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Introduction
November 24, 2004
November 30, 2004
December 5, 2004
December 17, 2004
January 11, 2005
February 7, 2005
February 27, 2005
March 7, 2005
March 30, 2005
April 8, 2005
April 11, 2005
April 18, 2005
May 2, 2005
June 12, 2005
July 15, 2005
Summer '05
October '05
Winter '05
Spring '06
blue-bottle home
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Handyman Special
Renovating that old house on Market Street
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Summer '05
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A lot
of work in the yard took place over the summer. The grounds at
Chez Melendy had been let go for quite some time so invasive weeds,
sumac, and box elder trees prevailed.
When I wasn't busy keeping up with mowing the lawn,
I was hacking away at the overgrowth, trying to give the yard some shape.
No real horticultural improvements will take place
until next year when more of the house will be finished. |
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Summer
wasn't all work, however.
Ramon likes Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Neil Young,
and Woody Guthrie. (Coincidence?) He's not a big fan of Monk and Coltrane
yet, but that's not porch sittin' music anyway. |
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Even in summer though,
we've got winter on our minds up heah in the
nawth.
In September, I got to work on the hearth for the
woodstove. The space requires a small stove so I wanted to put it on
a raised hearth for both aesthetic and practical reasons. It's both
easier to see the fire and load the stove when it's raised up some. |
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I felt a
little sad cutting away some of our new floor. Had I been sure of our
plan to get a stove earlier on I would have left this space unfinished
like the entryway you see in the background.
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The completed hearth
has bricks from the old chimney that was in the original kitchen. They're
framed by hemlock beams that were the original kitchen floor joists.
The stove requires that a non-cumbustible surface extends
18" beyond the front, thus the slate tiles and the copper flashing
wrapped around the beam. This design saved us from having the raised
hearth extend further into the room. (The copper flashing's a little
on the flashy side, but we're getting used to it. A little patina might
be nice.)
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The slate
for the entryway (and in front of the hearth) was installed by Bill,
a professional. He worked hard to get the symmetry of the layout right
as the measure of the floor cutout didn't match the tile sizes exactly.
The picture doesn't do justice to the beautiful purple coloring of this
stone. |
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