Old Traditions in a New House

The first couple or three Christmases we were married, we made a big deal of going to one of our local tree farms to select just the tree for us.  They were beautiful and took up a good portion of our narrow living room.  They smelled of winter and joy and peace on earth all wrapped up in sparkling lights and tulle ribbon and ornaments that came from my single apartment days mixed in with the ones I bought as a wife and soon to be mom. 

Then, more babies came, and they started to crawl and climb and break things, despite their oh-so-sweet natures and our best childproofing efforts.  The year I had an almost 3-year old, a 21 month old, and a newborn, I convinced myself a tree was out of the question.  I was doing good to keep the doors on their hinges--how could my sanity survive putting a Christmas tree in the same house with those people?  So, Christmas neared, and our home had no tree.  And I wished that it did and lamented my decision.  So, that man I married brought home our first miracle tree.  Not from a tree farm or Walmart or Lowe's, not trimmed or shaped or trained.  And it was ugly, but as I looked at it skeptically, he assured me it would be just fine.  So, trimming a branch here and sticking it in somewhere else, all around, little by little, he shaped and readjusted, and that tree became our beautiful Christmas tree.  We jokingly referred to it as our miracle tree. 

Each year since, in that house and in the five Christmases in the barn, we found our miracle trees.  Part of the fun has been tromping through our woods, all eyes out for a cedar that looks halfway like a Christmas tree.  If it has just a little potential, we can take care of the rest with a pair of clippers and fishing line.  Some years, I've cut it, and others my husband has.  Some years it takes branches from more than one tree even.  But after it's shaped and turned to its best advantage, the same ornaments I bought as a single teacher and the ones I bought to commemorate our first Christmas and the porcelain gift ones are joined by the ones our three kids have made.  Salt dough ones that slightly resemble candy canes.....the paper balls a sweet friend patiently helped them glue together.....tree shapes made from our own red clay when we experimented with brick making....the list goes on.  Each one is precious and brings to mind a mess when it was made and the fun we had and how fast these years are flying. 

In the barn, really, only we and our parents saw our Christmas trees.  We just didn't have room for much company.  But now we are in the house, and I am so looking forward to sharing this time of year with family and guests, to lots of laughter and cider and red ribbon.  To Santa Claus coming down the chimney instead of the electric heater vent, or even more disappointing, the door.  To our first Christmas memories in our new home.  And so, I came really close to giving up the tradition of the miracle tree.  I told myself the fun was in decorating anyway, that we would focus on that part.  Wouldn't a really full, shaped, "professional" Christmas tree be beautiful?  But, you know....I can't find any good Christmas tree farms around here, and after so many years of getting trees off our own place, the idea of picking some tree I don't even know out of a pile just started to seem impersonal.  So, we took a walk this past Sunday afternoon.

We walked all over our place.  We are so rich in scraggly, skinny cedar trees.  All five of us and the dog tromped through the woods, eyeing the fencelines and any clump of dark green among the yellow and browns and reds of the hickories and oaks and sweet gums.  Just before we headed down the path, my husband climbed in a sweet gum and taught us how to chew the sap. Not a threat to Wrigley at all, but still pretty good.  And, sure enough, as we walked and as he and I saw for the millionth time lately how much the kids are growing and how much fun they have just exploring our little world, we found two potential miracle trees.  The top nine feet of one will be our Christmas tree this year.  I know these trees.  They're ours.  They've absorbed the sounds of our family, of a chainsaw cutting logs for our home, of the kids' whispers when they think they're hearing war drums deeper in the woods (band practice at the nearby high school a few miles away), of me calling my cat of 10 years who disappeared in June, of yells and laughter and squeals when we sled down our one good hill when we get a rare snow.

So, it'll come in the house, and my husband will turn it until I say I think most of the bare spots are facing the wall.  We'll dress it up with ribbon and sparkles and ornaments from the gawdy to the precious, and this year, it will be our miracle tree.  And I can't wait!

Water and electricity!!!!

We now have electricity and running water!  No more running extension cords through the windows.  Here's a picture of the kitchen sink and cabinets, with the counter top my husband made from some of that post oak we've got.  We've had a wooden counter in the barn the past several years, and I love it.  I've had that shade of blue for the cabinets in mind for years, and the sink we got at a junk place in town for next to nothing.

 This is a little bar area with a storage cabinet, as you walk from the kitchen back toward the hall and stairway. 

 This is our room now that it's semi-cleaned and no longer a work station.

 The view over the landing toward the back of the house.

 Looking down from the head of the stairway.

 And up from the bottom.

 Here's the lighting for the eating area in the kitchen.  We got our lighting at Lowe's, all except the small one by the stove area and the attic pull chain lights.  I liked this one because it really kept the colonial feel.

 Here's the alcove areas in the living room, with pendant lights.    We thought about putting restaurant style booths in these, but instead now we plan to have a desk in one and a game table in the other.

 We put wall sconces in the living room to avoid running lots of wires across the ceiling.  These coordinate with the pendant lights. 

Well, there you have it!  We still have some major cleaning and the wood finishing for the ceiling and walls to do.  We're using raw linseed oil for that and found a great hardware store out of Houston, Cox Hardware that beat any other prices all to pieces, even with shipping this far.  That arrived this week, so we're itching to get started on this last leg of our adventure/nightmare/dream come true!  I'll add more soon!

Floors, baseboards, doors, and cabinets....

Here are samples of what our bathroom floors will look like. We have gone through a myriad of possibilities with this. After checking prices and reviews and specs on several options, VCT seems to be the best fit for us. We went with an alternating pattern to avoid that school cafeteria look. I love what we picked. We priced several places, and we ended up going with a flooring outlet here in town that sold it to us at a fraction of what other retailers told us, for the same product. One full bath and the downstairs half bath will have the green and white, while the other full bath has the violet and white.

Here's our kitchen with cabinets! We have never installed cabinets before on our own, so we were fairly edgy about this and not sure how to make it all come together, especially considering the beams and braces on some of the walls. My dad, however, put our minds at ease as he looked at it with the eyes of years of experience and remarked, "...shouldn't be a problem." Within one day, he and my husband made some exchanges and additional purchases at Surplus Warehouse and got these up. I have had no cabinets here in the barn, just a few open shelves, and about a yard of counter space, so this kitchen seems just luxurious to me! We went with Surplus Warehouse on the cabinets partly because these don't have particle board in the sides. I want to paint them a deep slate blue. Next, we take the stove to a guy we've found to go through it and get it all up to date.



My dad came and spent most of the week with us last week and they got so much done with two really good carpenters instead of one really good carpenter and a helper who is also the mom.




You can see the louvered doors we chose for in front of the washer and dryer downstairs. The house has tons of natural light, but not in this particular spot, so we wanted some kind of door that would allow light to filter into the hall. These did the trick just fine. After talking to Home Depot and not wanting to pay $100+ in shipping, we went with a local lumber company who was able to get the doors in one unit for about the same as the base price from Home Depot. They had them ready in about a day. We also bought the rest of our interior doors from a local company. They framed them for us, too, which made installation so much easier. They are solid pine, and I want to stain them, as well as much of the wood, too. The whole paint/stain issue is really a tough one. I love the look of the wood, but in some rooms, I think I do want to paint the walls, but still just stain the beams, braces, and baseboards. It's hard to think of covering those boards with paint until I see a picture of a timberframe home with painted walls, and then I think it should be done in moderation.






Here's a shot of our baseboards. We ran the wiring along the base of the wall, so this thick baseboard conceals that as well as complements the beam at the top of the wall really well. The electrician we used was really good about wanting to work with our wood to conceal his wires as much as possible. This baseboard really gives each wall a picture-frame effect with the beams running horizontally and vertically.
And a final pic of the kitchen. We are almost done!!!!!!!

Too busy to post lately!

It has been months since I've added anything here, but the work has continued steadily all through the fall and winter. It's been two years since our old Farmall headed into the woods down the hill to bring up the first logs, and now we are only weeks away from finishing. It's wild how familiar it all looks to me, something newly constructed, but a house we've seen on the cover of that book for years now. Since my last post, walls inside have gone up, and we hired our first outside work since the sawyer that milled our logs into beams when we had the electrical/heating and air/plumbing done. When I say "we", I really mean my husband, and that man has also built the stairs and is in the middle of installing the floors.
In the living area, we have this partition which gave him a good way to conceal pipes from upstairs, plus it adds natural zoning to this area. We read a book a few years ago by Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language, I think it was, and he really influenced our ideas about spaces and how to define them within a home. Extremely dry, wordy reading, and not all practical, but we got a lot out of it. We found him as the result of a detour several years ago that led in a circle back to this design. Every obstacle has learning opportunities!



Here's the view of the stairs from beside the fireplace. He used a book he bought, Stairs, from the Taunton Press Fine Homebuilding series, to build them. We've been very impressed by any Taunton Press building books we've seen. We were concerned about the stairs seeming crowded since there's not a lot of room in that stairwell, but they turned out just right. These are oak and have so much character about them. You can see the one I took from the top up above. The math girl in me loves all the angles and lines in this house.



And here we have the floors! The real floors! Our kids love sliding in their socks in the rooms that are completed. There's a story behind these floors. We had a ton of post oak we'd planned to plane for floors, but since this is our first (and last, we hope) time to build a house like this, we didn't realize that planing post oak is like planing concrete. My husband got a little done, just enough to see just how gorgeous post oak is, and then we realized it is near impossible to plane it! We even took it to a guy with an industrial setup who called us the next day to come get our wood, said he didn't want to fool with it. At that point, we kinda felt between a rock and a hard place, all this wood that we'd fallen in love with, that we've had drying for two years, and no way we could figure to get it planed. We did have a couple of offers that were a couple hours away, but after our experience locally, we hated for those guys or us to waste their gas money on what was turning out to be a wild goose chase. That all told, we ended up taking one of our first true shortcuts--we bought pre-finished flooring from Home Depot. It is solid wood, so we can refinish it someday when needed, but there's no sanding and finishing for us to do! It's 3" red oak, a dark stain (which was darker than we'd thought it would be, but, once again, once it started covering the floor, oh, how beautiful it is and I wouldn't want it any lighter), tongue and grooved, so that all we have to do is lay it out and nail it down. Here's a couple of pictures from last week when it was being put down upstairs. We are now working on the downstairs, and it goes down really easily. There have been some that we had to cull due to defects, but not many, and we can still use them up against the wall.



And the fireplace! Oh, I love it! I don't mean that bragging at all--I have nothing to brag about--I'm so proud of the work my husband is doing on this house. This fireplace took forever, but it's the centerpiece of the house. And if it works as well as the one we had at our old home, it should save us a lot on heating bills. I may have already explained this, but I don't remember.....anyway, it doesn't work like a regular fireplace. You build a fire, which warms up the bricks. After the fire goes out, that heat continues to radiate out. There are channels inside it, and it continues to warm the home for hours after the fire is out. And it just feels wonderful to lean against come morning time! He installed a bake oven in this one--I hope I can figure out how to use it well! We got our hearth from a local business--it's granite and has a beautiful marbled mix of several colors.




Well, that really sums up the past six months. In between these pictures have been hours and hours of building and researching and making trips to town for more supplies to keep on building, and hopefully it won't be long till the whole thing will be done! I'll try to do better about posting, too, till then!