New Project

Having sufficiently neglected this blog to shed all of my handful of readers, I thought it was a good time to start posting again. I have a new project that I have started rolling during the last two weeks. This hearkens back to the good old WV compound. We have been making use of it over the last couple of years, camping in the little RV, playing home base for a motorcycle trip each summer, and even tubing on the river a bit.

A number factors have lead us to consider making capital improvements to the compound. Among those factors are the desire to have somewhere comfortable for more than one person to sit out rain, the poor defenses of the RV against the local mouse population, and a gasoline-drinking, camp site vandalizing bear that has recently moved in. We started thinking about building something more permanent.

A full on house or cabin was considered, but those are expensive. They also require a great deal of time and effort to manage their construction. An alternative was proposed a couple of weeks ago, briefly negotiated, and settled as a course of action. The idea is to build a tiny cabin, really a shed that contains the virtues of a cabin, though in abbreviated or miniaturized form. The basic requirements were provisions for: a hot shower, a toilet, a king sized bed for the parents, separate sleeping area for children, comfortable seating for everyone, and pancake making facilities.

I quickly progressed from this to a working design. The basics are a simple 12'x16' box with a steeply pitched roof. On the outside it looks like a shed, with out swinging barn doors and shutters on all the widows to lock things up tight. On the inside, a set of sliding glass doors reside behind the barn doors. Walls are insulated and paneled. The front half is the living area is open to the rafters and houses a sleeper sofa. The back half has a loft above for sleeping and a small kitchen, toilet closet, shower stall, and utility closet. It is a lot of fun trying to work out how to fit all of these pieces in a small space. It has been dubbed the "shabin." Shed + cabin = shabin.

The cabin will be completely off-grid. Most systems will be adapted from RV components. Power will be 12V supplied by battery. Energy will come from the generator we already have, but could switch to solar panels in the future. Water will be brought in via car from the nearby spring. The toilet will be a composting model. Propane will supply an instant water heater and a cook top.

This week we secured a builder. He will be putting up the basic, weather tight shed structure this winter. We will be finishing and furnishing the insides our selves over the spring and summer. So expect more posts in the future to track our progress.

Virginia Weather

Two pictures taken two weeks apart...

January 27, 3" of snow


February 11, 72 degrees

Mud Room Project Finished

So I wanted to get back in to the swing of posting projects I am working on. I have in fact done a few, and I have a big one planned for this spring and summer. I just have been far too lax in posting them. To start off, let's see how the mud room turned out...



After plastering and sanding the walls, and many coats of primer and paint, I finally got the walls back in to shape from the mess removing the wallpaper created. This allowed me to finally move on to the fun part, the cabinets.



I got the cabinets at IKEA, from their kitchen collection. These are the closest things to LEGO you can do in home improvement. The room has windows on three sides. For the plain side, I have a large wall cabinet and a matching wine rack bolted to the wall, with a large cabinet and counter top below.



For one of the window sides, I wanted a bench to run below the windows. I also needed somewhere to put our small wine fridge. The base of the bench, being built here, is made from two long wall cabinets, the kind one would put over a stove. IKEA has a nearly endless selection of cabinet sizes. I completed the bench with a narrow wooden counter top that runs over the cabinets and fridge. For above the windows on both sides, I mounted more wall cabinets with doors that swing up.



And here is the final project. You can just see the matching wooden counter top mounted on the large cabinet. I think the wood counters look quite good. There were a lot of fun to finish using the vegetable based oil that IKEA sells. It provides a nice finish, and yet is safe for food preparation.

I actually have a couple more smaller IKEA hacking projects I have done since this, which I will perhaps post eventually.

Carleigh's First Swim

We started Carleigh on swim lessons at the local high school pool. This is in anticipation of our trip to Orlando next month, where we expect most days will involve a trip to the resort's pool.

More Home Movie Editing Goodness

Carleigh Walking

I finally figured how how to hook up my video camera to our Mac. Here is short movie I filmed and edited tonight of Carleigh walking in her first pair of shoes.

Mud Room Project

So child rearing has recently halted any new projects. I am bucking that trend by attempting a renovation of the mud room that leads from our back yard to our kitchen. This is one room in the house we have not touched since moving in. It was covered in a particularly bad wallpaper pattern, which we always intended to change. Over the past five years had slowly filled up to about chest high with random junk. I took the "before" photos after cleaning out the junk, so you will have to leave that up to your imagination.



The plan for the room is to clear out everything, strip the wall paper, paint the walls and trim, and furnish the room with built in storage. This should give us storage for the remaining random junk, as well at alleviate the amount of things we keep in the kitchen and dining room.



Progress on the room has definitely been slow. I have been finding that things go much more slowly with a baby in the house. Removing wall paper istedious and time consuming. I also got a nasty surprise when I started removing the wall paper. It was installed directly on the wallboard, with no spackling or primer between. This meant that pulling down the paper also pulled off the top layer of the wall board. This has added a new step to the project, covering the exposed paper with a skim coat of wallboard joint compound.



After a couple of weekends of work, I finally got all the wall paper stripped. This allowed me to move on to the skim coat the next weekend.



As of tonight, I got the skim coat applied. This took four buckets of joint compound. Tomorrow, I sand. Then I can finally primer and paint the walls and ceiling. After that, the cabinets go in. I will post another update once I am finished with the final product.