IS THAT LIGHT I SEE AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL?

SOME STRANGE THINGS HAPPENED THIS WEEK.
After somewhat of a hurry up, with bad weather impending, I finished the path down to the garden shed and cleaned up the pad where I want to park my car in the winter months.  The really strange this is that, when the rain came, I still found myself wanting to walk on the grass!  Not to worry, I got over that strange state of mind and now enjoy getting out of the car and walking all way up to the rear steps without stepping on a single blade of grass.

Speaking of grass, I noticed that my lawn seed in the strip above the French drain actually germinated this week.  The soil temperature hovered around 48 deg. F for several days and then warmed stimulating a germination.  Now if the frost does not kill the young shoots...

You can see one of my young mulberry trees alongside the path.  I suppose that, in a couple of years or so, I will be cursing the purple stains of mulberries on the path.

The second strange thing was that Daniel, my contractor, slipped and fell from off the roof onto the old deck, fortunately without injury (other than a certain loss of dignity).  Over a beer he told me that it looks as if he will be moving to Boston at year's end.

Later this last week, I was painting my front door and also renewing the draft seal at the bottom.  What was strange about this was that I realized  this was, strictly speaking, a maintenance job.  The weather has been cold and I had been awaiting a warmer day so that I could remove the door.  On Friday it was warmer outside than inside so off came the door for this work.  The main reason was to renew the draft seal, the last thing I can do to seal up the house.

I finally competed the sealing up of the loft above the stairways.  This how it looked before I started this work.  Quite a lot of air was able to move between this space and the attic above.  The problem was that the space was somewhat irregular due to the shape of the stairways up and down.

I solved this by walling off the difficult spaces above the stairways making the space cuboid.

Once I had completed the drywall work, I could not resist using up some old paint stock to make it all look pretty.  The ceiling is white and the interior walls a kind of daffodil yellow.  The wall next to the exterior cladding is blue, same as the exterior walls.  Both this wall and the ceiling have the InsulAdd treatment to reflect heat back into the house.  I had some old vinyl composite tiles, as you can see, stacked on the floor.  Now the entire floor is tiled, so it is just like any other room in the house.  Mostly, I will be the only one to see this.  It will become a store room.  I suppose that is yet another strange thing.

What all this has been about is sealing the house as much as possible, so as to conserve heat and keep heating costs to a minimum.  According to the gas company billing, my usage is about one quarter of the average of the houses in my area, so I have been doing fairly well in this quest.

The real test if all this is the 'door blower' test.  With this work done, I invited Jason (the air conditioning specialist) back to do the 'after' measurements, compared with the original measurements.  An airtight plastic shroud including a powerful fan is placed in the front door way.  When the fan is actuated it blows air into the house.  With all the windows and doors closed, it becomes possible to measure the proportion air escaping to the outside through various cracks and crannies.

This test indicated that I have been able to achieve, by this work and other work done by Jason's company,  a further 25% reduction in loss of air to the outside.  This will amount to a saving of about $200 per year in heating costs, so I can expect to recover the cost of this work in about five years.

Just in time, it seems...
Night time temperatures are now dipping below freezing and daytime ambient temperatures are falling to within 20 deg. F of freezing on most days.  I run the house at 65 deg F, a comfortable level for me as I dislike an overly warm house. Even with only a few hours of sunshine each day, the house warms some five degrees through insolation (heating via sunlight), so the heating only turns on some hours after sunset.  Overall, I am quite pleased with all this and consider all the work that needs to be done to be done.  In a year or so, I will consider adding underfloor heating to improve efficiency but am nearing the limits of the law of diminishing returns.

What these strange events mean is that I have come to the end of renovations and improvements to make the house into a comfortable pad for an ageing bachelor bloke.  What will I do with myself, I wonder, with the ending of over two years of devotion to making the house into what I want it to be?

I will explore that challenge in the original blog (LifeAccording...)

PATHS, DRAINS, AND LOFT

WELL, I HAVE BEEN A BUSY ONE...
Working outside when it is fine and inside when it is not.  With the Fall/Autumn on me, I am very concerned to have the outside of the house ready for Winter.  A major focus is to have a path leading from the garden shed to the back stairs, up to the deck and across to lower entrance into the sun-room.  Even though the Farmers' Almanac is predicting there will be little snow before February,  I am sure we can bet on quite a bit of rain.  Here in Corning when it rains it pours, often turning the back yard into a quagmire.  Since I like to park in the back alley (means I don't have to figure out on which side of the street to park and can keep the front screen door locked), I do want to keep my shoes dry when walking up the rear yard.  A slightly related issue is the need to improve water drainage from off the roof, since some really heavy falls of rain result in some water entering the lower level at the front corners of the house.

It is just over 50 feet or 15.5 metres from the rear stairs to the concrete slab on which the garden shed sits.  As I am almost finished this project, I am ready to tell its story.  This is what it looks like as of this evening (you may notice that I have a second raised garden bed alongside the path).  The first step is to excavate a strip about four feet wide, eight inches deep, eight feet long (roughly 1 m x 20 cm x 2.4 m), then to place a moisture proof membrane in this trench.  Next I lay in about three inches of rubble from the pile behind the shed (sorry, non-metric from now on).

This is very much smaller now, being originally some eleven tons of river rubble.  The pile on the right of the picture is the crude material and has lots of large pebbles.  This crude stuff forms the first layer.  I then sieve the large pebbles out using the excellent Robert-made device in the center of the picture. The resulting large pebble pile is at the left.  This material is very useful for making French drains.  The refined stuff  I mix with cement for a middle layer of about two or three inches.  Finally I use proper concrete mix for the top two and one half inches to ensure a good hard, durable surface.  All this is a lot of digging, carting away of earth (see the growing pile to the right of the path in the first picture), and various mixing, which is why I am only doing two slabs at a time and getting on with other jobs while the slabs cure.

I am very proud of the traveling form-work I have devised.  You may be able to make this out in the picture at the left.  This has enabled me easily to keep the path straight and to ensure a regular decline toward the shed pad.  By some miracle, the eventual end of the path will be exactly at the level of the pad at the left of the picture.  With luck and weather permitting, I shall have regained possession of the pad behind the shed, next to the alley-way, within the next week or so.  Then I will be able to park the car and make my way to the rear of the house without getting my shoes wet all, or sinking into the mud or snow!

When not working on this, I have constructed a smaller path leading to the steps descending to the sun-room door (see the middle of the next picture). Between this path and the lawn is a strip that I have just re-seeded.  Below this is a French drain to ensure water drains towards the fence and does not affect the dryness of the sun-room.  You might recall that I have had a problem with small amounts of water moistening the foundation walls of this room.

'What is a French drain?' you might well ask.  Basically a trench about 18 inches deep and 15 inches wide with an agricultural pipe at the bottom (a drain pipe with lots of holes), covered with large pebbles (from the rubble pile at the back of the shed), and finally about three inches of sandy loam to enable grass to grow on the top.  I am very pleased with how this has turned out.  I have to relay some of the tiles to the left of the path as I did a poor job of it in the first place and they have become detached due to the freezing and expansion of casual water last Winter.  Live and learn, as the saying goes!

I have done one French drain on the weather side (West) at the front of the house and will do three others so as to have good drainage at each corner of the main structure.

Well, what about the loft?  More of this in the next posting.  I have had a problem with air entering below the ceiling and above the stairways.  This is a space about seven feet long, five feet wide, and four or so feet high, above the stairs.  In a cold climate, when there is likely to be snow on the roof, it is essential to keep the air between the roof and the ceiling completely separate from the air in the house blow.  This greatly aids climate control; more importantly, it prevents the formation of 'ice dams' at the lower edge of the roof and the gutters.  That is the problem of the loft and how I have fixed it is the subject of the next posting.

IS THIS THE BEGINNING OF THE END?

TWO PROJECTS TO REPORT ON...
Today I put the final licks of paint on the outside of the house.  I suppose one could entitle this moment so:"Blue, blue, my house is blue..."
I started with the southern wall, along the rear deck, late in June, of which you saw some pictures.  Quite an easy segment, as it turned out.  Each of the large walls presented peculiar problems.  The western wall came next.  Here the main problem was getting used to being up at the end of a fully extended 24 foot ladder.  Of course, I managed to choose the two worst weeks of our Summer, either rain or thunderstorms, or hot and humid days that I accounted as four to six T-shirt days.  I drank quite a bit of beer until I discovered Indian Tonic Water, careful not to drink more than one beer an hour and not before 11AM.  Also, I had to learn not to use various ladders and planks to paint sections of the wall.  By the end of this wall (two coats of paint), I had mastered ladders and was climbing somewhat like a monkey.

The eastern wall presented rather different problems as the cable, telephone, and power lines had to be accommodated.  On one evening, I had quite an interesting time convincing myself that I could negotiate the various lines and reach the pinnacle of the roof line.  I was painting the fascia and the soffits as well as, a somewhat darker blue. Here is that wall. 

A quick course in self-management of fear of heights was in order toward the end of the day.  Figuring out the segments and order of painting them was also a bit of a challenge.  Here you can see I am well on into the first coat of paint.  With the Insuladd additive, it did not matter too much about keeping a wet edge; besides, these two end walls were quite large and the paint polymerizes really fast in the warm weather.

Just for completion, here is the northern wall which, as I remarked, I finished just today.

This has made for quite a pretty house and it seems my neighbors love the colors almost as much as I.  Bye the bye, my flowers are doing very well, as you might see.  Unfortunately, the transplanted dwarf firs eventually expired (all my other trees are doing well, cluck, cluck).

While I have been laboring outside, Daniel has been busy within.  The bath was removed and a window placed high in the outer wall to let in light and provide for additional ventilation.  The bath was really heavy (375 lbs/ 170 kg) and proved quite a challenge to get out and take away to Habitat for Humanity.  It took some shopping to settle on the shower alcove but I love the outcome of all this work.

I have some painting to do (ceiling and walls ) but this must await my return from the Great Northern Rockies Ride that I am to do with my long-time friend, Brian.  We plan to ride some 520 miles from Midway BC across the Rockies and then down to Glacier National Park in the first two weeks of September, and then up and over to catch the train from Western Glacier National Park back to Seattle.  The last day will be quite memorable, riding the Road to the Sun and managing a 5,500 foot climb, then descent, along the way.

My garden is taking shape and doing well enough.  In order to attract humming birds I planted a patch of bee balm in my one raised bed.  I was rewarded eventually by visits from at least two of these amazing birds as they took nectar from the flowers., for two or three days. They are so small and agile.  At first glance, I thought I was seeing a bumble bee (the first was head on to me) but was delighted to discover it was actually a humming bird.  The bed is occupied by an enormous rhubarb plant, six geraniums, some carrots, and the bee balm.

So, a final pic of the humming bird attraction:

The trees at the right have since been 'sacrificed' and the bee balm patch has expanded considerably.

My large, aged azaliah at the front had to be reduced in size so I could us a smaller ladder on the lower norther wall.  Now I have lots of cuttings to be potted tomorrow.  If they take, I will plant them alongside the foot path at the front in the Spring.  Lots to do before the ride, mainly cleaning up and finishing of jobs abandoned temporarily to get the painting done.

With the replacement of the front gutter, all the major work on the house will be done.  I cannot believe that I have almost come to the end of two years of work on my little house, my home sweet home.

Maybe one more posting (it is hard to give up)!

NOT FINISHED YET!!!

NOT BY A LONG WAY.

One might have thought that, with the kitchen remodel done, I would have run out of steam.

Not so, there is lots of work to do in the garden.  I am sorry to report that the transplant of the four dwarf pines from just in front of the house to alongside the foot-walk turned out to be a total failure. The trees eventually dropped their needles and will be replaced by new dwarf pines from the nursery.  Too bad but, as the saying goes, nothing ventured...nothing gained.  On the positive side, most of my initial tree planting is gone well, with just three or so more to be done.

Daniel will be back mid-July, to do the small remodel of the upper bathroom.  A shower recess will replace the bath, a window will admit light and air, and a new light and ceiling fan will be installed.  I have a bath in the bathroom downstairs and, much as I like a good soak, the usual for me is a quick shower.  As I grow older, I am concerned to make bathing safe, so showering in the bath is a hazard to can do without.  Already this bathroom has some sturdy grab handles.  The other day, I avoided a fall out of the bath courtesy of one of these handles, installed for the well-being of the previous aged owners.  The recess will have a tiled sit-me-down, so that I can scrub my feet.

Mean while, I am embarked on painting the exterior.  The soffits will be sky blue and the walls a lighter blue. I have been trying out possible colors on the southern wall, which is easy to do from the deck level.  The really 'techy' bit is that I am adding a product (Insuladd) allegedly developed by NASA for coating the Space Shuttles.  The object is to include tiny ceramic micro-spheres, that enclose a vacuum, and are very white, that have the ability to reflect significantly heat and light.  The idea is to make the paint for the walls extremely reflective, while retaining the color.  The expectation is cooler walls in the Summer and retention of heat within the dwelling in the cold months.  If this works with the walls, I will repaint the ceilings, using this additive.

Out of the packet, it adds 20% to the paint volume and raises the price by about 30%, so with energy saving and increased comfort within the house, this might be a very good deal.  Anyway, I have the first coat on the southern wall and it looks very nice and was exceptionally easy to apply.  Here are a some pictures of the early work.

 Sorry not to have included a pic of the entire wall but I just plain forgot to take one!  Next time, with a report on effectiveness.

Well, this brings me to a related topic.  Earlier this week, I had a Home Energy Audit done on the house.  New York State pays for this for impoverished folk like me.  Actually, it is not all that much related to income and it is good that this state, which has double taxation (income and sales taxes), and runs ever at a loss, affords this benefit to its residents.  Jason, the technician who performed the audit, had not heard of this product and was quite interested to follow the project along.  He is back with his recommendations this week.  I will try to have the western wall done with at least one coat before his return. If so, he will take temperature reading of the interior and exterior wall on that side.  He was impressed that the combination of the reflective steel roof and soffit ventilation maintains the attic temperature at about ambient levels.  His neat little temperature meter showed a nice uniformity of temperature across the walls and ceilings.

However, I sense that the afternoon sun on that western wall does raise the interior temperature of that end of the house by three to five degrees.  Next posting will report his recommendations and what I propose to do based on what he has to say.  Watch this space!

The weather has warmed up and day time temperatures have been as much as 85 degrees F (19 deg C), and fairly muggy these last four days.  Thunder storms were predicted for late this afternoon and evening.  Doubting that these would eventuate, I did some weeding and a little watering of the garden.  However, across the lane,I spied a neighbor washing his new car.  This will guarantee some rain, I thought.  Sure enough, spots of rain began to fall, then heavy rain in bands, with thunder in the distance.

Altogether, a nice rain and a fall into the low 70's.  I opened up the doors and windows to let the freshened air in.

A final note:  on Thursday, my washing machine gave up the ghost.  I thought to repair it myself; an internet search indicated a faulty timer and possibly one other part needing replacement.  This work would take about 30 minutes to do.  Alas, these two parts would cost almost $200!  With other things possible to go wrong, I elected to buy another machine for $300, delivered, installed, and the present machine taken away!

SPRING HAS SPRUNG...

THE WINTER HUNG ON GAMELY, long and cold.  Spring had the occasional moment and certainly her foot in the door.  Now it is Spring, Spring, and more Spring!

I got the Kitchen Remodel out of the way just in time although it is still somewhat of a shambles in the below-deck Sun Room, with bits and pieces of timber piled up here and there, waiting to trap the unwary foot.  I have 15 or so flower plants on the go and around 20 trees at various stages of infancy.  There are certainly signs of a certain 'cluckiness' in me as I transfer the plants from inside to outside in the morning and back in at night.

So...the switch from inside to outside has definitely taken place.

Four dwarf firs had been transferred, a week ago, from their most unfavorable placement in the shadow of the north-side of the house and now stand sentinel duty alongside the sidewalk, leaving just the holly plants and the lone Azalea along the immediate house front.

 I was sure they would not survive the transplant and they were poorly rooted we (my friend Walt and I) were not able to get much of a root ball.  However, with proper soil, mulching and watering, they seem to be hanging on.  They join a small fir further into west lawn area (excuse, if you can, the auditory pun), from my good friend Uma's home.  It will eventually dwarf them.

Also, two mulberry trees were delivered mid-this-week and duly planted near the east-side fence.  These are American Black mulberries and I hope they will show the large, long black fruit that is the hall mark of this variety.  I love mulberries, the fruit of heaven!

The hollies have been severely pruned and moved to better positions now that the firs have gone.

I am sure that little of this will grasp your attention for long.  The purpose of  all this planting is to further unite the house with its living environment.  The trees will act of provide shade and direct the breezes.  It will take a while for all this to sort out, since trees are not at all like Jack's magic beans and do not grow overnight.  At 76 this month, I am unsure of how much of all this I will see, hopefully all of it.  Just the doing of it will get me there.

As I signed for the house on my birthday (May 29, hint, hint!) and moved in on June 1, this will make just two years that the house and I have been made one.  It is a bit like a marriage, I suppose, since the house certainly has much that is old, borrowed, blue, or new.

The garden will be slow progress, so postings to this Blog may become few and far between.  There will be a modest remodel of the upper bathroom.  It needs light and I can make do with just one bath (there is a nice one downstairs) so it will be come a 'shower room' rather than a 'bath room'.  Sometime  in early Summer will see this work done.  Also awaiting me, the painting of the exterior.  An immediate project is to entice the humming birds to my rear deck.  Somewhat more interesting, perhaps.

Though you will not hear much of it, the work of the garden will ultimately be the more fundamental and I hope to enjoy the gradual development of a 'mini-forest' as my surrounds.

UPDATE II: MODEST KITCHEN REMODEL

IT SEEMS I AM NEARING the end of this phase of the partnership between me and The House.  Today I got the last bits of the floor finished.  I was so pleased that I went out and had a couple of Martinis and a glass of very dry Riesling, interspersed with a dip and, later, NY Cheesecake with strawberries.  Very much restored, I returned home and turned to begin this posting.

Looking back on the last posting, I see that I had not resolved how the painting would go.  This eventuated as a continuation of the basic color I have used on the eastern wall of this extended room...Cloud Burst, a sort of blue/grey that matches the skies we often see here in Corning. It is a very dense color and does well when broken up by other features (vs. and entire wall... which could be very depressing).  This brought me to the question of what to do with the floor.

I had thought to use linoleum tiles and muddled along for a while trying various combinations.  Then, Daniel (my contractor, who pays me the compliment from time to time that I am a person of vision; ah... flattery, how pleasant it is!)  told me I could use a floating vinyl floor that could just sit on the existing floor.  As it turned out, this changed the course of history, at least as far as my kitchen remodel was concerned.

Finally I settled on planks in the theme of Vintage Ash.  An outrageous color, one might think, but one that maintains the theme of Cloud Burst on the walls and cabinet panels but also picks up the Crushed Orange of the trim.  Once the flooring arrived (another story too complicated to tell), it burst on me that I would have to pull up the old linoleum (actually two layers) to avoid too much of a height mismatch between the floor in the living area and this new area. One and a half days of work with the heat gun and I had a heap of old linoleum out on the deck and down to the sub-floor once more.  Up till now, there have been three successive layers of floor covering in this room, plus layer of 3/16 in ply, all shoddily done I might say.  Hooray for the blessings of heat guns is all I can say of this dreary episode!

To end a possibly exceedingly boring  narrative, I revert to a Before and After approach.  Here is what we began with.  Some things must have seemed like a good idea at the time, but from the moment I set eyes on that peninsula of cabinetry protruding so rudely into the living space, I knew it would have to go. Besides hiding the defunct dishwasher, it just got in the way all the time!  This pic was taken February 18, around 2 PM, so you can see how pleasant was the fall of light through the French Doors.  That cursed peninsula made it almost impossible to access the cupboards nearest the doors.

 This gives you a good view of the floor.  Outside, the sky is indeed of the Cloud Burst variety, with rain most of the day.  I am glad that I persisted with this color, avoiding the Grass Mat possessing the long  western wall.  I allowed the Crushed Orange that you can see around the doors and along the bottom of the green wall to intrude into the cabinetry in this section.  This runs throughout the upper two main rooms and passageway between, rather like the lifeblood of the house.

When I first began to lay the floor, I thought the color a tad dense and somewhat boring.  What could I have been thinking,? I said to myself at the end of the first day's work.


With this style of floating floor,  the planks  stick to each other (the temperature has to be at about 68 deg. F.).  One has just one chance to get it right as it sticks better then Tar Baby (see the Uncle Remus story).  Once one learns the trick however, it all goes smoothly

As the laying extended across the floor, with the varying light through the day and between days, the wisdom of the choice of this color has become increasingly evident.  Much thanks to Uma and Daniel who encouraged me to go boldly with Vintage Ash!

The hardest bit of this was making the small cabinet box that extends the counter top to the doorway. This was challenging and exacting but ended up with the counter levels exactly matching.  This is composed entirely of materials recycled from the demolition of that cursed peninsula.

The chronic leak from the old dishwasher led to water egress through the paper underlay of the old linoleum floor from  the door jamb to alongside the stove so that, apart from the repair  under the dishwasher, the floor, once exposed, needed a good deal of airing to dry out.  On this account alone, I am very glad that I took this project on.

Apart from that, the end effect is very pleasing and the kitchen area is now much more ergonomic  Some minor trim work is outstanding and I have to mill a joining strip between the two floors.  The new floor is 1/8 inch higher than the floor in the living area, so I will have to make this up myself.  The table saw will make that easy and I will use timber studs from the earlier demolition.as the stock for this.

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UPDATE ON KITCHEN REMODEL

I HAVE MADE SOME PROGRESS, albeit quite demanding.  I have completed the cabinet box to extend the counter top, now that the dishwasher has been installed.  This pic shows the new washer, not actually installed at the time but just in place to confirm measurements for the construction of the cabinet.

It is actually more difficult to construct a box to match existing carpentry than to do it all of a piece from scratch, as it were.  I had to revive some skills not used for many years.

While I was busy with that work, Daniel came by and installed the dishwasher, as well renewing the 40 yer old plumbing and fitting a new faucet setup for the sink.  I had 14 1/2 inches for the new box.  I decided to retain the laminex top and to extend this over the cabinet box, using old material from the peninsular top.  The entire cabinet was constructed from these material.  Excellent recycling!

 Amazingly I got it almost exactly matching in height.  I am using an acrylic filler called SeamFil, to join everything up and make a smooth surface.

 As you can see, I have decided to go with the color on three of the walls making up the kitchen/dining/living area.  This is called 'Cloud Burst' and is a blue-gray hue to match the sky so often see hereabouts.

The rest of the cabinet doors and drawers will be done with this color since I like it so much. The framing will remain a wood stained hue but lightened.

Still asking the house to tell me how the rest of the room will be painted.  The Crushed Orange that you can see on the plinth and the door trim will find a place somewhere in this new scheme.

Now that I have a dishwasher that works, I suppose I will have to buy some crockery and cutlery to put in it from time to time.  Image, more than one spoon, two forks, four knives and five plates!

Working on how to do the floor.  Should have this more in shape over the next week or so.

SMALL REMODEL OF THE KITCHEN AREA.

I GOT BACK TO CORNING just a month back, on the tail end of a winter storm.  I was lucky to make it into the local airport (Elmira, ELM), an hour or so before midnight, on the only flight to get in that day.  How nice it was to trudge through the eight inches of snow to my front door and to be home once more!

It took a week or so to gather in two and a half's months of mail and to become my Corning self.  Snow outdoors most of the time so I found the kitchen area staring me in the face.  Staring back, this is how it looked.  Hidden within the peninsula you see in the foreground was an ancient dishwasher that, with my few dishes to be washed straight after use, I had never used. It had  made strange noises when tested prior to the house purchase but did work.  However, I like to wash dishes by hand.

The plan was to remove the dishwasher, demolish the peninsulate extension, and extend the counter some 15 inches to abut the door jamb.  In fact, the demolition of the cabinet turned out to be first necessary.  The eventual removal of the dishwasher revealed that it had suffered a chronic, small hot water leak, resulting  in serious erosion of the sub-floor.

It was now evident that beneath the top layer of linoleum was a layer of ply covering an earlier layer of linoleum.  This presented some of repairing the floor so as to bring it to an equal level to the rest of the floor.  As the plywood layer immediately above the joists had been eroded, the first step was to use a cement based product to fill in the hollows.  As plywood thickness has altered a little since the construction of the original floor, it took two layers of plywood to effect a good repair.
 
After seeing an "almost-top-of-the-line" Maytag dishwasher marked down by $250 at the local Home Depot, I resiled from my disinterest in replacing the dishwasher, so now you see the new one, not yet installed but in place so I can be sure of the dimensions of the cabinet I will build to use the space towards the door.  I was very heartened by the good result of the floor repair and set about preparing the counter top for its extension over the proposed cabinet work.  This turned out to be technically more difficult than I had first thought and this has made the design and cabinet making rather more difficult.

The cabinet box will have a top drawer and lower door opening to two shelves and will closely match the other cabinets.  The drawer will hold cutlery and the shelves will take crockery to make easy the setting of the table for dinners I plan to have once all this is done.

Already I can see how I will have more useful counter top space and better access to the cupboards you can see above the dishwasher.  Also, the kitchen area is much easier to navigate. 

The construction of the cabinet has got to have been the difficult middle third of the project,  I have been working on it for the best part of a week, one way or another.  It is all ready not to be assembled and put in place with only the top drawer needing construction.  Once it is in place, around mid-week, Daniel will install the dishwasher and attend to some re-plumbing.  It is quite a while since I have taken on cabinet work and I seem to be having to relearn lots of stuff, made and recovered from a few simple errors, but have been able to make use of most of the material from the demolished cabinet.

With this work done, I will tile over the Formica top with linoleum tiles and do the finishing wood work.  I have no be able to make up my mind about colors. This will have to  await the laying of a new floor covering.  I have been excited to discover a floating linoleum covering that avoids pulling up the present layer and will lay very quickly. 

With a little luck and some hard work this week I may get all this done.  The Tuesday following St. Patrick's Day, I have a small operation scheduled for my right hand and that will take me out of kitchen action for almost a week.  This had turned out to be far more than the easy, straight forward task I had envisaged.  How like life!

Watch this space for the next update, which should show the completed cabinet work and the final tiling.

ROOF REPORT

THE ROOF IS DONE:  Just a brief report and to let you know that, this New Year's Day 2013, I have survived 2012 and am alive and well.  

Despite diffuculties weather-wise, Daniel has used brief windows of opportunity to install the new roof.  Here are some pics:

The first shows how batons or furlings are fixed to the existing roof (by screws through to the roof trusses) and then the roof segments screwed to the batons. Each seam of the roof overlays the preceeding member, clipping to it by means of interlocking ridges.  And so on, across the width of the roof, with no nails or screws visible, all hidden beneath each seam.

This is a view of the southern half of the roof

And here the front, or northern roof.



My friend Uma, having viewed the roof, commented that it has the effect of making the house seem larger.  This may be due to the polar white color bonded to the metal.

There are not many metal roofs in Corning

Since the work was completed, just after Christmas we had a good snow fall. This is the view from the rear alley.

We have discovered that the roof is quite slippery so far as snow is concerned so that, when the temperature rises, despite the low pitch, it quickly sheds the load of snow.  As Daniel lwas leaving after an inspection, the entire covering of snow came off the rear roof.  Most had gone from off the front, so the roof was bare of snow, unlike the more usual roofs all about.

So, my friends, you have seen as much of the new roof as have I.  In three weeks, I will be winging my way back to the US and, after one or two visits on the west side and in Colorado, I will be back in Corning to see it all for myself, on February 8th.  Health and Happiness to all of you for 2013.