BarnStorming

This last week we had a pretty bad windstorm in the middle of the night. Starting about 1am there was sustained winds of 30-40mph with gusts reported at 54 mph. It was a pretty scary night, the house was creaking and moaning. The winds were coming from due West hitting the front of our house. To the West of the house is pretty much open field for 1 mile, needless to say, the wind was hammering us dead on.  After a pretty much sleepless night, daylight broke and the winds calmed into the 20's. There was a sigh of relief, no damage to the house. Upon going outside there was another story to be seen. Unfortunately the barn next door didn't survive the storm.

The roof was torn off in giant sections, you can see this half laying on the ground, mostly intact.

It was sad to see the barn destroyed, it was such a cool old backdrop, and the last remaining outbuilding from our houses early years. There has been a silo, a smaller barn and a windmill that have all come and gone in the last 150 years. It seems like these giant old barns are disappearing faster than ever.

Here's how she looked before the damage. R.I.P.

Building a Formal Pond

 Now that the trees in the English Garden are starting to fill in a little, I figured it was a good time to add the water feature that I had planned on putting right in the center. The first step to building a pond is really simple, figure out where you want it and dig a hole! The next step for my pond was a little different, "formal" ponds usually are symmetrical, have sharp edges and are geometric shaped, in contrast to a "natural" pond with free flowing edges.  To accomplish a rectangular pond, I build a foundation out of concrete blocks. Next I put down a layer of sand to protect the liner.

After the liner was installed I put down a layer of stone in the bottom and began filling it with water. Once the liner was firmly in place, I finished the next couple courses of block.

The finishing touch was to add a spitting fountain to add more interest to the pond.

 

Building a medicine cabinet out of a vintage mirror

For our bathroom medicine cabinet we wanted something a little more unique then the standard rectangle with a mirror on the front. Also seeing how I needed the cabinet to mount into the corner of the room, the best option was to build it from scratch. At a garage sale we had picked up an old mirror from the 60's with a fancy resin frame that would be the perfect size for our cabinet. The first thing to do was build a cabinet that fit the corner of the room, and had a "face" the same size as the back of the mirror. After I built the cabinet, I took the old cardboard back off the mirror, you can see it laying to the right of the cabinet. I then used it as a template to create a new wooden back out of 1/4" plywood (laying on the left side). This new back is sturdy enough to support the mirror by the hinges I will be attaching.


Here is the mirror mounted to the cabinet on the wall. (Also notice the light fixture that my mom mosaiced with stained glass)


Inside view of the cabinet. You can see the screws holding the mirror to the new plywood back.


Nightime shot.

Marble Floor Tile - Entryway

My latest tiling project was the side entry floor. After doing the bathroom floor, I wanted to step it up a little and do something a little more intricate. This is what I came up with. It took awhile to cut all the tiles, I think I had around 8 hours running the tile saw. There are only 3 whole tiles on the floor, every other one has at least 1 cut, some of them have 4 cuts.

I don't have a picture of it, but before I started tileing I had to beef up the floor joists. A lot of people don't realize it, but before tiling you should always check your floor deflection. There are online calculators you can use. You put in your joist size/spacing and the length that they span. It may not be perceptible, but your floor may have enough deflection that over time you would end up with cracked grout, or worse yet, cracked tiles. Its even more important to check deflection when using natural stone as it is much more fragile than ceramic or porcelain. Once my floor met the requirements I was ready to get tiling.

I started out by laying down the "rugs", followed by the black border strip. Cutting the black marble that thin left me with a bunch of broken pieces, I actually had to stop the job for a few weeks because I had to special order another case of tile because I was one piece short!


After both "rugs" were done, I did the filler tile with Crema Ivy marble.


The next step was too grout the floor. I used 2 colors of grout, the "rugs" I grouted with a dark grey, it actually came out lighter than I planned, but it still looks good. For the cream marble I used a light tan grout so the grout lines would blend in more as these tiles aren't the focal point of the room.

Flooring is done, just have to install my baseboards now!

Great Auction Finds, Crystal Chandelier, Throne

Its been quite awhile since I posted, we had a very busy summer and end of the year. Now that the holiday's are over and things slow down as we go through winter, I can try to get back on track. Over the last few months we've found some pretty cool things at local auctions to add to our house. A couple of the highlights are a crystal prism chandelier. It actually started out as 2 identical chandeliers, I won both of them, but they were both in such bad shaped that I needed to part them out and put together one complete chandelier. I'm not sure what the previous owners did to them, but it looks like they had been tossed around quite a bit in storage. There were several broken prisms, broken glass and even a broken metal arm on one of them. After getting one put back together and all cleaned up, it turned out to be a really nice piece. The prisms are quality leaded cut glass.

I even had enough left over prisms to add several to another chandelier that only had pressed glass prisms. I love the color you get from the leaded glass.

And probably my favorite piece, my parents actually were able to bid on this for me when I was out of the state for work. Its a hand carved throne that stands 6 feet tall!

The arms are carved lions heads.

Crown fit for a King

Whats better for a crown than gold?! Here is the start to the crown molding on the fireplace overmantel. I put the little wood blocks on for extra support, but after I got these pieces installed and I went to put the crown molding on, I realized I had made them too long, so after cutting them down shorter, I then realized I had cut them at the wrong angle. So about an hour later I ended up just prying them off and not using any support blocks.


Jump right to the end product. A full golden crown! I had to miter 10 seperate corners just to do the fireplace. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.


And here you can see the rest of the matching crown molding up in the room.


A wider view.


And last, I just finished this up a few hours ago. I put in a engineered floating floor. They are 5" wide oak planks with "distress" to mimic an original wood floor. Installation is relatively simple, the planks just click-lock together.


Another view of the floor, I hadn't put the bathroom doors back on yet.


I can't believe the day has come, but I think its safe to say you can call it a bedroom now. Its not 100% finished, there is some trim work here and there, but its livable and we can finally move in.

The Bridge To Nowhere

Christine worked most of the weekend, so I decided to do a little project with the boys, something they could help out on. As a kid when I would go hiking with my parents, my favorite part was when the trails in the woods had bridges or boardwalks on them. Miles and Zander love playing on the trails we have around the house, so I figured we could build a bridge for their trail.

Miles is pounding the lag bolts into the pilot holes while Zander watches.


Pile of parts. I'd like to thank Remus for donating the wood. He dismantled his 100+ year old porch on his house a couple years ago and saved the old oak lumber. When he moved he didn't want to leave the wood behind so he offered it to me. I've had it laying in my backyard for about 8 months, I knew I would eventually find something to do with it.

The bridge is fully assembled (except for a top to the railing). I snapped off 7 lag bolts during assembly when tightening them down. I had drilled pilot holes, but that old oak is just too solid.

Another view, the kids had been long gone by this point. Sweating and getting bit by mosquitoes for 5 hours wasn't the kind of fun they were looking for afterall. Maybe I can get them to dig a pond under the bridge now.... doubtful. They were however excited whem mom got home from work, they couldn't wait to show her what they made. Christine wasn't quite as excited though, I think she may have murmered something that sounded like "Bedroom?".

Even more tile (and some trim)

If you recall awhile back I had built a niche/shelf/storage area in the bathroom above and behind the tub. It will be used for storing towels, etc up top, and blankets, etc in the compartments below. I tiled the niche area to match the floor. I still need to build the doors to cover the lower compartment. They will just be wood and painted to match the rest of the trim.


Here is the completed tile work. I also installed halogen lighting that is controlled with a wall switch.

I made a little progress trimming out the doors, I installed the first layer. I had to router the edge on 96 feet of 1"x6" boards (2 to 3 passes per board). There is still 2 more layers too add to this trim. The last piece to go on, called the "Edge Band" has to be custom milled at a lumberyard. I can't buy "clear stock" (no knots or splits) in a 2"x2" board at the regular lumber yards, I went to 7 different lumber stores! I will then have to router 3 of the edges (again 2-3 passes per edge). Basically what it boils down to is I got myself into a lot more work than I was planning on by trying to replicate the original trim that was around these doors.

The baseboards luckily didn't need any custom routering, but they are still built up out of 4 pieces of lumber. There is a 1"x8" board with a 2-1/2" rounded egg and dart trim piece on top. Covering the joint between those 2 pieces is a 1-3/8" mullion strip (not installed yet in this pic). Then along the floor is a standard 2-1/2" colonial casing. Overall the trim is about 10" tall.

Zander was hanging out while I painted the trim.

More tile work

The nice weather is officially here, so I spent alot of the last weekend outside, plus the lawn is growing 2" a day, so that means plenty of mowing to do. I did get a little bit done in the house though. The bathroom floor is all grouted and ready to be sealed. I also installed the tile on the fireplace base, surround and overmantle. I still need to get that tile grouted, but that will be a quick and easy job.

Here is the tilework on the overmantle. The untiled area is where the TV bracket will mount.

To cut the curved pieces, I made a template out of cardboard, traced it on the tile, then used my angle grinder with a 4" diamond wheel. Then I sanded out any imperfections. Marble is actually relatively easy to shape and sand.

The tile around the fireplace insert was really easy, no cut edges of tile are visible, they are all covered up by the mantle and the insert. I pretty much just had to roughly cut the tiles to size and set them in place.

Here is a close up of the grouted floor. Once I seal it, the grout will darken up some.

Another pic of the floor

Bathroom floor tile

As usual, this project ended up taking about 2 months longer than expected. A good month and a half of that was due to the fact I had to order the tile twice. My first mistake was going with a company I found on the internet. They seemed to have a good website, and the important part was they were a little cheaper than the other places that I could find that sold Green Onyx tile. The problems started immediately, the website claimed they ship within 48 hours, so after 5 days of not even getting an acknowledgement of my paid order, I decided to email them and ask for a shipping date. Another couple days went by before they responded "shipping today". After another week I emailed again asking for a tracking number and a day later actually got one, but the tile hadn't even shipped yet. So, another week goes by and I finally get the tile, I excitedly open the boxes and was discouraged to see the very poor packaging they used. I knew the tile was extremely fragile, and as I wiped the packing peanuts away, my fears were confirmed. The first tile was chipped, I lifted it up, the next tile was chipped, lifted that one up, next one was cracked. All the way to the bottom of the box, chipped and broken tiles. I immediately called the company, however, like the previous times I tried calling, no answer. I then emailed them, and several days later they said they would file a claim with UPS and ship me new tiles. Another week later I decided to email and ask when they were shipping them, I got the same response as the first time "shipping today". I waited 3-4 days and asked for a tracking number. No response. another day, I emailed again with the same question. Again no response. At this point I couldn't wait any longer, I decided to order from another company, and within 3 days I recieved 20 new tiles ("only" 2 of them were broken). So anyway, now I could finally get to work. I chose 13 of the best tiles, as each Green Onyx tile is very unique as you can see in the pics below. The other cool thing about them is if you hold them up to light, you can see though them like stained glass. Not that this matters when mortaring them down on a floor though!

The first thing I did was dry fit the entire bathroom floor. I had to make a lot of cuts to make the design, I wanted to make sure every tile fit perfectly before I started putting them down permanently. (In the end this worked against me because I was off a little bit on my alignment, so when I got to the last few tiles I had to recut new ones.) After I dry fit every tile, I had to move them back out of the bathroom so I could clean the floor and start the installation.

I started the installation in the center of the room with 9 square feet of Onxy. After the onyx was down, I put a 1-1/4" border of Emperador Dark marble. The rest of the room would be Crema Ivy marble.


I didn't take many pics during the installation because I was worried my mud would set up before I got all the tile down. This next pic was where I ended up before I had to start recutting the tiles. When I got to the door opening I was about 3/8" off of where I should have been.

After recutting the tiles, I got them installed (you can see the green plastic spacers I used to make sure my grout lines were all the same witdth) and now the last step will be to grout the tiles and install the baseboards and trim.

The Doors

About 2 weeks ago I had ordered new doors, handles and hinges for the bedrooms, bathroom and closet upstairs. I received the handles and hinges within a few days, but I was just waiting for the doors to come in at Lowes. Box full of handles, its nice to be able to get reproduction hardware that mimics the look of the old victorian styling. I still needed to cut out the wall for the bedroom closet. I used a diamond wheel on my grinder to get a nice cut line without messing up the surrounding wall. About 4 hours later I had the door casing built and the door all installed. I still need to frame out the closet on the other side of the door though. I had to build the door casings from scratch. The walls in the old house are so thick that I couldn't order prehung doors. This is the casing for the closet door. I started by ripping down a 10" wide board. Then I routered out the corner to key them in together. After that I had to router in the hinge slots. The bathroom doors took a little longer, I wanted double doors here so that there wasn't 1 big door swinging out in front of the fireplace. Here is a close up on the handles. The one on the right is the live handle, the one on the left is a dummy handle, that door is held in place by a ball catch on the top. On the inside of the doors I put glass handles to match the chandelier. The next step is to get the new doors trimmed out and then get everything painted. Also I need to do the tile around the fireplace.