The O-Zone

It’s been a long six months working on house renovations for both aesthetic and practical and necessary changes, besides the present to ourselves which consisted of a stairway to the creek.

The last major project for our contractors was to replace the shower in the bathroom. The actual shower itself was the first piece of our puzzle we purchased, and the last to be installed.

Before we could make the change to the larger shower, we had to remove the water heater and closet. Before we could remove the water heater and closet we needed to get an on-demand water heater, and before we could install the on-demand water heater we needed to have propane pipes and a tank installed at the house. We did that when we were working on the kitchen renovation so that we could install the gas range. The whole renovation has been like that.

The incomplete bathroom renovation which at this point just had a new bathroom vanity, sink and faucet.

The electric water heater was in a built-in closet with shelves next to the shower, so all of that had to be removed down to studs. The water pipes and drain had to be relocated for the new shower, and concrete boards had to be installed. I’m sure everybody will be shocked to know that the walls were not square or level which added some additional entertainment to the process.

Four days, and many steps later the shower was done, the toilet was moved to center it in the space between the vanity cabinet and shower, and the flooring was replaced, as well as a new medicine cabinet hung and towel rods and toilet paper holder were hung. Sheetrock repairs required a lot of extra work but now the walls and ceiling are ready for paint. That will be our project for this week.  Our project!! We will get to do this part at our convenience. Yay!!

We had to grout the tile in the shower and will need to seal it when the grout is completely cured.

The flooring extends from the bathroom into the hallway and utility/laundry area between the kitchen and our bedroom.

The whole room feels way more spacious and efficient, highly useful characteristics for a small room in a small house.

Once the painting in both the bathroom and hallway is completed we will install the new light fixtures. Then we can turn our attention to painting the living room and kitchen. So we still have a lot of work to do but it will be quiet work that we can do ourselves.

Happy cat in a sunbeam on top of a pillow in a quiet house. He won’t be doing any work. He’s a supervisor only. Or king. Depends on who you ask.

The house is still a total mess with moving things around in order to facilitate the recent changes we made. Now when we put things back and get everything cleaned up and organized it will get to stay that way.

View from the living room window looking east in the evening as the sun is getting lower in the sky.

It’s kind of amazing how much the colors change on the trees and mountain and grass, depending on the height of the sun.

The pile of tree pieces in the picture above is going away at the moment. The guys are cutting it up, splitting it and hauling the pieces away. Next year it will be truly excellent firewood. It is going to take them quite a few pickup truck trips but soon the two trees will be gone.

Another view out the same window of our resident flock of Wild Turkeys. The flock consists of several hens and their chicks from this spring. These are big birds.

The turkeys congregate around this side of the house and then one by one they fly up into the trees by the creek to roost for the night. There must be some sort of order to who goes first and who goes last; we just haven’t figured it out yet. It’s fun watching them do this every evening and even more fun watching them all bailing out of the trees in the morning.

This morning one of the youngsters landed inside the garden fence and couldn’t figure out how to get back out again until I went out to open the garden gate to provide him with a really good reason to use the same wings he used to get into the garden in the first place. Silly bird.

The exterior painting is almost done.

Still some boxes to pick up in the yard, and this fall there will be flowering bulbs to be planted around the house.

It looks so different! We may have to put up gutters but that can wait a bit until more dust settles.

Mishkin snuggled up on top of the blanket. He is inside of it when the contractors are in the house.

We pulled the video cards from both trail cameras this week. One camera captured a really dramatic picture of some leaves in the middle of the night. It was thrilling. I was hoping for a mountain lion, or a squirrel…

The other trail cam captured this:

Another deadly predator… if you are a tulip. There were also some other pictures of deer ears as they walked up the trail next to the trail cam.

So we cleared both cards, re-positioned the camera that saw leaves, and will try to remember to fix the date and time stamps on both trail cams the next time we collect the cards. Still, the concept is proven.

Yay! Mishkin doesn’t think it has been fun living inside a drum. He didn’t appreciate the nail gun at all. Neither did we but we love the results.

Picture of the house prior to any changes.

We really hated the steel roofing. It was a hazard to navigation with snow sliding off the roof in line with the front door.

New roof, windows, doors, and siding, plus other issues that aren’t visible were all addressed.

For one thing, there is a propane tank sitting next to the house! I love the gas range and in October we will have a stand alone propane backup generator which can run the entire house. Considering how often the power goes off around here for hours at a time, this is pretty much a necessity.

Front porch. The pine ceiling over the porch has been completed.

Looking the other direction on the front porch.

The stain we are going to use on the pine boards will give it a nice warm color.

We’ll end up painting the porch deck boards, but probably not this year. They are going to start painting the exterior today which will make the cat happy. Oro doesn’t really care about the noise but he doesn’t like people walking past his window so we will move his cage into the kitchen.

Painting is a quiet activity, except for the leaf blower they are using at the moment to blow dust off the siding which is there as a result of sawing the boards to length.

Progress!!!

I should post some pictures. This is why I haven’t done anything.

This has been a rough last month. We had a tragedy in our tiny family. On Saturday July 24th our much loved macaw died. It was a horrible experience. She is buried in our garden where she will be safe from predators. I still cry a lot whenever I think about her. Now there are only four of us.

She was only 34 years old, a totally sweet personality full of joy and mischief. Wings was her only trick and she loved to show them off whenever we asked. Here she is on the island in our house up on White Mountain. She loved that island; it was a great place to play and keep an eye on whatever I was doing.

Things with the house renovation have continued albeit extremely slowly. The two mini-split heat pumps have been installed and are both now functional. That was an adventure in and of itself. Now that they are functional we love the convenience and how quietly they maintain a nice cool (or warm if we choose that option) temperature in the house. We can ignore over 100 degrees outside though I think we may be past that nonsense. No temperatures that hot are predicted for the rest of August and it would be beyond bizarre to see those temperatures in September. So… yay!

The windows arrived finally (the doors arrived last month and were waiting for the windows to arrive), and the contractors stripped the siding off the house and installed both the doors and windows.

View of the mountain to the east of us. This window in particular was badly in need of replacement as the seal was gone on the double-pane and it was always fogged up.

Window next to the couch where we can see the hummingbird feeder and look out towards the garden.

Vast improvement to not have to look through bars in the windows anymore. We have ordered blinds and will need to paint the walls prior to installing them. They won’t be here until the middle of September so we have time to accomplish that task. The windows have an issue; the manufacturer sent them to us without screens and at the moment we have no estimate as to when the screens might arrive. So we are having two custom screens made in Colville for our bedroom windows, and will see if they fit. If they do we will get screens made for the other five windows and tell Home Depot to cancel the screens and give us a refund sufficient to cover the cost of the screens. They already said they would do that.

The two exterior doors looked like this, no deadbolt and they didn’t fit all that well so they were not energy efficient and insects had free access.

This is the new front door which now opens into the kitchen side of the main living area. It will make it easy to set grocery bags directly onto the kitchen counter. It has a mini-blind inside the glass and opens and closes so nicely! Plus, no gaps for air or bugs.

Our contractor wants the old doors and windows so that’s excellent – they will be reused and not merely disposed of in a landfill.

So next they are putting tongue and grove pine on the ceiling of the porch. There are two large porches, front and back, so this is going to take a couple of days to be completed. The hardest part is next to the log support for the roof as they aren’t straight and are curved in addition to being wavy to some degree.

We will stain this a cedar color.

It will also make it harder for wasps to make nests. This would be a good thing!

Once the porch ceilings are complete they can stain the pine boards and start replacing the siding.

There is quite a bit of preparation they need to do first, like frame the windows, build and install attic vents on both gable ends, and trim boards on the corners, before they can actually install siding. After the siding is complete they can paint the exterior of the house. We did our part, buying the paint and stain.

Hopefully by the end of next week all the exterior painting will be done which means all the exterior work is finished. I’m totally dreaming but it could happen. All this exterior work will make the house way more energy efficient for heating and cooling and eliminate pests as they won’t be able to gain access to the crawl space or attic, or walls, we should be maintenance free for the next at least 20 years.

We see a light at the end of the tunnel. Might be a train….

This week the stairs project was completed. Yay!

Looking up at the stairs from our chairs by the creek, it looks like a long way to climb.

Can’t even see all the landings from this angle.

From upstream a bit, it’s easier to see the entire stairway.

There are four landings separating the individual sets of stairs. The middle one is large enough for a bench or small table and chairs, and will be a great place for spring bird watching.

Comfortable chairs sit next to a couple of large cedar trees, and have a view of the creek.

The chairs are in a very shady spot, and also catches the breeze which flows with the water.

We did some qiqong exercises by the creek for the first time this week. It was extremely relaxing. Here’s a link to the movie I made this week.

View of the creek from our chairs location.

So now we can start the next projects. We have two exterior doors sitting on the front porch, along with two mini-split heat pumps which will provide us with a more efficient and much quieter air conditioning for the house. One is for the main living area and one is for the bedroom, giving us the option to have the two spaces at different heating/cooling levels.

We just found out the windows should be available for delivery next week, probably very late in the week, from Home Depot. So that’s convenient! Hopefully the bathroom remodel will be done by the time the windows get here and our contractor friends and dive right into the exterior of the house.

Getting much closer to being finished with the work we have planned, at least in our heads if not in actual point of fact.

And in October we will have a stand-by propane generator installed which will be strong enough to run the entire house during extensive power outages, which have been known to happen around here. The longest one recently was a few years ago; the power was out for eight days because this end of the county is at the end of the road, so to speak.

On Sunday we went to our favorite fruit stand and bought some pie cherries, peaches and apricots.

First I made a cherry pie.

Then I made peach butter and apricot jam.

The cherry pie is all gone and the preserves will last a bit. It’s amazing how much fruit goes into filling six jam jars.

The stairs project still isn’t completed. Looking at it yesterday, most likely it will be another two days of work to finish.

The stairs project is not finished yet but should be done by the end of next week. The stairs are going to be quite the workout for our legs and heart and lungs. Not down so much, but going up is a really good exercise. Fortunately the creek bottom is such a cool place to be both literally and figuratively that we are going to spend quite a bit of time down by the creek.

They have to build another small platform and a shorter run of stairs, and the add hand rails and pickets under the hand rails. A whole lot of pickets.

From the top of the stairs, looking down to the first landing.

Hand rails are installed on this first section which makes this by far the most comfortable part of the stairs to navigate up or down.

From the first landing looking down to the second and largest platform.

There is enough room on the second platform for us to have a couple of chairs. It is a really good spot for bird watching because you can see the top of the trees where they like to hang out.

And looking down from the third landing to the fourth and final landing which will be much smaller than the ones above it.

Where the stairs end at this point is about two feet above the ground closest to the base of the stairs, and almost five feet at the end of the boards which are being used to locate where to install the next set of posts. The ground under the boards is very slick and steep with loose rocks. There is a climbing rope tied to the tree to the right of the stairs, but we were able to get down without resorting to using the rope, just by hanging onto the boards.

This view shows most of the stairs from the side. Dan had to be careful going under the boards at the bottom of the stairs; I just had to duck a little bit.

There are a lot of downed branches plus some small trees which had to be removed to make way for the stairs. We saw that the climate changes have killed off the majority of the Paper Birch which used to inhabit the creek drainage. Too bad. Those are such pretty trees.

There is an old abandoned road at the bottom of the slope which makes for easy walking up and down the creek.

Most of the trees are cedars. This really shows the ground which is a deep bed of needles.

I made a couple of movies, and I figured out how to put in links.

This link shows the creek itself.

And this shows the pool.

Spinning yarn.

This last week I finally started working on a yarn project. It was something to do while it was so hot outside, though the air conditioning and ceiling fan did conspire to blow a bit of very fine fibers all over the living room.

Forecast for today is to cool down a couple of degrees.

Wow, all the way down to 112!!

Watching the thermometer is a new hobby. Yesterday was the hottest temperature we’ve ever seen. It’s been going up 3 degrees each day. 105, 108, 111. I hope the trend doesn’t continue for today!!

Right about 5pm is when this picture was taken. At 10pm it had cooled all the way down to 80 degrees.

Today and tomorrow are supposed to be the hottest days and then it will cool down gradually. Monday it is forecast to be 99 degrees. Might have to break out the down coats.

Good thing we have air conditioning!

Yesterday was the highest temperature on our outdoor thermometer that we’ve ever seen living in this county for almost 13 years, all told. And it was supposed to be the coolest day we’ll see for the next six days.

Hmmmm.

This morning it hasn’t heated up outside as quickly as it did yesterday, so perhaps we’ll see a bit of moderation.