The Redneck Path

Hurricane Irene is on its way to New England and we aren’t far enough north in Maine to be free of it. We are in about the same hazard zone as Massachusetts. So to prepare, I made sure to buy lots and lots of beer. Sign number one that I may be on the redneck path.

Redneck sign number two came a few days ago, when I refused to call anyone to deliver us firewood for the winter. Instead, I bought myself a Husqvarna 18″ gas-powered chainsaw. It just seemed so un-Maine like and a bit sissy to call a guy to bring seasoned, dry and nicely cut up firewood when I’ve got 7 acres of land and plenty of dead trees to cut up myself. I did have to take baby steps into buying the chainsaw. I started with a hand-held crosscut saw and I labored at it for days. I cut down a few dead trees with it and it worked, but it took a long time. By the way, trees are heavy. Even small ones. I lugged two trees over my shoulder to the house after cutting them down. It was exhausting. In the end, I realized I needed more power as I was sitting on my porch drinking a beer.

Sign number three came at the same time that sign number two came. I realized that I really, really needed (wanted) an ATV. With an ATV, I can go deep into my forest pulling my tractor cart which has a load of 1000 lbs and bring back cords and cords of firewood. And because the snowmobile trail cuts our property in half, I can do some off-roading in the summer right from my own property. And who knows, maybe I’ll find some new, remote fishing spots on the way.

Sign number four came when my brother called to tell me that he may have found me a 4 wheel drive pickup truck that he was going to fix up and put a cab on it. His reasoning was that he can load up the truck with my stuff that I had left in Washington State and ship it to me on a train. Of course, my thought was, if I had a truck with a cab, I can put the air mattress in back and go camping up north. This was the turning point where I went full redneck. I can load up my chainsaw, pull my imaginary ATV on the back of the truck, tie my recently bought canoe on top, buy some land far, far up north on a beautiful river or lake only accessible by logging roads and build myself a fishing camp with logs I cut down myself. I’m already a member of the Log Home builders Association, so that in and of itself may make me a redneck.

Sign number five came when I realized that if I build myself a fishing camp up north, I have to be prepared for bears, big cats, wolves and other such predatory species and so I think I’d have to get myself a big gun.

And finally, sign number six came when I realized that I really need to learn how to skin animals so that I can make my own clothing out of deer skin. I’m not sure why I need to learn that skill, but it seems like a good idea.

At any rate, I’ve got to go cut some logs up for winter with my new chainsaw. I hope everyone has enough beer to last out the big storm.

garden(s), closet, and tractor pull(ed)…

Last year, we planted a garden buffet for our groundhog. We didn’t intend to be a 4-star groundhog restaurant, but that’s what happens when you plant a garden beside a groundhog home. It’s really not the groundhog’s fault for wanting to dine in our garden. If a restaurant was put up next to our house that had all the tasty treats we like, I’m sure we’d dine out a lot more. And it would be weird if we walked into a restaurant and the owner said, “Oh, we don’t serve humans…don’t make us put up a fence!”

Ahh…a fence! We decided to make our garden restaurant a bit more exclusive. I put up a 4-foot metal fence around the garden and put some chicken wire near the base to prevent critters of any size from getting through. I considered building a motion detection system that would trigger something really bad for groundhogs, but I thought it would be a bit too extreme. Besides, I don’t think I would feel good if I actually killed our groundhog. Groundhogs have a right to live too, and I’ve grown accustomed to seeing him/her every day. We plan to plant some clover for him/her so our pet groundhog doesn’t feel so slighted. So far, the garden is doing great. It is, at this time, no longer a restaurant for critters of the north, unless those critters are bi-peds that migrated from Cambridge.

Here’s a pic of our garden restaurant last year. The groundhog lives under our blacksmith shed to the left.

Our new fortressed garden:

Fenced Garden

We also decided to tackle a previous gardener’s mess. Many moons ago, someone planted a flower garden in the middle of our front yard. I’m sure it must have been nice at one time, but after years of neglect, it was a huge mess. Grass had grown throughout the flower bed, and the flowering “stuff” had spread uncontrollably. I also couldn’t mow near the flowering mess because the garden was loosely bordered by rocks that grass had overgrown, and my tractor doesn’t like rocks. Grass is good. Rocks are bad.

So we went to work digging up a 10 X 12 foot mess. It was not easy. Most of it was manual until I decided to bring out my tractor to shift dirt around. It was a good idea until I decided to leave the lawn mower attachment on the tractor, which negated the good idea and turned it into a really bad idea.

The tractor got stuck and I spent an hour trying to dig it out to no avail. The dirt was too soft, and the lawn mower attachment was too low and propped up the tractor so that the wheels couldn’t get any traction. After getting eaten by too many mosquitoes, I decide to get some rope and pull my tractor off of the mound of soft dirt with my SUV. K asked why, if I knew that pulling the tractor out with the SUV was an option that would work, did I spend an hour trying to dig the tractor out….I’m still trying to come up with a response to that question…stay tuned!

Here’s the before pic of the garden mess. It doesn’t look so bad here, but it really was out of control.

Here is what we did after digging up our mess:

And finally, I thought I’d share the start of our walk-in closet. Our small bedroom has a smaller room off of it. This smaller room was in bad shape. The walls were built with very thin plaster covered over by nasty wallpaper. At first, I tried to peel the wallpaper off of the plaster, but after a year of working on it, I finally gave up. I decided to put up aromatic cedar paneling on the walls to cover up the messy plaster walls and wallpaper issue. In the end, I think it looks pretty good. I still have to build all the shelving, but I’ll leave that for another post…

Before picture of our closet:

After I finished the floors and put up the cedar paneling:

How to Build a Computer Desk in 10 Minutes

This past Saturday, K and I started looking for computer desks. We had been working off our dinning room table, but our bodies started to complain. K’s shoulder has been hurting at the end of the day for a while now, and my mouse-arm started to ache like crazy. It was time to get proper seats and desks set up.

We had looked at your typical places, Staples and Office Max, but we failed to find anything that would work in our space. We did find one that we thought would work until we realized that the pull out computer tray didn’t have enough room for a mouse. Is it really that hard for these companies to design something that actually works?

Then I had an idea. What if I could build one, something decent out of real wood that we could actually stain or paint to match our office.

For approximately 65 dollars, I built a spruce top desk with ash legs. It took 10 minutes to put together. If you’ve ever had to put together a piece of store-bought furniture, you know how much of a pain in the butt it is. So maybe this could be an alternative for you.

It requires 3 main parts.
#1) AllWood Factory Sanded Spruce board. 1 inch thick X 24 inches wide X 49 inches long. Costs $29.00. Buy at Lowe’s. It comes wrapped in plastic too. Home Depot doesn’t carry this.
#2) 4 28-inch Parsons Table Legs. Cost $8 each. Found at Lowe’s and Home Depot…look in the mill work section of the store. Each leg has a bolt sticking out of it used to screw the leg into your table. See next step.
#3) 4 Heavy Duty Top Plates. Cost $2. These plates allow for the leg bolts to be screwed on.

Steps:
#1) Pick a bottom for your Spruce top and simply lay it down on the floor with the bottom facing you.
#2) Take one corner top plate and position it at one of the four corners of your table. It works best if you offset the corner plate about 1/2″ to 1 inch from the edges of the spruce top. This way you will never see the metal hardware. Once you position it, screw it on. Spruce is a relatively soft wood, so it goes in easy. Repeat this step for the remaining 3 top plates. This takes about 8-10 minutes.
#3) Simply screw the legs in by hand into the top plates until hand tight.
#4) Turn your table around and it’s now ready to attach a computer tray and/or a stain.

Here’s a pic of how the leg fits in the top plate:

There are two options when attaching a computer tray. You can buy a complete slide-out tray with hardware included at Staples that attaches to the bottom of your desk, or you can build your own. To build your own, you have to order a keyboard slide. Unfortunately, Lowe’s and Home Depot only carry these online. They work almost like a drawer slide except they attach to the bottom of your desk. Then you attach a long piece of wood to the slide and viola, you’ve got a nice a nice slide-out keyboard and mouse tray.

I opted to buy a prebuilt keyboard tray because I didn’t want to wait for one to come in the mail.

I recognize that this is a very minimalistic computer table, but it does have some advantages over factory-made tables.
#1) You can paint or stain it. Factory made tables are composites. You can’t stain these.
#2) A factory desk would take hours to put together. This table takes about 10 minutes.
#3) An all-wood table is cheaper, but not cheap. A factory-made table is not cheaper, but it is indeed cheap.
#4) An all-wood spruce table is extremely light. You’d be surprise how easy it is to move it around. The factory tables are pretty heavy and require more than one person to move them.

K and I built two of these tables and set them up side by side in our family room/office/book-reading room. Guess which monitor is mine?

That big monitor is actually a TV we bought before we moved up here full-time. I didn’t know what else to do with it, so I decided to make it my giganto-monitor. The plus is that it could be used to get streaming Netflix movies from my computer, so K and I could chill out on the futon and watch a movie. And, of course, these tables don’t have a stain on them yet.

Politics and Weird Weather

The picture above is in the morning after an interesting night of weather, one that K and I have never experienced before. K and I were warming ourselves by our woodstove watching some TV, when I heard that familiar sound of the plow crackling down our sandy road. A few minutes later, I heard it again, then again. I turned to K and said, “Is that the plow?” She turned, looked out the window and the sky lit up reflecting on all the snow on the ground and the snow flurries that had been coming down all day and night long. We couldn’t believe it.

We were having a thunder and lightning show while it was snowing. That is the first time in our lives that we have ever experienced thunder and lightning in February and when it’s snowing outside. Is it just us, or is that really unusual?

In other news, we were both mentioned on TV. That’s right, we are famous. Of course, our names were omitted. We were referred to as “The young couple who moved to town from Boston.”

Here’s the full story of why and in what context we were mentioned on TV.
Once upon a time, Bridgton used to be an economic powerhouse (slight exaggeration — this means they had a few mills and some other manufacturing plants and people had jobs). Anyway, the mills all closed, and the town has never recovered. So the town is trying to get businesses to come here, and this is where it gets interesting.

The town did get a business to bite, and that business is McDonald’s. Ya baby, that’s right, we might get a McDonald’s. Man oh man…think about all those delicous JOBS we all can get now that the mills have closed and McDonald’s is coming to town. Awesome. I bet you get a free meal when you work a full day. Of course, not everyone is that excited about McDonald’s coming to town. The townsfolk were ready for a fight, they got petitions signed, wrote to the local newspaper, and finally got some town ordinances to be voted on in March.

And Tuesday was the day that Bridgtonites showed up to a public hearing to say their piece on the subject and it was televised on our local cable channel. We watched for four hours as people got up and spoke for or against big-box retail and chain restaurants coming to the town. The arguments for it is that if we pass laws against chains like McDonald’s then no businesses will want to come here and that we need jobs. The arguments against it are that our town needs to remain unique to attract visitors, that McDonald’s and other big chains would hurt the small privately owned businesses in town and, in general, would hurt the image of our quaint little town.

And why we were mentioned. We happened to be in a local store browsing some things last weekend, and the owner talked to us about the meeting and urged us to show up. We did not, but honestly, we wish we had. At any rate, she quoted us saying that if big-box stores come to this town, then we might be moving farther north.

Why People Don’t Retire In Maine

If you’ve never had to shovel 2-plus feet of snow off your roof, then you just won’t get how exhausting that effort really and truly is. We are in the middle of a storm right now, but that huge amount of snow we were shoveling off our roof was early. This was from previous snowstorms. We had to do it because we just didn’t want our roof to collapse under the weight of snow especially since 20 more inches were projected for today.

But wait, I didn’t do it alone. Oh no, we all suffer together in this household.
Yes, she’s smiling now. After 10 minutes, no more smiles, believe me. (K says this last part isn’t true.)

Our sheds and the snow plowed up around them. No, I refuse to shovel off our sheds roofs. If they collapse, oh well.

Inviting, huh? If you come to visit, please shovel the path to our door.

An action shot. Believe it or not, we started at 1 pm and it pretty much took three hours to shovel off just one portion of our roof. More tomorrow and I won’t be posting because I’ll be too busy napping.

Princeton Elm

I’m going to attempt to spare you from my obsessed ramblings today, but I doubt I’ll succeed. I’ve been cleaning up all the debris left from our recently felled elm tree, and it led me to start researching Dutch Elm Disease. You may have read in the past that I’ve been looking to find the perfect trees to plant on our property. I waffled back and forth for over a year on deciding whether or not to plant some weeping willows. I still have some in pots, but they recently bit the dust. I also spent a considerable amount of time looking into hybrid American Chestnut trees but decided they were still too disease-prone to purchase and plant. Now I’m obsessed with Elms.

Here’s what I found out. There are many cultivars of elms; all are American Elms, and one in particular — the Princeton Elm, originally cultivated in the 1920s and selected for its beauty — just happens to be a USDA- and national-parks-approved DED-resistant elm. Over the past few years, they have been planting them on streets again, especially in Washington DC, and only recently are they now available to the public.

These particular elms are not hybrids. They just happen to be resistant to the disease. By resistant, I don’t mean to imply that they can’t get the disease, but these elms have developed a mechanism to block the disease from getting into their root systems, so the trees do not show any effect and do not die from it.

I’ve found a few dealers, one here in Maine and one in MA, that carry the Princeton Elm, and I will purchase a bunch of them in the spring to plant. I don’t think I’ll be waffling on which type of tree to plant anymore. I believe the elm is perfect. It is a beautiful tree, it is native, it is hardy to our Maine temperatures, its root system is not invasive, it is not brittle so it can withstand tough winds, and planting it will help restore this mighty giant back to the forests.

Woodstove

If you remember from previous pictures, we had an old wood stove aptly named “The Boss.”
It was definitely a relic from another time, but it wasn’t so old to be considered an antique.
From the very beginning, the old stove worried us a bit. Its legs were balanced on four small rocks. Yes, rocks! Wouldn’t that worry you? It was obvious that the stove wasn’t professionally installed. If you’ve seen this house, you would realize that nothing in the house was done by “professionals.” I’m not criticizing anyone though — I do a lot of work on the house myself and I’m definitely not a professional, but there are things that I refuse to do myself….like installing something that might burn my house down!

Earlier this year, we had some torrential downpours, and we noticed that water was leaking from our stovepipe. It was at that time, we took a long (okay, wasn’t that long…took about 30 seconds), hard look at our old woodstove and decided it needed to go. Part of the reason was the rain; the other reason was I didn’t want to burn down our house.

And after a good deal of research, we decided to buy a handmade soapstone woodstove from a company called Woodstock based in NH. All owners of these stoves rave about them. A small amount of wood heats the home for up to 12 hours. And yet, you can’t buy these stoves in a retail fireplace store. Why? Because the company does well enough selling directly to consumers that they decided not to sell them in retail stores. They are popular enough that people will find a way to get them, and they don’t ship to your house either. Talk about making it tough for the consumer.

So to make a long story a little shorter, we hired a company to take delivery and install it for us. And here it is, our very first fire in our Fireview woodstove.

Tractor Rides, Fryeburg Fair, and Feta

Every time I start a post, I don’t think I have much to say and then I end up writing a novella. In person, I’m fairly quiet, but when I write I just can’t shut up!

In late August, K’s brother’s family came to visit and I neglected to post any pics of that adventure.
Here’s a summary of the major events of that week.

K’s brother David and I (and the kids) went fishing every day. He broke his fly rod in a terrible kayak fishing adventure, and I destroyed my google android phone in a terrible kayak fishing adventure. We didn’t catch any lunkers, but it was still fun.

The kids got a tractor ride. Lucky for me, my tractor has safety features. If the tractor senses that the rider was thrown from the tractor, then it shuts down immediately. This is a weight-related feature, and so the kids were too light to even start the tractor. That’s a good thing because I didn’t have to argue with the kids about letting them drive the tractor by themselves. They just had to accept it. And they did a decent job mowing our lawn.

We rented a pontoon boat one day and went out on the lake. We also rented kayaks for the entire week.

We drove to Freeport one day to do some shopping at the original LL Bean store, and we had the world’s perfect lobster roll. We know it was perfect because that’s what the sign said.

We had a fire pit and had s’mores. That was the first time I had a s’more. Yummy!

We checked out the stars with a fancy telescope that has GPS tracking abilities. Of course, we didn’t have the instructions so we did it the old-fashioned way.

 

David fly fishing the river

 

In more recent news, we are getting our roof repaired, and we are replacing our old wood stove with a new handmade soapstone wood stove. The wood stove should be installed in the next few weeks. I’ll post some pics of it then. We had a big dead elm tree cut down a few weeks ago, and now I have to rent a hydraulic log splitter. That’s different, huh? How often do you talk about weekend plans with friends and family and say, “I’m renting a hydraulic log splitter this weekend, how ’bout you?”

I don’t have any good pics of fall yet, but it’s just the beginning. We did go to the opening of the Fryeburg Fair, which is a pretty big deal here. We saw sheep dog trials, chickens, giant oxen, hogs, and, of course, goats. We are going to get a dog next year, and I think we’ve narrowed it down to a German Shepherd, Yellow Lab, or a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever (say that fast five times).

We are also seriously thinking of getting a couple of goats and some chickens next year. I want to make my own feta because I can’t find a quality cheese maker anywhere. Who knows, maybe I can start to brew my own beer and wine and start a little cheese and wine shop…or maybe I can start a small pub/shop/eatery where I can serve some Macedonian cuisine (you won’t find a Mac restaurant anywhere for some reason) and have some live music at night…..no menus, just a couple of dishes every day. Maybe even guest chefs. Serve Macedonian spare rib soup in winter, pepper salad in the summer (every day actually), Zelnik (Macedonian pizza), and, of course, Macedonian chicken and rice…okay, business plan complete. Wonder if a place like that would be able to survive in a town like this? What do you think a good name for a pub/cheese/wine/beer shop would be? Any suggestions? Anyone want to be a partner/investor? Okay, I think I’ve gone off on a tangent here….but I don’t think it’s a bad idea….probably be a lot more fun than building advanced software systems. I gotta say, for a hard-core techie, I’d really rather make cheese.

Well, that’s all to report for now except the Red Sox organization may buy the Liverpool Football Club. We used to go watch football league games at the Phoenix Landing in Cambridge, all organized by our very own Brit, Steve Day who moved back to Liverpool last year. Must have been fate.

Another Visit and a Bit of History

K and I were sitting out on the porch enjoying a nice Sunday evening when a red car slowly came down our road.
We watched them come to a dead stop near our dead elm tree and, like everyone else who freaks out when they realize they are on someone’s front lawn, mechanically try to figure out how to back up and turn themselves around to make a quick exit. If you haven’t been here yet, you probably don’t know that our road ends with us, and there are no signs that say dead end. We’ve learned to ignore people who drive down our road. It doesn’t happen that often, but it happens enough where we are no longer alarmed. We usually just sit and watch people frantically try to get off our property.

These people were a bit different. They managed to turn themselves around and as they were heading back up the road, they stopped and backed up! ..err…it was at this point, I put down the Bridgton newspaper and headed toward the car. And, lo and behold, it was the Mowatts, the people who owned the house prior to the people we bought it from.

They stopped by because they just wanted to see the old house they grew up in. They told us that seven kids grew up in our house. Hard to believe if you’ve ever seen the place, but fifty years ago, times were a bit different. One woman, in her late fifties, said she slept in the attic and at that time the rafters were still exposed. During the winter, the snow blew in, and she would run downstairs to warm herself in front of the woodstove before getting dressed.

We found out that they built the cow/chicken barn and that the forest behind us was all pasture land. We also found out that two of our outbuildings, the blacksmith shop and the old garage-ish sorta thing, were brought here from an old camp in Naples, Maine, where the woman’s uncle used to work. The camp was getting rid of them, so he brought them here.

Ahh…sooo…here is the interesting part. The people we bought the house from said that it used to be an old horse farm. Apparently, they assumed that because it has a blacksmith shop. It wasn’t until today that we learned that it was an active farm, but not a horse farm, and those two buildings were not original to the house.

They also told us a good story about how our land abuts another farmhouse that also had cows and that on several occasions hunters would shoot the cows, having mistaken them for deer. The farmer finally got fed up with hunters and started to paint COW on the sides of his cows each hunting season.

Ya, it’s a small town and these little moments remind us of the people who live all around us and the warm memories they have of our farmhouse. For some reason, it’s a nice feeling knowing that our neighbors know this house and love it.

In the end, they said they were in the phone book, so if we wanted to see some old photos of the house, just give them a call. I think we’ll do that one day…

Floors with Waterlox Tung Oil

Been awhile since I last posted.

As you have been reading, I was working on the floors. A few weeks ago, I applied Waterlox Tung Oil on the floors. Tung oil is not a stain. It just protects the floor while bringing out the natural patina of the wood. Before applying the Waterlox, the floors were yellow like most pine, but after applying the Waterlox, the floors turned a beautiful dark brown. Note that I tried Waterlox on new pine boards I bought and it didn’t alter the color at all. The reason is that old heartwood pine has a very distinct character than new pine. Old pine boards were cut from very, very old large trees. Most trees today used for lumber aren’t aged like they were a couple hundred years ago.

You may also notice that I didn’t actually get all the paint off the floor and so the result is that floors do look distressed. Can’t believe people actually pay money to get distressed floors.

I also build some custom baseboard heater covers. They certainly look a lot better than the nasty green metal ones.