Boat Stuff

One of the jobs of winterizing our Friendship Sloop involves taking all her stuff out of her, cleaning it, and putting it away for winter. This is important for every boat, but for a wooden boat, it is particularly important to set the boat up properly so that air can circulate, without drying out the hull to the point where you excessive leaking in the spring.
           An aspect of this job that is critical is simply having a place to store everything that would normally be in the boat. This is again, where our boatshed “pays off in spades”.  Standing and running rigging is hung on designated pegs, which not only keeps it all high, dry, and free from winter damage, but also makes it easy in the winter months to check it all over and do any need maintenance before next season. Interior cushions, sails, bedding, and foul weather gear are washed and stowed in the sail-loft, an animal proof, and bug proof loft in the rafters of the boatshed. The animal and bug proofing part of this is critical. The amount of damage that even one rodent can do is amazing, and could be very expensive. Along with the sail-loft, we also have large, sealable, plastic tubs for storing galley items and other interior items that could possibly be damaged if they were left onboard for the winter.

           I should also point out that this part of the winterizing process is not a lot of fun, and for me is the final nail in the coffin for another season. However, I discovered a long time ago that if everything has a place, and those places are easy to get to, clean, and dry, then I will be sure to do all the winter “put-away” and won’t try to skip any part of this very important part of winterizing.

Kitchen Part Two

As you can see from the previous post, this whole project has taken on a life of its own. As of last weekend, I was able to move most, but not all of the appliances back into the kitchen, and had water run to the sink, but had not connected the faucet yet because I needed to make the counter top first. Most of the painting has been done and the floor has been sanded and refinished. The wiring is complete, well, almost complete, we wired up the wrong outlet for the range, so I need to get the electrician back. Otherwise, I am spending lots of late evenings putting back trim, rebuilding the pantry, and am getting ready to make up new cabinets.
               Here we see the kitchen at about day fifteen:

               And day twenty one:

               At least now I have running water.
               One of the more challenging aspects of this project, or of any project that involves a room in your home, is the question of what to do with all the stuff that is normally in that room while you work on it. My solution has to do with the generosity of my neighbors who have a variety of military surplus tents. I borrowed one that was designed to house a hum-vee. I set it up behind my kitchen and moved the contents of the kitchen into it. It has worked really well, although I have to admit, I now appreciate no having to go outdoors to get to the refrigerator.

Kitchen remodel rebuild

For eighteen years, I have been putting off the renovation of the kitchen at the cottage where I live. This year, thanks to a combination of a boom in the rodent population and a spell of wonderfully warm weather, I decided that I could not delay the kitchen project for another year. I have been putting this project off because I knew that it would be fraught with construction dilemmas that are difficult, if not impossible to predict. I was right.
         The problem list that I knew about were a nine-inch sag in the roof, 2×4 walls that were about 20% insulated, 2×4 rafters with no insulation, iron pipes that were rusted and that were causing the shut off valves (where there were any) and the faucet to fail, and the floor needed to be refinished. Easy, right? Well, OK not easy, but manageable, or so I thought. I figured I would strip out the interior, sister-frame the walls and ceiling so I could put in adequate insulation, push the ridge pole back into place with screw jacks, and replace the collar ties, re-plumb and refinish the floor.
         It turned out that those 2×4 walls were actually 2×3 walls and that there was additional iron plumbing left in the walls from previous upgrades, and which all had to be removed, and did I mention that the whole room needed to be rewired? If you add to this classic New England farmhouse framing from the 1920’s (nothing is square or plumb) you can understand why what I thought was a two-week project is fast approaching week four.
         Anyway, I present here the first part of a visual time line on the kitchen:

Day One: the old kitchen

Day four:

Day five: Jacking the ridge pole back up

Day seven: New framing, insulation and rough wiring

Day ten

Stay tuned…

Barn Update

If you read about the barn raising, that I helped with last July, then you might be interested in seeing what the barn looks like now that it is ready for winter.

            While it is not complete, windows and doors nee to be installed, it is closed in for winter, the exterior siding has been sealed against the weather, the steel roofing is on, and is even cut in such a way that the later addition of the cupola will be more easily achieved.
            What a satisfying project, even though my part was mostly just to do with the timber frame itself, I am delighted with how this came out.
            A very different project to the kitchen I have been working on most recently…