squeezing into my house from the attic, and giant spiders making homes out of the many dark cracks and crevices left in the unpointed wall. Thankfully, our mason's enthusiasm rebounded somewhat once he actually began the project. And we are thrilled with the result. Particularly impressive is the work along the edges of the stone wall, where it meets the doors to the north and south bedrooms. When the plaster came down there were gaps between these door frames and the stone wall. These gaps were filled by our mason with small pieces of stone and pointed just like the rest of the exposed wall. You can see the finished result below:

Standing at the bottom of the stairs now is almost surreal. To my right is the new door with transom and sidelights, straight ahead is the living room with windows trimmed out in floor-to-ceiling walnut, and to my left the refinished stairs topped with the exposed stone wall.

There are times when it's hard for me to believe that this is actually my house. : )

Operation SOS - Part 3

In this chapter of "Saving Our Springhouse" our masons move from working with stone to working with wood. In this first picture we see the rebuilt threshold of the springhouse door. The first several floorboards were completely rotted, so the masons replaced them with some salvaged floorboards that my parents had laying around in their barn.

Next up is a picture of the small door in the west side of the building. The two sides of this jamb have been replaced with new pieces of walnut.

The same view, zoomed out a bit:

I believe that this little door was there to allow water to flow under the building. The south side of the springhouse (right side in the picture above) has two wide but short holes in the very bottom of the foundation wall. Dirt from the creek bank has eroded and covered these holes on the outside of the building, but they are still visible on the interior side of the foundation wall. Given the direction the creek flows, I believe when the springhouse was built there would have been a small channel dug directing water from the creek to flow under the building through the holes in the south side of the foundation. The water would then exit the building through the larger door on the west side of the building and be routed back to the creek. It would be interesting to see if we could someday restore the flow of water under the building.

Back up at the top of the creek bank, the front of the building now looks like this:

Quite an improvement over where we started just a few weeks ago:

Coming soon: figuring out how to put a door back on the springhouse.