a friendly place to hang your hat

been looking for this picture for ages now.


the town recently commissioned a new one in a similar vein that we keep meaning to photograph too. however, now we don't need to, as it appears it's in the news...



which brings us nicely to the top 3 reasons to live in vermont: no billboards; least church-going state in the nation (check out this scary map, btw); bush and cheney have never been here.

fish tape too late

at first i wasn't even thinking i needed an electrical fish tape, not thinking i was going to be doing much rewiring behind existing walls. hell, i thought the house was ready to rent when we bought it... now, i guess i'm avoiding buying one. depending on the wall i'm rewiring, the wires can sometimes be fed through on its own, especially if it gets its own fish eye; but usually i end up having to dig a hole or two out of the wall between where the wire goes in and where it's supposed to come out. that's been working out ok so far, since i've been slapping new drywall over the holes anyway, but it sure ain't purty.


got lucky with this one - deep bays between studs with no obstructions.












and not so lucky with this one - witness a hole 1/3 and 2/3 of way down wall to help feed wire down. stud separation here is wide enough, but because this is an outside wall, there is an extra layer of outdoor-type plaster/lath between the studs which inhibits pushing a wire down or up.









but for $25, it might have been worth the purchase if i'd got it a couple of years ago.

back to the front

time to tackle the front - that is to say, master - bedroom (the one where you can have a bed and stand up in the same room) on the 2nd floor. i really wanted to be able to just patch the holes in the original plaster/lath walls and stick a new drywall ceiling in and be done with, but it just wasn't viable.


ceiling furred out with new studs, as is de rigeur. this bedroom, like most of the 2nd floor, had no ceiling light, so had to add in that and a switch.








the wall had three loose outlets, one of which had dead wiring lead to it. so, those were replaced with new outlet boxes attached to the studs. the large patched hole above the window had been created in 1984 (thank you eric merrill) when they installed the drop ceilings/loose new wiring. and then they blew in cellulose insulation between the studs from the outside... and kept on blowing and blowing... such that the dropped ceiling had 40 gallons of insulation piled on top of it when it came time to remove it.



so, in the end, there were too many large holes and countless other cracks to merit trying to save the plaster/lath as the finished wall. here, we've started installing the 3/drywall over the top, as per the other rooms on the 2nd floor. the plus side is that it will add some slight r-value to the insulation and better seal drafts from the outside.

i-cleans basement

tidied up the basement to save space (more bikes, less cars) and get more wood off the damp ground. built the wood storage racks from old lumber and some discarded kiddy/pet safety gate that now acts as slatted shelving to separate the types of wood. located this in the corner that has already been repointed, so now we can continue repointing rest of the walls. paging alice... alice to the basement, please.
half an old door and some other garbage wood makes up the router table and shelving for smaller lengths of wood.