Kristen in the Country

We've reached an important milestone in our renovation plans for the house. We finally started. Technically, lots of work has been done since we moved in, starting with the garage and eventually moving on to the basement (still a work-in-progress as far as mortar and wall repair are concerned).  Rob finally has a proper (and heated !) shop so we took a month or so to regroup, reevaluate, and decide on a renovation strategy.  As far as we were concerned we had two feasible options: 1. Buy a trailer, put it on the property to live in, gut the house, and go for it. 2. Renovate this bad boy, one room at a time. Since we still haven't found what we're looking for (a money tree), we went with door #2. The attic has been on Rob's mind for a long time because in order to insulate the ceilings above all the bedrooms, the attic floor will need to be taken up so insulation can be put down.  Before any of that can happen, the attic needed cleaned out.  When his mo...

The last two weeks in our area have been frigid, with sub-zero temperatures and our house has been pretty drafty. According to my in-depth and highly scientific research (might be Google), homes built in the late 1800s were often insulated with paper, wood, or sawdust, if at all.   Rob tells stories of winter days of yore when he would see his breath in the air of his bedroom and find not frost but actual snow inside the window sill of his room. The house was remodeled twenty or so years ago and that problem was taken care of, but the insulation situation is still what the teeny-boppers like to call "cray." We waited until it got cold to play around with Rob's infrared camera to confirm our suspicions about how well-insulated a late-1800s farmhouse is.   SPOILER ALERT: It ain't. Orange: Warm; Purple: Cold   Living room wall directly behind our television   Wall directly behind the couch   Second floor landing I can't wai...

I f it seems like w e're in a constant state of half-finished projects, we are.  We're quickly discovering that unless you want to devote endless amounts of time (we can 't) or have an un ending supp ly of money (we don't), the best way to tackle projects without feeling like y ou never finish anything is to chip, chip, chip away at them every day a little at a time.   With that in mind, h ere's t he second part of an earlier p roject: The garage workshop .  To recap, Rob wanted a functional, legitimate workshop for projects and building things.  Our garage is roomy enough to ac comodate that wish on one side.    He quickly decided that in order to be able to comfortably work in the shop year round, it needed to be insulated and heated .  We weren 't necessarily pl an ning on doing this so soon but he found a fantastic deal o n ins ulation as long as a bulk quantity was ordered , so we went ahead and bi t the bullet and got started .   ...