Bin Lid

It was time. The garbage bin, now in its 25th year, has been relentlessly plowed in winter, whacked by a falling Tamarack, and finally upended (twice!) by a bear. A mother bear and her three cubs haunted the neighbourhood for a few days, and twice upended the bin, tearing out a pair of boards to get at the contents. A bizarre feature of the attacks was that on both occasions, she and her cubs carried away the bags without spilling the contents--it was like a free mid-week garbage collection!

You can see on the right a branch that went through two inches of cedar (a stile as well as the lid lumber) to protrude on the underside of the lid. 

I tore off the old lid and top plate and fitted a new one--made, however, of the same cedar boards from Skinny Green's mill down the road. These ones were rescued from the old dog house we built for Freya. Once I'd planed the old lumber, it looked so good that I used spar varnish instead of paint on it. Then Jo told me the next step was to re-build the entire box, so I guess that wasn't the best approach after all.

 

The Dreaded List: Completed Item

Today we finished final painting and sealing on the North East wall, from the ground to the attic gable. It came out quite well. We finished, took down the scaffolding, and then the rain started. On 21 July the scaffolding was up and we were tearing out the old kitchen windows. We took off the vinyl siding and styrofoam insulation, and then tore off the tar paper. Underneath, as we expected, there was some rotten sheathing--below the bathroom and kitchen windows. This is how it looked back in July. One month and one week later we're done. The Maibec siding was fairly easy to work with. We changed out the rather clumsily installed plastic vent hood with a new aluminum model. I used the metal brake to fabricate a fairing for it, so I could seal it in around the clapboard. Because the new attic window was considerably larger, I designed a new external header for it, with the corbels beside instead of above the window. Well there. That's done.

First Fire

 I cleaned the pellet stove and its chimney. Joanne laughed at this at first but when I was done and asked if she'd like a fire, she said "YES!" It has been quite chilly--7C was the overnight low, and the kitchen was at about 12C. Brrr! The irony is that while this is the first fire of the new heating season, the LAST fire was in July! 

Rock

 While digging out the old chunk-of-stone-with-some-concrete footing, I flaked off this piece of slate with a well-shaped hole in it from the jackhammer.

Gable

 This is the first proper window for the attic, in the North East gable. I wanted to keep the external box style of the other windows, but there was very little room to spare, so I put on a beveled top and mounted the corbels on either side of the window instead of above them. I think it works.

Awning Style Windows

 We rebuilt the kitchen wall and fitted awning style windows. I quite like them, though I suspect we were influenced in our choice by the tendency of the old windows to leak in bitter weather. These look more reliable.

Corbels

There are decorative corbels below the crown moulding and on the exterior headers for the windows. They used to take me ages to make. Today I knocked one off in a few minutes, and I could kick myself for not figuring out the technique earlier. Dunce.