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.

I hope I don't lose my membership

 In the Procrastinators Guild.

Over the last couple weeks I sealed up the hydraulic tank on my garden tractor loader project. I got the machine back in 2017, you guys might have forgotten about it. Checking back it looks like I haven't written about the loader since 2017 which is weird, we've come a long way...

Heres a shot from back when I got it:

Last week I reinstalled the tank, it had leaked where I added the hose fittings so I slathered the inside with POR15 gas tank sealer. It didn't leak overnight so yesterday I fired it up. It did NOT want to run but finally got going, smoked a lot but I'll be darned if it didn't work pretty good.

I moved some snow out of the shadows on our yard over to the storm drain which gets more sun.

Everything was going great until:

That's the upper bucket cylinder mount, or rather there should be a mount there. Apparently I'd only tacked it on and the tacks broke. I wanted to move the mount a little higher anyway.

While I was working I finished cutting the bucket down: 

I took 3" off each side of the bucket, bringing it down to 38" which is still about 2" wider than the machine. Took probably 25# off the weight of the bucket making it much more manageable for the machine. There's still some more to come off but it's much improved.

I'm going to take it over to buddy Ben's house for final welding, he's got a big stick welder so I can really burn in the mounts, my MIG works okay but doesn't really have enough heat for the job...

Plumbing and electrical

 So here we are again, 2023 is upon us and I've forgotten to update the blog for 6 months...

It feels like just yesterday since I updated but clearly not.

This week I'll be working on few posts to bring us back up to date. For today lets dial back to July.

You might remember our house in Maine:

In 2021 we repainted the house and rebuilt the enclosed porch. The idea is to stop the house from disintegrating before starting any upgrades. In 2022 I decided to continue down the same path when I discovered that the water pipe to the toilet was leaking.

Thus embarked a weekend long odyssey of pluming. Here we've got the pump and pressure tank. Those have been left alone but notice the blue pipe heading up, that's 3/4" PEX. I did have to sweat in a copper to PEX adapter which was surprisingly easy but from there on almost all of the the plumbing is plastic.

I've been a plumbing traditionalist in the past, not wanting to use "those new fangled things" but honestly PEX is the way to go. I installed the entire cold water system in one day and could have done it in less with better planning. With copper I'd have been at it for several days.

My original plan only involved replacing the cold water system, as shown here. Everything in blue is new PEX, the hot water side is still copper. I did that because I still haven't installed the hot water heater, so there really wasn't any point in doing the hot water side. Then I decided I'd link the hot water side to the cold water side. This would result in both faucets running cold water but it would at least let the hot water faucet do something. In the picture you can just spot a little red pipe from the cold to the hot.

This turned out to be a terrible idea, all the hot water pipes (unused for many years) leaked. So I took another day and replaced those as well.

This is 3/4" PEX running along the outside wall of the house. Since all the fixtures in the house are in line with each other what I should have done was run one 3/4" trunk line and then spur off with 1/2" lines to each fixture. I'd have used less pipe and it'd be a better looking install. Probably in 2023 I'll redo all of it, I'm planning to relocate the kitchen sink anyway so I'll do both at the same time.

This is the new bathroom vanity. It replaced a very ugly, early '80s unit that was installed with galvanized pipe that had very nearly corroded away...

Anyway, with the PEX installed we were no longer one plumbing leak away from a flooded basement. Even with my ugly install things are way better than they were. So I turned my efforts to electrical.

On the electrics side the first thing I did was wire in basement lights. There were a few lights down there but not enough and not done in a safe way. Now we have 4 foot LED lights wired to a common switch and a good, grounded, outlet. This makes working in the basement much more pleasant and safer.

The next step was to address the well pump wiring. I've been told the pump itself is probably from the 1920s.

This is the old setup, we're looking directly above the pump, the pump you can see in the picture is the old "soft water" pump that was used to move rain water from a cistern. That system has been disconnected from the plumbing for years but the pump was still connected to the electrics via the left side switch at the top of the picture. The right side switch that you can barely see in the picture powers the well pump. What you can't see is the copper pipe that used to run between them. This was not what you'd call a safe install. Also notice the top of the ladder in the left of the picture. Those switches are eight feet off the ground, very difficult to access.

This is after, I've added the piece of plywood to protect the switch in case the pump blows up, I've located it lower so it's much more convenient and I've used 12ga ROMEX wire directly from a 20a circuit breaker.  

I still need to repair/replace the pressure switch on the pump. It'll work if you tap it but it gets stuck between uses and we run out of water pressure until the switch gets tapped again. I think this is just because it doesn't get used enough. I have another pump with pressure switch I could put in it's place which would undoubtably be quieter than this one but part of me thinks that this thing has been working for 100 years I should probably keep it.

So what's on tap for 2023? This *should* be the year for upgrades. We spent some time in November working on the kitchen and have the old plaster and lathe mostly removed. I need to shore up ceiling a little and remove a little stub of wall and then wire in electrics. I want to be able to run the microwave and toaster oven at the same time so I'll be running at least three circuits, plus one for an electric stove. Eventually I think we'll go to a propane stove but short term a used electric stove is cheap.

Once the wiring is done I want to replace the two kitchen windows. The one facing east is too small, it'll be over the sink so I want something fairly large. The other one is a reasonable size but I want them to match...

After windows I'll get the kitchen spray foamed. Foam insulation offers the highest R-value for thickness and seals the room against drafts. There is a chance I'll get the bathroom done at the same time, that's contingent on removing the tub, removing one window and replacing the other. That window replacement is kind of a big deal because we'll be going with a much smaller unit that is up higher in the wall. We'll see...

Loader advancement

Finally got some more time with the loader, first off that stupid top link had to go.

There was a little tension in it... That Harbor Freight 7" angle grinder was a good investment, its a little low on power when I really play the gorilla and lean on it but it does a good job.

Outgoing at the top, incoming below. 2.5"x.18", way overkill but I figured go big or go home. That turned out to bite me later on.

Lookin good right?

Heres the problem, thats my new 10" hydraulic cylinder replacing the 16" that was there, notice how the bucket is tipped slightly down but the cylinder is sucked all the way in. The bucket can't curl up any... Turns out when I had measured to replace the cylinder I'd measured to the TOP of the new brace. I should have bought an 8" cylinder and 2" tube steel. In the first step I shortened my top mount which helped a little but not enough, the second step involved modifying the bucket.

I cut the cylinder mounts off the bucket and moved them 2.5" down. While I was at it I took off the 1.25" bushings and installed proper 1" so the pin won't beat itself to death.

The bucket curls correctly now. Theres still more work to do, I need to go back and pretty up the new mounts, probably box them in some for added strength too. Then I want to cut the bucket down considerably. Its waaaay to heavy for this application. Its 47" wide where the plans I bought call for 42". I think considering how heavily its built I'll cut it all the way down to 40". I'll lower the top by 3" and pull in the leading edge by 4". Is that easier than making a bucket from scratch? I don't know but the ribs on this one make it super strong which is why its super heavy. Once its done I'll never hurt it...

Something NEW

Well its been a whole day and my pics still show up Picasa may have saved the day...

So lets get something new on here, first an update.

You might remember when I built the mk2 mod2 wood rack for camp that I cut enough wood to make two of 'em. This is the other one installed at the house. The mk1 it replaced is actually in pretty good shape, I'm going to push it over to the side of the yard where the big woodpiles are and use it there. I've had terrible luck building woodpiles this year which is to say my wood piles have had a tendency to fall over this year so I'll use that once its full of wood as a brace for the other piles. We've had a heckuva lot of rain lately and I'm sure glad I built this new rack.

This here:

is a Chinese made ETQ 1200w 2 stroke generator. I picked it up in 2008 when we had the big ice storm. I ran it a couple times just to make sure it ran but never really used it as such. I'd planned to take it to camp a couple times but kept forgetting. In November I finally took it to camp. We've got a little solar electricity system at work (more on that in another post) that isn't really big enough for our needs in the fall when the sun is low in the sky so I hauled the generator up so we could use it top off our batteries. The battery charger only provides 6a at 12v which is only 72w. The generator is rated for 8 hours of run time on 1 gallon of gas at 50% load. I figured it'd run a good long time with this teeny load on it.

So I got it up to camp and went to fire up when the fuel petcock broke right off.
 Fortunately our local CarQuest (now Advance Auto, *sigh*) had a replacement:

The only problem was that the replacement drains from the side and the original went out the bottom so the gas line was a little short. It worked well enough that I didn't worry about it at the time, once I got it home I replaced the line with one slightly longer. To do that the airbox has to come off. Two of the airbox screws also hold on the carb in place and just as I started to reassemble things I managed to break the seal between the carb and the engine tearing the gasket. Fortunately I had some gasket paper in pretty much the same thickness as the original and within a few minutes I'd made a new gasket.

I find making my own gaskets very satisfying, I didn't have to wait a week for parts, all I needed was a pencil, scissors, utility knife and a punch. I didn't have a punch big enough for the carb throat but it wasn't so hard to cut that out with the knife and get a pretty good circle.

Sadly the generator doesn't like to start now, and by now I mean from the time I replaced the petcock. I think the carb has some varnish built up in it and I really should take it all the way apart, give it a good soak and put it back together. I'm reasonably sure thats going to mean some more seals will get ruined but I'd like to have the thing reliable in case Angie needs it while I'm away. Back when I first bought it it started real easy but now it wants a shot of starting fluid into the carb every time it starts. Oh well, I might as well give it a try right?