Buh Bye 70’s Berber in the Kitchen

Sometimes I wonder why we didn’t do a thing sooner. Like get rid of this nasty carpet in our kitchen. It was stained long before we took over dominion of this house, and it got exponentially worse with us living in it. There were many insults: muddy boots, manure tracked in, Gene occasionally peeing on it when something upset her, Gene spilling various liquids on it when she would try to carry away food bowls and dishes with fluid in them, and us cooking and lazily letting things fall or spill on the floor. I’m already unfaithful about regular vacuuming (and Kirk sticks to the claim he does not know how to operate a vacuum ). And it’s not like the vacuum could even come close to addressing what was wrong with this carpet. Stylistically or cleanliness-wise.

 

The Hammerhead II: Like Butter

This house is the second historic home where I’ve installed salvaged vintage fir flooring. The first time I did it, and also when I first started working on the upstairs for this house, I borrowed a pneumatic flooring nail gun from my friend Giang. And oh my goodness, that nail gun was like butter. Giang is one of those friends who’s great to know because when he buys a product, he does tons of research. So if I decide to buy the same product, I’ll just choose the brand Giang did, knowing I can trust his choice!

Since we have quite a bit of flooring left to do, and may also employ a flooring nail gun in the barn loft, we decided to buy our very own gun. It seems justified over renting or continuing to borrow Giang’s gun, knowing that we can re-sell it when we’re done and recover a portion of our investment.

So, we got it: the PortaNails Inc. Hammerhead II.

 

Sheetrock Taping and Fir Flooring Laid

We have been tackling some projects in our upstairs, which has been patiently waiting to be finished for nearly three years. We decided to hire someone to tape the sheetrock. It’s hard to do a nice job on smooth walls, we weren’t keen on doing the ceiling above the staircase, and we figured it would be nice to have this piece get done fast. But of course booking a contractor created other due dates for us.

 

Barn Plans Starting to Gel

We are in the stage of getting detailed engineering plans from our pole barn. And hopefully not inadvertently getting some kind of Picasso interpretation of what we wanted! We are going to hire a contractor to build it, because it’s large and complex, we don’t want to horse around giant poles to get them precisely planted, and we don’t want to take forever to build it.

 

Old Barn, New Barn Part III

So here we are today, with a fallen 106-year-old barn, and a strong need for a replacement to serve our growing farm operations. So, we are making plans to build a new one in the old one’s footprint.