Happy Anniversary...

...to us.

Today is the 10th anniversary of our move into this house. (If you haven't heard the story of our move in a blizzard, you can read about it here.)



It's been a wild 10 years starting with the fixing up of this poor neglected house we bought...










... and continuing through storms and sunshine....














.... an education every step of the way.





Here are a few more of my favorite blast-from-the-past photos of the past 10 years...

The goat days... how much hay CAN you fit into an Isuzu Trooper?






The day we realized M should probably not plan on getting a driver's license...



Got mud?




R and Grant...



The ever present deer...



... and even a rare albino one!



The day the circus came and painted our house gray and ran off with the kids...



... thanks to my brother's extreme photoshopping skills.

And, of course, the years of homeschooling...





It's been an amazing 10 years.

Here's the house before we moved in....



... and this morning... shrouded by fog from a cold front that blew in last night.



The barn back in 2006...





... and last summer.



If you like before and afters, there are a few more here...

the endless quest...

The bitter cold temperatures we had for a week or so are gone, at least for now, but my endless quest (written about here, here and here) to find and seal the drafts in this creaky old house continues...

The master bedroom has always been the coldest room in the house. It connects to the sunroom, which is almost nothing but windows (and until I sealed it up last year, was very drafty...) and it has a loft area, which probably pulls the heat up and away from the part of the room where people actually spend time. It's too far from the wood stove to expect much heat, so the boiler has to do the main job of heating that room... and during the last cold spell it just couldn't keep up. There is a fireplace in that bedroom, but it's never used and really isn't practical anyway... it's too close to the bed, and hauling wood up the stairs to that room would be miserable.

The master bedroom fireplace is another 1970's zero clearance insert, like the one in the living room, which relies on outside air pulled through the insert to keep it cool enough not to set fire to the wood studs surrounding it... I couldn't help wondering how much that outside air intake system was adding to the coldness of that room, and guessed it was considerable... so I decided to close that fireplace off.

I'm not going to permanently close it off... maybe make it a seasonal thing... close it off during the winter, but open it up again in summer just because it's such a pretty fireplace.

So.... I've been working on my plan for sealing it up all week, and hoped to have it done today... but didn't quite make it.

I can show you what I've gotten done so far though...

Here's where I started.. I LOVE this fireplace... it's made of petrified wood, found here on our land. (The glass doors on the hearth are from the downstairs fireplace, the initial plan was to try to adapt them to fit the opening and use them to seal things off...)



I found some leftover OSB in the garage and figured out that I could fill the fireplace opening fairly easily with just one seam across the middle.






After the OSB was cut to size, and I was sure I had a good tight fit, I moved it back out of the way, took off the fireplace screen, taped everything off, and gave the outside of the fireplace a few coats of heat resistant paint. (That's soot in the fireplace, not over-spray. :)




Then I cleaned up the (horribly dusty) screen and painted it too.



Finally, I added foam board insulation to the back of the OSB, and put it all back together again with the opening sealed up.

 

Yeah, it's pretty ugly.

But that's where this fabric I bought at IKEA comes in...



I'm planning on covering the OSB with the fabric, to give it a look of stacked wood behind the fireplace screen (which also still needs a bit of work).

So it's gone from this...



... to this...



... so far. And the room does feel warmer this morning, not as drafty...

Next step is adding the fabric to the OSB and fixing up that screen a little. Hopefully I'll have some "finished" photos to share next week...

And totally unrelated... I heard back from the Spine Clinic I mentioned on Monday, and M has an appointment to be seen in early January. It might be a long couple of months, waiting for that appointment... but I'm hoping really good things come from it.

Annie's Story (our house's original owners)

I just got done reading Sherry's post on Young House Love about the history and original owners of their house. I've LOVED researching the history of our homes, and Sherry's post got me thinking I should also write about what we know of our current home's history.

(Our house, circa 1980)


And a similar view today...




First I should probably back up a bit... When we bought our home the seller didn't disclose any major defects, and it passed the home inspection... so, needless to say, we were shocked to discover (shortly after closing) that the house had major problems... It's a log home and the logs hadn't been maintained (by the previous, not original owner) and there was wood rot, bug infestation, and places where we could see light between the logs. (The inspector apparently knew nothing about log homes and just gave the exterior of the house a very quick look!) Anyway, a fair amount of panic ensued when the first estimate to fix the house came back at more than 25% of what we'd just paid for the entire house... and there was anger too.  Anger at the seller, and the inept inspector, of course... but I was also angry at the house. It made no sense, but I somehow blamed it (for not being taken care of?!) for all it's problems.

It was in the midst of all the drama and trauma of discovering the house we'd sunk every penny into was in danger of falling down, that I tracked down Annie. I guess I needed to know the history of the house to try to make my peace with what felt like a dream home turned nightmare money pit...

Annie, with her husband, built our house... their house... starting back in the mid-1970's. She was an art teacher, he was a lumber jack... She eventually told me a dozen stories about the building of this house.... about how they'd harvested the logs for the house up in the mountains and had them milled before hauling them down here to build. The logs are all lodgepole pine, and some of them have a bluish tinge to them because they are beetle-kill wood. (The beetles stain the wood...)





The living room fireplace was built from huge stones they gathered in Coal Creek Canyon and hauled down with the help of friends...




The bedroom fireplace is made from petrified wood they found when they dug the foundation.



It was a long time before they were ready to build this fireplace, so they "stored" the petrified wood under a big scrub oak in the front pasture until they needed it.



It took them two full years to build the house... When they first started building they drove out each weekend to work, during the latter part of the building they lived in a little camper parked in what would later become the garage.

The logs are held together with huge spikes and have both insulation and chinking in between each course.



Annie had one very close call during the building... She said she had been working pounding together a course of logs on the north side, towards the top of the second story. As she worked her way along, straddling the top of the logs, holding on with her legs and pounding in stakes with a sledgehammer, she worked her way to where the guest bathroom is... and not realizing that her husband had cut out the logs for that window since the last time she'd worked, she scootched forward expecting solid logs between her knees to hold onto and found the open space of the window instead. She lost her balance and slipped upside down (legs still holding on, feet locked together), around the top course of logs where she held on as tightly as she could and started yelling for help... Thankfully her husband was close and was able to get to her before she fell.

(Annie was sitting on top of the upper window on the left when she almost fell...)



After she told me that story I asked what she did after she was pulled back to safety... She said she got back up on top of the logs and kept working.

Our loft was designed to be her art studio (it has water piped into it, but has never had a sink installed) and the big wall in the family room  was designed to be a "gallery wall" of her artwork.

(The house in about 1980, Annie's gallery wall on the left...)




The family room now from about the same angle (notice the same doorbell, painted now, over the stairs...).



We have their original blueprints and cherish them. It's a quirky house, but not a haphazard one...

It is definitely one of a kind.



Annie bred and raised Arabian horses and was so happy to know that the barn is being used as a barn again. (It had been used as RV storage for years before we bought the house.)

See the little camper in the background? That's what they lived in while they finished building the house... (the photo dates from the early 1980's)



Sadly, Annie's husband began losing his sight about 5 years after the house was finished. By the time the house was 7 years old he was almost blind and unable to maintain the house any longer and they sold it.  He passed away a few years later...

(Annie's husband ans son shortly after the house was finished...)




After I tracked Annie down and we had a chance to talk about this funny old house, I found it easy to forgive the house (for being such a wreck) and became 110% committed to bringing it back to what it should have been.

(2005 - During the exterior repair stage... log damage repaired, chimneys rebuilt, stucco... to the protect logs... going on.)


When the house was built, Annie and her husband had intended it to have stone chimneys... but the budget just wouldn't allow stone, so they finished them in wood. When we repaired the outside of the house, I used Annie's blueprints as a guide and had the chimneys rebuilt in stone.



Since we couldn't preserve the log exterior (leave it exposed) we trimmed out the house in lodge pole pine timbers as a way of connecting the "old" log home, with the "new" stucco covered one.




The first time Annie came to dinner, she walked into the house and tears immediately came to her eyes. As she wiped the tears away she said, "There's a lot of love built into this house..."  She even asked if, on another visit, she could sprinkle some of her husband's ashes out in our gully...



I wasn't sure what to say (it was an unexpected request to say the least!) but I said yes... and later that same summer she came back and walked our gully, sprinkling ashes and just being alone there. She later told me that gully was so important to her (to them) because, before this land was even available for purchase (when it was still railroad land) she and her husband had been part of a trail riding club and had frequently ridden their horses across this land... timing their lunch stop so they could picnic in a pretty little gully along the way.

That pretty little gully ended up part of the land they (and we) eventually purchased...




So... that's the story of our house. Sorry it got so long, but it seemed important to get it written down...

Anybody else have a house story to share?