I donāt like to count a task finished until Iām really done- tools put away and everything. But I can pretty much say Iām done fencing the center field. At least, I was able to move the sheep into it at the end of September. I had a few lingering details left to finish, like filling in some nasty ankle-twister holes in the field and adjusting a gate that didnāt ride smoothly. Iāve done those now.
Category: Historic Home
Insulating the Innards of Antique Weighted Windows
The front of our house used to have three side-by-side wood-framed windows, as can be seen by this 1937 tax photo I found in the county Assessor records. In the eighties, a prior owner had them replaced with a bay window.
Continue reading “Insulating the Innards of Antique Weighted Windows”
A Very Big Fir Tree Log
Kirk has been enjoying the use of our new road up from the pasture, using the tractor to haul up debris from down there that was a bit too scary to drive on the street. Much of what he’s retrieved are standard-sized logs, metal chunks etc that have probably arrived here from past floods.
But this mammoth looks like it may have been something from the original farmstead, back in the 1800’s. I know that the homesteader family logged the hill and had an on-site sawmill from which they cut boards to build the barns. It took Kirk some finessing to get this onto the tractor bucket (you can only see the tractor’s roll bar and Kirk’s head behind the log, it’s so big). But he did, and got it up the hill and into the to-be-processed scrap pile. Our little 30-hp tractor does pretty well carting big loads like this around.
We’re thinking of what we could do with this one, to keep it around for posterity. Maybe we’ll make it into a bench or something. Any creative ideas?
Historic Craftsman Porch Restoration
Our house has a peculiar combination of architectural styles. It was mostly a basic cottage, originally, built around 1929 (1937 tax photo above). But when it was moved to this site, I added a taller second story, which made it look more like a Farmhouse-style house. Yet tacked onto the front of it isĀ a decidedly Craftsman porch overhang, even though there isn’t much else Craftsman about the house. Continue reading “Historic Craftsman Porch Restoration”