What else have you been up to?

 Oh, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. A whole lot of projects that add up; at least in terms of time. 

One thing I've been meaning to do is get the water runoff from the gutters further away from the house. So one afternoon, I went to Home Depot, got an underground drain pan thingger and some gravel and dug a trench.

Here I was laying out how I thought it should go, but that plan soon changed since having a 90* turn at the top seemed like a bad idea.

I didn't get any good "during" shots, because I was covered in dirt, but here it is after. It lets out at that dark spot in the upper center. I don't think I buried it deep enough. The next one I will set out forward an extra 2". Hard fast rain almost overshoots the catch pan when it's more centered.

A slightly better angle - the outlet is under the rock, but I didn't go deep enough, so the rock is going to have to disappear. Gets the water at least 8' away and down the hill from the house. Now I just need to do the other corner of the front of the house.
(The ruts are from the little excavator they brought in to raise the step. I need to get more dirt to flatten out my yard.)

Naturally the first day it rained I watched it work and took pictures!

I started a commissioned window job, and also started taking a leaded window class at the same time. While some of the class has been a little basic for me, I have learned a lot of tips and tricks.

One tip I learned is that when working out from the center of a half-round, the center is what you would think of as the "top" (not the little center of the "bottom"), so I had to flip it over and modify my work.

Here it's all fitted up and leaded. I soldered it last night, but I need to get it some re-enforcement bars, which I'll pick up at my class this weekend. Those will get soldered on, then it will get cemented, and it'll be done! I can't wait to get it up out of the basement into the sunshine.

I belong to the Society for Creative Anachronism - which is like a social club for history geeks. I donate a custom painted placard to the Royal Travel Auction once or twice a year. I had run out of blanks, so I went to Home Depot, grabbed a 2'x4' piece of 1/4" birch plywood and made a bunch more.

Then I took the last winner's heraldry (registered in the 80's) and started painting it. There's a whole process - priming, gesso-ing, transferring the image from the printout to the board, sketching in the details, and then painting multiple colored layers until finally I hit it with a couple of coats of exterior-grade poly.

At this point, I've only got the base coat of red on. It's coming along.
I want to get this one done before the next one has to get going!

I also have homework for my leaded window class. For project #3, we were given a choice of about 10 different patterns. I chose this one because a lot of the historical reproduction-type windows I'd like to do are very geometrical, so I need that sort of practice.

 

Tonight I'm just going to cook dinner, fold the laundry that has been stacking up on the sofa and is threatening to topple over on the cat, and watch TV, maybe paint a little on that red lion. I'm staying out of the basement, because once I go down there after dinner, I don't come out until well after bedtime. I've been messing up my sleep schedule this week, which is not good. Tomorrow after work, I'll go down and grind the edges of the glass pieces for project #4. This weekend if the weather is ok, after glass class I have to mow the lawn and try to get that other drain in the ground, get the rebar on the blue fan-light window, and if I'm feeling spicy, I might take the living room door outside and strip it.

No news from the wayward bathroom contractor who was supposed to be here today. I'm starting to wonder just how hard replacing windows really is so at least I could get the living room done. I had a couple of contractors out to quote just the windows, and it was almost $8k for 8 windows (and that was the cheap end.) I know that there's more to it that "rip out window, slap in window"- leveling, flashing, insulating, etc,) but yikes. I really wish they had just left the old wooden windows alone. Those I could fix. These vinyls from the 90's are a hot mess.
So, who knows, maybe I'll add window replacement to my bag of tricks.

Panoramic view from the Marshfield seawall. It's massive, and tall. Since I'm down on the south shore for the glass class anyway, (and I never go down there without a good reason,) I took myself on a field trip. It was a beautiful day.

Back to the basement

A while back, I had some extra mortar from when I repointed the chimney. You might recall that I took that mortar and started repointing the east wall of the basement. There had been some loose evidence that it had been mortared in the past, but it had long since disintegrated. I was basically starting from scratch.

Those two bags of fine grade lime mortar went further than I had thought, covering about 40% of the wall. I had an opportunity a number of weeks back to go on a bit of a road trip with my mom to pick of 10 more bags of mortar, only this time it was "course". I didn't have much choice in the matter unless I wanted to drive all the way down to the manufacturer in Pennsylvania. Besides, it's a basement wall, who's going to know the difference?
Well, visually it's different, yes, but working-quality-wise it's also different. Now I'm no mason - I don't even pretend to be one. I'm just a woman, in a respirator, wearing long chemical resistant gloves, smooshing fancy mud on my wall. But I'll tell you - the fine mortar smooshed nicer. It... smoothed? better.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not going to stop with what I've got now. I'm determined to get at least part of the basement off-limits to outside infiltration from rodents. Even if it's just the east and part of the north wall this year. I also plan on painting the whole thing with a layer of lime wash, so that should, (theoretically), even the surface out a little.

Assembling the materials - Vacuum to suck the loose junk out of the joints, a spray bottle of water to moisten everything for better adhesion, the sack of mortar mix, 2 gallons of water, a cup for scooping the mix, gloves, tools for mixing, and yes, a kitty-litter pan for mixing it in.

I wore full sleeves, gloves and a respirator. I don't fool around with this stuff.

Before - this is how far I'd gotten last time. That is an old defunct ground wire from the previous electrical system I can remove, and a water pipe from when the house was tied into a different system. I just haven't gotten the ambition up to get the right blade to cut it off yet.

I was reminded that one part of this process is going out and finding smallish stones to help fill holes so you aren't just piling in mortar.

This is how far I got with two bags - about up to the electrical panel (that vertical 2x4). A third bag got me almost all the way to the corner with the door. The mortar goes on grey, but dries off-white.

I have 7 more bags out at my folk's place that I need to bring back with me this weekend. It take about 1-1.5 hours per bag, but that's because I'm painstakingly hand mixing it about 1/4 bag at a time. I think I'm going to look to speed this up a little by doing 1/2 bag batches in a 5 gallon bucket with a drill/mortar bit. (It would also be easier on my back that way.) If I was doing real-mason repointing work, having it in a bucket would not be practical, but my scoop and smoosh by hand method doesn't care if it's in a bucket or a pan.
It might just be me, but it already feels like there's less air infiltration down there.

***

Another job in the basement is the next window I'm doing:

New window pattern for a paying client.

For this window, I needed a new tool.
Meet my very happy came-bending jig.

It works beautifully - nice smooth arcs.

I have the glass - the clear/seedy glass for where it's white in the pattern, and a mottled light blue for the outer panels. But the glass I got for that center little blue half-round is not playing nice with the light blue. I'm going to have to find something else.
I got in a few books on fanlights in the past couple of weeks - unfortunately, very heavily British-Isles influenced. Fun facts: Fan lights were usually constructed with wooden muntons (not lead caming), and the grand majority of examples I've seen have the arcs pointed in the opposite direction. (So it would look more like flower petals than a spider web.)
One book did have a slim chapter on American examples, and there are two examples of a "spider web" orientation:

Linden Place, The Colt Mansion in Bristol RI, built 1810

(Photo from the Linden Place entry on Wikipedia.)

The Crosby House, in South Brookfield MA, c1795

(Photo via: Historic American Buildings Survey, Arthur C. Haskell, Photographer. 1935. (d) Ext-Detail North Entrance. - Colonel J. Crosby House, Main Street, Brookfield, Worcester County, MA Photos from Survey HABS MA-133. Library of Congress.)

So while my little window doesn't match these beautiful (and still standing!) examples, at least mine does pay them homage. By having these two books, I have access to hundreds of pattern examples now. I'm shooting to have this window wrapped up by mid September.
I just need to find the right dark blue.

***

Summer is thinking about winding down, and the garden, which never really recovered from the intense drought we had around here has pretty much called it quits. I have some potatoes to dig, and a handful off carrots. The tomatoes are still trying to go gangbusters, but with limited light now, I don't know how far they are going to get. This weekend, I go out to the folks to treat the bees for mites, and hope the temperatures don't shoot over 85 for the next 10 days.

The bathroom guy has started to talk about showing up. If you have any spare fingers to cross, I'd appreciate it if you could cross them for me.