Nippy - October 12th

Brrrrr! Autumn is sure here in New England. The nights are cold and the days are brisk. We are still constantly at work on the shack, but we can't control everything. The floor is dry, but sometimes events just happen that force you to slow down.

Right now, I'll catch you up on the more entertaining aspect of our lives before I delve into the Shack.

This week Dave announced that the water might be getting too cold for him. We got back from a kayak expedition in the swamp last Sunday. We took a quick swim together before we went in for the evening.



I am making the weirdest face, but I swear that I was just trying to get Dave to smile. The water was chilly - I'll admit that - but it has gotten colder and I am STILL SWIMMING every day. In that picture, the water temp was 60 degrees. I went swimming this morning after my run and the water was 55. I don't think it is too bad, and I bet I'll last until November - maybe right up until we have ice. It is an invigorating way to start the day. Dave says that was his last swim. Perhaps so, but I'll be sure to post a picture if he gets in again.

On another topic not shack-related, our beautiful robust "laying hens" are looking more and more like roosters. In fact, we have identified at least three, and in the morning, the cacophony of cock-a-doodle-doing leads us to believe that we may actually have four or even five roosters. Please understand that this is our first time with chickens; even now as they run around the yard they are tough to distinguish. Juvenile roosters look pretty much exactly like hens.

Here is the only one we think is a hen - for sure.




She looks like a hen right? Yeah! Say yes! The poor girl is dealing with sharing her house with an awful lot of men, though. Most of the other chickens are in different developmental stages but seem to be starting to look like this guy (our biggest rooster, named Hero.)




Don't mess with this guy, he keeps all the others in line. He is starting to try to keep us humans in line too!

Okay okay, roosters and hens aside, the shack is still progressing mightily and we are trying to keep up this exhausting pace so that we beat Old Man Winter. The shack is looking fine amongst the fall foliage.




It may be hard to see at this vantage, but I have finished trimming out the windows on the outside with rough-cut one-inch lumber which looks just smashing. I spent a lot of time working on the outside of the house because the floor took such a long time to dry. It DID finally dry though. But while I waited, I did window trim. I am proud to say that I trimmed the entire outside of the house using only boards that came off of the former roof. After a good belt sanding, they looked good as new.

There are no pictures of the dry floor, but it looks great too. Come see it sometime.

As soon as the floor was dry, I drilled all the holes in the walls for the wiring that Dave would be doing.

Last week, I found some kitchen cabinets on the side of the road for free (perfectly good), and the Kaufholds generously gave us a couple of cabinets as well. I spent some time trimming these all up to the same hight to go under the kitchen counter top. As soon as Dave is finished the wiring, I may start getting down to business and setting up some of the more "housey" parts of the house while Dave is working (when I say he is working, I mean on his REAL job - the thing he used to do before we decided to renovate the Shack.)

Wiring! That is right, Dave is wiring as I type this (on a beautiful Sunday afternoon.) It is very exciting to see just how much electrical work he can get done in one weekend. Here he is yesterday mapping out our electrical layout.




And here he is today, all the wires have been run and he just has to hook them all up. (oh, look, you can see some of the beautiful floor there!)





It is a small house, but it is no small task. Dave, having had to do day-job stuff lately, hasn't had a weekend since our honeymoon (which, technically, was four week DAYS not a weekend.) Yet, as you can see, he is still smiling. If you see him, give him a pat on the back, and buy him a beer. He deserves it.

I should tell you all that we are working almost exclusively with found objects, salvaged goodies, and reusing the good wood that we removed from some unusable part of the shack. We are pretty darn proud of what we've put together. With the exception of the unsafe or non-salvageable materials we got rid of, we have managed to incorporate a huge amount of the "what-once-was" of the Shack into the "What-will-be" of the Shack. This experience in "shacking up" will be one that we draw upon for the rest of our lives - construction experience and relationship experience.

Curious to know if we make it in before the snow flies? Will our fire wood be delivered? Will we find a refrigerator? You'll just have to tune in for

Chickens - October 5th

Heya kids. Wondering where we've gone to? Yeah, well, we are too. If you ask us how we feel when we wake up in the morning, the answer is "weary". It is October now and this is the first week that it has really begun to get cold. The leaves are all changing now and it is frosty in the night. We promised ourselves that we would take our weekends off from working, and this might be the first weekend that we have actually stuck to that pact since we got married. Well, I guess that isn't true since I was in there for a couple hours yesterday morning trying to get the finish on the floor before we left for my grandmother's 90th birthday party.

You might get a kick out of the fact that, although the lake temperature is only in the high 50's right now, Dave and I are both still swimming pretty much daily. Here is a picture of Dave a couple of days ago. He had worked on the floor all day long and came back for his clean-up swim after the sun had set. I had to use the flash to capture it properly.





you can faintly see the horizon above the far shore. Dave is being a really good sport here because we generally don't spend much time in the water now that is really cold. We are in it just long enough to get that brisk clean feeling, and then we're out.

Now that you know how we get clean after we work a hard day, I should tell you what sorts of things we have been working on. Dave spent three days burning the junk wood that had come off of the house. The yard is just really clean now. He also put down the plywood floor in the front of the house. Oh, and we spent a half-day installing the "spine" under the belly of the building so that the floor would stay nice and solid and not develop a bounce. We have really gotten bad about pictures of all of this stuff lately because we are just plain tired. We keep getting closer to our goal of actually getting in the shack, but it still seems like there are many many things left to do.

For my own piece of mind, I took a side-jaunt into a building project that had nothing to do with the shack. My mother and I have been scheming and researching about chickens. We decided that we were going to get some laying hens. So, this week, I scrounged up enough materials to piece together a chicken coop. It took me about a day of working on it and it was done. It was refreshing to get to build something that wasn't quite so critical as a house to live in. Chicken's live simple lives and don't have high expectations for their house. So, in one day, I built a chicken palace.




What fun to do something so whimsical as a chicken coop! Here is the back view. This is where we can reach in and pull out the theoretical eggs they will lay.





Mom and I were so excited that I went out the next day to get our chickens. They are four-month-old Rhode Island Reds. Five hens and a rooster that are currently free-ranging in my parent's yard. We have found it endlessly entertaining to watch them peck around the yard. Bean, our bold black cat, is terrified of them. Every time he has to walk past them they chase him. We are just glad that he doesn't seem to be thinking about eating them.




Ahh, yes. chickens, you say. That is nice. but what about the shack? What phase of construction have you reached? Let me see. I painted the beams white before Dave put in the floor (because I can tend to be a sloppy painter) so, any questionable paint that may be on them is sealed up with a heavy coat of oil based paint. It looks quite grand inside with the white beams, I don't think a picture really does it justice, but I'll show you anyway.





This picture also captures the loft a little bit. (it is hard to take a picture of a loft) We have found two little windows for each side of the house in the peaks so that we can be well-ventilated. That is easier to see from the outside.




This is the back view with our little loft window nestled up in the peak. Here is a view from the lake side.



As you can see, the leaves are all turning as we are well into autumn. Our little chimney is poking out all ready to have the wood stove attached to it. The current "shack state" is that all of the roof is done, the walls our finished and wrapped in Tyvec, and we are now buttoning up all the little holes. The new plywood floor is a real improvement. Here is a picture from this morning that I took from the doorway. the floor has a red mahogany stain that this photo does not do any justice. It is a rich warm color if you were to see it first-hand.




We are currently waiting for the finish on the plywood to dry so that Dave can start running the electrical wires back in the walls, and hopefully, insulation will be next. These cold nights are certainly making us think about buttoning down and getting moved in. Our firewood is being delivered this week, and we will definitely post a picture of that, as it will be our heat in this quickly approaching winter. We are excited about getting it all stacked and ready to burn.

The trees are getting to the point where everything is overwhelmingly colorful, but we are not quite there yet. A couple more weeks and it will be stunning. Hopefully, we'll be moving into the shack by then. Meanwhile, think warm thoughts for us! We'll keep on trucking.