"I Think I Can Handle It!"

Let me set this up for you.

We drove up in torrential downpours on friday evening so that we could make sure the cabin is okay. This part of new hampshire is under flood warnings and flash floods and despite the rain, we headed up to make sure everyone and everything was ok.
Saturday morning we woke up early so we could get started on the railing. I was going to be putting in the "spindly things" all by myself. After proving my worth on the screen, Dave felt almost confident that I could do it but he wanted to set it up to be fool proof. THe man made me a jig, so that i would be putting the screws in the back of the railing at the same level and they would be even. WHen we finish, we are going to plug them and stain it, but we are going to plug it with a different wood so the plugs will show. Now remember, Dave has been hand notching the beams and has put hours of work into them so really, neither of us wanted me to screw (PUN) it up. So he created this jig for the screws and a guide for the spacing. The only problem is, the jig he created had a third hole.




"Do you want me to put tape over the third hole?"
"I think I can handle it Dave"
*insert eye roll here*



I mean I am a grown up right? I know which holes to put the drill in for goodness sakes. I raised 2 kids as a single parent on limited funds. I got 37 years under my belt, how hard could drilling 2 holes, countersinking them, and then screwing in a screw be?








Ummmmmmmmmmmmmmm



Well Okay. Folks, I did the walk of shame down the the basement. I asked him if he had tape. He laughed thankfully and said it was easy to fix.... He did this graciously but I still felt very very small.

I did tape up the hole and our marriage was not destroyed. I also admitted my smugness was unfounded being an amateur and all. All was not lost and we continued the weekend.

Imagine that, he still worked with me after all that!

We still have to put the "top" on to the railing but we are probably going to put it on hold for a while. We have a 4 day weekend up there over the twenty something and would like to start plumbing. Plumbing alone isnt enough, we also need walls lol...

The real McCoy

" border="0" alt="" />

I was a bad blogger but now I intend on making it up to you with the REAL update post.
I dont even know where to start. Many hours were spent, not by me, but by Dave who painstakingly notched every beam that you can see. The notcher can even be seen carrying a large board out to the front porch in this picture. It will soon be time to put the spindly things (still have not a word to really call them) in place and make this very strong, over engineered masterpiece transform from bessie's gate, to a real live loft railing. I am pleased to say however that through all this hard work, Dave has found some peace and much enjoyment (or so he says) in the very zen-like job of notching these large pieces of Hemlock. In fact, I dare say that I have not seen him quite so at peace in a while. Oh and there is also the added joy to purchasing hand tools to add to his already astronomical collection of things I have no idea what they are really for. I leave you tonight with this, my view of Dave working on our railing. I must admit though, being the phenomenal photographer that I am, I spied this vision from the window and as I ran to the kitchen to fetch my camera and came back he had moved.... so in the interest of candid photography I forced him back into the original pose. *laugh*
Well at least I was honest about it. Photography is fun for me, but even more fun is making fun of myself for not being that great at it.
More to come :)

Update fun fun fun

It gets harder and harder to come back to work on Monday after I have spent all that time being happy and free... but alas, here I am updating you on how things went!

We got up to Shmoopywood on Friday evening and really when you get to camp on Friday's, the only thing there is to do is unpack and have yourself a Coors light (or 5). That is precisely what we did. The sky was completely LIT UP with stars Friday evening and we spent a great deal of time gazing at shooting stars and watching satellites go by. We are only about 80 miles from our other house and the difference in the sky is amazing, without light pollution you can even see the milky way. We had great weather all weekend with only one thunderstorm on Saturday late night so we had plenty of time to get stuff done.

Dave spent most of Saturday notching beams for the railing and carrying them up and down stairs to make sure the fit was right. This is a picture of the morning on on Saturday. By the end of the day, we were able to set the 10 foot beam at the top of the stairs. Side note: carrying a 16 foot beam up the side of the mountain is not easy but its much easier than carrying a cast iron bathtub.




We ended Saturday much in the same way we ended Friday, with some beers only not without the star gazing due to lack of sky ;0)

This is the way it looked by the end of day on Sunday. You can see the 10 foot beam kind of hides underneath that plywood we have resting against it. I should be a better photographer and move stuff but it was hot and I was tired ;). The handrails are fitted nicely into the notches that Dave worked so hard at. The bottom beam is still not cut but you can imagine what that will look like with a foot lobbed off the top.

Here is a picture of one of the corners where the handrail's are snugly fitted into the notches that Dave created, the second rail isn't in this picture but you can clearly see the notch that it is intended to fit into

We spend alot of time working when we are up there but we have also started to know people in our community. It has been an amazing experience but I will reserve the details for another post ;)

Weekend Update

We are back after a very rainy weekend. We weren't able to get up there on Friday because Tarynn and I had a concert to go to on Friday night but we were up bright and early Saturday and on our way!
Exciting news, well for me anyway, we finally began the railing project. It is not in any way shape or form done, but having what we have thus far has taken some of the stress off of me. You see, we just were not getting any sleep because Django wanders around at night. Neither dave nor I could keep him downstairs. We would build these barricades to keep him from attempting the dangerous ascent to the loft but somehow every night, about 3am-4am he still managed to get around them, push them out of the way or leap over them and come on up. Its about 10 feet or so up off the ground with NO RAILINGS and no barriers to tell big gangly great danes "hey you are too close to the edge dumbass" so we basically have been sleeping with one eye open on the weekends that the kids are not with us.

Great pains (not great danes) have gone into the actual design of the style of the railing. You see, at first, we wanted to build a rustic cabin. We wanted it to be alot like the Little House on the Prairie houses we all loved so much as kids but since the actual plans for the house quadrupled in size and took shape into a fairly large CAPE, It just didn't fit. Then we started to acquire many furnishings from our D-store and Craig's list, so it morphed more into an early 1900's style. With the addition of the brown couch (that nobody will ever see because its covered with sheets to keep down the Drool from Monsters - shown on the left) it kind of just morphed back into eclectic styling. Finally one day, I just surfed the net and pulled out a bunch of pictures of different style railings ranging from stick rustic to regular bannister type that you see in every house and by golly, we found something that was rustic but sturdy. Dave has set off to building it.

We are aware that at this time it looks a bit like a corral fence to keep in cattle (isn't that what it basically is?) but its not close to being done at this point. Once we do the finish work - little spindly posty things between the beams - and stain it, it will be far more elegant than Bessie's gate... Ok maybe not FAR more elegant but we really like it and 200 pounds of dog can bump and lean on it and they will remain on the second floor and that really is priceless.


Here we see the right side railing.














And here is the left side. You might be asking why it doesnt go to the wall, I have an answer for that (some may argue I have an answer for everything)










The answer is: Knee wall ;)













I needed to add in this picture because it really shows the very fine, tight fit of the beams that Dave painstakingly chiseled out by hand. The beams are rough saw Hemlock to match the beams that we installed under the loft which are shown in the next shot.













































There were some modifications done to the tiny little solar set up too, but once again, I will let Dave post about that because I do not posses the knowledge to post about it in any way. ;) I am really happy with the progress this summer and I think Dave is too. We have the top 4 items on the list and still have a good 3 months to complete them. 1. Porch 2. railing 3. dog fence 4. Indoor plumbing. We realize we need walls and the solar stuff as well but we actually work full time and had to prioritize the big things and work on the other things in the mean time. Since we have spent 2 solid years up there without ALL of it, we are OKAY as far as I am concerned. Thank you for hanging out with us.

On the Green front: our composter is on its way! WOO HOOO

ok thats it have a great night!

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.