A big goal for all of us has been installing the spiral stair between the main floor and the basement ... this week we got the beautiful red skeleton up. Boy, are we excited!! Here you see Abbi painting her heart out and a proud Evan peeking over the landing at the top.
We wanted a colonial type chandelier to light the stairwell from above and after some head scratching we decided to get one from the Iron Apple Forge in Buckingham, PA which is the village next to Lahaska where we used to live. It felt good to deal with a "local" craftsman from back home, and the lamp is a nice eclectic complement to the very modern looking stair railing. To the right you see the row of oak treads that are drying prior to installation.
Lars is back for a stint to help the "rents" and we put him right to work painting in the basement ... that basement is huge and many hands have helped get the job done ...
... here our neighbor Dom pitches in for a day ... his house building project is on deep freeze because of winter (he's not quite out of the ground yet).
Meanwhile, I was prepping the guest bath for wallpapering, and then actually wallpapering. It's an exacting task and you can't go vey fast ... trimming around all those beams and odd angles was challenging but it turned out pretty nice. My wallpapering tools are all still in storage so I was unable to access them, which meant I had to retool. Not a problem, except for the fact that proper soaking trays for pre-pasted paper seem to have gone the way of the dodo bird ... not available anywhere, not even the internet. I was fit to be tied, finally I asked Chris to help me out by retrofitting what was available with a dowel across its full length ... that worked like a charm and I was on my way. That Chris is a pretty super guy.
We now have soapstone counters in the kitchen. In the first picture you see the guys unloading the island slab from the truck ... they are all near the hernia bursting point for the stuff is massively heavy. The cutout area of the island is where my butcher block fit in.
With the basement painting finally done, Lars and Chris install and adjust all the light fixtures. Here they are working in Chris' future office.
Rita: I sure am excited to find your essays and blog. This particular entry makes me long to build, especially with a spiral staircase (something I've always thought about because of it economy of space and its shape). Maybe my wife Helen and I will build someday, we live in an old house built in 1820 and sometimes maintenance and worry about upkeep of the structure itself are not only expensive but tiring.
ReplyDeleteWarm greetings from Maine!