Yesterday I was searching Craigslist for pork. Our half pig from last year was basically used up so our meat supply was getting low. After having nice farm raised meat I didn’t want to have to start buying the stuff you usually get at the grocery stores. Eating naturally raised pork makes a world of difference in the taste. I found someone who was selling a half pig for a better price then we paid last time, so I was pretty happy. We met up and gave him our deposit and the pig should be ready for pick up from 4 Star Meat Company (local butcher) around the 15th of next month.

While we were chatting with the farmer, he asked us if we were looking for any beef. I said that I had looked at buying beef before, but that I thought that it was pretty expensive. Buying a half cow at once can get spendy quick. However, it turns out he had a quarter cow for sale, still at the butcher, as the original buyer backed out, and he didn’t have the freezer space. So we got it for a deal: 125 pounds and paid $2.60 a pound for all naturally raised beef. I thought it might be interesting to someone to list out the cuts of meat you end up with in a quarter cow:

• 4 packages stew meat
• 5 packages chuck roast
• 2 packages rump roast
• 2 packages round bone roast
• 4 packages short ribs
• 20 packages ground beef
• 5 packages round steak
• 1 package cross rib roast
• 2 packages sirloin tip steak
• 1 package flank steak
• 4 packages sirloin steak
• 4 packages T-bone steak
• 3 packages rib steak

Most of those packages are about a pound, except the roasts and ribs which were 2-3 pounds. I think we are going to be stocked for quite a long while after we pick up our pork. Plus it’s a pretty nice feeling buying your meat local and supporting a farmer. I rarely bought any meat last year due to having a freezer full of pork. When I did it was usually beef for those dishes that you just couldn’t substitute pork for.

While the roof was getting replaced the existing corbels all got destroyed in the process. Lee decided that he wanted fancier corbels then the originals so he made up his own. To get started, he built three for the dormer (one was just for practice). Most of the corbel dimensions were already decided for us. The overhang of the roof was two feet so that was one length. The window placement made it so the part of the corbel that came down the wall was sixteen inches. (The other 13 corbels on the house are 26″ long.) The width of the wood is two and a half inches.

Lee made his cuts. He did an open mortise and tenon joint to connect the right angle. Then the joint was glued and clamped.

He drilled a hole through the open mortise and tenon joint and then chiseled it square for a wooden peg.

The wooden peg through the joint makes the corbel stronger and adds a nicer look. The peg was left out a half an inch through both sides. The diagonal brace was then screwed into place.

The diagonal brace is a half inch smaller then the other elements in the corbel. The corners of the diagonal brace and the bottom of the vertical are chamfered. The horizontal will be fit tightly against the varge rafter as we may later add faux caps so it looks like the supports pierce the face of the eaves. In a way, these corbels are the beginning of our planned architectural update for the house: from rough depression-era craftsman to a more refined arts and crafts styling.

Lee and I had a lot of discussions on how to make the corbels look. I hated anything that looked too ornate. He hated how plain the originals were and liked ones that emphasized the joinery. Finally I told him to knock himself out and just do whatever he preferred. I like them quite a lot and am very happy with how they turned out. I do feel bad for him in that I think they would have looked a bit different if he hadn’t of spent the last three weeks pointing out corbels I hated on other people’s houses.

Of course with Lee being Lee he couldn’t help himself and had to add some more details. These ones are just faux pegs. He drilled a quarter inch deep hole with a forstner bit (this leaves a flat bottom). Then he chiseled the corners out square. The pegs themselves are three quarters inch cubes which were glued into place.

We got our first new window for the house. We will be doing a few windows at a time as we work on particular rooms. The next two windows we order will probably be for the two rooms upstairs and that will make the second floor complete. Then it will be all the windows on the first floor. All eleven of them. Oh joy of joys.

But I digress… We are replacing the windows with Marvin Ultimate double hung. The windows right now are very leaky and need replaced. We really wanted to keep the look of the old ones as the windows are a big part of the charm of our old house. Slapping some big vinyl picture windows in just wouldn’t cut it. We looked at a lot of windows online and then culled it down to Pella, Kolbe, and Marvin. We ended up picking Marvin over Kolbe as the price was similar but the Marvin seemed better built. The floor model of Marvin had more detailed wood work and higher quality gaskets.

This particular window is aluminum clad on the outside and pine on the inside. It has interior and exterior muntins (bars that separate the window panes), and spacer bars between the glass for a more accurate divided light appearance. The sash lock is an oil-rubbed bronze spoon lock which keeps the old look. It has a U factor of .31 which is an R value of 3.22. This is important to us as we continue in our quest for a very insulated energy efficient house. Lee wanted to go with a straight grain Douglass Fir interior which would have been more in keeping with our house, but that added another two hundred dollars to the price so we decided we could live without it.

Lee plans on building a window seat by this window. Then we will stain the wood to match all the other woodwork in the window seat. But that will be a ways down the road, so right now I just admire it.

I don’t have an outside picture of this window at the moment, but the exterior trim has been replaced to maintain the current trim style. We like the window trim a lot, and it seems to be an uncommon design even in older homes. Of course, our new window doesn’t have an integrated angled sill like the old wood windows, but we went with a false sill with a angled top cut to approximate the look. An article in Fine Home Building (our reference for everything) gave us the idea.

Lee started laying down the underlayment flooring in one of the upstairs bedrooms. We are using 1/2″ CDX plywood. We plan on having wood floors so we needed to use plywood instead of OSB because of its superior nail holding capability. Putting down the underlayment also is going to make the upstairs floor stiffer. We are using glue and screws to help prevent squeaks.

We originally were going to use a product called DAP Subfloor 7000 (because it had low VOC emissions) under the CDX. We must have gotten a bad batch of it at the store because it was rubbery and non adhering. So we brought it back to the store and ended up going with PL Premium. Its a polyurethane adhesive which is basically not suppose to off gas. It seems to have better performance in every way compared to the other product. It also had less warnings (like brain damage) on it compared to the DAP. So far Lee seems pretty pleased with it.

Can you spot the big one? It’s been a month now and the girls are still having varying egg sizes. Most of the eggs have worked their way up to a medium small size. I just had a new girl start laying today and it was such a tiny petite egg compared to the others. There are three girls that still haven’t started laying. No colored eggs yet so I am pretty sure Elwood and Jake are in those two late ones. Today I was graced with the jumbo egg you see in the picture. It didn’t want to fit in the egg carton. I feel sorry for the hen that layed it.

I find myself staring at the cabbage patterns every time I slice one open. They are so pretty. I only got three cabbages from my garden that did well. We have been eating purple cabbage soup for dinner. Looks gross but tastes awesome.

I couldn’t help myself. Really, I tried to resist the urge for over a week. Edgar’s doggie mohawk was just begging for a punk color. I did restrain myself and didn’t do pink. He is very thankful for that.

After we bought our house last year we did a major cleanup trying to get rid of most of the garbage left behind by the former tenants. A few things we kept to reuse. I kept the metal storage rack in the picture below for Lee to use for his tools later. Basically the storage rack just sat outside for the last year after being moved out of the shack it was in during the cleanup.

Fast forward to now. After all the canning that I did over the summer I had cases of jars sitting around with no place to go. Some of them actually went driving around with us in the car for weeks due to not having any place to store them. So now I am the proud owner of a crusty storage rack sitting in my kitchen. Sigh. I made sure to clean it up really good but I never envisioned actually using it inside the house. It still doesn’t hold all of my canned goods but at least we can stop tripping over them and they don’t have to ride around in the car anymore. I guess when we get my pantry built it will be all that much sweeter.

I was very surprised when I counted up all my jars. My final canned goods for this year turned out to be 124 jars. My eyes bugged out at that.

• 51 quarts of tomatoes
• 33 quarts of peaches
• 14 quarts of cherries
• 17 pints of beets
• 6 pints of cherry syrup
• 3 half pints of cherry jam

I also want to note that the beets that I canned with red wine turned out awesome! I finally tasted one of my jars and decided that I will definitely be making them again next year.

My uncle came twice and collected Hazel nuts from all our wild trees. We told him to knock himself out and take as much as he wanted. We were way too busy to do anything with them. He went and dried and cracked them, and then gave us a big tupperware container of them back much to our surprise. They are pretty tasty.

We picked up a vanity for the future upstairs bathroom. Since the new bathroom is going to have space constraints we were looking for something that was small. We almost went with a pedestal sink so the room would look more spacious but then we found this vanity. It was the smallest one we found with it being 17 inches deep and 25 inches wide. Plus a little bit of storage which was a bonus. Lee wants to change the doors later on but I say don’t mess with it until the rest of the house is done.

The new roof has been finished for over a week but we had trouble finding the camera charger after moving back. We found it now, and will hopefully start posting more frequently again.

We re-roofed because the existing roof was starting to look pretty rough and would likely be leaking in the next few years. No sense remodeling the inside of a house if the outside is failing.

We originally wanted to go with a metal roof, but costs and other considerations pushed this off the table. I talked about that in the comments of this post. Ultimately we went with Owens Corning Duration Premium Shingles with “lifetime” warranty in the Driftwood color. They are a very heavy shingle, lots of raised character, and not likely to end up in the landfill any time soon. The original house had a wood shake roof, so we wanted something that would keep the look. The next photo is a close up of the new roof. Although your computer monitor may show it differently, the shingles are a gray-brown color. They get darker and more shake-like when it rains.

If the roof portion of this project had been a simple tear-off and nail-on it would have been quite a bit cheaper. Unfortunately, the original shake roof was still there under the composite, along with the original skip sheathing. That had to get torn off. Also, quite a few of the rafter tails were rotted, the varge rafters (wooden overhang in the gable ends) were failing, and the whole roof had some serious dips and rises. Translation: our new roof was basically an all new roof. The original rafters were still good, but everything else was replaced. We went with A/C plywood in the eaves for appearance. If we run out of things to spend money on some day, we might come back and add bead board to the front gable to restore the tongue & grove overhang appearance. All the gables have a neat new trim detail on the varge rafter face, and we added fascia boards since we’ll be adding rain gutters pretty soon. Exposed rafter tails would be truer to the craftsman roots of this house, but aren’t practical in an area with 51 inches of rain a year.

From that last photo you can see we went with ridge vents to keep the back of the roof cleaner. Also, the corbels (decorative angle brackets) were destroyed when the overhangs came off. We’ll be building new ones to restore the look.

We are very happy with how this project turned out. Our contractor was very detail oriented and honest. Robin now speaks in glowing tones of the joy of hiring out home improvement. Yes, yes, as soon as we win the lottery. I hear your chances of winning are slightly better if you actually play.