The Great Greenhouse Project Continues

After watching the original greenhouse site for a couple of months at various times of the day, we realized it just wasn't sunny enough where we had it.  So the project got a lot bigger:  first dig a hole for the new spot (I'm determined to have it partially underground), then fill in the old hole, reroute the water line, then line the bottom with gravel, measure it from every angle, and level it.

More trips to Home Depot for more cement block for the foundation.  We are going to do three tiers of cement block, or a total of 90 blocks. (That's a lot of lifting and toting!)

We decided to order an 8 x 12 greenhouse from Costco, so it was really important to get our foundation the proper size.  We waited for the greenhouse to arrive to be certain of the dimensions.

So here's the greenhouse....yikes!

Including nuts, bolts, brackets, and panels, there have to be a thousand parts and pieces.

Fortunately I have a very handy husband, so the project is once again underway.

Continuing our Greenhouse Project

We keep saying "Rome wasn't built in a day" and then we keep trying to finish every project as quickly as possible!  Not sure my body will hold up until this one is done!

Fortunately, we brought some professional construction stakes home from our Georgia building project, so we started the day finding them and then laying out the footprint for the greenhouse.

Yesterday we went to Home Depot and picked up the first 20 cement blocks for the project, and Ron hauled them to the site this morning.  While he was doing that, I pounded in the four stakes 8' apart to outline the interior walls of the building.

Of course, getting every side to be exactly 8' is the easy part - However, you can end up with a trapezoid if you don't make sure the diagonals are the same.

There's probably some "trick of the trade" for doing this, but we just kept measuring until it was all even.

Then came the hard part - routing the existing water line from where it came out of the ground, across where we had laid out the new greenhouse, and up through a hole in a cement block.  That took quite a bit of digging as the plastic pipe was pretty rigid, but we managed to get it in and the water line covered.

Ron helped me with that as there was no way I could do it by myself.  Then he went off to his mowing project and left me to tinker with the cement blocks.

You can see the water pipe coming up through the first tier of cement block.  I did a preliminary level, but will do final adjustments as we mortar it all together.

Next step:  Off to Home Depot again to pick up mortar mix and another 20 cement blocks.  I'm thinking about filling the holes in the cement blocks with insulation before we do our mortaring.

The Great Floor Project of 2013

I used to wax the old wood floors in our log house, and they looked pretty good for a while.  However, we decided when the kitchen was redone in 2009 that we should refinish all the floors so I quit waxing them.  We redid the floor under the breakfast nook the next year, and then put the rest of the project on the big "P" (procrastinate).  Other projects always took priority, and let's face it, it was a huge endeavor not to be taken on lightly.

We had asked a flooring guy to look at refinishing the floors for us and he suggested we tear up the old floor and install new.  That probably makes sense to anyone without deep sentimental attachment to this house in all its quirkiness.  So the work began with us doing it ourselves.  Our original plan was to do about 8' x 10' this year and another section next year and so on until it got done.

It's a tedious job - painting the caustic stripper on a small section, then scraping with razors, then scrubbing with steel wool, then sanding with a belt sander, and finally painting with a coat of Danish oil.  We decided to go for a matte look rather than a shiny one this time.

Of course, we had to move all the furniture around and around and around as we worked.

But gradually, foot by difficult foot, we moved all the way from one end of the room to the other.  

And after a full week of full days, the floors are done!

Just in time - the sun is out, Ron is well, and we are heading out on the motorcycle.

Spring Cleaning in Georgia

I always go into a manic cleaning and organizing mode just before we leave to be gone for a long time.  So our house is never in better shape than just before we leave.  The entire house in Georgia has tile floors. I love tile - but wish I knew when we were putting it down what I do now about tile.  We chose 16" tile for the kitchen, living and dining rooms.  The first year we came back, we found a crack all the way across the floor where the slab had settled around an expansion joint.  


We spent a week chipping up the tile and replacing it with new tile as we had enough of the original tile left to replace the dozen broken tile.  To our dismay, when we returned the next fall, the new tile had cracked along the same line.  So for a couple of years, we have tried various patches, covering with rugs, and other unsatisfactory fixes.

This year we tried something different - we once again went through the arduous process of chipping up the broken tile and every trace of thin set that we used to lay the tile and all the grout that had held the tile down.

This is not a project for the faint of heart - we had a layer of dust everywhere by the time the old tile was removed.  We tried to match the tile in the entry way as the cracked tile fortuitously fell along a line between the kitchen and dining room.


Home Depot doesn't make it easy as they change all the tile colors every year, and it has been 6 years since we originally picked tile.  We were able to get pretty close to the entry way colors, and they don't directly abut each other, so it turned out pretty good.

Another big maintenance job is finished - we should be on the road to Washington soon.