The Potting Shed, Part 2

It took me a while to get my poop in a group and get started, but I managed to hire movers to move the potting bench out of LE's basement and coordinate with Ashinator's best Marine friend, Chief. In September, 2023 we broke ground.

My non-negotiables for the potting shed included:

1. The stained glass window from the lodge,
2. "Vintage" windows from Mom's cabin,
3. The "potting bench" from LE's basement,
4. An old door that had been living in one of the barns that I fell in love with.

We literally built the shed around the potting bench.

I 'rescued' some pallets from work to use.

Chief worked fast. This was all the first day.

I was astounded by how much someone who knows what they're doing can do in just one day. It would have taken Mom and I at least two days to get this far. Building a frame instead of just putting it together like a puzzle is genius, not to mention the correct way to do it.

Ashinator mentioned that the potting shed was looking "quirky", which became its working name. It fit.

Bright and early the next Saturday, Chief was back at it, putting the windows in. Some of the windows were missing panes, broken from being removed from the cabin, but I wasn't worried about it, considering Mom and I had become glass cutting "experts" with Whimsy.

Non-negotiables numbers 1 - 3 complete.

She looks like a real building with walls.

The requisite "I helped" picture.

I might not know a thing about framing walls,
but I can use a square and saw.

Again, I was amazed at how much Chief could accomplish in just a day, and I'm so thankful he volunteered to do this. All I had to do was feed him! I definitely got the better end of the deal.

By the end of the day, "Quirky" fit as a name. 

However, the minute we started putting the OSB up, she no longer looked quirky. I was floundering for a name, until LE walked out and said, "oh, she looks magical". Ashinator and I agreed that she did, indeed, look magical and immediately "The Magical Potting Shed" stuck. I love how LE just casually comes up with the perfect names. Ash immediately shortened "Magical" to "Maggie", which I embraced. Maggie was named within a day or so of Dame Maggie Smith's death, so it seemed even more fitting.

Welcome to the family, Maggie.

The Potting Shed, Part 1

 Following my failure with getting seeds to start in Whimsy, I decided we needed a potting shed. And, it just so happened that the Bionic Cowgirl was getting the windows replaced in her cabin, which meant more free windows! I seriously can't let an old window go to waste.

Plus, there was this amazing stained glass window that she'd brought down for Whimsy that we never got incorporated, so I had to build something to hold the window, right?

This window stood sentry outside of Whimsy,
just waiting for me to figure out what to do with it.

Plus, LE had offered me a cabinet a few years ago. The catch was that I'd have to get it up from her basement without ruining her beautiful floors. It was a heavy piece of furniture, with bins for flour and sugar, but, more importantly for me, a pull-out bread board for rolling dough. That piece of furniture was never far from my mind, and last spring I had a eureka moment in which I realized that would be the perfect potting bench. There were drawers for supplies, and two tilt-out bins that we could put potting soil in. It needs some love, but not a lot. I'll strip the paint from the top, sand it and the pull-out board, and seal the surfaces with polyurethane, then she'll be ready to go.

It needs some love, but not a lot.

Old windows from Mom's cabin, a stained glass window that she and Beel found in the lodge attic, and a potting bench from LE. All signs pointed to being required to build a potting shed. My mind made up, I hired movers to get the potting bench up from LE's basement and chose a spot near Whimsy that would be easy-ish to reach with a hose.

I gathered some pallets from work and contacted a friend of Ashinator's to help with the build. I knew that I had to make it less air-flow-y than Whimsy, so I had to call in someone who know what the heck he was doing.

The (Five) Weekend Project: Tiling the Counters

It might have taken six weekends.  Or even seven.

All I know is that we finally got that gawdawful chore done.  Let me tell you, it definitely seemed like a good idea at the time.  C'mon, how hard can tiling be?  Really?  I mean, people with no experience do it all the time on the DIY home makeover shows.  Jay and I are reasonably intelligent people (but not intelligent enough NOT to take on this project).

Everyone assured me "tiling is easy", "don't worry about it".  They are all liar-heads, for the record.

We decided to start with the "little" counter - really just a free-standing cabinet we have by the stove for storage.  We figured we couldn't screw it up too badly.  It started out nicely enough. 

We borrowed Mr. Nebalee's tile cutter and Jay went to town making the cuts we needed.

And that was the last thing that went right with our project.  When we bought the supplies for the project, all we saw was mortar that we'd have to mix ourselves.  No problem, we can follow directions.  So we did.  And we ended up with some nasty mortar that was more like crunchy peanut butter instead of the smooth stuff. 

We fought with it for a while, then just said fuck it and slapped the tiles down, mushing them into the crunchy stuff as well as we could.

It doesn't look horrible, but there's not a single level spot on it.   That little project drove us to drink and we decided we were not doing any more that night.

When I bitched about it on Facebook, someone asked why we didn't just buy the pre-mixed mortar.  Pre-mixed mortar?  Are you kidding me?  We didn't see any while we were at Home Depot buying our supplies.  Sonuvabitch, we could have made our lives so much easier.

We finally made it back to the store to return our not pre-mixed mortar and buy some sensible stuff.  Jay and I put on our grown-up unders and started again.  He had a couple of hours before work one morning, so he started and I "finished".

 

I should say I finished all but the last seven pieces that needed to be cut.  I tried to bribe Deejo into coming over to cut them, but he couldn't make it.  I'm perfectly capable of running power tools, but I'm partial to my fingers, so I wimped out on the cutting part and left it for someone - anyone - else to do.

A couple more weeks went by and Jay had enough of having a partially complete kitchen project and we finally finished setting the tiles.

A day later, we grouted and now we can say the damn project is finished!

I'm all about learning new skills, but this is a skill I never want to use again.  Maybe if it had gone smoothly from the beginning, but it didn't and set a bad tone for the whole project.  I think our last weekend home project will be to build the benches for the picnic table.

Wait ... no, we're going to install a dishwasher.  That should be fun, right?

Weekend Project #2 - Kitchen Cabinets

The same weekend we did the picnic table, we started the kitchen cabinets project.  At Habitat for Humanity's ReStore, we found a 13-piece cabinet set for $600, which we thought was a pretty good deal.  But the deal got even better, we happened to be shopping during "Habi Hour", so Jay got to spin the wheel to see what our discount would be.  I was happy with a $600 set of cabinets, but I was even happier with 40% off those cabinets!

Getting them home was a bit of a problem.  We thought we'd be able to shove them all into the truck bed, but we were sorely mistaken.  Jay called in reinforcements in the form of his family with their big excursion and we were able to shoe-horn the three cabinets we couldn't fit in the truck into the excursion.

Kitchen before

With the cabinets unloaded

This pantry? Enormous.

We couldn't find a counter top at ReStore, so the salesman suggested getting a solid-core door and cutting it to size.  Why not?  It would give us a nice solid counter top and we could tile over it.  The door they had in stock was HUGE, something like 7 feet by 4 1/2 feet and weight a zillion pounds.

To get it cut, I called in my own reinforcements with a circular saw.  Nebalee and family came out to cut our "counter top".

Huge, heavy door undergoing its transformation.

It had taken most of the day to get the cabinets home, unloaded, and the door transformed to a counter top.  We laid out the base cabinets, slipped to top on, and called it a night.

I was determined to at least get the base cabinets put together, so I took a day off of work.  When I called Mom to tell her what I was going to do, she sent Bill down to help.  Instead of just getting the base cabinets done, we were able to get all of the cabinetry put together and hung.

Me and power tools - a dangerous combination

All together

We took a break and Bill played with Skeeter before heading home.  I decided I wanted to paint the cabinets and had just gotten started when Jay came home, so he jumped in and we knocked it out in no time.

After a break for dinner, we put the doors back on and it started to look like a real kitchen!

I love our "new" kitchen.  The gaping space in the upper cabinets will be a wine rack (eventually).  We also need to replace the shelves in the two right upper cabinets and all of the shelves in the pantry.  Why on earth those didn't come with the cabinets is beyond me.  It never occurred to me to check, because who takes the shelves out of cabinets?  What does one do with lengths of board that were formerly shelves?  It's a mystery.

We haven't actually gotten around to unpacking and putting things away yet, but I'm sure I'll love it even more once we get our kitchen stuff moved in (and the shelves replaced).

Maybe once Copper is delivered, we can go back to focusing on getting us settled in.  For now, we've been too focused on outside stuff.

Weekend Project #1 - The Picnic Table

Since we've moved into our new place, we've come up with some "weekend projects" that needed to be done.  Remember the shade tree that needed a picnic table?

See how lonely that tree is?

First order of business was to move the big, wood kitchen table from the kitchen outside so we could strip it and re-finish it.  We knew that we wanted to put kitchen cabinets in the kitchen to maximize the space, but the table had to come out.  The table is roughly seven feet by four feet and weighs a gajillion pounds, because it is solid wood.

Jay and I managed to muscle it out of the kitchen and into the mudroom, but came to a screeching halt at the door.

Off with its legs!

The door was about two inches too narrow to force the table through.  Many cuss words and one amputated leg later, we were able to get the table out.

We were smart enough to buy an electric sander, but not quite smart enough to buy the right grit of sand paper, so stripping the table was slow work.  We stripped the bottom of the table and the legs Friday night, then sealed them with Thompson's Water Seal and left it to cure overnight.

The next morning, armed with 100 grit, we tried stripping the top of the table.  It took us forever and we eventually ran out of the "starter pack" that came with the sander, so off to the hardware store we went.  When we came home with proper sandpaper, the project went much faster.  I hadn't realize how well sealed the table had been.  Maybe if I had thought about it, we would have bought something to chemically strip the varnish instead of spending two hours taking turns sanding.

I love the weathered look of the stripped table, but we had to seal it.  We love this table and want it to last, so on went the water seal.

After all that work on getting the table ready to be an outdoor table, there was no way we were going to let its wooden legs sit in the mud, which meant we had to expand our project to include setting pavers.

I know the pictures make it look like I made Jay to all the work, but I really did do some.  Really!  It's just difficult to take pictures and do physical labor at the same time.

Doesn't that tree look much less lonely now?  We still have no way to sit at the table (yet another weekend project), but it's a nice place to hang out and watch the amazing sunsets.

Allie-bird got to move back in with us now that we're not living in a pet-free apartment and she spent her time surveying her new domain while Jay and I worked.