Bring back the bat!
What a quiet summer this was. No buzzing. No flies. When the tools were still we heard only the peace of a snug house and the footsteps of a couple of righteous-feeling builders who thought they’d solved the fly problem.
In 2010 the log house was filled with flies who’d moved in the previous year, when the house wasn’t as well sealed up as it is now, and they were fruitful. We hung up fly strips everywhere, swatted flies, shooed flies out. The campaign cut the population but we still had them last winter and into the spring.
One day early in the summer I observed that all the fly strips were well-studded with fly legs. Legs, with no bodies, and no sign of anything messing with the sticky strips. How odd. In a couple of places there had been evidence of mice, but a mouse couldn’t climb up the log walls and onto a fly strip without getting permanently adhered.
Summer went along buzz-less, and so did early fall. Miller moths accumulated amongst the legs. Yuck. I didn’t take pictures.
One morning John took a closer look at a dark knot on a kitchen log, one that seemed larger than he remembered. “There’s a bat in here!” he hollered, waking the critter from its rest. A ruckus ensued, of flapping plywood scraps and brown wings, and in short order the squatter took up new digs in the great outdoors. Slam! Good riddance!
But guess what now … buzz!
Rejuvenation's Drake bat light. Customer service representative Andrea says it's "no bother", presumably meaning that it doesn't poop. But does it catch flies?
For what it’s worth, we’ve had the best luck with Catchmaster fly strips (ribbons).
For the dining room, a 1930s real-antique light fixture from Rejuvenation
Depression era light fixture
As much fun as it is to search out light fixtures from Rejuvenation’s new fixtures, there’s nothing like their restored antiques section for a real “look what I found!” experience. You get the thrill of the chase (somebody might beat you to it) plus the satisfaction of giving a a whole new life to something old and well-made.
Right now I’m grinning ear-to-ear over this pendant light that Rejuvenation describes as follows:
Clean and streamlined, this effortlessly modern pendant design was widely popular and used in commercial settings both new (for cutting edge style) and old (as an update for obsolete lighting fixtures in vintage buildings). Semi-indirect lighting like this was the up-to-date technology of the Depression era, and remained in use into the 1950s.
An antique steel finish lends this fixture a soft yet intense appearance that is equally at home in period or contemporary settings.
Here’s a very similar fixture in a photograph from Flickr:
- Office of The Carolinian, the weekly student newspaper, which was located on ground floor of Alumnae House. Seen here with eight students at work, sometime between 1937 and 1947. Hand tinted. This building opened in 1937 and is considered an excellent example of neo-Georgian architecture. It was designed by Penrose V. Stout of Richmond, Virginia, and modeled after Homewood in Baltimore, Maryland. The building was called the Alumnae House from 1937 to November 1972, when the name was changed to the Alumni House
I’ve also seen a picture of a more ornate version, with the metal shade embossed with flutes, swags and floral motifs.
When I bought most of the house’s light fixtures, well over a year ago, I wanted a vintage dining room fixture that cast light up to the ceiling and down to the table but not out into people’s faces. At that time, anything that met the requirements looked too new, too mid-century modern. I bought Rejuvenation’s Marquam Hill chandelier because its lighting appeared to be scattered enough not to glare, and I still think it’s incredibly pretty, but it always seemed a bit too early and too fancy. I suppose I will sell it now.
Andrea Roselle at Rejuvenation searched out answers to all the questions I had about this fixture. It is 33 inches long overall. That’s a little shorter than I’d prefer but we may be able to make modifications to the ceiling box mount to drop it a little more. Look closely— the fixture has a “hang straight” where the generously-sized ceiling canopy and the pendant rod meet, allowing installation on the moderately-sloped ceiling.
Rejuvenation currently has several antique fixtures that perform the same function as this one, including two more exactly like this one. Some are refinished in contemporary colors. Under “Restored Antiques” check the listings for new arrivals, industrial fixtures, and antique pendants. Call Rejuvenation at 888-401-1900 and ask for Andrea. If you like this fixture, call before anyone else can and tell her you are interested in item number AL2685. If you snag one or both, let me know!
The first little grave at Blizzard Gulch
Chokecherry enjoying an after-lunch scratch.
Yesterday we buried little four-week-old kitten Chokecherry in the bushes behind the outhouse.
Chokecherry lived with us for two days after she was found, in the height of chokecherry blossoming time, in the road near a colony of feral cats. Her eyes were infected and she undoubtedly had other issues. Just a plain gray kitten with creamy toes and muzzle, she was snuggly and trusting. She ate eagerly. It was easy to hope for a better future for her. It was tough to find her cold and limp in her crate, even tougher when the vet said she must be put down immediately.
So I arranged her in a box with some bubble wrap. John dug a grave in a place where it’s unlikely any further digging will occur, and he brought up a big flat white rock to mark the spot. Tears were shed. And thus our emotions, our very lives, became even more bonded to this place.
Chokecherry's rock
A kind woman I’ve never met in person sent me a poem her mother recites at times like this. From an old magazine, author unknown, title unknown.
Futile the doctor’s great patience and skill —
Somebody’s kitten lies lifeless and still.
Hot tears are blinding somebody’s sight
For a little grey kitten was killed tonight.
But outside another wee kitten looks in,
So small and alone and pitifully thin.
So somebody mourn not the one who is dead
But give of your love to the living instead.
***
Look! One room is finished! (the outhouse)
This is the place.
Company was coming so John built an outhouse for them. Okay, so it was a bunch of earthy blacksmiths from the Rocky Mountain Smiths, here to watch John give a demonstration in the shop, but we couldn’t have them doing all their business in the woods. (There are no toilets in the house yet.)
Door stays closed but needs a slide bolt inside.
Conforming to rural tradition, the biffy is built mostly of scrounged material. Lumber is either salvaged or milled from dead trees on a small Wood-Mizer sawmill. Corrugated roofing is left over from the house. A friend sold us the Sun-Mar composting toilet after he moved on to something else. Door, window, carpet on the ceiling, and clothes hooks are from the Beulah Inn cabins that were demolished some time ago.
This privy is powered by a composting toilet, not a hole.
Salvaged carpet gives acoustic properties. Or something.
Finishes used:
- Siding: Lifetime Wood Treatment chemically weathers and evens the color without looking coated like ordinary stain; may eventually turn silver. A very similar, if not identical, product is Eco Wood Treatment. Both of these products are claimed to have preservative qualities but I have not been able to confirm this.
- Door: Benjamin Moore MoorGlos semi-gloss exterior paint in Raccoon Fur, a deep slate gray.
- Interior: Benjamin Moore Regal semi-gloss interior paint in Daiquiri Ice, a pale seafoam lakeside bathhouse green.
- Moon: Fine Paints of Europe MV65 Epaulet. Left over from something else. Exceedingly good paint.
Painted popcorn can keeps mice out of the TP.
Speaking of tradition, people used to practice Halloween outhouse-snatching here in Beulah. EveryNovember 1 someone’s privy stood in the fire station intersection, at Grand and Pennsylvania. I suspect most were hauled to the dump, subtracted from Beulah’s stock of vernacular architecture.
Battered old faucet accomplishes at least as much here as it did in the odd-parts box.
In some parts of the American West a constant water supply can’t be counted on. There may be times when this “necessary room” becomes a real necessity.
Read about outhouses:
Wikipedia (includes the history of the term, Chic Sale)
Outhouse books available at Amazon
Biffy books available at Amazon
Privy books available at Amazon
You're always welcome at our "house".
Bathroom color paralysis and the Habitat ReStore cure
Are there too many paint colors these days?
Nearly every major paint company has thousands of colors. Most of them are willing to go even further, offering to color-match anyone else’s color chip, and sometimes they’re pretty successful at that.
Professional designers and artistically inclined people may have no difficulties finding the right colors in all this abundance, but I do. I get kid-in-the-candy-store syndrome and will spend weeks, even months, pondering the choices for any one room. Paint store palettes and magazine pictures help but after a while it becomes no fun to just copy the trends. (John, being the easy-going diplomat that he is, keeps his opinions pretty much to himself as he sweeps paint chips off the table to clear space for dinner. Usually he says “that’s fine” to whatever scheme I have going at the moment. If he gets real quiet I know he thinks the scheme is horrible.)
When color paralysis sets in it’s time to make a commitment to something that will limit the choices. Go buy something colored that’s expensive enough to make you feel like an idiot if you don’t use it, then go from there. I am only half-kidding.
Habitat for Humanity provided the focus I needed for the main floor bathroom. In their Cañon City, Colorado store I found 268 salvaged grayish-blue square tiles, enough for a countertop and backsplash plus a blue band around the tub/shower space. The tiles reminded me of Farrow & Ball’s paint color Borrowed Light, a slightly drab pale blue that I’d already considered. It turns out that the match is almost exact.
Borrowed Light by Farrow & Ball is the best color match I've found for the old blue tile. In the middle is the linoleum tile by Marmoleum that we'll install in the main bathroom. Its color is Moraine, a gray with cream and specks of maroon. Set next to blue, it also reveals a suggestion of blue-gray that I never saw before.
We’ll see what colors this bathroom ends up with, but right now I’m thinking of the vanity painted with Borrowed Light, a white sink and white grout, white tiles with the blue band for the tub area, white towels, natural log on two sides, a golden-varnished beadboard wall and varnished woodwork, and one wooden chair painted Farrow & Ball’s Pale Powder, a very light bluish green, or their Cooking Apple Green. And maybe something orange or coral.
But I could go with a red, white, and blue 1940s patriotic scheme, or … !! What do you think, John?
Edit: a similar color in a completely VOC-free clay paint is Bioshield’s Azur. Clay paint is a delight to work with. It smells fresh and clean as you apply it. You can mix in some mica and, after the paint dries, rub with a cloth to bring out the subtle sparkles. I don’t think I’d use clay paint in a bathroom, though, and that would apply to Farrow & Ball’s high-clay-content Estate Emulsion.
Thanks to Pam Kueber and her blog, Retro Renovation, for the video of her blue bathroom.
Lehigh Green paint
For those who are looking, then, here is a post about Benjamin Moore Lehigh Green.
I have an old wooden box with a hinged lid, similar to bins that my grandfather kept chicken feed in. We use it for storing kindling. Some of the boards in it are eighteen inches wide. Weather took a toll on its old paint when it lived on the porch so I brought in indoors, but soon there won’t be a good place for it except outside. New paint was a must, even if I will never see that peculiar gray-blue-green-beige color again. There appears to be no paint on the market that truly matches it, probably because it is no longer one single color.
The right new color had to be a vintage sort of green, somewhat drab, more on the blue side than the yellow side, and be a “man’s color” – a green you might see on a worn workbench in an old garage. Whenever we went to Pueblo’s old steel mill neighborhood (for Mexican food at Jorge’s Sombrero, where Barack Obama ate during his campaign) I eyed the old buildings, looking for a green with the personality I wanted.
The screen door turned out to have several shades of green depending on where the eave’s shade falls, but the best match overall was Benjamin Moore’s Lehigh Green.
- The kindling box painted Lehigh Green.
Would you believe a plywood kitchen?
In 1933, when the prototype for our house was being built as the Valley Creek Ranger Station in Stanley, Idaho, they probably didn’t spend much time worrying how the kitchen was going to look. I, on the other hand, have stewed about it ever since the design process began. That was, let me think, four years ago? Nothing I hatched in my mind seemed right once it was translated into drawings.
Just recently, hunting on the Internet for pictures of old ranger stations, I came upon the Clackamas Lake Historic Ranger Cabin near Mount Hood in Oregon. Among the online pictures of this delightful cabin (which you can actually rent for a vacation) was a shot of the vintage Northwest fir plywood kitchen, glossily varnished and deeply colored with age.
Look at those curved supports on the upper cabinets! Without them you'd really notice the disparity between the bottom edge of the cabinets and the window trim. The materials may be rustic but the craftsmanship is anything but.
The Clackamas Lake Historic Ranger Cabin, located on the Mount Hood National Forest in Oregon, was built in the same year as the Valley Creek Ranger Station in Idaho.
Finding plywood as pretty as this has proven to be difficult. If what we are currently finding is any indication, modern plywood has a looser, less elaborate grain. Maybe that’s because it is no longer made from old-growth timber. Does anyone know for sure? We did learn that it pays to check all your sources. One lumber yard’s plywood may have so many “footballs” that it’s unusable for cabinets, while another place will offer very nice stuff.
I presume that the deep color of the old cabinets is a result of age. To attempt to duplicate this look, I am going to try varnish tinted with a red-brown dye from Woodcraft. Another way that would work, but might not hold up to moisture as well, would be a thick-cut (dissolved with minimal alcohol) garnet shellac tinted with brown wood dye. Directly staining the plywood doesn’t seem to give quite the same effect that you get with a colored clear finish.
That old white sink with backsplash would be just the thing if we could have planned for it, but we have a new Kohler Bakersfield sink already waiting. It does have a Hudee ring (a metal mounting ring, now rapidly going extinct) instead of being self-rimming, so that makes it look relatively old. Also, the kitchen window sits too low on the wall for an integral backsplash to fit. Oh well. But we do have a fairly old white Roper gas stove, fifties era probably, given to us by a friend.
At one time we thought we would more-or-less pattern the kitchen after the one in the Valley Creek Ranger Station, now the Stanley Museum, in Stanley, Idaho. However, that kitchen has no log or wood walls at all so everything is painted. Although I had been mulling over painting with Valspar Spring Botanical and Fine Paints of Europe’s Mount Vernon Palladian White, in the end I just wasn’t quite willing to do that in our own kitchen. It has two log walls and having all these different surfaces seemed too complicated.
One thing that both of those 1933 ranger station kitchens have in common is a wood countertop. John’s been wanting one all along while I’ve vacillated between wood and laminate (Formica’s Virr Varr).
Formica’s Virr Varr laminate in White. I just found out that Formica has discontinued Virr Varr as well as all but one color of their Boomerang laminate. I get so aggravated by these myopically trend-oriented companies. If you think you want any of these patterns, order NOW before the warehouses run out. Laminate is inexpensive so you can overbuy if necessary. Good luck finding Boomerang in coral.
Seeing wood countertops in both of these historic buildings allowed me to settle on Virr Varr for the utility room and wood for the kitchen. If the wood ever turns out to be impossible to live with it can always be covered with laminate, I suppose, but by then there will be nothing available I’d consider compatible.
Laurii Gadwa tells John about the Valley Creek Ranger Station kitchen. Like the Clackamas Lake cabin, this kitchen has a wood countertop. You can’t see it in this picture but the right-hand side of the countertop was grooved to make a drainboard. I believe this was pretty common at the time. How did they do this without modern routers?
Maybe some future owner will overhaul all our work, painting everything pastel and installing granite countertops (ewww!) and stainless appliances (yawn), but during our tenure we will enjoy lots of wood, including wood countertops, and our old white stove.
Thanks go to Shannon Hopkins and Mike Hamel of the United States Forest Service for permission to use these photographs of the Clackamas Lake Historic Ranger Cabin. To read more about the history of this building and how to rent it, check it out at the USFS web page, Recreation Rentals of the Pacific Northwest.
Thanks also to Pam Kueber who writes the blog, “Retro Renovation” (www.retrorenovation.com), for the information on the Hudee ring and for posting the regrettable news that the metal-rimmed Kohler Bakersfield sink has been discontinued. I thank myself for worrying about just such a thing happening and ordering the sink long before it was needed. Ditto for the Formica laminate.
First light fixtures for the log house: outdoors
They don’t work yet, because we’re still running on temporary power, but we have some light fixtures in place! Thrilled at having reached this stage, we recently put up porch, yard, and flood lights. No real ranger station ever had so many fixtures, I bet. With great pride I introduce to you:
The skidsteer is the tallest ladder we have for this situation. I hope the inexpensive gray barn light weathers well because replacing it would not be easy.
The Klamath Falls porch light from Rejuvenation was chosen for the roofless deck because it is waterproof. It has the caramel and white art glass option. Imagine how pretty it will look once we can put a bulb in it and switch the power on. This was the easiest outdoor light fixture to install because there are no logs here and no conduit was required.
Vintage flood light, probably from the seventies. An auction find, it came from a small apartment building in Oregon. There are four of these scattered around the exterior. No, we are not going to leave them on all night. I dislike that fad.
This Appleton explosion-proof light has an enormous white shade that, sadly, will not fit here under the porch eave. There are two of these fixtures and I paid a lot for them because of those shades. Had I known I could have bought two new fixtures without shades for about ten dollars apiece.
Shallow white porcelain barn light, one of two on the south side of the porch. I do not know what brand they are. The shades and sockets came from two separate auctions. Conduit is as thick under the porch roof as snakes in a nest. Bending it is quite an art.
For the west side of the porch I found two vented white barn lights with cages, made by Benjamin. There is a third fixture nearby that looks similar (no cage) but I believe it is an Ivanhoe.
At the front door: a little red-painted porch light with bubble shade. Another auction fixture. Because its base conflicted with the logs we built the electrical box out, then chinked over the resulting weird assembly.
At the side entrance, over the steps, hangs this small deep green porcelain fixture. The manufacturer is unknown.
At the side door we have this little copper lantern fixture with a nice patina on it. It came from Oregon. Was it one of your auctions, Chris? As with the little red fixture, the base did not sit well on the log wall so the electrical box was extended and chinked. Chinking is good for hiding a lot of things.
The electrician said “never again!”
“Never again!” said the salesman behind the wholesale electrical supplies counter. “I wired a log house once and I’ll never do it again! Too much work!”
We were at the beginning of the wiring phase, purchasing wire and boxes and asking for some advice. We figured this guy, a licensed electrician, was just being a bit melodramatic. Half a year later his words don’t seem so exaggerated any more but we sure do know a lot more about the subject.
Right here is where I tell you that the best way to minimize your troubles with wiring a log house is to plan your wiring scheme thoroughly, have a standard joist ceiling between the first and second floors (not boards resting on beams), check and double check that the electrical plan are sent to your log contractor so he can drill the all of the necessary holes right there in his log yard, and don’t change your mind about anything after the holes are drilled.
Yeah, right. The only step we followed was the first one.
Because our designer had a copy of the electrical plans, we assumed that he sent it on to the log guy with the rest of the plans. Nope. The logs arrived here in Beulah without being drilled. Throughout the frenzy of log raising, dodging helpers and keeping an eye out for logs being lowered by crane, John ran about trying to drill holes in each new course of logs. Some got missed and some didn’t line up quite right but nothing could be done about it – the next log was already swinging overhead.
Months earlier, in the design phase, the question came up about the nature of the first floor ceiling/upstairs floor. Should it be big log beams with boards laid in a charmingly loggish fashion over them, or should it be conventional framing? Log romance won out and we chose beams. They are beautiful and we love them, but without joist spaces where are you going to run the wires for main floor ceiling lights? Are you going to skip ceiling lights? I don’t think so, not for the kitchen and not with boxes of pendants from Rejuvenation and vintage bead-chain fixtures from eBay piling up in storage.
And of course I had several changes of mind about the wiring plan after it was too late to have changes of mind.
As with ever so many things you do when building a log house, the only way to approach the challenge was to get started with a cautious certainty that, for every issue, ingenuity and persistence would provide a solution, and so they did. Not every solution was as elegant as we might have wished for but heck, it’s “a 1933 log house” and it’s not supposed to look like something out of Log Home Living magazine.
Upstairs, where the ratio of logs to framed walls is low, the wiring was relatively straightforward. We already knew that the only way to get power to the ceiling lights and fans would be through exposed conduit. Old log buildings, with their retrofitted wiring, have conduit. It’s just part of the look. I’d made certain that there were no more outlets in logs than code required, and those few were a good test run for mortising holes in the logs to accept electrical boxes.
Needing to get some insulation installed in certain areas upstairs before winter, we decided to get the upstairs wiring done first. We could call Regional Building for a partial electrical inspection of just that area, do the insulating, and then go on to wiring the rest of the house.
John worked out a system for carving rectangular holes into the logs for electrical boxes, switching between the Fein Multimaster tool and a wood chisel. There were no major difficulties getting wires routed from the electrical panel downstairs. The wiring passed the inspection and we felt pretty good. This inspector is well known throughout the county for being rough on people doing their own wiring, and we’d passed on the first try. That salesman behind the counter may be an electrician, but look what we did! We must be at least as good as him!
Attaching an electrical box into a rectangular hole cut into the logs.
Then the inspector went downstairs to preview some work we’d started there and which had been hard to do. Holes that John had drilled way back during the log set were misaligned, too small, or sometimes even missing, so we’d gone through quite a learning curve coming up with ways to cope with the issues.
“Those boxes aren’t big enough for the wiring you’re putting in them.” Uh, we’ve already mortised them into the logs, and they fit the vintage Bakelite brown wall plates we’ve been collecting, and we have no idea if we can find bigger electrical boxes that won’t show and look awful. Worried about how ugly the solutions might be but fearful of having the inspector think we were ignorant dummies, we just said “okay, we’ll fix those things” and kept our anxieties to ourselves until he drove away.
A vintage brown Bakelite receptacle cover for a metal electrical box.
That day pretty much wrecked our motivation to do wiring for a while and we went on to other work like insulating and putting knotty pine car siding on some of the upstairs walls.
Meanwhile, John bought a copy of the 2008 National Electrical Code book, 2008 being the year we got our building permit – we aren’t obliged to meet the 2011 code. From the book he calculated how many cubic inches of electrical box capacity was required per outlet or switch based on the size of the wires and the number of them entering the box.
Matching those calculations to the boxes we could buy was, I think, harder than reading the code book, partly because it is not always easy to find out what a box’s actual rated capacity is. Even the guys behind the electrical counter don’t always know. Much of the information came from searching online through manufacturers’ spec pages.
Blue plastic boxes, fine for stud walls, were out for log walls because the blue might show between the logs and chinking. Metal boxes aren’t exactly beautiful but at least they are a little more discreet when they show themselves. That limited our box choices.
In most cases we were able to find metal boxes of greater capacity (deeper or with corners that are square instead of rounded) but still of a size that would fit behind the old wall plates. For some places a “mud ring” could increase capacity and save us from having to install a much bigger box, but we used these sparingly because it is, for all I know, impossible to find a vintage Bakelite wall plate to cover these. Here and there we resigned ourselves to someday covering an unsightly box with a big blob of chinking.
Eventually, it became necessary to tackle wiring again in order to meet a building inspection deadline. Nearly paranoid about the electrical inspector, we went to extremes to make sure everything was right.
Using leftover log ends that matched the ceiling beams, John built a mockup of the ceiling structure. A fellow blacksmith who also builds log houses told us about a wiring channel system that he’d used: use a router to cut channels in the top surface of the floorboards, run the wires in the channels, then cover them over with steel plate. We trotted this contrivance into Regional Building’s office and got an okay on it.
John made two passes with a router to make T-shaped channels in the upstairs floorboards. Wiring is laid in the channels to serve ceiling light fixtures below. Then steel plate is set in the upper channel and drilled for screws to hold it down.
As each electrical box was installed and wired, on the adjoining stud John wrote clearly the capacity required by the wires and the capacity of the box. This helped assure him that he was right and might impress the inspector.
I gave each light fixture a letter designation, then transferred that to the light fixture boxes and their associated switch boxes with matching colored cards that John could easily spot. If they were pull chain lights that was indicated, as were three-way switches (used where a light can be turned on or off from either of two locations). Outlets were marked with the number of duplex receptacles needed.
Electrical box tagged to match switches with light fixtures and show that a receptacle is to be installed in the box.
When finally it was all done, we cleaned the house top to bottom, took deep breaths — and called for the inspector. He spent most of his visit checking our porch wiring then zipped through the house, not even bothering to go upstairs to see the channel system. “Looks like you got it figured out,” he remarked, quite kindly for a guy that everybody thinks is an ogre, and he signed the inspection card.
We thought to ourselves, that salesman was right, it is a lot of hard work to wire a log house and it’s a pretty sure bet we won’t ever try it again. But we did it and it is done well, and I guess that’s what this whole project is about.
The guy who scared the bejabbers out of us.
Blog burnout
Last summer I got completely burned out on blogging. Hot weather and a discouraging setback with the electrical inspector were the initial killers. Viewed from a daily or weekly perspective, things seemed to be so repetitive that it just wasn’t worth writing about them, or maybe more precisely, it didn’t seem worth the effort of cropping, improving, and resizing pictures to upload them to Flickr in preparation for including in blogs. Now that it’s past Thanksgiving, a look back shows that quite a lot got done. I’ll try to catch up over the winter.
Our electrical inspector thinks that homeowners shouldn’t be allowed to do their own wiring so he is especially hard on us. Despite that, we passed two electrical inspections: the underground wiring and a partial inspection of the second floor wiring.
- Convincing the electrical inspector that everything is up to snuff.
With the second floor inspected by both the electrical and framing inspectors we were able to install fiberglass batt insulation in the dormer, one of the few places in the house with exterior framed walls. Immediately we could tell that the house was holding temperature better. Heating is presently done by solar gain and two woodstoves. The in-floor hot water heat and the two gas heaters in the second floor rooms are not yet hooked up to propane.
Those gas heaters are the Tudor model by Hearthstone, in a rich brown enamel finish. This finish makes me think of old gas room heaters, all unsafe and hopefully no longer being used, but full of character.
Next April will be the third anniversary of ground breaking. When we will move in? Maybe sometime late in 2012. The building inspectors might force us to meet the requirements for a Certificate of Occupancy before then but we are comfortable enough at Little Bear, our tiny cabin near the coffee shop, that neither of us wants to move while there is still messy work like cabinetry, door hanging, woodwork, and painting to do.
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