Replacing the front steps

It was sickening to my soul, but we had to make the very tough decision to remove and replace the solid stone slabs that made up our front stairs. The stone was spalling and crumbled a little more with every footstep and raindrop that fell on it. The top step had broken in half and wobbled precariously under any weight. They needed to be replaced before someone got seriously injured.

So we needed to decide what we would put in their place. Replacing with comparable stone would have been prohibitively expensive. Concrete would have been cheaper but still pricey and probably not DIYable. Wood won out. Although not accurate to this particular home, wood steps are true to the time period and can be made to look as if they always belonged to the house. Hopefully the local historical society will not raise a stink about it.

We removed the bottom tread, which was actually 3 blocks of stone. Layers of stone came off in sheets. I was amazed and a little frightened by how easily the stone crumbled in my hands. Once the bottom treads were out, I pulled out an incredible amount of stone debris that had fallen off the bottoms of the other treads. I dug a trench along the sidewalk, then filled it with several inches of gravel and then sand. This will help water drain away from the bottom of the stairs and hopefully prevent rot. Solid concrete block was put on top and stabilized and leveled all the way across.

Tom grabbed a demolition bar and wrestled out one of the pieces of the top tread.

We carefully rolled it down step by step to a furniture dolly and rolled it to its new home, just a few feet away.

The stone seems randomly placed at the moment (my landscape architect sister is probably cringing right now), but it will eventually become flowerbed edging.  There is still a lot of use left in these stone slabs, just not as structural elements. I'm glad I'll be able to use them as part of the house and not just have them hauled to the dump. We're waiting for the weekend before we tear apart any more of the stairs to maximize our work time and minimize the time we have to climb up and down the porch foundation to access the house.

When I was a kid, I had a favorite rock. It wasn't a fancy polished rock, or pretty color, and it wasn't shaped like a heart or a bunny or anything. It was a ruddy purplish brown with flat sides and sharp corners, about the size of my adult hand. It had some sparkly bits on one face, but otherwise it was just an ordinary piece of rock. I'm sure it was puzzling to my parents as to why I was always walking around with a rock in one hand (and probably a book in the other), but by that point in my childhood they'd learned to not ask questions.

But now that I'm an adult, I no longer have a favorite rock (although if I saw that rock in my parents' yard I'd probably take it just for nostalgia of my childhood weirdness). Instead, I now have a favorite brick. You see, I have piles

and piles

 and piles

of brick (several more piles than just these) at my disposal, and I've already used them in quite a few projects. So far I've built a raised flower bed,

lined the flower beds along the sidewalk,

buried a line of bricks under the neighbor's fence (to keep the former neighbor's terriers from digging under it, plus it helps keep my weeds contained to my yard),

and outlined around the heat pumps (to keep the stone "mulch" in place).

Whenever practical I orient the bricks so that you can see the brickmakers' stamps. In our one-half of a city lot, you can pretty much see the entire history of the Portsmouth brickmaking industry. I like having that history literally under my feet, and yesterday I spotted this gem:

Not only does it have raised lettering, which in itself is unusual, but the S in Sciotoville is backward. I don't know why this is so appealing to me, but it's a reminder to me that all of these heavy, durable bricks were made by artisans using hand-set molds. I have dozens of these Carlyle Sciotoville Blocks, but this is the only one I have found so far with this mistake. Here's the larger view of the project:

It's a work in progress.

Where has the time gone?

Oh, hi strangers. Nice to see you again. Believe it or not, I've actually been working on the house and quietly ticking things off the to-do list. I finally finished the crown moulding in the master bathroom, back bedroom, and the tub/toilet half of the hall bathroom. I also finished baseboard in the hall bath and back bedroom. Other than some touch-up paint here and there, the back bedroom is done.

The temperate weather has inspired me to get some projects done outside as well. The next major project is replacing the front stairs, which we should make some serious progress on this weekend. Demolition of the existing stairs will be by far the hardest aspect of this job, since each of the steps weighs several hundred pounds. I promise I'll post some pictures soon of all our progress, but I just wanted to check in and assure you that I'm still alive and kicking!

Handmade Christmas

Christmas has really snuck up on me this year. Maybe it's because I am doing a handmade Christmas for my family this year, and those projects always take more time than I anticipate. My siblings decided to forgo gifts to each other and just focus on the kids this year. My gift for Catherine's kids is more of a family gift - a set of Notre Dame cornhole boards. Everybody gets their own set of beanbags, so the kids can play their own game while the adults are using the cornhole boards. I'm pretty proud of how these turned out.

The beanbags turned out equally well, though this picture was obviously taken before they were stuffed.

My niece Amelia is learning her colors, and her mommy thought she could use a color-sorting beanbag game. I was happy to oblige. The holes have a fabric pouch to catch the beanbags, and the colors (10 in all) have 2 beanbags each. I think it turned out pretty cute!

I even made a couple things for myself. It's not up to the level of craftsmanship of the other two items, but it's plenty sturdy and helped tidy up my pantry floor quite a bit, though you can see that I've got a long way to go in that regard. One day I'll get around to adding more shelving, but this utilizes the sliver of wall under the light switch pretty efficiently.

I also finally got around to making a cutting board for myself from an old piece of walnut I found. My old bamboo board split in half ages ago and I've been in need of a new board ever since. I just sanded it to bare wood, cut it to size, rounded over the edges, and applied as much mineral oil as it could handle. I thought about routing a juice groove around the perimeter, but the board is not quite as wide as ideal and the groove would have made the working area even smaller. The picture doesn't show it well, but this board is almost too beautiful to use as a cutting board.

Unfortunately, it is officially too cold to be working out on the roof, so I'm afraid the lovely blue tarp is going to be a little more permanent than I'd hoped. Since I can't do that, I've been busy with inside tasks. I built fence panels:

I also hung insulation, installed battens in the master bathroom, started on the crown moulding in the master bedroom, and painted window trim in the master bedroom that has been primed for 2 years. None of it amounts to a whole lot, but it's something at least. We also spent about a week in October down at Gulf Shores in my sister's condo. We didn't ever want to leave! With this view greeting me every morning and not a speck of construction dust anywhere, can you blame me?

Since my last check-in, we also survived Halloween:

(Mary Poppins, a penguin, Bert the chimney sweep, Madeline, and Boo from Monsters, Inc.)

Thanksgiving, Sam's polydactyly surgery, and now we're on to Christmas preparations. I'm doing a lot of handmade gifts this Christmas, so I'll hopefully update with those projects as they are completed.

Up on the roof

I took the plunge and started tearing up the gutters on our porch. I got quite a bit torn off the first day and a couple of the rotten lookouts replaced. The lookout is the part that holds the gutter. It has a deep V notch on the top to receive the metal liner. In our case, it also has an angled cut at the top to receive the crown moulding trim and a squared notch on the front to receive the fascia. It's a lot of notching, but it makes installation of all the trim boards much easier.





At any rate, that's just about all I've done on it in the past week. Despite a weather.com extended forecast of nothing but sunshine, it's rained just about every day since I started. I had to scramble the first day with a too-small tarp that ended up blowing off in the middle of the night. So I ordered a larger tarp to cover the entire roof and I'm waiting for clearer skies before working any more on it.

Fixing the foundation

We had another contractor come to look at our gaping crack in the basement wall, and again we were assured that it looked much worse than it actually is. He told us it would be absurdly expensive to hire him for such a small job (his company is located several hours away and he has to pay his employees just as much for travel time as for actual working time) but told us how to fix it ourselves.

I built a second wall out of concrete block in front of the brick knee wall and in the doorway, then filled the gap between the two walls with mortar. This basically makes the knee wall twice as thick and much stronger for resisting the lateral force of the dirt. Now if that brick wall wants to bow outward, it will push against about 1200 pounds of (reinforced) concrete. Access to the coal room through the doorway is restricted somewhat, but we can still get back there if we need to (which is very infrequently).

No, it's not a thing of beauty, but whaddaya gonna do?

I had an idea to mount a jack sideways in the doorway to push the bricks back to where they ought to be, but that unfortunately didn't work. Both contractors indicated that the wall was still OK to remain stepped like it was as long as it didn't get any worse, so this fix should be alright. Ideally I'd like to get a steel beam installed on each side of the brick wall (for other reasons, but that would also alleviate this issue somewhat), but I am content with this as a solution for the time being. It was only about $150 for the block and concrete mix plus a few days of work. I still need to fill in the crack with new mortar, but it's not really a pressing need.

I'm almost convinced that the root of the whole problem was the termite guy. He said he pumped an outrageous amount of solution into the ground (I don't remember exactly, but I want to say it was something like 1300 gallons), and that amount of fluid pressure behind the knee wall could have caused the damage. Thanks, Terminix!