Hurrah! The second coat of paint is now drying on the chimneys in the upstairs hall. Here they are when the paint was still drying on the first coat:
I tried to paint the north bedroom too, but it was just way too much. I used up the last of the paint in the can on a few square meters, but there was no way I had the stamina to do the full room. That will just have to wait until another visit. Baby steps…
By the way, the white on the floor next to the chimney on the left is not spilled paint. It’s some kind of material used to level the wood floor for the vinyl flooring and underlayment that I removed. It looks like it can be sanded off fairly easily.
This summer has been incredibly frustrating. Just when I felt I was getting back on track and starting to get things done at the famlet, I came down with covid, and while it was a relatively mild case (I’m double vaccinated and boosted), it knocked me out, and then once it was over my chronic pain and fatigue (polymyalgia rheumatica) surged, which put me in bed for almost a week.
I couldn’t stand the thought of not finishing the painting in the upstairs hall, though, so in the past couple of days I decided to just push through and do the best I could. I put a third coat on last night and pulled off the painter’s tape this morning. It’s a pretty sloppy job, if I’m honest, but it was the best I could do with limited mobility, and actually not any sloppier than the original red paint. Here are some snaps, starting with the stairs:
It’s so much brighter and cleaner looking. Here’s a shot of the trim in the ridiculously low-ceilinged “hall”:
I kind of regret not painting the top of the banister white too. I may do that at some later point, but to be honest I’m completely reliant on the banister to get up and down the stairs because of the reduced mobility, and I couldn’t risk not being able to get to the bathroom while paint was drying.
Finally, here’s the functional part of the hall, with the doors to the bathroom (left) and north bedroom (right):
Next up is the two chimneys in the hall (the other one is just off camera to the left). As you can see, I have already spackled the one on the right. I’ll be painting them in a lower gloss version of the same paint, which is what I used on the walls in the south bedroom. Secretly I hope that I can paint the walls and floors of the north bedroom too, thought that may be too much. This is my last full week at the farmlet this summer, so it would be so great to have all the painting done.
I’ve been at the farmlet for about three weeks and it’s only now that I’m rested enough to start doing a few small projects. Over the past three days I have been prepping the trim in the upper hall and the stair risers for paint. It was all the same deep red as the downstairs hall, with a little bit of an older blue color a few places.
Here are the risers prepped for painting:
Strangely, the chimney looks green on my screen, but it’s actually a bluish gray. Eventually it (and another one on the other side of the hall) will be painted the same egg white color as the rest of the trim. But first I need to spackle a bunch of rough spots on the surface.
And here’s the main part of the hall:
I’ve been thinking a lot about what to do with that space between the window and the wall bump-out. It’s about 63x170cm, and if the ceiling weren’t so low it would be perfect for a window seat/reading nook, with cushions and storage under. It would have to be pretty low, however, to be a useable spot for sitting. It might work as a cosy bed for a small child, but it doesn’t seem very likely that I will have a need for that any time in the near future. I also kind of like the empty space as it is and I have many other more pressing uses for my money, so for the time being I just want to get the painting done.
In a continuation of the nano-projects going on at the farmlet this summer, I came up with a temporary fix for the main barn door. Somehow the padlock seized up last summer. In preparation for breaking in, this winter I taught myself to pick locks by watching a YouTube video. It worked fine on a clean padlock, but somehow the oil that I used to try to loosen up the barn lock only made it stick more, so my newfound lock-picking skills didn’t help. And I did double check that the key I have really does fit, but nothing budged.
I thought about prying or sawing off the wooden board that the lock attaches to, but that seemed like a bad idea; all the wood is in pretty bad shape, and it seemed like doing that might destroy the door. So, instead, I just decided to get out a hacksaw and saw through the metal. There was no way to saw through the lock itself, but the very old u-shaped metal piece that it attached to was actually pretty soft and easy to get through:
It was so great to get back into the barn and poke around! I even found another u-shaped metal piece that I could pound into the wall as a temporary solution until I find something more permanent. But for now it works, here with the new padlock in place:
Since coming back to the farmlet I’ve mostly been cleaning up, but at a very slow pace. I left in a hurry in September expecting to come back soon and shut things down for the winter but that didn’t happen. There were scraps piled in the entryway from the attempt at demo-ing the living room wall and a bunch of detritus left over from the bathroom renovation on the upstairs landing. I took all this garbage out to the room in the barn where I’m storing it until I can get a container, and I tidied up all the tools and other things associated with various jobs that I left unfinished. Beyond that, I’ve washed most of the floors and cleaned most surfaces (like windowsills).
The only really bad consequence of abruptly abandoning the place last fall is that I had left the bed made up and it was occupied by mice over the winter. That necessitated buying new bedding and a new foam mattress to use as an alternate bed; this was actually something I had been planning on doing anyway, since I want to have a place for guests to sleep. This week I’ve been sleeping on the foam mattress while the bed airs out. Here’s the setup in the south bedroom:
Hey, it works for me! I’ve mostly been sleeping really well.
Thankfully, there really wasn’t much damage to the original bed and bedding. I threw out the fitted sheet (it was bad), washed the remaining linens (which were fine), and have been airing the pillows and comforter outside in the sun over the past few days. The bed has a very thick mattress topper, and while there was some staining, I have been airing it out and will simply flip it over to the clean side. I bought a new mattress pad/protector to put over the topper, and with that in place I’m going to declare the bed sleep-able. I know this will gross a lot of people out, but hey, what can I say? It’s a farm, and farms have mice. Eventually, when I move here permanently I will definitely have cats, but until then I just have to deal with it.
The only other little “project” so far was figuring out a way to contain the wires and components for my internet setup on the upstairs landing. It was a thicket, but a simple basket from a box store seems to be doing the trick:
At least it will be easier to clean around and it gives a tidier impression. Plus it doesn’t even block that very low window!
The last “home improvement” for this week (aside from hanging up some more of the linen curtains I bought last year) is really too small to even mention, but it pleases me nonetheless. There were two really ratty doormats outside; they were so torn and matted and gross that I went ahead and tossed them and replaced the one on the step with a very robust rubber mat:
I was prepared to have to trim it to size, but it just fits. Yay for small victories!
After an absence of nearly nine months, I’m finally back at the farmlet. I struggle with a chronic illness that got pretty bad over the winter, leaving me stuck in the city and feeling guilty about abandoning the farmlet. While I’m still not in top form, it’s great to be back.
Back in September I had broken a hammer in an attempt to uncover what may be an old window opening in the living room. It seems kind of auspicious that one of the first things I found in the barn this week was not one, but two hammers to replace the broken one:
Given that there were many times over the winter that I though to myself that I needed to get a new hammer, but somehow still forgot to buy one, this felt doubly fortuitous.
I can’t promise a lot of renovation over the eight weeks that I’ll be here; I still have a lot of pain and mobility issues, but I’ll do my best. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a shot of the gnarly old lilac bush, which produces the deepest purple blooms I’ve ever seen:
The more closely I look at the house (and what documentation there is for it), the more convinced I become that the exterior was once quite charming and decorative. Take a look at the details under the eaves:
To me the carving suggests something in the direction of “Sveitserstil” (“Swiss style”) decorations. This means it’s not wrong to try to make the place pretty again. Very exciting, actually!
I was finally able to make it up to the farmlet after a few hectic weeks in the city. My main goal in coming here was to tear into the wall in the living room to see if I could uncover the window from the old photograph. It had been relatively easy to pull off the thin “huntonitt” panels that were covering the beadboard in the kitchen, so I guess I just assumed it would be pretty much the same in the living room. Boy, was I ever wrong! Here’s as far as I got:
It turns out that the walls are clad in a much thicker Huntonitt panel (a full centimeter thick) that is used as insulation, even today. It’s essentially a kind of fiberboard, so it just comes apart when you try to pry it off. The black is a layer of plastic and underneath seems to be another layer of Huntonitt that is perhaps plastered and covered in what looks to be striped wallpaper.
I’m guessing the wallpaper may date from the major renovation in the 1950s or 1960s, when the upstairs was built out. I tried to feel around underneath the striped panel, but couldn’t reach the wall behind it. Here’s a link to a website I found that gives a great overview of the various materials used in the walls of old houses in Norway. It’s super helpful!
My neighbors were surprised to learn that there was another window there. The septuagenarian patriarch, who has never lived anywhere else but on the farm next door, says he can’t ever remember there being a window there. He started teasing me about the likelihood that I would just uncover a big hole in the wall, which made me realize that this probably isn’t the best project to start in the fall, especially given that the government is predicting record high prices for electricity this winter.
That, and the fact that I managed to break my only hammer, have me rethinking the wisdom of doing this project now:
Oops! Those Huntonitt panels are way tougher than me. I also bruised up my left hand pretty badly, so I’m declaring myself defeated for this round. I should never assume that anything is going to be easy in this project!
ETA: I took some photos of relevant windows along the walk from the bus stop to the farmlet:
Not sure what the neighbors think of me taking snapshots! The last two are good examples of window chaos on older houses in this area.I feel like this gives me a certain amount of leeway to choose what I like. I love the detail on the windows in the black house!
I went back to the old photograph of the farmlet from before the renovation with upstairs addition, just to see if I could figure out anything more about the windows. Here’s the best close-up I could get of the full house:
Unfortunately, the kitchen window is obscured by the tree, but you can definitely see not only the east-facing living room window (which is much narrower than the window that’s there now), but also, if you look very closely, a window on the north wall that must have been boarded up:
People, this is HUGE! How could I have missed this before? Not only does it tell me there once was a window there. It also gives me the best clue yet for what the original windows for the whole first floor might have looked like. Sadly, the photo is so blurry I can’t be completely sure, but it really does look like one of two or maybe three styles.
It might be the “empire” style I’ve written about before. Or it might be what is called a “krysspostvindu” (cross post window), where the two upper squares each open independently and are separated by a “cross” that divides the window opening vertically in the middle and horizontally two-thirds of the way up. I feel like maybe you can just make out the “cross” as a darker shadow in the north window, but I can’t see it at all in the east window, which doesn’t seem to have any panes in the two panels.
Anyway, now I’m totally confused and desperate for more evidence. I don’t think I’ll be able to make it up to the farmlet until the first week of October (the traditional Norwegian “potato vacation”), but obviously I’m going to have to start tearing out whatever is covering up that window as soon as I get there!
Renovation Tangent 