The Great Northern Estate Update Phase 2

So at the end of the last post we were up to summer 2024 and nearly the end of phase 1. You might think this post would be about ending phase 1 but that would include finishing the downstairs floors. If that happened the floor in the living room would get ruined by the work upstairs so we'll pause phase 1 for now.

Phase 2 begins upstairs. As bought the house had 4 bedrooms upstairs. With the removal of the stairway to nowhere three of those bedrooms are all in a line, which is no fun. That northern bedroom was really small and there was only one bathroom in the house so why not turn that little bedroom into an upstairs bathroom and a walk in closet.

The original plan had it as a half bath but Angie and I pushed for a shower and I'm glad we did. It essentially makes the upstairs a little apartment. Its nice to not have to traipse through the kitchen to take a shower.

Bathroom on the left, walk in closet on the right. Well, it was supposed to be a closet. My parents wanted a little bed in there, so for now we're using it as a bedroom.

With the upstairs bathroom and closet finished the guys moved on to the master bedroom. This didn't require a whole lot, new trim and better paint. Electric and insulation had been done by one of the Cushman brothers at some point in the past.

The floor in the master bedroom has been stripped but not refinished. Unfortunately its had a lot of traffic since the finish was taken off so when we do the rest of the floors this one will need to be sanded too but fortunately it'll just be a quick sand to take off the wear. I'm tentatively planning on refinishing the floor in the little bedroom and the master bedroom last summer but that will depend on replacing the windows in the master bedroom.

Actually the big holdup right now is the fact that we've used the house all summer. The guys really only get access from late November through mid-May. I think they had planned to work into the summer but my parents are much more comfortable in the house than the camp, the indoor bathroom being an important feature.

At some point last winter the roof leaked a little around the chimney into the downstairs bathroom. The guys gooped up the joint which stopped the leak but that meant we needed to shift focus and get a new roof.

This will be a standing seam metal roof but we opted for an inch of foam insulation. There isn't much insulation in the roof of the house. We intend to add more but there is only so much you can do so this will help.

I left before the metal started going on, it should be done by now.

Technically the roof is phase 3 but this is one of those things we didn't feel comfortable putting off. It'd be stupid to spend all that money on the inside to have it ruined by a leaky roof. Fortunately this kind of investment is once in a lifetime, I should never have to mess with the roof again.

The Great Northern Estate Update Phase 1

I realize I've been remiss in updating you on the state of Cushman House

Fall 2020:

Summer 2024:

A pretty good transformation right?

In my head I've broken this project roughly into 3 phases. Right now we've nearly completed phase 1 which is to rebuild the downstairs. Phase 2 takes us upstairs including re-working the stairs themselves which are too narrow and steep.

To that end we've rebuilt the kitchen, bathroom and dining room entirely. Thats new windows, exterior doors, flooring, insulation, electric, plumbing, ceiling, cabinets, lighting, shower, and toilet. The only thing original is the kitchen sink and fridge.

I didn't really want the laminate flooring but the glue on the old flooring would have been very difficult to get off the hardwood underneath. I'm particularly pleased with exposing the chimney, I think it looks great. Our builder was doubtful. There is something about folks around here that makes them want to hide a chimney.

The living room and downstairs bedroom (formerly a parlor) got new insulation, electric, windows and wallboard. The bedroom also got a closet:

These old houses never have any closet space and we were lucky to have somewhere to put this one.

Oh and before I forget the reconfiguration of the bathroom had us saying goodbye to the stairway to nowhere:

Its such a weird stairway that it bears explaining. I'm taking the picture from a very small bedroom on the north end of the house. The stairway Angie is coming up ends at a chimney. So there are 2 little like proto-steps that brought you into the bedrooms. I wouldn't have wanted to negotiate those in the middle of the night. 

The spot where Angie is standing in the picture is now the bathroom vanity down stairs.

Still to come in phase 1 is the ceiling in the living room and bedroom and refinishing the floors in those rooms.

Pictures of food

Often I think "This would be a good story for the blog" and then I forget to take pictures.

So instead of the stuff I've been doing lets take a look at what I've been eating. We're making an effort to eat less meat, really chicken, pork or beef. This has mostly taken the form of burritos.

The magic here is that they're super easy and can be made from just about anything. For purely vegetarian we'll grill some peppers and then warm up a can of beans with some taco seasoning. Start with a layer of rice. I usually use white rice, Angie tends to use a rice pilaf like from Goya. Then some beans, and the peppers. You might like onions with your peppers but they upset Angie's stomach.

A couple weeks ago the grocery store had tuna steaks on sale. I've ruined quite a few unsuspecting tuna steaks. The thing I've learned is to not overcook them. This one is done, you might not think its done but you're wrong. Cook it any more and its ruined.

Really good, big wraps are hard to find, if you've got a hispanic grocery near by they're your best bet. Fortunately our local grocery has good ones. Here I've added some Caesar salad which gives a nice flavor. I forgot to add salsa before I took the picture and had to go back later.

This is haddock with "Magic Fish" coating. Again pan fried but haddock wants to be cooked all the way through.

At home we steam the wraps before we assemble, this makes them slightly sticky which helps keep them rolled. At the great northern estate I grill them a little in a cast iron pan which seals them shut. I like the little amount of crunch they get when I do that.

I should note that this is also a good way to eat cheap, I bet we're only looking at maybe $2 per portion.

The floor continues

 The difficulty with the great northern estate is really the distance from the great northern estate to, well, anywhere. That of course means I can't be around as much as I would like to and thus everything takes twice as long as I would like.

So, you'll remember a couple weeks ago when I started refinishing the floor in the camp. When I left the floor had been sanded to 80 grit and the first coat of finish put down.

I used an oil based finish with the old-school thinking that it would be a tougher coating for a floor that gets kind of tortured. The satin finish is supposed to not show imperfections so bad as gloss.

The result looked okay but felt terrible. I think that first coat raised the grain of the wood and made it feel really rough and unpleasant.

I'd used the entire gallon on the floor and couldn't locally source any more oil based finish, the stuff I could get was all water based and thus incompatible with what I had already put down.

Fast forward a couple weeks and I'm back with 2.5 gallons of the oil based finish, honestly this is the size can I should have bought in the first place. If I'd looked around a little more at Home Depot I'd have found it.

Because of the delay I needed to sand to 220 grit. I did that with my old Harbor Freight palm sander. This wouldn't have been so bad except that the backs of my knees were still sore from the 5 hour slog getting the floor flat. My knee pad straps had really dug in. I should have taken a few minutes to rig up my sander on a stick so I could do the job standing up. Oh well.

Once again I had to clean, clean, clean all the dust left behind and finally put down some of the new semi-gloss.

Semi-gloss gives a balance between that nice shiny look and hiding any imperfections in the job.

This is the dried 3rd coat just before I put down the 4th.

So with 4 coats down I'd intended to give a couple days for the floor to dry and harden but Independence day intervened and I didn't have a chance to get back to it. This is probably for the best, the longer it can harden without getting walked on much, the better. I'll be back at it soon.

While I was waiting for the floor to dry I took a minute to clean the accumulated cruft off of the pipe that goes under the dam. When I first walked out to the pipe a frog jumped. Later as I was cleaning he came back. Frogs are common around the edge of the pond but I rarely get to see them, they jump away before I get close. This guy hung out for 10 or more minutes just watching me. He was pretty big for a frog in our area, maybe just a bit smaller than my fist.

Well that was weird, again...

 You might remember back in 2023 when the burner element in our stove failed. I was sitting near it and heard the "BZZZT" of the element trying to weld itself to the body of the stove.

At the time I replaced that burner with one from eBay that cost about half of the official replacement. I noted that it was thinner than the original but otherwise seemed to work fine.

That was true until last September. I was up north hunting moose with my dad when Angie texted that it had happened again, only this time it was worse:

Where before the shielding had only melted a little bit Angie wasn't as quick to get the oven shut off and this time it melted but good.

I jumped on the internet but couldn't remember the model of the stove. I ended up ordering the same unit again. Interestingly this time the replacement is thicker.

I have a good feeling about this one, its better built than the last one. I probably ought to buy the proper replacement now, these are easy to change so just keep the right one around until this one fails. I probably won't do that but its what I ought to do...

A sad time

 Its taken me awhile to be able to write about this but it is my sad duty to report the passing of our little buddy Buster.

In the run up to our last trip to Maine the boy wasn't feeling well and during the trip we could tell that he was really suffering and we had to let him go.

Getting a dog is signing up for sadness, you know that day is coming but there is really no way to prepare for it.

Buster came to live with us in 2008, he was the first dog I'd ever had. Looking back I mentioned him on this very blog June 23, 2008, we were set to pick him up on the 28th but there doesn't seem to have been a picture until the ChowdaQ 2009 post.

The shelter he was in called him "Feisty" which is kind of a dumb name for a dog. They claimed they were trying to encourage him to be more outgoing. He never really was outgoing but he was inquisitive and always wanted to check out what everybody was up to.

I want to use this space tell a couple Buster stories, the picture above he's got his head bandaged. This was our first Coleman collectors gathering all the way back in 2010. We'd driven to just north of Syracuse, NY and arrived well after dark. Then through a series of dumb events Buster got bit on the ear by our host's dog. I could get the bleeding to stop but only until he would shake his head. So we went to the emergency vet who bandaged him up. That bandaging came after he shook his head and sprayed blood all over the wall.

This is a shot from 2015 which was a big snow year. I'd taken to walking Buster in the state park near our house because there was a plowed section. As a low slung dog the deep snow was difficult for him. This was early in the era where I would let him go without holding the leash. The deep snow made this pretty safe because there was really nowhere he could go.

At some point he was off digging in the snow on the side of the road. I thought he was digging up poop to eat and tried to hurry along to catch up to him. Suddenly he stopped digging and ran to me with something in his mouth. Prepared for the worst I was very surprised when he gave me this $10 bill and then just ran off again. I posted about it on Facebook and immediately had a bunch of offers to walk my dog for me...

Like most dogs Buster wasn't much for wearing clothes, unlike most dogs he tolerated it fairly well. I wish I had more pictures of him in the little cowboy hat.

He didn't mind other dogs much, in fact late in life he barely noticed them. He'd give a sniff if they got really close but mostly he didn't care. There were a couple people, other than Angie and I of course, who he really loved and one was Fred.

The other was our neighbor Bill, I wish I could find pictures of them together. In the last couple years Buster could barely see or hear but somehow he would know if Bill was out and would immediately head over to see him. Bill was without a doubt Buster's favorite person and Bill likes to tell how Buster was the first to introduce him to the neighborhood.

Buster got allowed into a lot of places dogs weren't normally welcome or normally didn't go. A good example was on Thanksgiving at Angie's uncle Rick and aunt Carla's house. Rick and Carla had a little dog Jimmy who was kind of high strung and "doesn't like dogs." We were going to Maine after dinner so we just kept Buster in the car, it was only a couple hours and we'd go out to check on him, no problem. Well about the first time one of us goes to check on him Rick and Carla decide it'd be okay if Buster sat in the sun porch off the back of the house. The sun porch has a glass door and Jimmy eyed Buster through the door. It wasn't long before somebody opened the door and Jimmy burst into the sun porch and nothing exciting happened. Pretty soon Jimmy thinks Buster is his best friend. Buster of course didn't really care. I wish I had pictures of that, it was pretty cool.

The number 1 thing I will always remember Buster for was his ability to dismember toys. Soft dog toys are rated 1-10, we usually got #10 tough toys but we figured that number was really just the time, in minutes, before Buster could have it torn to pieces. Tough toys are more expensive so for Christmas he'd get a variety of cheaper, low rated toys. Since it was Christmas we'd allow him to do whatever he wanted which meant dismembered toys.

We've still got a bag of soft toy pieces that need to go to the fabric recycler.

Buster's relationship to hunting was complicated. He'd never had any training since I wasn't hunting much when he first came to live with us. Early on he was fine with the sound of gunfire and I used to take him to the shooting range with me frequently. Then he got really sensitive to the sound of gunfire and extended that to not liking guns at all. Frankly he'd kind of freak out at any gun shaped object, like a stick or piece of pipe. That ended a year or two ago and last fall I took him with me to deer camp.

It was hard to get a picture of Buster, me and the grouse all at the same time.

Up until very recently he really needed to be walked every day or every other day at the least. In recent years those walks didn't need to be very long but they needed to happen. On two different occasions I took him after lunch into the field behind the camp where I managed to shoot a grouse. In both cases the gunshot prompted him to take a glance back "I hope this isn't going to interrupt our walk."

The last few months were tough for all of us, its rough knowing the end is coming but not knowing exactly where that is or how it will arrive. He was with us just about 17 years and even now, almost a month on I still think "Do I need to take the dog out?" or I'll walk by his bowl and think I should get him some water.

We'll get another dog at some point but there will never be another Buster. Farewell little bud, may there be rabbits to chase, a soft bed to lie in and all the treats you could ever want.

Well heres a stupid thing

 Dad has a 2017 Jeep Renegade. During their last trip to Caribou the external thermometer quit and set to 128 degrees.

When that happens the car suddenly decides "You don't need any cabin heat" unless you use the defrost setting which is 100% heat all the time.

So I jump on the google machine and find that the exterior thermistor has failed. Chrysler says you need to replace the passenger side mirror, $350. Fortunately I found a YouTube video with a link to the part required. Its too bad that the video stinks because its got good information in it.

Anyway the hardest part of the job is disassembling the mirror:

I really shouldn't make fun of the video creator too much because I didn't get pictures of the clip locations either.

With the back of the mirror off there is a little like pimple down at the bottom of the mirror that houses the thermistor. Digging that out with a little screwdriver caused it to totally fall apart.

Putting the new thermistor on is easy although I did break off all the extra plastic to get 2 clean wires I could slide heat shrink tubing over so there wouldn't be a short. I then potted the new thermistor into the little pimple with some silicone sealant.

Totally fixed the problem and the new thermistors were like $10 for 60...

Unfortunately the failed thermistor sets a persistent check engine light. I own an OBD-II adapter for my phone but it was, of course, at home. I'd bought another one for dad but he's lost it...

When we're up in July I'll reset the check engine light but the good news is that it doesn't seem to hurt anything else...

A refinished floor

 Geez its been awhile. I keep thinking "gotta write the blog" and keep not doing it. Fortunately a bunch has happened.

Most recently I refinished the floor at camp:

This is a good before shot, you can see, down at the bottom the damage from 60 years of usage.

The floor is not actually "flooring". Its just 4" birch boards and family lore tells that those boards were green when the place was built.

I didn't realize (but should have) that those boards weren't flat and because they weren't flat I couldn't just quick sand them like I'd planned. I had to buy 40 grit belts and cross sand (sand against the grain) to flatten the floor. This took 5 HOURS on my knees with a belt sander.

The 60 and 80 grit passes took 1 hour each (16x24 room) although during that last pass my knee pad straps sawed 1 inch square chunks off the back of each knee... No picture, trust me, you don't want to see this one.

I bought a new "WEN" brand corded belt sander for the job and it was flawless. That first pass produced 5 gallons of sawdust.

After sanding to 80 grit I took my old Harbor Freight palm sander around the outside of the room, also at 80 grit. I bought that sander to refinish a hood to put on Hammie my '83 240D when I bought it the second time. That'd have been 2007ish. I've gotten good value for money on that.

Then swept the floor 3 times, vacuumed the floor 3 times and ran a tack cloth over it 3 times. Even with all that I still pulled up mouse turds on the roller while putting down the finish.

This is after one coat of oil based finish. Unfortunately I was unable to locally source additional oil based finish so additional coats will have to wait until July. Because of the wait I'll have to sand again to 220 grit. I'll do that with the palm sander, it shouldn't take all that long, just enough to scuff and provide adhesion.