Eco Teat

As many stories as there are bricks

2007-08-16T20:41:00.000-04:00

Last week we participated in a fund-raiser for the local library--we opened our house to the public as part of their annual kitchen tour. Talking with the 300 guests that meandered from the front hall, to the dining room (wast parlor), through the kitchen (keeping room), and out to the garden reminded me of all the wonderful stories this house holds. I found myself telling the story of how we ended up with the kitchen sink* several times. We talked about when lightning struck the house several decades ago when is stood in Wilmington. The story of how we even know that story is interesting too. (I'll tell those some other time.) I know there are a handful of people who are interested in these and other tales, and I would like to document them. Since there isn't much to write about regarding the house's current status, I'll start trying to post some stories of its past, starting with the kitchen sink.

When we lived in Massachusetts, we had purchased a sink from a salvage yard for $100 with the intention of using it in the house, which was in about a zillion pieces and packed in a 40-foot trailer at the time. It is a beautiful apron-front sink with a tall backsplash that would look lovely in our country kitchen. A while later I was driving home from the store in the rain with a brand-new dolly in the back of the pickup. I spotted a big old white kitchen sink on the curb with someone's trash. I drove past it, thinking that we recently bought a kitchen sink and I had no use for a second one. But it looked like too nice of a sink to pass up, so as I was turning around I decided we could use another sink for the basement. It's a good thing I had a new dolly in the truck because I don't think I could have gotten this huge, wet, slippery, cast-iron double sink into my truck without it.

Both heavy, bulky sinks were stored, waiting to be given a new life in our new house. When it came time to do the final measurements and layout of the kitchen before having the countertop made and installed, we realized we had made a pretty major oversight in the placement of the kitchen windows that made installation of the salvage-yard apron sink impossible. Luckily, we had that spare sink in the basement! The curbside cast-off worked perfectly in the kitchen and is still one of my favorite details of the space. The apron sink has worked well as a utility sink. It's really too beautiful for a utility sink, but I suppose drying paintbrushes and the washing machine drain are as entitiled to a nice sink as our dishes and pans are.

Spring is in the air

2007-03-13T09:57:00.000-04:00

A few people have asked about this blog and if I'm ever going to update it again. I've mentioned before that ecoteat is about our home, not us, and when the home took a back burner to Phoebe, the website took a rest, too.

But now spring is upon us and Phoebe is becoming slightly more independent and there will be some activity around the house again. We did build a colonial-style raised-bed garden last fall. It started like this in late August:
Damian and Kenny are framing the fence. A few weeks later it looked like this:

In October, we made row covers so we could grow greens in the fall.

In December, there was spinach to harvest under the snow:

Now, the plants that froze during the coldest of winter are coming back to life and putting out new growth. Hopefully we'll have some baby spinach in a few weeks.

August ramblings

2006-08-23T05:17:00.000-04:00

Still not much happening with the house. Damian has been getting some work done on the fence when he has time, but it's challenging when I'm attached at the hip to the baby and he has to pick up the slack for what I don't have as much time to do around the house as I used to.

This time last year I was posting pictures of our beautiful harvest and making lots of pasta sauce (which I couldn't eat beacuse for some strange reason it tasted metallic and yucky in the early days of pregnancy). Since we were a bit preoccupied this spring with birth and a newborn, we didn't get much of a garden planted. Luckily, though, we can count on nature to grow something good for us to gather and eat. There are lots of ripe blackberries growing along the edges of our road. There are raspberries and blueberries, too, but we were a little late in picking those. We will be harvesting the garlic we planted last fall and we should have a fair amount of potatoes if the weeds didn't just suck all the nutrients out of the soil!

I love this time of year in Maine. The light is starting to change, there is lots of fresh food to eat, and school is about to start.

What are we doing here?

2006-07-03T04:58:00.000-04:00

Wow, so um, we have some catching up to do!

When I made this website it was for the purpose of sharing and documenting our house adventure. Moving, rebuilding, and restoring an 18th century house is fascinating work and it needed to be shared. But now that the house is finished, does that mean Ecoteat is too? We've done some work outside the house; should I share that here? Our family has grown, but this isn't a blog about us, so I don't write about our perfeect little baby girl.

I suppose I'll tell you a little of what we have going on with the house and gardens. This spring we planted an orchard of heirloom apples. Many varieties are as old as the house. Hopefully, in a few years (if the abundant deer don't foil our plans), we'll have an assortment of unusual and delicious apples. We are also working on creating raised-bed gardens. We have been using some historic garden plans for inspiration. The garden will be directly behind the house, under the kitchen windows. It will have a fence like this one in Strawbery Banke:

This week we hired a neighbor with a tractor to help move some clay around to level the area the garden will be in. The lumber is stacked and waiting to be made into beds and a fence. It has been pretty slow going with all the rain New England has had these past couple months. Maybe I'll document the garden-building here, but with my recent posting trends, I'm not making any promises!

Happy Birthday to me

2006-03-11T21:32:00.000-05:00

Today I turned 30. The best part of my birthday festivities was our long hike through our woods on a beautiful, sunny, relatively warm day. It's been a long time since I've explored our 80ish acres, and there are some truly stunning little places. I should have brought my camera, but I guess lugging around a 7 month old fetus was enough. A few highlights:

An enormous pine tree on the edge of a large clearing that towers over all the other trees around it. The wind was howling through the branches and the noise it made was quite impressive.
A high spot on top of what may be a glacial outcropping that was used as part of an old stone wall where you can see up the stream in one direction and where it flows into the coastal estuary in the other direction.
A little collection of small boulders that create something like a peninsula poking into the stream. The rocks are covered with a thick blanket of moss with a spruce canoy overhead. If there were fairies around, I'm sure they'd want to hang out here.

It was fun to imagine what it will be like with a child playing in these woods. Later this evening we had some friends and family over for pizza and birthday cake. There were two little kids here, aged 2 and 6, and it was just as interesting to imagine our child playing in this house. I think part of the reason I'm enjoying being pregnant so much is that I know this house and land are perfect for our new little family. We are creating a place for this baby that has so many of the things I loved or wished for when I was little.

Fooled you?

2006-02-06T20:58:00.000-05:00

Raise your hand if you thought we were really painting the floor pink. Go ahead, no one will laugh. In hindsight, my last post was a little vague. Nowhere in it did I mention that we were actually painting the floor red, not pink. Nor did I mention that the color we chose is fairly close to the original. Or that the color we chose has a cool name (because I love paint color names): Mars Red. Behold. . .

Once the paint is dry and the furniture is back in place, I'll post pictures of the finished (I mean it this time. I think.) living room.

Pink floor

2006-02-04T20:27:00.000-05:00

So here it is:

The living room floor is primed. I can't stop looking at it; after stumbling on splinters and cracks for so long, it is wonderful that it is so smooth and uniform. The width of the old boards really stands out now. Tomorrow comes the paint! Yippee!

Making the living room baby-friendly

2006-02-04T17:05:00.000-05:00

Damian and Kenny spent yesterday and today transforming the living room floor from a splintery, wobbly mess to a smooth floor that a little person could scootch across without injury. So far, this involved many hours of sanding, gluing, screwing, puttying, more sanding, vaccuuming, and mopping, which left it looking like this:

(Notice how my belly doesn't really fit into my sweater anymore!)

Now every surface in the house if covered in nasty dust from sanding 286-year-old floorboards with (extremely worn and faded and, sadly, not salvagable) original red paint. And Damian and Kenny are priming the floor with pink-tinted oil primer as I type this. Pink floor pictures are forthcoming!

Christmas

2005-12-25T16:30:00.000-05:00

Well, it's Christmas and I am sick. Damian went for a walk because it's no fun to be hanging out with a sick person all day, even if it is Christmas.

In other news, it has been another long time since I've posted anything, which doesn't mean that nothing has happened. The half bath downstairs is now fully finctional and painted and looks wonderful. We don't have the chair rail up, and we don't know when that will happen, but it is finished enough for now.

The most impressive progress is the fitting installation of the storm windows. They are interior storms that pop into the window opening from inside. Since we have plank-framed windows (I'd post a link to explain what that means, but I can't find a good one), the window sills are really deep, even with an extra inch taken up by the storm window frames. They aren't painted yet, but they are installed and have cut down the amount of wood we burn significantly. This house has turned out to me much more energy-efficient that we expected. We haven't even turned on the oil-powered radiant heat at all yet this year. With the south-facing large windows, good insulation, and these storm windows, it is pretty comfortable this winter so far.

Thanksgiving

2005-11-25T11:58:00.000-05:00

We didn't have Thanksgiving dinner at our house because for as long as we've been living in New England we go to Damian's cousins' right down the road. This year more of Damian's family came up for the week and stayed with us. Being the lovely hosts that we are, we had a pre-Thanksgiving dinner, all cooked in the big dining room hearth.

If you have never eaten a chicken roasted on an open fire, you need to. We use a tin kitchen in the hearth for roasting chickens and it makes the most delicious bird. The history and layout of the house made a lot of decisions for us when we were rebuilding it and I am very thankful that one of the choices that really seemed beyond our control was how the fireplaces would be reconstructed. Our hearths really are the heart of this house. There is something incredibly satisfying about using the heat that is already there to keep you warm to also cook your food. Cooking on the woodstove in the kitchen is just as pleasant and almost as delicious as cooking on an open fire.

Paint, paint, and more paint

2005-11-16T19:37:00.000-05:00

Kenny's been staying with us again for a while. This is great because we like having him around, but also because he and Damian get a tremendous amount of work done together. The entire first floor is done. Finished. All the paint is on the walls. The only exception there is the half bath, which is a project. Upstairs, the guest room and the baby's room (have I mentioned here that we're having a baby in May?) are completely painted. The old splotchy whitewash on the beams in the bathroom was scrubbed off today and they look much prettier. The plaster in there needs painted, as does our bedroom, but other than that the only thing left upstairs is some finish carpentry in the back staircase.

I am keeping track of all the paint colors here, mostly for myself to refer to later. The plaster walls and ceilings that were painted whitish upstairs and down has Benjamin Moore Bone White. The plaster walls in the dining room are called Maize, from The Seraph (the paint wasn't, but the color is theirs). The inside of the side exterior door is red. I can picture the can, but I can't remember the brand of the paint and I'm not going to look for it.

Adios

2005-11-03T21:22:00.000-05:00

This morning when I drove to school, I passed the big trailer in our front yard that the house parts came in like I have done every day since we moved here. When I came home it was gone! And there was a check on the fridge for it! Unfortunately, it was already dark when I came home, so I don't really know what it looks like to look out the north windows and not see a 40-foot slab of aluminum and tires instead of the forest that has been hiding behind it.

Eye candy

2005-11-01T19:34:00.001-05:00

I keep describing all this beautiful work that Damian's been doing, but with no pictures. So with a quiet evening to myself, I've taken a few more pictures and uploaded the ones that have been sitting in the camera for too long. Here's the staircase progress.
Before (picture taken one year ago):

After:

Also, the half-bath vanity is coming along nicely. We can't take credit for that, but it's still pretty, so here's a picture:

Progress

2005-10-30T09:37:00.000-05:00

Today Damian got a little bit closer to finishing the front staircase. He has spent the past week or so sanding, stripping, scrubbing, staining, and painting the stairs and surrounding walls. Previously we thought that there was so much paint and gunk on them that we'd end up just cleaning them and painting them. Now, they are a beautiful, golden wood, which looks wonderful against the mossy green on the walls that we weren't so sure about when we painted them a while ago.

In other good news, the vanity in the half bath is almost completely installed. The door isn't on yet and the faucet isn't installed, but the cabinet, countertop, and sink are in place. It looks wonderful.

It was a perfect, gorgeous day outside, so we did as much work outside in the 60 degree sunshine as we could. I planted 69 garlic cloves and 68 tulip bulbs and moved dozens of orchids from the cabin to the house while Damian cleaned out the trailer that all the pieces of the house were shipped to Maine in. He have been using it for storage for the past year, but yesterday we sold it, finally. It will be such a relief to get that eyesore out of the front yard.

Wood cooking and house updates

2005-10-16T19:49:00.000-04:00

Today I baked bread for the first time in our wood-fired cookstove. I immediately regretted not making 2 or 3 loaves. There's always next time, I guess. I was inspired by Anna, who showed a group of friends some recipes and tips for cooking on a woodstove yesterday at the Good Life Center. While today's bread was baking, Damian was tending the big pot of applesauce on top of the stove made from apples we bought at the Common Ground Fair last month.

This week I was too busy with school to contribute much to the house's progress, but Damian has been diligently stripping and sanding the front staircase, which looks more gorgeous each day. When it's a little further along I post pictures. We've made some color decisions today for both staircases and agreed last week that we would paint the plaster in the bathroom marbley, cloudy blue.

Tomorrow evening our 1/2 bath vanity should (finally!) be installed. I am quite anxious to get that bathroom finished and functional. Right now I never use the toilet in there because it is the only room left in the house that feels completely unfinished. Once the vanity is in, Damian can install the chair rail and I can paint.

No, it didn't burn down or anything

2005-10-03T11:51:00.000-04:00

I guess things have been pretty noneventful if a whole month goes by between posts. So what did we do during the month of September?

Stacked 4 cord of firewood in the basement (with Kenny's help)
Yanked the rest of that nasty weedy grass from our infant lawn (with Kenny's help)
Scrubbed hundreds of years of gunk off the boards that make the walls in the back hallway (with Kenny's help)
Stripped most of the nasty old paint off the front staircase (with Kenny's help; are you noticing a trend here?)
Harvested obscene quantities of tomatoes, made gallons of pasta sauce, and filled every last crevice in the freezer with it
Slept a lot (no, that was just Amy)
Took care of our elderly neighbor and good friend as he was ill and then passed away
Enjoyed the amazing beauty of Maine in the fall and looked forward to it getting even better in October

There are a few new photos (click the photo link on the left). The progress we are making is noticeably less noticeable. I guess that is a good thing; that means we are spending more time living our life and less time building it.

Basement

2005-09-05T20:51:00.000-04:00

This weekend we were very busy working on the house, but not in the way where we end up with a finished room or a new light or something. When we "moved in" to the house just over a year ago, we only unpacked essentials. Over the year, we gradually dug up things we needed from the mountains of boxes in the basement. The end result of this method of "unpacking" is a mess of broken, half-empty cardboard boxes with no discernible organization strewn all over the basement. So yesterday we started really unpacking the stuff down there. Obviously, since we have lived without this stuff for over a year, it couldn't be that important, but we did find a few gems:

My olivewood peppermill that Damian's grandmother just replaced for me because I figured I'd never see it again.

Many old photos.

The "Do Not Disturb" sign from the hotel we stayed in when we visited Iceland a few years ago (I'd write it in Icelandic here, but there are letters to their alphabet I can't type on an American keyboard).

More purple wool fabric than I thought I had left from the bolt I bought for $1.00/yard 5-6 years ago.

Now a large section of the basement is CLEAN! And ready for firewood! Where we will keep it this winter so we don't have to go outside to get it every few days!

Also, on a completely unrelated note, I put the basket backpack on, rode my bike that I have finally been reunited with (it was still in Boston until very recently), visited my neglected garden this afternoon, filled the basket with veggies, and, well, see for yourself:

I will make tomato sauce this week to freeze it. I'm really looking forward to those tiny little eggplant. I don't know why they didn't grow any bigger, but they'll still be tasty (I hope). I'm also really looking forward to harvesting my pumpkins! They are beautiful.

Be our guest

2005-08-27T13:41:00.000-04:00

We are about to spend the weekend with our sixth house guests of the summer. We knew that once the house was hospitable, we would practically have to beat off visitors with a stick. (Not that this is a bad thing; in fact I really enjoy having people here.) It's a good thing people come to visit periodically because it gives us motivation to be a little more thorough in our cleaning. Each visitor gets to see the house more finished and comfortable than the visitors before them. The photos in the new Eco Teat Photos Volume 4 show off the rooms as the best they have looked yet.

Here, kitty, kitty

2005-08-23T17:10:00.000-04:00

Our little kitten Jerome is always trying to get outside. During the day, when we are home, this is fine. In fact it's really entertaining to watch him try to catch grasshoppers. But at dusk, we keep him safely indoors where predators like this

can't get to him. This bobcat was hanging out around the edge of the woods Sunday evening. Apparently he wanted to know if Jerome could come out and play, but we all know what he REALLY wanted to do with Jerome.

We are trying to keep the grass seed moist so it will grow and someday feed sheep, but with all these predators around (bobcats, coyotes, owl, bald eagles), I'm afraid the sheep will be feeding something else!

Grass

2005-08-22T21:39:00.000-04:00

This weekend I spread grass seed around the house for the lawn/pasture. Now that the inside of the house is almost done, it's harder to go on ignoring the dirt surrounding us. It was a cool, damp, foggy day - great for planting grass.

There is some type of grass coming up on its own. I don't know what it is, but it is growing pretty evenly over most of the area I seeded. I hope it doesn't compete too aggressively with the grass I planted.

Front staircase

2005-08-14T19:44:00.000-04:00

We are starting to tackle painting the front staircase. This is a bigger project than it sounds; the railings still have the dirt on them from sitting outside last summer. So I just scraped and scrubbed and puttied and sanded and primed the old wood walls.

Then we put the first coat of this color on the walls and we don't like it . . . to varying degrees, but we both want a change. So now we are scraping old paint again to find what was there before and being very indecisive about how to proceed. At least at this point most of it is prepped and primed, so when we do make up our minds we can just do it.

Step right up

2005-08-05T20:55:00.000-04:00

I just found out that it is easier for me to upload pictures to thie blog, so I'm trying it out, even if this post is boring.
This is a picture of the newly installed steps to the side door. The granite chunks were originally part of this house's foundation when it lived in MA. The little stone walls will hold dirt and flower beds someday.

Bristle Grass

2005-08-05T20:40:00.000-04:00

Here's another bit of progress. . . Last week we (OK, Damian) spent hours stripping the old paint off the paneled wall in the living room. We also painted the wainscot on the other three walls and all the trim this color:

It's called "Bristle Grass." I don't know why, but I am very amused by absurd paint color names. We can think of other less polite things this color reminds us of, but grass is not one of them. We picked this color out months ago and completely forgot what it looked like. When we brought the can up from the basement to start painting, it was a bit of a surprise! Anyway, it really looks great (it's actually quite different from the sample above once it's actually on the walls), especially with the wood paneling.

On another note, the kitchen and guest room floors did get done while we were away for a few days, and they look fantastic. Now the guest room is all put back together and looking beautiful just in time for my parents to arrive tomorrow. Yippee!

Lots of places to put my butt

2005-08-03T17:53:00.000-04:00

We just left an auction where we ended up with this sofa, two bannister-back chairs (#1 on the left and #2 on the right.) a wing-back chair (the multi-colored one), and a little fireplace tool. This means our living room is about to change dramatically. After all the trouble to went through moving the huge, faded, hand-me-down couch in there, it will be dragged out and replaced with a fine piece of early American furniture. Watch for pictures once we get the room rearranged.

Also, while we were bidding away, our kitchen and guest bedroom floors were being refinished (hopefully). I'm looking forward to seeing them on Friday when we get home.

What a hoot!

2005-07-18T22:55:00.000-04:00

For the past three nights, we have had some special visitors to our house. At dusk a group of owls starts swooping around the house and making a lot of noise. They are very large and very loud, making a high-pitched squealy call. They fly all around the expanse of newly spread dirt that will soon become the back yard. They perch in the few trees that we left standing in the clearing and call to each other. Yesterday I think there were about five of them, and they keep up this racket for 2-3 hours a night! It's really very impressive.

I can't figure out what species they are though. They don't have the feathery "horns" of a great horned owl, all the large owls I have read about have deep calls, and they are flying around in the open at dusk. They have me really confused. I did manage to get a recording of their call, so hopefully that will help me identify them. Since I only see them at dusk, I haven't gotten a good look at them, but I think the underside of their wings is white.

I hope they stick around. I'm a little honored that they think our home is a good place to hang out. We just have to make sure we keep Jerome in at dusk; a little white fluffy kitten on the ground seems like easy prey!

Green tub

2005-07-18T22:51:00.000-04:00

I've been working on the bathroom this weekend again. I painted the outside of the bathtub this color:

Brookside

The medicine cabinet is also this green, which goes beautifully with the trees in the tiled backsplash. It also looks good with the color of the beaded wainscot:

Langdon Dove

New pictures added

2005-06-17T14:34:00.000-04:00

It's mid June and we have finally gotten around to adding some updated pictures. The photos link is on the left side of this screen and will take you to ofoto.com. Enjoy.

Colors

2005-06-04T14:33:00.000-04:00

No one can say we have boring colors in this house. For example,

Georgian Yellow in the guest bedroom.

Cottage Green in the third bedroom.

Another Anniversary

2005-06-03T22:34:00.000-04:00

One year ago today we raised our house's frame. It was a damp, cool day when we had about eight people and a crane working quickly to get the huge timbers pieced together. This was the day we discovered the wonderful view of the woods and beyond from what would become our second-floor and attic windows.

Today the guest bedroom's first coat of yellow was painted, as was more of the red back upstairs hallway.

I'm too exhausted to be more descriptive; I just got back this evening from chaperoning the eighth graders' three-day class trip to Boston. Good thing I have the weekend to recover before jumping into the last two weeks of school.

After midnight

2005-05-16T20:34:00.000-04:00

The best way I can describe the color of the dining room is Crayola Midnight Blue. There's this great B&B in Portsmouth, NH, that has a dining room this color that we really love. Last time we stopped in to say hello, we mentioned that we were thinking about using that color and the owner said in her European accent "I'm repainting. Here." as she scraped a big flake off with a putty knife and handed it to us.

Happy Anniversary!

2005-05-15T21:06:00.000-04:00

One year ago today Damian left Boston and moved to Maine for good. The remaining weeks of May 2004 included much cold rain and wood-replacement epoxy for him and much gardening and packing for me; I was still in Boston.

Now, one year later, the house is nearly finished. This weekend we painted the first coat of the dining room's midnight blue woodwork and it looks beautiful, like an old colonial room should. All that really remains is cleaning and painting! (And a little more carpentry in the back staircase.)

Pictures are on the way. Check back soon!

Something big has been here

2005-05-02T17:17:00.000-04:00

The Home Stretch

2005-04-27T12:46:00.000-04:00

Wow, it's been a while since I posted. I keep thinking, "I'll post pictures of that. . . No, I'll wait until it's finished (it's almost there!) so the pictures will be nicer!" As a result, there are no recent pictures yet because everything is this close to being finished.

But for an update:

Last week was school vacation week, so I personally was able to get a lot more done. I had to rewire a few things because of changes/mistakes that were made. I tiled the backsplash in the kitchen (which is lovely). All, and yes I mean ALL, of the sheetrocking is done! There are a few walls that will be made of wide pine boards that aren't up yet, but nearly all the trim is finished. Starting Sunday, the rest of the plastering will be completed, and that will leave just the painting.

Smooth and white

2005-03-29T18:37:00.000-05:00

Over a week ago we plastered most of two of the bedrooms, along with the front hallway. It looks amazing. Sleeping in a freshly plastered room, one that we have been sleeping in for months, is like visiting some new, strange place. Everything sounds different and the sunlight shining through the wavy glass in the windows makes new shapes and shadows on these smooth, white walls. Furniture looks completely different in front of the new plaster, too.

There are some new pictures up, so go look. If you run into any trouble let me know; the photo album service just restructured and I think some of my stuff got bonked around.

Also newsworthy is the back staircase, which is nearing completion. So is the trim around windows, doors, ceilings, and the baseboards. One month to go. . .

Getting plastered

2005-03-17T21:43:00.000-05:00

This week has been a frantic rush to prepare for the plastering that will be going on this weekend. Sheetrock is going up (slowly, of course, because this house is so weird), rooms are having their window trim completed, and the back staircase is starting to look like something beautiful.

I'd show you pictures, but the camera's battery just died. With no warning. Ugh.

So tomorrow is the start of a nutty weekend. Two of our masons/friends will show up, one with his sister the expert plasterer in tow. We'll all go out Friday night for some fun and good music (compliments of Damian's band) and then back to work all weekend. I am SO looking forward to looking at smooth, clean walls instead of the framing and blue-green polyurethane foam that has passed as walls for the past 7-8 months. This will be an eventful few days for the house. I'll try to get batteries soon so I can document this craziness.

The elves have been busy

2005-03-03T13:58:00.000-05:00

It sometimes seems like there isn't much happening, when, in fact, a lot of things are quietly getting done while I'm at school.

Yesterday when I came home, I ran upstairs to use the bathroom, flung the door open, and noticed a sign on it reading "tread lightly." So I flick my shoes off into the hall as I go in to an empty bathroom with a freshly sanded floor. This floor has been so troublesome; the old, wide oak boards shrunk much more than we expected once the in-floor heat was turned on, leaving us with large (sometimes 3/4 inch!) gaps between them. After filling the gaps with strips of wood the floor squeaks in spots and was pretty irregular. But now it has been sanded down and holes have been puttied. When I get home today I won't be able to go in there because the first coat of whatever is going on there will still be wet. Good thing the 1/2 bath toilet has been installed!

While Damian was working on the bathroom floor, elves or somebody (I never actually see the people who do these things) worked on the windows. It won't be long before all the windows have their trim up. Then we can plaster. Then we can paint. Then we'll be just about done. Which is good, because we have just under two months to finish.

Home sweet home

2005-02-26T18:42:00.000-05:00

We just returned home Thursday evening after four days visiting family in Pennsylvania. It was wonderful to see everyone that I managed to pack into a busy vacation. There are a few things I regret not getting around to (lunch with Amy, seeing the new Children's Zoo, eating at Taco Bell), but it was a happy, productive trip.

I got to see most of my cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents on both sides of my family (and Damian's cousins, too) which is always fun. It's amazing how much the kids change when a year goes by between visits! I was also able to spend time with my parents, my sister, and my adorable nephew.

Today we spent the morning organizing the huge van-load of things Damian dug up from his childhood and brought back to Maine. This meant rearranging everything that was already in the basement and cleaning up all the sawdust to make room for boxes and boxes of stuff. This also meant setting up one of the drum sets in the attic. Great.

The whole process of sorting through these things while still in Erie was interesting. There were a lot of things that were fun to discover, but weren't worth keeping another decade or more, so off they went to the great basement in the sky.

I wonder what things we'll find 20 years from now that will stir up memories of today?

Winter wonderland

2005-02-13T21:08:00.000-05:00

This summer and fall, when people heard we had moved up here for good, they would say things like "But have you ever been here in the WINTER?" with the assumption that once we have seen what it is like up here, we would wish we were somewhere else, somewhere that doesn't have the snow, ice, and isolation that comes with coastal Maine winter.

So here we are, well into winter, and absolutely loving it. Yes, there are fewer things to do this time of year, many stores and restaurants are closed until the summer people return, and it's often too cold to want to leave the house, but these things are really quite enjoyable.

Today I saw a wonderful string quartet from NYC perform for free in Blue Hill. My drive to the concert was spectacular; there is such amazing natural beauty in my surroundings, especially right after the blizzard we just had (that closed school for two days), that it can be overwhelming.

Ugh.

2005-02-09T17:35:00.000-05:00

I thought I had it all figured out how to get around ofoto's advertising, but my plan doesn't always work.

SO... Here's what you have to do to see the ofoto slideshows: When you get to the screen with all the little pictures, instead of clicking on one you want ot see larger (which will take you to an annoying ad), click on "Slideshow" in the margin. That should do it.

This makes me want to move all the pictures to Flickr, but it's probably not worth the trouble.

Shameless advertising

2005-02-03T20:36:00.000-05:00

If you are here to look at pictures, you may notice ofoto's new and annoying sale on prints. This makes it look like you can't see the slideshow, but don't despair. After clicking on a photo to see it larger and then discovering you have been directed to a big ad, just go back a page and the slideshow will appear.

Speaking of pictures, there will be new ones soon of the painted bookcases in the upstairs back hall and the first trimmed-out window in our future bedroom. With less than three months to go before our goal for finishing (Damian's birthday), we need to kick ourselves back into high gear!

I have taken away the comments feature. No one was really using it. If you know us and have something to say, you know where to find us. If anyone ever reads this that doesn't know us (which I doubt) and wants to get in touch, there's a new email link on the left.

From The Island

2005-01-30T19:33:00.000-05:00

Friday night, as part of our big date, we went to Home Depot to buy the insulation we need to keep the heat in the first floor and not in the basement. After loading up one of those huge carts with many rolls of insulation, we were waiting behind and chatting with a friendly man and his teenage daughter. Once outside, they were loading up their minivan and we were strugging with the realization that all of this insulation was NOT going to fit inside the Volvo. As I'm fidgeting with a strap to try to figure out how to get all these bundles attached to the car, the teenage girl runs over to ask where we are headed. When I tell her, she says, "Oh! We're going to The Island! We can take some of that for you!" So we load some into their minivan and they follow us to the gas station and then home. We invited them in to look around and chat some more and they were such nice people.

It's funny that in every other place we have lived this type of generosity and friendliness is unusual. Here it is the norm. It's so good to be here.

Anyway, the insulation is now installed, after many itchy hours. The house feels warmer, but that's surely due to the fact that the average outside temperature has risen a few dozen degrees--to 20.

After those itchy hours and thorough showers, we used the bake oven in out dining room hearth for the first time. After building a fire in the beehive oven and keeping it burning for a few hours to get the bricks hot, Damian swept the fire out of the oven. Then we put a pizza made with thin homemade crust into the empty and very hot oven for three minutes. Out came the most wonderful pizza I have ever eaten in my own house--maybe anywhere. Cooking with wood fire is very satisfying and enjoyable.

That's better

2005-01-27T12:51:00.000-05:00

I came home yesterday to see the baby blue covered with something very much like the color I really wanted. My newly painted cabinets look beautiful. I'll post pictures soon.

Baby blue?

2005-01-26T13:07:00.000-05:00

This is the color I think I would like to paint my kitchen cabinets. But Damian, being very thoughtful and motivated, went out and bought something like this color and painted some of the kitchen. It's nice to see something other than streaky primer, but baby blue isn't quite what I had in mind, either!

Facelift

2005-01-21T22:01:00.000-05:00

You probably can't even tell, but I just spent some time tinkering with the formatting of this blog. It has gone through many changes (including one version someone called too Victorian) and ended up very similar to the version I started with. All is not lost, though; I love doing this kind of stuff.

Two steps back

2005-01-20T20:12:00.000-05:00

The lumber for the window trim and chairrails that we have been waiting for for many weeks finally arrived today. We moved carefully "celloed" (as the guy who milled the lumber calls wrapping in plastic) bundles of beautiful wood through the window into the space that will someday become our bedroom. We looked at the pieces and Damian realized that one bunch of them was milled completely wrong. We sent the bundles back out the window to the guy's truck. He was very nice and understanding and quickly offered a solution. Phew. But now we have to wait even longer for the windows to be finished!

You know it's time . . .

2005-01-17T22:45:00.000-05:00

You know it's time to get the window trim up so the walls can be plastered and the heat installed in the bedrooms when you wear long underwear under your flannel jammies. And then get in a fleece sleeping bag under flannel sheets, a down comforter, and a wool quilt.

You know it's time to finally put the snow tires on your Volvo when you get stuck in your own driveway.

You know it's time to rearrange your classroom when the sight of it makes you want to crawl under your desk.

You know it's time to remember to call Sears to get those little feet for the front of the washer when it thumps and rattles and tries to wobble across the floor.

You know it's time to call your grandmother when those pizelles you didn't get to have at Christmas arrive (finally!) in the mail.

You know it's time to go to sleep when you've been planning lessons and grading papers for 3.5 hours and it's 10:30. On a school night.

Welcome back

2005-01-13T21:13:00.000-05:00

Sorry it's been SO long since I've posted. In the past month or so, a lot of little things have happened around here, including (but not limited to):

Finishing the guest room and upstairs hall floor
Tiling the bathroom vanity
Installing the medicine cabinet (a $25 antique store find!)
Priming a lot of walls
Enjoying the scenery
Visiting Boston and being guests of (instead of caretakers for) PB
Having a very quiet Christmas
Reflecting upon what an amazing year this has been. 12 months ago our house was in pieces in a trailer many miles away from where we were and we were spending all our time scraping and cutting the glass that is now in our windows.

I'll try to be better about updating those of you who actually visit this little site. Feel free to leave comments so I know you've been here if you like. Also, take a look at the new pictures in ofoto.

Toasty and tasty

2004-12-12T18:13:00.000-05:00

Yesterday we finished installing the tubing in the ceiling of the basement that provides heat to the floor above. What a luxury to have even heat throughout the first floor! We'll be able to install the baseboards upstairs after the walls are finished, but who knows when that will be?

Last week we cooked our first meal in the dining room hearth. We roasted a chicken in the antique tin kitchen that we bought ourselves for Christmas and baked potatoes in the embers. Chicken and potatoes have never, ever tasted so good.

From building to living

2004-11-30T20:18:00.000-05:00

I realized recently that there are lots of really interesting blogs that are fun to read. This is not one of them. But EcoTeat and the ofoto albums should be evolving, since we are spending much more time living in our house than building it. Getting a new digital camera helps, too. So look at our photo albums and visit this blog to see what's it's like for us to live in the Maine woods.

This weekend, in addition to enjoying the long holiday break (which involved lots of pie and seitan, a long drive Down East, and some peaceful resting time), we cut down our Christmas tree. Even though we have owned this land for four years, this is the first time we used a tree from it for Christmas. It is in the cabin right now, soaking in a bucket of water, waiting to be trimmed and brought into the house.

We also finished installing the in-floor heat tracks this weekend. Next we will run the tubing through them that will carry hot water that warms the floor. Soon we will be able to stay warm without burning a fire in every room.

Pumpkin house

2004-11-08T10:30:00.000-05:00

I came home from school last Thursday in the dark (with the time change on Halloween, it gets dark around 4:00!) and saw, for the first time, with the headlights of the car, my house as all one color. It was beautiful.

Now that I've seen it in daylight, I've discovered that it is much more orange than I expected. I'm OK with that. We have admired many orange houses in New England, and ours is not nearly as orange as the one in Natick that we used to drive past to get to the grocery store. I'll post pictures in the next few days with the new digital camera that should be arriving any moment now.

Weird mustardy yellow

2004-10-21T21:35:00.000-04:00

Click here to see the color we are going to paint the house. I think it is a weird mustardy yellow, but the paint manufacturer calls it farmhouse ochre. Anyway, the painters will start any day now, so I hope we like it.

Happy now?

2004-10-21T20:05:00.000-04:00

OK, you can all stop bugging me. I've finally put new pictures up on ofoto, so go look. Use the link on the side of this page. Enjoy! :)

Here come the twins!

2004-10-05T12:58:00.000-04:00

No, not the twins that everyone seems to think we'll have someday, but Damian's mother and her twin sister. What a hoot this week will be!

So we've been working really hard lately trying to get this place to resemble a real house as much as possible. On the list of new, wonderful things are:
* Completely functional fireplaces (3 of them) and woodstoves (2 of them)
* A filled oil tank (that isn't doing anything yet, but soon we'll be able to get rid of the energy-guzzling temporary electric hot water tank)
* Door latches on bedroom doors
* A couch and stereo in the living room. These, and many other items, have been patiently waiting in the basement since May to get used again. I bet they are happy to see us again. (I know I'm happy to see them!)

I'm looking forward to a week of visiting, entertaining, and acting like a tourist. It will be wonderful!

Fireplaces

2004-09-20T17:04:00.000-04:00

Be sure to check out the ofoto link on this page. . . There are new photos up of the fireplaces, which are beautiful. The first floor is just about done and the second floor is not far behind.

This weekend was the first time I felt like I was living in my house, rather than working on it. Of course, there was plenty of work to do, but we also just spent time with guests and baking and watching out new Simpsons DVDs. This was some much-needed relaxation!

Huge leaps

2004-09-11T07:46:00.000-04:00

Now that I have started school, I'm a much smaller part of the house building process. But this has its advantages. Every day I come home and I get to see all the work that everyone did while I was gone and it's always so impressive. We are really steaming ahead now; the masons are quickly building our fireplaces and chimney and the bathroom is almost completely functional. The kitchen is pretty much done. It just needs some paint and tiles and trim, but the cabinets, appliances, and countertops are being used.

Now that it is the weekend, I will cram in all my house contributions before teaching again on Monday. I'll work on some wiring, cleaning, moving things out of the cabin, etc. So I better get busy!

Sweet dreams

2004-09-06T09:17:00.000-04:00

We slept in the house for the first time Saturday night. It is so wonderful to be able to roll out of bed (a real bed, not a futon on the floor of the cabin loft!) and walk down the hall to the bathroom with a flush toilet and hot shower. These are real luxuries!

The kitchen cabinets were also installed this week. They are really beautiful. I absolutely love my kitchen. I'm anxious to move my things into the cabinets and get the faucet hooked up so I can really start using it. Maybe I'll bake some cookies this week. :)

This is a test.

2004-08-12T18:33:00.000-04:00

So I just installed this new Blogger feature that makes posting a new blog entry super fast and easy. Let's see if it works!

Quack.

2004-08-12T18:11:00.000-04:00

Last week, Damian found out about some young ducks that need a new home, so we went to meet them and ended up spending the rest of the afternoon driving home with 4 ducks in the back of the Volvo sqeaking away, flapping around, and stirring feathers about in my indoor bunny cage.

We built them a little duck house that they seem to enjoy. We spent nearly an enitre day hunting down a little kiddie wading pool for them (no one seems to sell them in August; there wasn't a single one for sale anywhere in Ellsworth!). We watched proudly when the ducks figured out that the big blue plastic thing was filled with water they could swim in. We clipped their wings after they went for a little joy-fly around the house (they came back).

The ducks have not been named yet since we aren't sure of their genders yet. Although they resemble adult ducks, they don't have their adult plumage yet so it's hard to tell boys from girls. Every day we seem to have a different idea of what we have there.

Louise the Lightning Bug

2004-08-04T17:03:00.000-04:00

Dad has come and gone and I picked up where he left off with the wiring. I was a little nervous about finishing the rooms he didn't get to. I had terrible dreams that we would turn everything on and the outlets wouldn't work.

After a week and a half of Damian and I wiring after Dad left, we had everything hooked up to the breaker panel and tested what I had done. It worked! :) I really expected to have to re-wire something. There was one outlet in the kitchen that needed a little wire swap within the box, but that was simple and only took a couple minutes.

To add to this happy week, our plumbing is going in. There's a hot water tank in the basement, a shower stall in the guest bedroom waiting to be installed, and a whole mess of pipes running all over the place.

AND. . . the long-awaited frame and exterior trim for the side door was installed this week. The door (which is beautifully restored) is sitting the the hall waiting to be hung.

This has been a very busy, exciting week. We'll be living in this house in no time! Check the ofoto link on this page for some pictures of our progress.

Louie the Lightning Bug

2004-07-13T12:08:00.000-04:00

This week we are preparing for my parents to come up so dad can wire the house. We have been building interior walls and pulling out the original flooring and walls to see how the rooms fit together. We keep discovering more pieces of the house that we didn't know we had! Last night we went on a shopping spree at Home Depot to get the electric supplies. I've been really pleased that we have done very little shopping there during this building project, but sometimes you need a big store to find what you need.

I have also been teaching a summer reading program at my school for kids between the ages of 3 1/2 and 8. These little ones are so different from the 6th graders I'm used to teaching! Two of them will be in my class this fall, so it's nice to get to know them and their families.

Moving on...

2004-06-23T23:32:00.000-04:00

Today was my last day of school. Saying goodbye to the kids was just like any other year. But saying goodbye to the other teachers, my classroom, the school itself was an entirely different thing. Many tears were shed by the faculty this afternoon after the kids left.

But tomorrow is the day I have been working towards and looking forward to for years. Tomorrow morning I load up Clyde, the pickup, and drive to my house in Maine. From that point on, whenever I am in Massachusetts, I am a visitor. I am going home tomorrow.

:)

Boarding in the house

2004-06-10T20:39:00.000-04:00

The house is getting sheathed in. Now it looks like a house!

Hopefully it will be weather-tight before Damian and Toby leave for their trip south in 2 weeks.

Frame raising

2004-06-06T19:05:00.000-04:00

Last Thursday we raised the frame of our house. Damian, his dad, four helpers, a crane and its operator, and I got all the posts, beams, joists, purlins, braces, etc. assembled into something that is shaped like a house. It went very smoothly and we are all extremely happy.

There are pictures at ofoto.com. Check back here and at ofoto frequently over the next few months to see how things are progressing.

Settling in

2004-05-27T13:59:00.000-04:00

Damian has been slaving away on our house frame, mixing sticky wood-filling epoxy in the cold, damp weather and making our building site livable. This involves setting up the cabin to hold the two of us and our essentials this summer.

This week the electric was hooked up, so things will be slightly less primitive than when we lived in Cassidy. Damian moved most of our furniture and all of our amazingly beautiful windows to the house site last night. Things are moving along! One week until the frame raising! :)

2004-05-07T08:44:00.000-04:00

Damian will be moving to Maine for good next weekend, and I will follow him when this school year is over. I need to pack up my classroom and say goodbye to this school and get ready to teach 3rd and 4th grade next fall in my new school!

2004-04-26T11:07:00.000-04:00

This is the first entry of Eco Teat, done mainly as a test of how this blog works. I might as well add something of substance, though.

Last week we closed on our construction loan. So by the time Damian turns 30 we have to have our house done and then we start paying on the mortgage. Scary. Also last week I went to Ellsworth to get my Maine driver's license. We are getting closer to my dream of living in the woods in Maine every day!