Well, now it's a sprint.

Long time, no chat.
Things have changed a bit in the world since the last time I posted.

Early last week, we were made aware that someone on my floor at work had contact with someone who had contact with someone who was at the Biogen Meeting in Boston, now famous for it's  Covid19 load. (That's me being 4x removed, if you follow.) I appreciated the transparency.
Last Thursday (3/12) my employer sent out an email encouraging us to work from home until further notice. My direct boss followed it up telling us that we were more than encouraged; please take home anything we needed in order to do our jobs.
I packed up, hoofed my big monitor out to the car, and after a quick stop at the market, came home.
I have been pretty much home ever since, except for one early morning run to the hardware store, and on a different day, an early morning run to the grocery store. I've been in pretty restricted isolation mode for a week now. (Which, funny, isn't so terribly different than a normal week, except for the working from home part.)
I did go check on my two sets of neighbors who are of a dignified age (from a safe distance) and let them know if they needed anything, just call.

I'm pretty much set - I have enough food for the cat, the fish, the snail and myself for probably about a month, more if I had to. (Heck, I've got enough food for the fish for years, he only eats 3 pellets a day, and shares the pellets with the snail.) I tend to keep a well appointed paper product closet, so that was not a concern.
I started some lettuce and tomato seeds, we'll see where those go. The lettuce seed was store bought, but the tomato seeds were saved from last year. It's kind of an experiment - I fermented one batch of tomato seeds, cleaned and dried them, but the other batch was just cleaned and dried. Science!
I have some Long Island Cheese Pumpkin seeds I saved, and some zuchini I bought that I should start soon. But then I will have to figure out where exactly to plant them.
Anyway.

A tangelo seed I started on a whim from a store bought fruit.
I now have 7 perky little tangelo seedlings.
More science!

Because I was bounced home and have to work here for quite a while now, I've been trying to situate an office of some flavor. I had been plodding through the bedrooms upstairs one at a time, fixing the walls and painting.
Now the room that I currently use on the first floor as a bedroom has to become the office. It's one of the few places with more than one outlet and it's the easiest place to run a hard wire internet connection to that *isn't* my living room.
Working from the couch isn't sustainable - one week was enough.

The run to the hardware store was for paint. I hit the point of the spackle in that back bedroom being good enough for government work, (it is far from perfect, please don't judge me on this room.) I got the same shade of green as I did the other two small rooms, Benjamin Moore's "Silken Pine". I had considered picking out another color, but now being under the gun (and not wanting to linger around the paint swatches everyone else has touched) I got what I know I like, and we'll see how it looks in room #3.
Primed the room, 2 coats of B.M's Muresco ceiling paint, 2 coats of Silken Pine on the walls, and a dollop of High Gloss Super White on the ceiling trim.
Put all the electrical back up and on, and the room, save for dealing with the chimney and the dragging doors, is done.

Before.

Before. The whole room really did deserve to get skim coated.
I got about 70%.

After. That far wall was the one the insulators blew through.

After. The furniture still needs to move around.

Chimney still needs attention.
Considering seeing what the brick work looks like underneith the plaster.
(All I have to do is keep vacuuming it and I'm going to find out!)

The view back out into the hall. The next room on the left is Windy's Room, then the stairs,
and then no-outlets Harry Potter Room at the end (which would be a perfect office except for that no outlets and no wired internet part.)
After the window, the "master" bedroom is on the right.

Once I get the furniture from the soon-to-be-office upstairs, I'm going to do a quick scrape and spackle of that room, slap some paint on it, run the ethernet cable and call it functional.
I'm hopeful Ian can come out this weekend and help me move furniture. I can do most of it except the floppy mattress and the steamer trunk (which might have to stay down here.)


In other news, spring is starting to do it's thing. The lilac buds are getting fat, the forsythia is going to burst any day now. Bulbs that I had peppered around the place are starting to surprise me.

Tiny little dwarf Daffy. I think I got one of those $3 pots at the supermarket and stuck the bulbs in,
not expecting them to come back. Surprise!

The Poppy I moved from the (now gravel) Not-A-Flowerbed in the fall came back!
I had heard they are super fussy, I didn't have much hope.

The cat has been regularly worshiping the stronger rays of sun.
This was a surprisingly candid moment I was able to catch.
Shortly after, she fell off.

I had a bunch of work done in the mudroom. If Ian can, (after wrestling furniture) he's going to come out this weekend and help me drywall it (so I can mud it and paint it and maybe finally get some appliances!)

Be safe, stay healthy, (wash your hands!) and I'll see you all soon.

Plodding along

It's been a while since I posted - I got sick the last week of February, so doing house work was completely out of the question. I've been plugging away at the spackle in the last bedroom since, but that is slow going because of the dry time between coats.
I don't really have any picture of that - beside, all you'd see is the same wall, (but slightly white-r.)

One thing I did get done this past weekend was a trip to a local lighting store. I'm going to rejigger the bathroom a little bit, and it needed a new light. The rooms in the house are so small, and the ceilings sort of low that I need light fixtures that aren't going to overpower the room. So many of them are so big and chunky - that's not going to work for my space. So I wound up with this one - 

I'm not terrifically keen on the clear shades, but I couldn't justify paying 2x the price for something I didn't like as much with white glass shades.
Got the fancy Edison-look LED bulbs to go with it, even.

Earlier in the week I'd had the local Gas Guy come out to quote putting propane in for cooking - It's not so bad, but a lot of work will need to be done to the kitchen first.

Eventually -
New Fridge and stacking washer/dryer in the mudroom.
Blow out the wall between the kitchen and dining room, tile the floor, swing the stove to the wall and put in a new stove with microwave/hood vent.

But tonight - more adventures in spackle.
Someday, I won't have any more walls to spackle.
That will be an exceedingly good day.

Things you find in the walls.

There's no good way to explain how Saturday morning went without pictures.
I'm well into working on the back (and last!) bedroom upstairs. I was confronted with this weird built-in bookshelf/basin? Thing. And I didn't really want it to be there any more. The doorway was narrow, and I felt like it just didn't belong.
On with my trusty dust mask, and ready the tools of demolition!

It's just... not pretty. And full of nooks and crannies if I wanted to repaint it.
What a potential pain in the butt.

See? It jut doesn't look right. All those panels when the rest of the room is dry-walled.

Mystery though - Why does the lid lift off?

Why are there holes? And Slots?

It was put in *over* the door trim, so it must be a later addition.

And the trim has been scabbed in (badly.)

Enough. Time for it to come out.

Removed the scabbed in piece of baseboard trim - what have we here?
More trim disappearing back into the darkness? And more trim after a gap?

What on earth is going on here?

After carefully having removed the shelves, the baseboard trim, one horizontal plank and two vertical plank, I'm getting a better picture... of the chimney.

But let's talk about the metal clad box for a moment!
Ever so carefully nestled in the fake wall.

It's only metal on 3 sides! THe back isn't metal at all!

Also, freestanding on it's jenky little base. The metal box wasn't attached to the base.
And the base wasn't attached to the floor. The only thing holding this all in there was the sheathing.
And a lot of caulk.

Ohh! Holes!
For what, I have no idea.

One of them even lined up with the "drain" hole in the box.

Oh! A secret space behind the chimney!
There were no secret treasures in the space behind the chimney. Not even a news paper.
Just a rusty paper clip.

This... Thing... was put together with a variety of left over materials, in such a way that
I wondered it this was some kid's woodshop project.

Revealed! Look! A Chimney that once was finished!

The only little clue left behind was this tiny scrap of mangled copper that had come to rest in one of the floor holes.

Chimney finish - it had a coat of at least bleu and then light green pain on it before it was boxed in.

This floor probably hadn't seen sunlight in a very, very long time.

Cleaned up holes. Evidence of moisture with the finish shot, and fittings wearing around the edges of the holes.

The bottom of the almost-metal clad box - pencil measurements? Not sure what for.

This was another case of getting kind of excited for treasure and coming up empty. But the room looks more open already. I'm trying to decide what to do with the chimney - take it down, leave it? (Taking it down would be expensive, but give about 4 more square feet to a small room.) If I leave it, do I re-plaster it, or expose the brick?
So many decisions.

While thinking about that, I scrubbed, taped, and started spackling the rest of the room.

The whole room needs to be skimmed. This was just the first pass.

This room is coming along pretty quickly though. I'm getting better at this (or I've given up trying to be a perfectionist about it.) There's a lot of fiberglass tape and there's going to be a ton of drywall compound in this room to fix where the insulation guys blew out some walls. I wandered around with my screwgun and a box of 3" drywall screws and shored up anything that looked saggy.

One other neat detail of this room is that the top moulding where the walls meat the ceiling is picture rail moulding. At some point, someone didn't like the look of it and stuffed the gap full of rope caulk and painted over it. I have been carefully scraping it back out.

Profile of the picture rail moulding.
It's all muddied up here because of the paint, but it's actually quite a graceful moulding.

A rail hook. There's 2 or 3 of them kicking around the house.

The hook would go over the top round bit, and the weight of the picture
pulling down on the hook would keep everything in place.

The little pressed hooks have pretty little details too, under the paint.
It will be nice to get these cleaned up and be able to use them again.

So there you have it. I did some yardwork too - cut down the Rose of Sharon in the front yard and plotted out where I'm going to put the blueberry bushes. Picked up branches and kind of tidied up.
My goal is to get the back bedroom to a place closer to done by the weekend.

Photo dump

Lots of little things going on, and it's easier to explain in pictures.

Got some air grills water-jet cut at the shop I have access to.
Sandblasted them and hit them with a coat of matte black spray paint.
They look great, can't wait to get them on the wall to cover up the hole in the small room at the top of the stairs, affectionately called the "Harry Potter Room".

Sometimes it's the little things.
Looks sharp.

Have a new hive of bees on order, as well as 6 blueberry bushes, 3 cranberry bushes, and a Redbud tree.

The oddity in the back bedroom. Maybe one of you knows what the heck this is.
it's behind the bedroom door.

The top comes off, but you can see where it was nailed shut at one time.

It was installed after the room was finished, because it goes over the trim.

There's pipe holes in the cover of the bottom "shelf" but nothing through the upper shelves.

The is the view into the chamber. One hole in the bottom. Here's one weird cut-out in the back board.
There's an inverted one in the board right above, to the right,
From here we see that the box is actually clad in metal.

The inverted cutout. It's hard to tell, but past that upside-down U is a small space behind the chimney.
The bright white part behind the boards to the left is the chimney.

Here it is from the side. The only part that's clad in metal sheeting is the second big section down.
The top board is wood, then the metal box, then more wood below it.

This was thrown up pretty hastily, with little care about matching trim or anything. The outlet is in wallboard, the rest of the wall to the corner is panel board. Frankly, I'm tempted to tear the whole thing out and expose the chimney - it would let the door swing open wider, and give back a tiny bit of floor space. But I have no idea what's going on behind the paneling. I would have to explore.

Emptied out the back bedroom into the master so I can start working on this room.
The new drywall and spackle lines are from where the insulation guys blew out the wall.
This room is going to take a lot of spackle.

At one point, all of the trim had a slight gap above it so that hooks could be secured over it,
and pictures hung rather than putting nails in the wall.
It was all very civilized. There's still some of the hooks in the house. But someone, at some point, decided they didn't like the look, so they filled in the gap with rope calk and other various caulks, ran some scotch tape over it in some places, and called it good.
Now I'm painstakingly picking back *out* all the caulk (at least just this end of the room.)

So that's my excitement for now. Hopefully this week, we'll see the doors go back on the Master bedroom.