Week of November 16

I’ve been in workaholic non-stop mode for a few weeks now. The excuse for this is that we have 6 full size garbage barrels of lime plaster sitting outside the house and if they freeze they are ruined. The prospect of hauling them inside is onerous. They are extremely heavy. They can only be moved by scooping out a bucketful at a time, back and forth.   So, I am trying to beat the freeze ( you never know when we might have one here) and get as much of it as we can onto the walls. As I’ve reported before, Sebastian can only plaster the walls where I’ve completed the window trim, so that’s what I’m working long hours on, with the usual distractions added in. 

For example, this Saturday we had a nice and dry day, despite what was predicted. So Jennifer and I decided to tackle completing the chimney, so that we can begin to fire our now complete Tulikivi masonry heater. That job went fairly well. We had to add a few lengths of pipe to what was there coming through the roof 

and put on a support bracket with legs that support the top of the chimney in case of high wind.  It’s always quite stressful to be up on the slippery roof. I think, unless there’s some problem with something, I’m done going up there, and we actually removed the ladders and platforms and rope. So at the end of this post you’ll see a picture of the house without those things for the first time in a long long time.

Also this past week I had Sebastian lay the tiles for the downstairs bathroom. The tiles we have chosen need to be planned a bit  – they don’t look so good just laid down randomly. So after having done such a nice job on the bathroom tile layout, this weekend Jennifer worked on the design for the mudroom floor so we can put those down this week.  

And yes, earlier in the week Uwe completed the Tulikivi. Here’s what it looks like from the living room side.  And here is the dining room side, with warming oven. I think we’re going to make a lot of use of this.  The first few fires are to break in to heater – to allow the moisture from the mortaring to escape and to let the pieces adjust to high heat firing. So this weekend we did the first of those fires:

There isn’t enough of the cherry that I mentioned last week to do the trim whole house. By the way, here’s a little detail picture of that trim:  So based on a sample window I did in the upstairs closet 

we have decided to use the wood from one of the fallen down trees that we had milled last fall.  

Remember back in September '08 I reported on Clifford who brought his portable sawmill and milled (among other trees) a blown down Chincopin?  Back then he left me with these piles,and I had a heck of a day bringing them into the basement a few weeks ago when the rains returned. In any case, we have decided to use the chincopin for the upstairs trim: So this weekend I started milling wood for that.  I'm not quite done on the first floor,  but the bulk of the plaster is up,  and it really is changing the feel of it all.   The living room is now completely doneand we ended the week with the window seat wall in the dining room,  which is a favorite of mine:  

So,  that's it for now from your tired and creaky homemaker!