Weekend Re-cap

Towards the end of last week we FINALLY decided on the loft railing design so this weekend our goals were simple, put some finishing touches on the screen porch (springs for the screen doors, put the knob on, put up my new solar christmas lights, find a LOCAL lumber yard to order the wood for the railing, and complete the screen that would be on hinges.) Dave and I are both avid target shooters and one of our first projects after purchasing what would someday become S-wood, was create a shooting lane. We wanted to be able to open a screen and shoot. I am happy to say we accomplished all of our missions AND had some time to hang out with our dogs - side note - thoroughly enjoyed watching me try to get a picture of the attack hummingbird which i failed miserably at.

What you are looking at on the left here is Dave's version of the best place on earth. A local lumber yard. Yes folks not only were the prices reasonable and the staff accommodating, but the words "beautiful" must have come out of Dave's mouth at least 15times. Now before you say HEY WAIT! Thats not recycled. Part of our "green" outlook is yes, using recycled materials but our other hopes is when we have to purchase wood, or materials, we stay local. This is 8 miles from our door!






This is just probably something only I will enjoy, but to me, this is the epitome of "kid in a candy store". We got our wood ordered for our railing and we hope to start building it next weekend. Not only is it one of the things that we just need to do (aside from walls) but it will give us piece of mind. With the dogs at night wanting to be near us, and us being on the second floor, there have been several sleepless nights.

















Please ignore the great dane, he was not cooperating, focus instead on the hinged screen window above the dog :)






I am sure dave will update in a later post but one of our coolest accomplishments besides all of the above, was we hooked up 2 small Solar Panels to charge our deep-cycle batteries that we run our lamps off of. I have some pictures too.

We did have one not-so-pleasant experience which I am surprised we have not encountered before. Now that the porch is done, we are happy to be able to extend the living area in this hot weather. We are in the middle of nowhere, no electricity so no outdoor lights. Our dog Frankenstein alerted to something outside. Normally this could mean anything from a neighbor stopping by to him thinking a neighbor stopped by so we removed him from the situation and I went to the front to see if there was anyone in the drive, there wasn't. I went to the back to see if there was a deer or something in the rear. When I stepped out onto the porch, I could clearly hear what sounded like a small dog barking about 150 feet from the back door. We could hear it but not see it. I asked Dave what it was (only there may have been some colorful wording in there) and he said Coyote. JUST as he said it, more "barking" and suddenly howling as well. We figure there were about 6 or 7 of them. What was scary about it was that our dogs were going nuts, i mean with all that howling, our dogs were making alot of noise.Our dogs are big, about 350 pounds together, yet the coyote started to advance TOWARDS us and our house. We are staring towards blackness and listening to the howling and yapping of many coyote. The hair was raised on my neck. It sure was scary that they were NOT afraid of us, or our dogs.

So thats my "critter encounter" story for the weekend, not one that I want to experience again. I like the woodchucks, turkey and moose stories WAY better.

my first construction project

We are back! So many pictures, so little time :)
We worked our butts off yesterday trying to get the screened porch finished so that I could stop being attacked by the nasties up there ;) and We accomplished our goal! Dave spent alot of time with chisels and other instruments, notching the beams for the back door (the dog pen door) that we got from Craigslist last week. The door is at least 50 years old and makes that neat SLAM noise when you let it go! LOVE that. I have so many pictures of the weekend and so many topics to discuss and update on so I will do it one day at a time because we are unable to go back up there until after the 4th of july :( because Dave is on call for work.
Ok, so in this picture is the frame and I had just finished stretching screen over it. The wood is actually left over from building the house, and the screen is just something we happened to have laying around the house!

Here Dave is, notching one of the beams to fit the door. It came out awesome! He put alot of time into it and the workmanship really shows!





























This picture you can see a bit closer how snug the beams are.














Here is a picture of the really cool $15 door from craigslist. It needs a coat of paint and it needs to air out a bit too ;) it smells musty.





























Here is the finished product from the inside!















And here it is at night, we thought it would look cool and it did!
Well all in all, it was about 2 days work but really well worth it as we sat in there and got no buggy bites!

Screened Porch

We are back from our wonderful extended stay at shmoopywood. As you know, we intended on getting some of the porch framed and hoped to move the eventual process of screening in this porch up on our list of things to complete this summer. We have very limited time up there so alot of the work was completed last week. We basically designed the porch around this very cool door that we had found at the dump... yup thats right... the dump!
SO here is the "before" picture taken only mere moments before we began swinging our hammers.
(keep in mind, I never have built ANYTHING before hehe)

As you can see the door is already framed with some 2 x 4's. AFter this shot was taken, I was given the job of removing the nails from the newly removed 2 x 4's because it was framed in the wrong spot ;)






Proof that I actually built the railings!


I had forgotten to take the telephoto lens off the camera so in order to get this shot, I had to climb up the incline so my apologies if it is not the best. The perplexed look on Dave's face is a direct result of my meandering up the side of the mountain so I could get the whole porch in the shot instead of changing lenses. ;)








Dave then spent some time notching some beams in order to fit in for the new door jamb, You can see the notch in the top of the new beam in the above picture.
And a closer look.
I really think these extra touches are making a big difference in the quality of the job done. It may have taken us all day to complete but we really enjoy putting the extra effort into the work we do plus recycling building materials as much as possible.





















The challenge will be when we build the frames for the screen. The purpose behind making the porch this way was because it will be easier for us to replace WHEN the great danes wreck the screen. (notice the WHEN).








And our final picture for the progress on the porch demonstrates that even the most well thought out plan can go awry. We decided (at the last minute really) that we were going to build a fence off a portion of the porch so that we could have a safe place for our dogs as well as a visitors dogs. Not every dog can be as well behaved off lead as Django, and we wanted to be prepared for any guests that may want to get away from it all by coming out to our almost solar powered haven. So the big gap on the right side is left to fit the next salvaged door we locate hopefully this week.
In a later post, Iw ill show you what we do for "utilities" at this time and be more specific.

Another small project that I worked on a bit was removing the old fixtures (oh and sent them to the salvage yard to be recycled to someone else who may want to save them from a landfill)
The new fixtures were located on ebay. The tub was salvaged as well.

Our Plans - this helps us carry them out!

Dave took the day off to bring supplies up to the cabin today and measure for the screened porch inserts. I think it just might be a ploy to spend the day in the beautiful sunshine!

Anyway, he will be bringing up some of the crap we have collected over the winter to live in the cabin as well as bring up the water tank we purchased (with water) and some wood. He will also be bringing back the supplies we got for the screened in porch and hopefully he will be building the porch here at home. He will be building it at home, in parts, and then we can install it up at the cabin. It has turned into a necessity due to the deranged black flies and monster sized mosquitoes that live in that area. It would be awesome and it is our plan, to leave the back French doors open at night in the summer to facilitate some AIR in the house as well as let Django sleep cooler. There will be a door (that we can latch so nobody can get out) and there will be “dog safe” screen. This just means that we need to create something that will keep the dogs from running THROUGH the screens if a critter meanders by. This is a likely scenario. Although I trust Django to stay put, Frank is a loose cannon and can (and has) run through a screen without even realizing there was anything there!

You can see above in the pictures, the full back of the house (picture was taken in april when there was still snow) and a closer shot of the porch from yesterday. I will try and get some pictures of Dave building the porch inserts (porch is not even framed – hard to see in the picture) and then post pictures of the progress next weekend at the cabin. I do believe that we will be spending 2 weekends in a row up there and hope to accomplish quite a bit. Riveting isn’t it?

I know its alot of work, but we are also very able to enjoy this work and spend the time there. We allow for some play and some work, although the work is hard, its FUN! ;)
Here is some comic relief:
Over the winter, NH had more snow than we have in 100 years or some such crazy shit, so D and I drove up to the cabin just to make sure it was okay. We have a HUGE driveway and it is very steep, which makes it impossible to climb in a car when there is snow on the ground. We had to park, and walk up. We also have a metal roof, and had not considered the amount of snow that came flying off of it! THere were snow banks until MAY! Here is a picture of me trying to navigate the snow banks and one of me deciding the easiest way down that driveway was on a cardboard box!
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