New Year's Eve

We woke to this--softly, in the middle of the night, a moist, heavy fall of snow arrived.

We didn't notice until morning that everything had changed. Happy new year!

The End

 

The end of the year:

Bathroom

The window is trimmed up, after existing as a flapping box of Tyvek and vapour barrier since the summer. Jo gave it a fine coat of spar varnish, and for modesty's sake, some pseudo-stained glass appliqué. It makes a nice splash of colour in what is otherwise a most austere room. Now we have the closet to tackle, the area under the stairs, the heater, and some miscellaneous trim.

Progress

 I was troubled to find significant rot in the studs in the bathroom this summer. We had to tear out the windows and rebuild from without, a process that shouldn't have worked but did. This is how things looked:

This was rather discouraging. Jo was very positive, though, which helped a lot. We removed the rotten wood--tricky, but not especially challenging--and then, somewhat to our surpise, successfully replaced it without demolishing the bathroom wall, which by then included not only insulation and gyprock, but a substantial amount of rather nice ceramic tile. Anyway, after lots of structural work, a great deal of expandable foam insulation, and many other bits of detail work, we had the "rework" windows back in place.

The original frames were toast by then. I was not especially troubled; unlike the downstairs frames, which they closely resembled, they were not oak but some softwood--probably spruce or pine. 

It WAS a challenge. I wanted to join the two windows, as before, with a common sill and header. I minimized ornamentation, as the style of the new bathroom is quite austere, but I felt the grooves in the centre trim piece would tone down its breadth. It's not bad!  And now, perhaps, we are almost ready for winter.

Christmas Shopping

 Little by little, the shop looks less like a dump and more like a...well, a shop. I have extended the vacuum ducting to the router table, so that's the planer, tablesaw and router all hooked up. This greatly reduces the amount of sawdust. There is still much to do but since June I've managed to complete many improvements, the greatest being the Stalin-like purge of much of the junk from the place. The huge collection of windows is not packed neatly away in the closet under the stairs, together with most of the shutters. I just have to deal with the overhead rack for long stock and it will start to look like something respectable. More or less.

The Heat Is On

 The old pellet stove is in suprisingly good condition for a relic more than a quarter century old. With the elm tree out of the way, there is room for a horizontal chimney between the sunporch and the window. With a fire on, it looks remarkably cozy. It's still chilly as the dickens, but now there is a place to warm up one's numbed fingers after working with the cold, cold tools!

Tree Go!

The elm by the workshop has been troubling me for years. This morning I set out to dismantle the sump pump because the temperature dipped to about -9C last night; I worried I might already be too late. However, I found the pump churning away quite happily. As I studied the discharge pipe, which emerged amidst the sucker growth on the elm, I noticed that there was not a breath of wind--exactly the sort of day I had been waiting for, and quite surprising after about 18 hours of violent winds, starting in the wee hours of Monday. I sharpened my trusty Husqy, and set to work. I cut an open-faced notch, and then dropped the elm quite neatly between two red pines. 

As a bonus, the butt came to rest above the sump pump line without crushing it in the least!

Soon the tree will become firewood. I'm quite curious about how it will burn. I might just stack it in the "wet" end of the woodshed, because our woodpiles are tarped for the winter. I think we have about two cords of seasoned wood left in the shed--I hope it's enough! Winters are so unpredictable.