Unlocking the Landlocked Land within our Land
Our land as we bought it surrounds a small parcel with a house. A nice person lived there and we never worried about it. But she passed and we inevitably started wondering what may happen to this small parcel, it’s close to everything we built. The right people on it would be awesome, the wrong ones terrible. To make a long story short, we approached the family when it was polite to do so and inquired about it. They were just as nice and we soon agreed on terms. Their ancestors owned pretty much the whole hill, now subdivided into many many parcels with many houses. It’s nice to go the other way a little, and it’s nice to not worry about what may happen to this parcel. Not only that, but there are now no parcels close enough to us to bring any worry. We’re very lucky to live in a neighborhood with awesome people, and with more than enough buffer between them and us :).
We acquired the nice person’s house in the process, it is very run down and will most likely be demolished when the time comes (a mix of respect, resources, and knowing what to do with it). I heard rumors that it may be the oldest house in our village, and that it has an incredible stone foundation. we don’t feel like going in just yet, it needs a bit more time.
This adds 2 acres to our land, and we’re very glad to be done with the paperwork.
Hard Cider Vintage 2021
Very nice color, I haven’t tried the taste yet.
26,237 Pen Strokes
Little by little I’m increasing the complexity of what I can send to the plotter. As an image passes through the various programs I choose for a particular render, I push their limits and often run into bugs, memory limits and others. As much as possible, I dockerize each step so they are easier to summon and improve on their own. This also allows for pipelining.
I finally found a fast and reliable SVG->GCode converter. Inkscape’s is reliable but it’s extremely slow. I had to rewrite a part of it to be iterative rather than recursive so it could handle the size of the SVGs I am throwing at it.
Inkscape itself has a command line mode so some of the repetitive stuff I use it for are dockerized, for example to ungroup objects and break apart compound paths. It’s truly amazing.
I kind of want to publish all this but I have no idea if I violated any licenses frankensteining code from various sources. And I have much better things to do with my time than to find out. Things such as this wonderful plot:
Glenwoods side by side
I compared the stoves a little closer to make sure the pieces would fit between each other. I was able to confirm that this new find is an absolute score. What luck to find it, it’s going to save me time, money, and the result will be a thousand times better. And we’ll have some spare parts if we need them.
My main piece of concern was the top of the oven box, where strong fires can eat at the iron over time. You can see all the cracks and other weak areas on the top piece, but the same piece in the new stove is in perfect shape!
In that same region where fires burn hottest, the frame supporting cook lids had been eaten at. Once again, the new part is perfect.
The 2 siblings side by side, one is a model C, the other a model C-H. I cannot figure out what that could possibly mean, but the C seems to have more than the C-H.
Ash removal from the bottom of the burn chamber, a very common configuration.
Ash removal from the side.
There’s a lot more odd parts here and there that will nicely merge to make a complete cook stove.
All parts have dates ranging from 1904 to 1917, I’m not sure why that is. I do wonder if they were cast at different years and then assembled together. If that’s true I’m not sure what the date of assembly is. There’s still a lot of unknown about this stove, possibly a lot that will never be known again.
Oops we did it again
We bought another wood stove. But it’s ok, this one is just for parts, which is a bit sad as it is in really good shape. The absolutely gorgeous Glenwood we bought a couple of years back needed some TLC and had a few parts that were cracked. I got them out and I was trying to find a cast iron welder for them. But any plan to get them back in shape was imperfect in some way. Then one day, this other Glenwood from 1917 (I think) pops up online and without many details or documentation, it just looks the same. For $100 it’s simply worth a shot.
As far as I can tell it’s the exact same model minus a few bells and whistles. It’s hard to tell, there is simply very little online about 100+ year old stoves. But the pieces that were damaged on the first one are all there and are in pristine shape. Now that is a score in and of itself. I’m going to feel terrible cannibalizing it, it’s in really great shape but it is missing more than our original.
I could definitely get into restoring these beauties if I had more time. In the meantime getting good deals on stoves opportunistically and a few years before we need them has worked well for us. The Glenwood will be ready by the time we need it, most likely to replace the Sweetheart as it moves into a shop to be built adjacent to the house. Long live the Glenwood, may it fire for another 100 years.
I might need to open a “stoves” sections on this blog.
A Christmas Living Room
We’re trying to have a real living room to spend Christmas in. I’ve been putting in long days of work to this effect, much unlike the more quiet pace of these past couple of years.
After 6 years of nailing by hand, I’ve acquired a nail gun. Our solar setup is good enough to power such things these days, the compressor is on par with the air conditioner but it only comes on for short periods of time. It’s a bit of a sad feeling to no longer handle every board as much but the speed gain is nice.
No more hammering against gravity.
The real reason we got into high pressure high velocity nailing however, is for the hickory flooring. There is absolutely no way I would have been able to plant a whole flooring worth of nails through this wood. I didn’t even think wood could be that hard. I can barely run a saw through it. Nailing by hand results in bent nails. I love the patterns in pine, hickory is on a whole new level.
The kids took no time to figure out how to have fun with the smooth and slippery floor.
Starting to look quaint.
New window, only view to the orchard.
Nicole did the tilling, mudding & painting in the stove corner. It’s nice to have some color in the house since everything else is wood. She picked the color too, it’s not Christmas red, it’s Amélie red.
Framing Rough Cut Lumber
Matt helped with our house several times, and so it was a great honor to help him with a house he’s building. It’s framed freely and fluidly and in this way, it reflect his personality perfectly. I love how houses in Vermont which are self built are a perfect reflection of the people within them.
It’s the first time I work with rough cut lumber, and well it’s no more capricious than kiln dried stuff from the lumber yard. The dimensions are a little loose and that’s much less of an issue than the usual warps, twists & knots wood always has.
With several years of building under my belt, I was for the first time ever, the more experienced builder. It was cool to show Matt all the techniques I picked up over the years, and to summon the eclectic characters I learned them from. 1001 ways to impose your will on recalcitrant wood, that’s pretty much what this all boils down to.
Free & proud
Made some Paths, Dropped a Rotted Birch
I was working in a spot that was naturally flat. Instead of moving the logs to the closest trail as was the original plan, I made a new trail.
And it’s quaint
This tree gave me a lot of grief, it’s in a slope, it leans, it’s completely rotted, and it hung in a nearby maple so I had to walk it down. It was raining branches for a while. Thankfully there’s some good wood in it, but mostly I went through the trouble of bringing it all the way down because I can’t leave a dangerous tree anywhere near us. So I was committed on the first cut, when middle of the tree felt oddly soft to the saw…
I also took a small ash, that one was much easier.
Still likes to come pick up logs with me :).
Fermenting Cider
Hidden in a corner of the house, 11 gallons of apple cider are turning into hard cider. Hopefully this 3rd attempt tastes even yummier than the previous 2.
On this fast-forwarded gif, you can see the different rates of fermentation. Fruit flies are attracted to CO2 (the byproduct of fermentation coming out of the air lock). That’s why I attach an extra piece of paper towel to make sure they don’t find their way into the lock through the tiny holes.
High Altitude Siding
It’s hard to muster the resolve to spend a day doing acrobatics on ladders, but once things are underway, you get in the groove and it’s actually pleasant. Still, I definitely earned my beer today.
Fighting recalcitrant boards as always.
Cutting station visitor
I’m finally closing the rakes, and I’m finishing the wall how I started it: with meshing to prevent insect from going behind the siding but allow for air circulation.
The last piece!
This section is very hard to get to, stuck between 2 roofs.
In fact at a certain height, I can only reach everything by adopting body positions which are not ladder approved. At that point I grab my harness and trusty GriGri.
Tethered to some dead weight on the other side of the house.
It’s always super nice up there, the trees around the house are really growing.
