The Plan

I alluded to the snow in my last post. It has come. It is the wet, heavy, stick-to-everything variety helping to create a winter wonderland in the country. I ventured out into the cloudy-yet-cozy landscape and took a few pictures. I’m not very good at winter photographs. I would like to blame it on the camera, but a poor photographer blames his lenses. Then again, I am a poor photographer, so it’s totally my camera’s fault! My camera, in auto-mode, seems to be fooled by all the reflected light of the snow, it overcompensated for the brightness and the shots were under exposed. Good to know. I tried to fix some of the shots in Photoshop, but ultimately moved toward complete desaturation to eliminate the bluish haze on the snow. Still, I manage to capture some of the wintery scenes on the farm.

There are more shots than this one. A few might appear below (those are random based on tag information). To see them all, visit the 2008 Flowers and Farm gallery (link on the right) and head to page 7 or so.

It occurred to me today that there isn’t a room in the house that might be considered finished. That says something about our ambition, but also about our apparent incapacity to finish anything. It is now my goal to actually finish a room every month. That’s actually really generous of me. It would take most people a week and they would just be done with everything. But I like to puzzle things out before I start building. Deconstruction is quick, but construction takes time. I like to anticipate problems and contemplate alternatives. And we opened up a huge can of contemplation this last weekend when we ripped out the kitchen ceiling.

We were inspired by Better Homes and Gardens magazine, of all things. There were plans, loose ones, to fix the sagging and deformed kitchen ceiling, but those plans seemed to be for the distant future. But then we saw the pictures in the magazine and thought, hey, we could expose the beams in our kitchen too. And so we did. It was extremely dirty. I recommend wearing a mask for this job. Goggles would be good too. I’m still picking dust from my eyelashes. 

The truck is full of plaster. We burned up the lath. The plan now is to think some more about how to fix it up. We will probably paint the beams white. Need to insulate the walls a little and patch up the gaps with wood or drywall, not sure which would be better. And then trim it up. We might add some cool timber framing accents here and there too. Why not? That would be a good project.

 

Susan's Cabin, aka The Sue Shack

Alan’s brother, David, built a work studio that he calls “The Dave Cave”, so Alan and I have started calling my mom’s new cabin “The Sue Shack”. Check out freshly painted door and trim. When it snows it’ll look like a little gingerbread house. All guests are welcome to stay here. Unfortunately this offer doesn’t appeal to everyone as there’s no bathroom or running water. But there’s a nice thicket of willows about 50 feet away.