PlantingOaks

Laura at (not so) Urban Hennery posted about shocking her well, and I realized we actually *have* been doing something at the house, it’s just been so slow it doesn’t feel like progress.

Anyway, I’d never heard of shocking wells before we moved here. Apparently, you throw a bunch of chlorine down them a couple times a year to get rid of iron bacteria. Most of the neighbors in our area do it, and we wanted to start as fresh as we could before replacing the softener, so we went ahead and gave it a shot.

We bought an ‘official’ kit from a local water softener office. I think chlorine is chlorine as far as effectiveness is concerned, but the granules were easier to deal with than liquid, and we wanted good instructions and measurements the first time through.

The process was pretty simple. Pour the chlorine down the well, run the water with the hose going back into the well for a while to get it distributed, then run the faucets in the house until you smell chlorine. Then wait. We’d thought it was a 24 hour process or something, but apparently you only want to do 8 or so to avoid damaging the pump. Then you run the water again until it doesn’t smell like chlorine (a few hours).

That’s where we got a little scare. When we ran the water afterwards, it stayed cloudy even after the smell went away. We’d had a hard time getting the water to clear after installing the new pump, and were afraid again of having to drill a new well if it didn’t clear. We let it run overnight into the yard, which was what we’d done when the pump was being installed (thank goodness all this is going on during a wet spring, not a summer drought). Thankfully, in the morning it was better. It really seemed to knock a lot of crud out of the pipes - grit and strange colored water would come out of the faucet when you cycled the water for some time, but a couple minutes standing at the sink turning the water on and off seems to have fixed it for good.

And I am such a convert. The water here used to be *nasty*. I know well water, I don’t have a problem with it. M’s family has some pretty icky well water, and I can deal with it, even when it turns my toenails orange from showering. This water was nasty. It smelled horrible, iron and sulfur and just nasty. Tasting even a drop off your wet finger was not advisable. B - A - D. After, it just tastes like well water. Still not yummy well water like my grandmother’s, but you could drink it, if you were thirsty. It was a good experiment.

In other news, we’ve found a guy to do the floor who actually seemed to recognize that there was a difference between our old-growth pine, and normal hardwood or modern pine. And, he was willing to do the prep like countersinking the top nailing and other things we’re not sure about himself. There was another company specific to old house restoration that we were considering, but given that after two calls, they still can’t call us back to schedule an estimate, I guess they don’t really need the business.

Now we just have to decide whether to sacrifice the upstairs, or the dining room to get patch boards. The dining room would be a better choice, as it is large and in poor shape, but it would require a pretty big transition from old to new wood between it and the office. We’re trying to decide whether that would look too strange.

Last night, we purchased and assembled a wheelbarrow. Tonight, we will use it to pick up the miscellaneous sticks in the backyard, so that Thursday, we can mow the lawn. Because, the lawnmower arrives on Thursday.

For context, please note that our neighbor first mowed his lawn two and a half weeks ago. We were beginning to feel a mite guilty about things.

Really though,  gardening has been all that’s gotten done since the well incident. Putting in vegetable beds, trees, iris beds. And there’s still much to do, starting with the lawn, but the vegetables will be picking up speed as it gets warmer, and I’ve discovered a treasure trove of garlic mustard that needs dealing with (grumble grumble)

So, M wants applesauce. Particularly, his grandmother’s applesauce, made from specifically from yellow transparent apples that cannot be bought in stores. So apple trees. I research trees that cross-pollinate effectively, and finally get off my butt and order them last Monday. This Monday they arrive. (I will save my opinions about their dubious practice of shipping plants over a weekend for later - I supposed with bare root items it’s not as much of a big deal as with tender green things). At least they’re here.

Now, this is hearsay from M who went out to the house this morning, but apparently, the order was not quite as expected. We do have the three apples we explicitly ordered for optimum cross pollination and utility. We do have the raspberries. We also have a grand total of eight trees. He seemed a little shell-shocked, but I gathered ‘two cherries -  cortland - lodi - another kind of mcintosh’.
They *did* have a ‘free tree of our choice with any order’ special going. I would have preferred the ‘free oriental lilies’ they were running earlier, but that’s my own lazy fault. Anyway, I figured one extra tree we could probably fit in.
Five extra trees though. That’s a bit of a different. We do not need six apple trees. I feel like a bit of a jerk tossing them out, but, well, we really weren’t planning on setting up as fruit farmers. We just wanted some applesauce.
Anybody want an apple tree?

So, there we were, diligently (attempting to) insulate the basement. then M notices some damp and mold sprouts in a previously bone-dry place. (I do not understand our basement drainage. It is incredibly to-the-dust hasn’t seen moisture in ages dry. There isn’t even a sump pump. I find it incredible)

So we pop out to open the vent near that area, and examine possible causes - like the nearby downspout. After running and digging about the yard trying to find where the downspout goes we run the hose down it and decide that wherever it goes, it isn’t clogged, and the problem is more likely that we had an *incredible* amount of rain recently, so probably won’t be reoccurring. (later note: we think it may actually go to the cistern - which we will need to check for an overflow)

Having run about in the unusually dry and warm weather, the notion arises to clean the junk out of the well-pit. In goes M, a shovel, and a bucket. And here’s where the fun really begins. About one bucket of trash down, M slips in the cramped muddy pit, and bumps the well pump. At which point, the rusted top cracks off, and begins spurting water everywhere. So I run to the basement and flip the breaker labeled ‘well-pump’ . . . to no effect. So we flip the main breaker to solve the immediate problem, and call the plumber to order a new well-pump asap.

So, now we need to solve the electrical problem too. M puts the main back on, and flips random breakers until the well goes back off. Apparently, it’s on an unlabeled 15 amp breaker (the breaker it was labeled as on was 40 amps, which seems more reasonable). Better call the electrician and get him to fix what he messed up.

But wait! there’s more! In flipping though the breakers, M gets a little zap. Forgot to dry his hands completely after the foray into the well-pit? Well . . . open up the panel and check. No…it appears there is water dripping into the breaker box from *inside* the main service line. Let’s make that call to the electrician a little more heated now, what do you say?

So, in the space of a day, we have no water, *and* no electric. Which, coincidentally, makes mixing mortar and applying it to the un-windowed basement, well, difficult. So we went home and watched the Kansas-Davidson game.

New plans for the week are finding a sink, and doing the bathroom demo (since it’s not functional anyway), and continuing to try to find someone to tell us what to do with the floors.

I’ve purchased a shelf. I’ve purchased dirt. I’ve purchased seeds. I’ve been saving toilet rolls for months now. This weekend is ‘7 weeks before last frost’. Now I gotta jump.

I’m a little concerned - the good nursery nearby hadn’t gotten their shipment of pea inoculant. Though at least the lady knew what I was talking about and didn’t think I was asking for some crazy voo-doo thing. (which I feel I might be - I’d never heard of pea inoculant before this winter). So I’m torn - wait to plant them until it comes in? Plant them now and try to sprinkle it on top/in the hole later? I’m not sure that driving around to the other nurseries in town would be productive - they don’t seem the types to have serious vegetable supplies, more miracle-gro and ornamentals.

I still need to get lights, but I figure things probably won’t sprout in the first week. I’ll probably also have to get a new extension cord to run up the stairs for them, since I think we’ve cut all the power to the upstairs for safety reasons. I’m also still debating whether to get a heating pad, just for peppers and tomatoes.  But they’re so expensive! Maybe next year.

Which means I should probably finalize my plans and dig the veggie beds to put out the peas and lettuce by weekend after next at the latest. It’s starting to worry me that gardening season is coming up and we still aren’t in the house - so many things will be a lot harder not being ‘on-site’. I wonder how much I can really pull off.

Wow, so after the enthusiastic last post, people might be getting the impression I enjoyed the mudding.

Well, I did. Until we had to keep doing it. And doing it. And sanding it off again. And making all sorts of dust. And putting on more, because we’d sanded down to the tape, then sanding again, and again, and again. Horrible.

But!

We declared ourselves done, mopped all the dust up (it’s amazing how much cleaning feels like progress at this point) and started priming. Well - first we went back to the store to exchange the 10 gallons of ceiling paint we bought for 10 gallons of primer. Both giant purple paint tubs, and right next to each other on the shelf. Thankfully, the primer was cheaper :)

My family was over, and we got three rooms cleaned, taped and primed in one afternoon. M & I came back the next night, cleaned and taped the last room, and put up our sample colors. I really, really hope they dry darker. They should, but I’m having a hard time. The beige is very, very pale, and the dark, hunter green? It looks like nothing so much as the algae I used to scrape off the aquarium walls. Coupled with our gooey-textured walls? Disgusting. I’m really not sure what I’ll do if it doesn’t look good - I guess try even darker - or give up. I’m still a little scared of painting a whole room dark green. Even if it is an office with two walls essentially open.

The past few days have been spent patching & mudding the plaster walls.

It’s not so bad. And the ‘put on a coat and let dry for 24 hours’ technique works quite well with our ’spend two hours after work every day’ schedule.

If anyone had told me the day we first saw the house that one day I would be replicating the wall texture, I would have laughed at them ‘no, we’re getting rid of that’. But there it is. Also, unlike the office, the front room texture (though identically random-globby looking, and made of identical not-exactly plaster compound) is apparently applied directly to the brown coat, as opposed to over a nice smooth plaster top coat.

In any case, they’re both cracked. The steps to repairing cracks in textured plaster are basically as follows:

Day one

• Take something sharp (favored instruments have thus included a pry bar, a chisel, and my personal weapon of choice, a spade bit for a drill) and widen out the cracks to expose the brown coat underneath. The idea here is to make it so the mud goes into the crack and sticks it together, as opposed to just sitting on top of it, where it will just crack again.
• Get the area to be patched wet with a sponge or mister.
• Slap on a thin layer of mud along the widened crack with a putty knife. Don’t worry if it’s pretty, it just needs to be enough for the tape to stick to.
• Cover with a length of fiberglass mesh tape. Fold back a corner of the tape when you’re done so you can find the end again. It’s also a good idea to have different people mudding and taping, since you have to put the tape on when the mud is wet, so you can’t do two passes, and cutting tape with muddy fingers is a pain.
• Cover the tape with more mud, and smooth with the putty knife. Of course, since you’re doing this over a textured wall, you won’t really be able to ’smooth’ the way you would on a flat wall, but don’t worry about that. Really, it’s easier to fix it later. Just make sure it’s relatively even and thin. You’ll probably still be able to see the tape grid through it. Make sure all the corners and edges are stuck down though, since those are somewhat more annoying to fix.

This day will take some time, and is a good job to split among a bunch of friends - crack scratcher, mudder, taper, etc. (we thought crack scratcher is a particularly good job title)

Day two!

(The rest of the days take much less time, and are pretty easy for one person.)

• Go around again and put a second coat of mud on all the cracks. Try to cover all the grid pattern, but if a little bit shows through, it should be ok. Not much though. Again, don’t worry about getting the edges smooth.

Day three

• Take a mister (or a sponge, but the mister gets more water on the wall and less on the floor) and one by one wet the patches. Rub the edges and rough places with a rag until they smooth out. You can also rub with a sponge or your fingers, but I found a sponge to soft to be very effective, and my fingers got sore.

Day four

Replicate your texture. In our case of ‘random globs’ we did this by adding ’some’ water to our mud. ‘Some’ in our case was enough that when you stirred your fingers around in it it was soft and liquid, and didn’t leave ridges. Then we took a rag and rubbed and dabbed until it looked right. Highly unscientific. Hopefully, it will be effective once we paint it all the same color. I have high hopes, since the previous patch work (which essentially stopped at step two) wasn’t *too* glaring.

In the case the case that you have fairly large cracks (the brown coat crumbles down to the lath, or more than 1/2 inch or so wide) you want to build up the inside of the crack in layers over a few days before you start on the taping in step one. Otherwise the first coat of mud will be too thick and will crack as it dries.

If you have really big cracks where the plaster is coming off the lathe (it moves when you push it) you need to screw it to the lathe with plaster washers before you start any of this. We only have a few cracks at this level, however, we haven’t started on them yet because:

The thing they don’t tell you about plaster washers in all those diy guides is that they aren’t actually sold anywhere. We’ve been calling hardware and building supply stores for days (four exactly) and just now found a place that stocks them. We were fully prepared to break down and order them on the internet.

So, that’s how our past few days have been going. We can’t say how well this technique holds up, since we just did it, but I’ll try to keep updates if anything fails in the future.

It was much easier than we were expecting. This is an unspeakable relief to me, as I adore the mantle, but it does not fit in that room as we’re planning to use it. I was really upset about the idea of either ruining the mantle, or covering it up with a giant desk and making it look all out of place instead of on display. But once we got up the guts to actually just yank on it, everything was better than fine. While there were lots of nail heads in the front, there were only a few going through, and they were just tacked into the (smooth & finished!) plaster wall underneath, as opposed to being structurally tied to the oak studs. All is wonderful and perfect.

I placed my veggie seed order the other day. The tally so far is:

• four tomatoes
  • Brandywine - It’s so often referenced, I wanted something common to calibrate my standards with.
  • Green Zebra - something interesting. Was also considering Hillbilly here, but thought the giant beefsteak type was a little too close to Brandywine for now.
  • Black Cherry - gotta have some cherry tomatoes. These looked more interesting than most, and I’m not a huge fan of typical cherry tomato flavor.
  • Siberia - something early. In case it all goes to pot, hopefully I’ll at least have a few tomatoes from this one. I almost did a hybrid resistant type here for my ’sure bet’ (and maybe I’ll regret that eventually) but the site that had the other varieties I wanted doesn’t stock hybrid tomatoes.
•  Peas - Aldermann -a.k.a.- Tall Telephone. I saw a really good review of these here, and really wanted to try them. Particularly since peas are probably our favorite vegetable. That and we can use the young pods for stir-frys.
• Lettuce - green salad bowl and lollo rosso.  No reall good reason on these. I also have some mesculn type seeds left over from last year’s container lettuce experiment (a failure btw). Must remember to start earlier this time.
• Finally, serrano peppers. M dreams of making salsa from our garden, and these looked like a good blend of decently spicy, but will actually ripen in our summers.

I also have herb seeds from last year - plus I plan to fill in a few gaps there from local sources. Online selection didn’t look much better than what I remember locally as far as herbs went. Mostly I want to get some sage for roasting chicken. And a better oregano variety.

I’m a little unsure how I’m going to lay things out so I have trellises for the tomatoes and the peas without them shading one another or taking up a ton of space. But I figure I’ll work it out when the time comes.

I was *this* close to ordering fruit too, but realized the website wasn’t overly secure. So I requested a catalog instead. Hopefully that will clarify some of the shipping options that were vague on the website as well. I have a personal recommendation for the company, as well as seeing good online reviews, so hopefully they just aren’t tech savvy. In any case, the plan is:

• 2x Yellow Transparent apple trees -  Another thing that’s very important to M. Apparently they used to grow at his grandmothers’, and they have a very important applesauce recipe that requires them. A very old variety, they can’t be purchased, so you have to have a tree to get the applesauce.
• 1 Pollinator apple tree. I think I decided on a Braeburn.
•  6x Caroline Raspberries - Raspberries are my favorite food ever. At all. And I like them nice and tart and strong flavored - not too sweet. Which this variety was reputed to be from what I could find. And decent disease resistance too. Double score.

Am I in over my head? This doesn’t even touch on flowers.

So, we think we’ve finally finished ‘tearing things up’ phase and are embarking on the ‘putting them back together’ part. Even though we’re not really making any better progress, it feels like a big step. It was getting really discouraging going home every day and realizing the house was one step worse than it was when we got it.

In any case, the time feel ripe for a bit of a retrospective.

We peeled at least eight (with opinions as to whether there were nine or ten)  layers of wallpaper off the bedroom. Steamers are wonderful and your bestest friends. Particularly on the old brittle, not too sticky paper. It still took forever, just because there was so much of it, but it was pretty much easy work. Having the plaster underneath was so rewarding - just how smooth it still was under all those layers of mess. We ended up ripping out two and a half of those walls anyway (for varied reasons) but, um, yeah.

We also have  a bit better idea of the age of the house now. We found the original 100-acre allotment including the house on a map from 1877, with the owner listed as George LongGrake. (not sure on that capital G in the middle - it was handwritten over the road, but that’s sure my best guess). We also have an unofficial opinion from my grandfather that the woodwork in the front room is civil war /1850’s era style. It surprises me a bit, I would have pegged it more 1920’s. But my grandfather is definetly a more qualified judge, having a fair amount of experience with old houses and antiques.

It amazes me how once we bought this house, people in both our families started coming out of the woodwork with stories of rennovation work they’d done in the past. While I’d known some of them used to live in older houses, I never assumed they’d done the work themselves. It never came up at all before.

So, all that’s left is to repair the plaster, paint, and get someone in for the floors. Can we make it by the wedding aniversary?