What to do with Lathe

(from April 2014)

What do you do with unlimited amounts of lathe? Stack it and store it. People around here seem to love it.

Check out some of the lathe art I've spotted around town:

This beautiful bar was made by the owners of Pip's Donuts. Yummy mini donuts and delicious chai.

This wall was found at a local architectural salvage mall. I want!

Meanwhile, spring is in full bloom, which means miles and miles of blossoming trees!

and bees, hand delivered, courtesy of the farmer:

and children, who like to make me sneeze:

Honey, buy me a cute trailer

So, sometime late spring, I suddenly became obsessed with owning a little vintage trailer. And I decided one day that I was going to drive up to the suburbs of Seattle to buy a certain cute little one that I had seen on Craig's List. A 1963 Shasta Airflyte, nonetheless! It was going to solve all the problems of where we would stay during the renovation, and eventually become a vacation-mobile/kids playhouse/guest cottage.

Let me tell you, getting the opportunity to buy one of these is pretty tough to do. I had been searching with fervor. Every time I'd answer an ad, an ad that just popped up, the seller would announce that someone had already bought it. So I wasn't going to let this one go. This man said I was first in.

So my husband comes home from work on a Friday, and I tell him that on Saturday, we are all going to drive to somewhere outside of Seattle (approximately 3 hours), and haul a trailer home.

You should have seen the look on his face. I might as well have announced that we were going to get full body waxes that weekend. He pouted, he yelled, he stared me down, he gave me dirty looks, and then, he said ok. That is usually the evolution of me getting my way.

It's not like it was just my idea. The kids have been wanting a "house car" for a long time. Because they think it would be neat to do things in a little house that you can drive, like not be late for school or get stuff you might forget. Or have sleepovers with friends. What a great fantasy!

So we decided to make a weekend out of it. Drive up to Seattle, drive over to this random place to get the trailer, head through central washington and down through some college town. It was awesome, and now I have a cute little trailer to call my own. Too bad it's a fixer upper....

Here are some pictures from our adventure!

Farmland...

Wild Mustang Country...

Stonehenge and Sam Hill Memorial...

Hmmm, maybe he is not having a bad time after all? Maybe the wife was right?

and here she is in her new home!

did we camp in it? no, it's gross. and this is why you should be VERY CAREFUL before you buy one of these on ebay. Which we didn't. I saw exactly what I was getting. But if you don't like things like mold or dry rot, maybe vintage isn't the way to go. That's ok. we'll fix it. Eventually.

Demo continues on the second floor

There is a room upstairs that has a gorgeous sunroom, but is awkwardly spaced. We're going to make this into our master suite. 

We are also stealing closet space from the adjoining bedroom and flipping the doors around, as the current closet is not big enough for two.

View from the closet to the sunroom:

Same view with walls removed:

An unexpected surprise: vaulted ceilings in the new master bath?

Bats in the Belfry

I'm not sure why, but for whatever reason I completely ignored the fact that my contractor told me that there were 50 pounds of bat guano in the attic when they demo'd the ceilings. Maybe it was just more than my brain could handle. 

Needless to say, I was disappointed when he told me, because not only did he not call to tell me, but he literally tossed out a very valuable commodity. Yes, bat poo is valuable! But it's gone and there is no use dwelling on that.

Looks like this is where they're coming in...

Months ago, we happened to do a walk through of the house and when we got up to the attic, this is what we found.

Oh boy, should have considered that where there's bat poo, there are bats.

Isn't it cute? A cute little family of baby bats all snuggled in together cute as can be! So we let it be. Because we weren't living in the house. Then I read up on bats, and found that like bees, bats don't just move out. 

So I bought them a little house, and I thought, ok, I will put the house on the side of the house, sprinkle some bat pheromones inside and they'll move right in. 

And then one day, my husband came down from the attic and said, the bats are gone!

So I ran upstairs to see, and indeed they were! And just as I began to turn towards the stairs, what do I see but....

I'm sorry, but a bat hanging upside down like Count Dracula is not anything close to cute. I got the hell out of the attic as fast and as quietly as I possibly could and went straight downstairs to give hub the news.

Then I started calling certified bat experts in the area. Absolutely nobody returned our calls for a week, so we decided that we were going to tackle this problem on our own. In a humane way, of course, as bats are extremely beneficial to the environment and are a perfect compliment to a farm property. We had to do it this weekend, because we were about to have a house full of designers, contractors and subs.

We hatched out a plan: I would scoop up the bat poo if Jesse would risk his life capturing the bat. He would place a box over the bat, wearing thick gloves so as not to possibly catch rabies, and slide a thick sheet of card stock under the box to capture the bat. Then he would drive the bat very far away. While he is driving the bat far away, I would seal all the holes in the attic so the bat would not ever return.

Then a bat guy called me back. He said, "well, i'm not actually a bat guy, but I used to play with them when I was a kid, so I'm not afraid. I'll take him out to where I live and let him out. But you should know that he will probably just fly back to your house." I said, "that's ok, as long as he doesn't come back for a couple of days." Then he said, "you could also just sit outside your house and see where the bat flies out and then patch the holes at that time." But I wasn't planning on being in the house past dusk. We don't have power, and it's a little scary up in that attic.

Then the second bat guy called me back. He said, "sorry I didn't call back but suddenly I'm getting all these calls about bats." That's when I realized that my husband was calling all of the same guys on the department of fish and wildlife website as I was. I admitted to actually calling him several times and then we got down to business. I told him that someone was already coming out and we were covered. He said, "don't believe anything anyone tells you, they're all lying if they say they can take care of your bats. They will always come back and they will come into your attic and if you plug up the holes, they will die in there and stink up your whole house. And if they don't die, they will fly throughout your house, terrorizing everyone inside until they find their way out."

Wow, that was kind of stressful.

So we called the first guy back and he came right on over, walked up to the attic and plucked it right off the wall.

Yep it was dead. Not only that, but it was a dead baby bat. he said that sometimes they just don't make it. So the family must have flown off without him. He was a super nice guy! And you can see he's having a good chuckle over the whole thing (silly city folks)!

We took it as an opportunity to educate the kids.

Bugging OUT

Apologies in advance - this is a gross post. But the reality of farm living is the critters that come with it. Surprisingly, we haven't really found any mice in the house, though there is evidence they have been here in the past. And we find evidence of them in the outbuildings. 

We did find a dead ground squirrel rotting on the basement steps,

A family of bats living in the attic,

A beehive in the other attic room,

Dozens of wasp nests,

And now the flies come. It's truly disgusting, and difficult for me to go up there. They're attracted to the scent of honey and it's difficult to neutralize.

My attempt at scrubbing the honey with soap and water.

Demo - we don't know when to say when

Feb, 2014

So I should probably start off by apologizing for taking such a long break. There has been quite a bit going on and that's kind of caused this little diary to take a back burner to everything. So I'm going to pretend that I haven't stopped writing for 6 months and continue on. It's just easier that way. Just for my own sense of when things actually occurred, I might put a little time stamp somewhere, if that's ok! 



I have a thing about plaster. I really really love it, and embrace the cracks as character. I understand the craftsmanship that went into it. I understand the benefits of soundproofing and the acoustical qualities. But, I have a big issue when it comes to plaster ceilings. I just don't like all of that weight above my head. I worry about the potential for it to fall on my head as I lay sleeping in the middle of the night.

Because we needed to update the electrical, and because the ceilings were in such bad shape, after testing for asbestos, we went into demo mode once again.

First we needed to demo some plaster too far gone in the basement stair area, to allow for plumbing and electrical chases.

Why I thought wearing my favorite scarf and coat is beyond me, but luckily everything comes out in the wash!

Then we headed upstairs to tackle the ceilings. Most of the walls will be left intact and patched and repaired. I have to say that tearing out plaster is a seriously intense, backbreaking job. Wow!

We worked well into the night, comforted that our children were safely at a friend's house, and stopped only to admire the gorgeous sunset over the valley.

Demo part 2

At about the same time we opened up the living room entry, we felt like it would only be proper that the opening to the kitchen and dining room match.

To get into the kitchen was a little bit of a shimmy through multiple doors. The doors were narrow and the traffic flow poor. Once again, these entry ways were added later since the house was built.

We also decided to open up the space between the kitchen and dining room because the kitchen was tiny, the dinette well used and the dining room rarely used. We wanted to make that space a part of the kitchen and use every bit of the main spaces on a daily basis.

The arch is a later addition, as were the built in pantries.

After: this is where the music kind of screeches to a halt. The before pictures DO look nice, but it was very dated, and we were faced with many holes from the duct removal. It's always darkest before the dawn, right? Here we go:

Taking out the pantries revealed the "servants" stairs. We'd like to preserve that bit of history, but the jury is still out on how that will happen.

The blurry Iphone picture makes me the happiest!

One could argue that taking out some of these doors and pantries takes away from the coziness of the rooms in the farmhouse. And sometimes I walk through the house and wonder if this was the right call. But ultimately, gaining the dining space and widening the kitchen for times when we want to gather with friends and NOT be cramped and away from the fun solidifies that decision. As for the wide openings between the eating and living spaces, there is the main entrance separating the two areas. Should the large openings begin to cause a problem, we'll look into large sliding doors or heavy drapery as a solution. Either would be typical for that era.

Bathroom Inspiration

I happened down Division Street in Portland recently, and wandered into Roman Candle - yet another Stumptown guy creation. I've driven by it in the past, but didn't think much about going in at the time, because I thought it was just a bakery. I'm trying to avoid baked goods, so it's usually a no-go.

Boy was I wrong! Not only do they have insanely good salads, and other choices outside of baked goods, like pizza that you cut with super cool old fashioned scissors, the restaurant is absolutely stunning!

http://romancandlebaking.com/

The bathroom:

WHERE do I get a soap dispenser like this?

talk about insane craftsmanship!