Mid-summer

Sharon and Catherine are home now but I'm taking another week of vacation to work on the house. It was cold and foggy this morning so I sat by the warm wood stove and considered what I have done and learned so far.

One of the big problems with this place is its location on a slope - rain water runs right down and under the house. There does not seem to be any provision for proper drainage at all. It's a wonder that the house isn't in much worse shape than it is considering that it's had "wet feet" for about 150 years. One project will be to create French drains around the up-slope sides of the house. As a start, I've installed rain gutters and drainages pipes that take the roof water away from the house.

There is also the strange issue of the "path" leading to the main door of the house. It is just a slippery, grassy gully with no stepping stones - not only dangerous but a veritable river leading rain water to the foundation of the house. I'll have to build some kind of terraced walkway with drainage integrated into it.

I removed the ridiculous garden that was right up against the west wall of the house. It seemed contrived to hide some Mickey mouse repairs to the foundation and served as an ideal method to keep the sills constantly damp and make it convenient for carpenter ants to get into the wood. The soil from that garden is now in a pile waiting to become a new garden.

Sharon spent a lot of time pulling up Japanese Knot Weed which is spreading all over the property. We burned great piles of the stalks the other night. The smoke was a reprieve from the hoards of mosquitoes that descend every evening.

Eric (14) and Julia (17) were here for two days. Eric seemed to like the place. He slept outside in a tent by the gazebo. He was expecting to sleep in the workshop but got turned off at the last minute by all the axes, saws and machetes - it seems he has been watching too many horror movies. Julia was less enamored with the place. Bath facilities were definitely not up to her standard.

It stayed miserable and foggy today so I decided to crank up the wood stove and bake bread the old fashioned way. Sharon had stocked the kitchen with all the ingredients including yeast but I had to remember the recipe - a bit risky. Luckily, the Grandy's left the instruction manual for the wood stove which I needed to figure out how to control the oven temperature. Well, actually you can't really control it, but I got it close enough to bake two magnificant loaves of bread.