Buttoning Up

The attic is quiet. I'll miss the flying squirrels but not the red ones.

With new coverings of hardware clothe and screening there's only the the sheet rock to replace and a couple of holes to patch. We've considered adding to the cedar trim but I haven't had any problems with moths in the woolens so I'm just going to fill a few old pillowcases with cedar shavings and place them around the room.

I've spent much of the past few months hauling stuff out of the attic. The last boxes of books, crockery & glassware, linens, Christmas decorations, etc. went this week.

The once cluttered and crowded attic is now almost empty and I can't for the life of me decide how I feel about that.

Back In Business

Back in business and glad of it. Unfortunately the repairman, anticipating that he would be replacing the hinges, made matters worse with the door but I can make do. 

The latch on the microwave door has also broken so the stars align and this spring we will be putting in a new cabinet with new ovens. I just hope this will be the last time I will ever have to do this.

For the moment though the oven works. On Friday I set it to self-clean while I cleaned the racks and the screen and the bread dough rose. It seems the new element will require some adjustments in my baking but now there's homemade bread in the house again.

Buying Time

There are no longer any replacements for the hinges but the repairman seems confident a new heating element will give me time to make a decision about the oven, the cabinet, the rest of my life in a kitchen.

The entire world seems to be about buying time right now but of course that can't go on forever. I just wonder if the center can hold until spring...

Budget Buster

When we moved into this house we replaced very old, very beat-up built-in kitchen appliances. It didn't seem a wholly unreasonable thing to do since we weren't replacing the cabinets. It was only a couple of years ago when a stop on the oven door, possibly a spring, broke that I fully realized the additional cost of built-ins and that I was right and truly stuck with them.

Now the bottom heating element in the 23-year-old oven isn't working. I have to do something but I don't like my choices.

For one thing, I do not like 'stainless' appliances. I do not want my kitchen to look anything like a commercial enterprise and I do not want to clean more fingerprints than I already do but it's gotten nearly impossible to find anything other than 'stainless'.

It also irritates me no end that these things are being built with shorter and shorter life expectancies. I had to call Dacor to find out if they even make a replacement heating element and the young man I spoke to said they estimate the life of their new ovens to be seven to ten years!!! I don't know about Electrolux; I don't think I want to know.

What I would like to do is just bite the bullet, buy the Electrolux and slide it into the cabinet even if it doesn't fit perfectly.

But no, it won't fit, even imperfectly. It turns out manufacturers have resolved one of the problems I've had with my old oven, the shallow depth. The new ovens require the full cabinet depth and a junction box below the cutout floor.

We are now looking at a new oven and a new cabinet. Just shoot me.

The repairman comes today. I know it doesn't make much sense to put money into the old oven but even if we were ready to order things today it would several weeks before I would have a working oven again. I'm just hoping the heating element can be fixed...

And I'm just glad I wasn't planning to host Thanksgiving.

Roofs & Roofing

The Mister, working off the rent on our first abode, circa 1972

They finally finished the roof on Monday. The roofers understandably are trying to do too much before the weather changes so there are few details to take care of and more clean up to do but the new shingles look very good.

I hope this is my last roof, the last in a lifetime marked by several roofing jobs. 

The Mister was doing roofing the first summer we lived together and then did the roof and siding on the house we rented after we got married. 129½ West Washington Street, Athens Ohio.

After several years in Connecticut and New Jersey we bought our first house in Ashland, Kentucky. It was fairly decent new construction but the roof was put on without any felt and The Mister ended up putting on another new roof by himself while I repainted the siding.

Twenty-three years ago we bought these two acres knowing we would have to have professionals replace the original roof of cedar shakes covered by two layers of asphalt shingles, three layers on the porch. We used our lifetime allotment of landfill with the debris from that mess. I also remember we had an official drought that summer of 1988 until, of course, the roofers started to do the tear off and before they were halfway through we had a torrential storm that forced the closing of part of 81 due to flooding.

Now we've had this one done again and I'm glad to say it's probably the best looking roof we've ever lived under even if The Mister didn't do it.

Shutters

Although we didn't do the roofing, we did replace the double-hung windows ourselves that first year. The working shutters we removed in the process were in bad shape and for various reasons we put off replacing them – for twenty-three years. Where does the time go?

Anyway, the roof looks so good now and there seem to be so many more replacement shutters available nowadays that we're planning to replace the working shutters in the spring. We'll also be replacing the front door and I plan to finish it a chestnut stain. It's gonna be beautiful!

Driftwood

The truck arrived at 8. I think they should have waited until the roof dried off but they're hoisting the shingles up and slowly moving around as they unload them. Everything is very wet this morning from a very heavy dew. The neighbors' roofs look like there was some frost but the vegetation I can see from the house doesn't look like it was cold enough to kill anything.

So we're gettin' 'er done. The old shingles were still okay but like so many things they were going to have to be replaced while we're still here and only likely to get more expensive over time. There's also the happy prospect of not having to look at the shabby old, stained, faded, moss covered roof any longer but I'm not sure exactly what the new one will look like. Picking out the new shingles was a bigger chore than I expected.

I looked at brochures, samples and online photos and I swear no two looked the same for any of the colors I liked. We finally dragged home full sheets of several colors and I ended up holding them from a window while The Mister took pictures.

It was worth the trouble I think. The color we first picked turned out to be almost as light as the old faded shingles so we've ended up with the darkest of our choices, Driftwood.

The Cistern

This is the one part of the house I've never stepped foot in, never really seen until it finally dawned on me last week that I could get a picture of it with a digital camera held over the edge. When we bought the house twenty years ago this was filled with 4 feet of water and every bit of roof on this Dutch colonial had old half-round gutters draining into it where they weren't twisted out of shape.

The first summer we had drought conditions so we'd used most of the water by the time we did the tear-off of the roof (of course thereby breaking the drought) and hung new gutters with conventional downspouts.

The plan was to cut an entryway in the 5 1/2 foot high, 1 foot thick concrete wall and use the space as a root cellar but I've now accepted the fact that it ain't gonna happen. Maybe someday when I'm dead and gone, someone will actually use this again as intended and the fact that we never cut into it will turn out to be a good thing.