Updates

Good News

Celia with one of the twin tiger kittens

We have kittens at the EH!!!  Maude's taking good care of her three little ones who are now ten days old.  Ethel's litter was born yesterday - there appear to be 6, possibly 7 (including at least one calico!).  And because my husband we are softies, we've also adopted twin tiger striped brothers that were dumped in a ditch.  Anybody need a good kitty or 4?

Not So Good News
Preservation Ohio recently announced their list of 2011 Ohio's Most Endangered Historic Sites and the Seneca County Courthouse and Seneca County Museum both made the list.  (The courthouse for the fourth time.)  At a recent meeting of the Seneca County Commissioners, Commissioner Jeff Wagner "made a motion to seek bids for courthouse demolition, but there was not a second. [Wagner] said he would have been remiss had he not made the motion."


Related and Better News
Following up on my earlier post, today's local newspaper reports that at their most recent meeting, the county commissioners "voted 2-to-1 to not sell the museum or any contents, including three paintings possibly created by the Hudson River School art movement."  As for Mr. Wagner, the most civil thing I can write here is to quote a Facebook user who said, "there is a certain political movement that wants to bulldoze the past; at the same time they claim to revere the past."

Not So Good News
It poured rain here again last weekend.  Somewhere around 4 1/2 inches overnight Friday into Saturday.  Although there's a footer tile around the house for the gutters to drain into, it is obviously not large enough to handle the volume of water these summer storms pour into it.  We're slowly accepting that we're going to need to dig it up and replace it with a larger tile.  We also have a new 6 inch deep gulley at the end of our driveway.  It's obvious that a permanent solution to this problem is going to involve more tile.

Since some might be wondering - The basement had water coming through the walls, but with the bypassed tile still in place the sump pump was able to keep up for the most part.  I've not ventured down to check the stone bridge, and I'm not planning to either.  There's nothing we can do for now so I'm trying to just not think about it.

Bragging News
Cecilia was completely thrilled with the cake I made for her 6th birthday.

(Charles thinks I'll have a hard time topping this next year.  I suspect he's right.)

Bat News
This year's crop of baby bats took wing earlier this month. I spent a couple of nights watching them fly out of the bat houses.  The babies are easy to identify, not only because they are smaller, but also because they flap their little wings so much more quickly than the full grown bats.  They're really rather cute.


In other bat news we have bats back in our attic.  Although the majority remain in the bat boxes, a fair number have noticed a small gap in the very corner of the eaves.  We had a local tree-trimming company lined up to come out with a bucket truck to install another one-way bat door, but they had to cancel because the truck was needed to clean up storm damage (see a few items above).  I still need to call and reschedule this.

Bad News
When we contacted the neighbor who told us last February that we could take siding from a barn on his property to let him know we were about ready to use the salvaged siding he apologetically told us he has sold his farm (and aforesaid barn).  This will obviously delay work on our shed.

More Not So Good News
Taking a good friend up on her offer (see the comments to this post) I went to Lowe's prepared to order roofing for the shed.  Only to find out that they can not match the 24" seams on the current shed (16" is the widest available). 

This next bit is a little difficult to explain.  There is a 14" strip on the original shed, immediately above where the new awning joins the old roof, where a previous owner removed the old standing seam roof.  Because I rebuilt the new awning using the old one as a pattern, this 14" strip still remains.  The transition strip available to change from 24" seams to 16" seams and to make the change in pitch only covers 7".  After considerable discussion with the salesman we had four options:

1 - partially dismantle the awning I just built, extending the joists and increasing the pitch so that the new joists would join the original roof at the top of the fourteen inches instead of the bottom;
2 - remove the rest of the standing seam from that side of the building and replace all of it with new 16" standing seam;
3 - use flashing to cover the remaining 7" so the resulting roof would have 24" seams on the top, 16" seams on the bottom, and a seven inch strip in the middle with no seams;or
4 - leave the remaining standing seam and shingle the new roof and the 14" strip above it.

I've tried to talk myself into #1 but I just can't.  #2 would double the cost and labor required for the job and that's something that we're not comfortable doing at this time.  If we went with #3 that flat seven inch section in the middle of the roof would drive me absolutely crazy.  So shingles it will be.



Expect it to be a couple weeks though before I resume work on this project.  As this post shows, I've got a few other issues demanding my attention at the moment.  And I've got kittens to spend time playing with and cuddling as well.  : )

Enough Already

This is still at least two feet lower than the water was the night of February 28th, but the creek is obviously still rising tonight.

And it's not going down anytime soon.



More Bridge Pictures

It's finally dried out enough that I was able to get down along the creek to get some pictures better documenting the current condition of our stone bridge.  I'll mostly let the pictures speak for themselves here.

The east side first:

And the west side:

I also snapped a few pictures of the creek itself, including the one below:

I didn't notice it when I took the picture, but the above photo clearly shows the high water mark from the flooding that damaged the bridge.  Note the debris hanging in the tree branches:

It will be a few months yet before it's dry enough to start any work on the bridge.  Although I hope there is not too much additional deterioration through the spring, in one sense the delay is welcome.  I've realized that (for me at least) 70% of any project around here is mental.  If I jump into a job too soon I'm a nervous mess, doubting myself and feeling incompetent the whole time.  Even if I successfully complete the job at hand, I'm not going to enjoy myself while doing it.  But if I have time to think the work through, to 'wrap my brain around the job' first, I'm much more confident when it's time actually dig into the physical work.  At first the damage to the bridge was overwhelming to me.  But one month out from the flooding, I'm feeling mentally ready for this challenge. 

(With no ill will meant to our local farmers)

 Here's wishing for a dry summer!

Bridge Over Troubled Water

Technically that's not quite right.  Troubled Bridge Over Water would be more accurate.  Or Water Under Troubled Bridge. 

Eh, I think you get the point.  Let's just cut to the pictures.

I'll start with a before.  The picture below was taken in September, 2009 just before we closed on the property.  It shows some settling, but the stone walls were intact.

And what we've got now.  First up the east side.  There's actually more stone hanging on here than I expected, but it's precarious at best.

Notice the collection of debris on the top of bridge near the upper right corner of the picture.  That debris shows the high water mark which was reached sometime around dawn last Monday.  Below is the same picture with some (ahem) high quality computer work to show the high water mark.

I was honestly surprised when the water dropped to see that some stones on the east side of the bridge do still remain.  The left side has collapsed and the right side is bulging severely, but it's better than I expected.

The west side though is much worse:



I did not take any pictures Monday morning, but the one below will give some idea of what the bridge went through last week.

That photo of the bridge was taken after a storm in the 1990s.  In it you can see that the water is nearly level with the top of the box culvert (the smoother water at the center of the picture).  Last Monday the water was about two feet higher.  It completely covered the culvert and when it came under the bridge it was under enough pressure that it shot out of the culvert about a foot above the level of the rest of the water.

Even before this flooding we knew the bridge needed attention.  The original plan was to rebuild the bridge in its original state and splitting the project into four summers - west wall first two summers and east wall the following two summers.  But after last week it's obviously time to 'make a new plan, Stan'.  (Sorry, couldn't resist another Paul Simon lyric.)  Various family members have been sharing ideas and no final decisions have been made, but the general consensus is that we need to start by removing what remains of the current stone walls.  All of the stones from the collapsed walls will need to be carried to the creek bank and stacked to be reused later.  Hopefully we can dismantle what remains of the east side of the bridge before it collapses, causing the remaining large stones to break.

After that there are two possibilities.  Assuming it's not completely out of our budget, we could remove the current bridge entirely and replace it with a precast box culvert that is larger than the current culvert.  We could then have new sidewalls built using poured concrete reinforced with rebar.  If a new culvert is as expensive as I expect it to be we could keep the current culvert (assuming it survives this spring) and simply have new side walls of poured concrete with rebar.  Either way we would then use the salvaged stone from the original bridge to rebuild stone walls in front of (and hiding) the new concrete side walls.

It dosn't take long to type that out, but the reality of the job feels much more daunting.  For now I'm limited to the mental gymnastics involved - it's still much too wet to do any work along the creek.

Good Riddance

At work today I was strongly tempted to spit on the calendar page that said February before turning it to March. 

Illness and revolving snow storms had already placed this February among the most overall craptastic months I can remember.  But last night managed to top it all.  In the course of 72 hours we went from blizzard to tornado warning and flood.

This is what our creek looked like at dawn this morning:

And this is what our basement looked like at dawn this morning:

I've been up right now since 2am.  I caught the basement early in the flooding, but Charles and I couldn't do a darn thing to stop it.  It was too dark at 2am to see it, but the creek had risen so high that the tile the sump pump drains into was itself underwater.  Because of this, no matter how long the sump pump ran it was unable to push any water out.  The water in the basement just kept rising.  God bless the crew from the local heating and plumbing company (same ones who installed our furnace & heat pump) who came out at 4am.  By 6am they had figured out the problem and had rigged a temporary tile that is by-passing the buried tile.  It is still pouring water about ten feet away from the house along the hill down to the creek. 

At its peak the water was somewhere around 10-12 inches deep throughout the entire basement.  Once the by-passed drain tile was in place the sump pump ran non-stop somewhere between 5 and 6 hours to empty the basement. 

It's going to take a lot longer than that to clean up the mess though.  The back room of our basement had a dirt floor.  It now has a mud floor.

The picture below (which is of the bin that collects dirty clothes under our laundry shoot) shows how high the water reached:

When the by-passed drain went into action the water was less than an inch from reaching our furnace, heat pump, hot water heater, washer and dryer.  As it is, the only valuables we may have lost are our shop vac and cordless drill.  We were lucky we didn't lose more down there.  But our greatest possible loss is outside the house.

I don't have any pictures of the stone bridge to post here.  Most of it is still under water anyway.  Most of what is left of it anyway.  Back in my 'plans for 2011' post I said we planned to make rebuilding the bridge a four year project, but after last night our timeline has been cut drastically.  Right now the middle of the bridge is still standing, but it appears the entire east side has mostly collapsed (and the west side was already collapsed before last night's storm).  One more backhanded slap from Mother Nature and I fear we won't have a stone bridge at all.  Our basement is one heck of a mess, but it's the bridge that has me fighting back tears. 

 So if you're reading this and have a few prayers to spare for north-central Ohio they would be much appreciated.  At least one neighboring county has been declared a "state of emergency" and based on phone calls and the internet I know that many, many of our family and friends are dealing with their own flooded homes right now.  I'd especially appreciate prayers for my parents.  In the morrow they face the not unexpected but still very painful loss of a much loved family pet.  In the morrow they will also face the continued job of salvaging what they can after pumping eight inches of water out of their own (partially-finished) basement.

So good riddance February.

(...and God-speed Redigen...)

"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!