The bathroom barn door

Remember when we bought the awesome doors for the bathroom and pantry? Yeah, it's been so long I barely remembered it too. But we did! And we finally got one of them hung up. Given our general sense of priority you may think we hung the pantry door first, but no, we opted to give a measure of privacy to the bathroom. We were having a party and thought the guests might appreciate it.

Step one: buy doors. Wait months to install. This allows proper aging. Honest.

Step two: buy barn door hardware. Curse when a search for barn door hardware online takes you to sites with very expensive examples. Hundreds of dollars just for one bracket. Go instead to Tractor Supply and buy real hardware for real barn doors. It'll be galvanized, but that's why they make spray paint.

Step three: paint the hardware and then lift extremely heavy door into position so you can figure out where you want to attach everything.

In situ so to speak

The track and hangers from Tractor Supply were much less expensive than fancy not-really-for-a-barn stuff. I used black satin spray paint to make them less industrial.

Galvanized, pre-paint.

Cut track to fit and file for smoothness

Once you decide where on the door you want the brackets you have the scary task of drilling through your awesome door. Take it outside to do so. It's pretty out. Enjoy the sun.

We moved this darn door many times. It's heavy.

Bring door back inside to see if the height is correct. Yes, you could measure it. But would that really give you the full effect? Ahem. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Figuring out where to mount the track

Once we figured out where we wanted the track, we had to find the door header. We planned for a barn door here so put a full header all the way to the far wall, not just over the door opening. Unfortunately, despite having photos and knowing that we did this, we couldn't find the darn wood. The stud finder was not finding anything. We drilled a few test holes and hit air. WTF???

Finally decided to cut out the drywall and see what was going on. Figured we'd sister in a nailer if that's what was needed.

Desperate measures

Chris was a good sport about all this. It was very frustrating that we couldn't figure out what was going on.

See? He's still smiling.

And this next shot says it all. If you look really closely you can see the three test holes we drilled in the upper left corner. We were 1 inch too high. 1 inch! Argh. The stud finder wouldn't work because the whole darn thing is wood. Nothing to sound against. Double Argh.

#@&!

So we took that perfectly cut out piece of sheetrock and put it right back in place. Fortunately I've had lots of practice mudding and sanding drywall lately. Got that puppy repaired and repainted within 24 hours.

And now, back to the hardware installation process.

The wheel assembly is designed so that you can adjust the height by tightening/loosening the center bolt. This lets you correct level if the track should shift for some reason (like it's actually hanging on a barn and the barn sags). What it did for us was allow us to have a wee bit of wiggle room if the door didn't hang quite right against the jam.

Adjustable wheel assembly

In order to install it properly you have to drill down into the door frame so the bolt can travel up and down. It's a tight fit and we pinched a few fingers getting it all set up.

Drilled and ready to adjust

One more session of measuring and fitting and we had to trim a bit off the bottom of the door. Since we had to install the track a bit lower than originally planned, a couple inches needed to come off. Chris set up a jig, moved the sassafrassing door again, and used a circular saw to do the trimming.

Clamped level for a saw guide

Almost done

Then he used his hand plane to give it a nice finished edge. Applied some stain and varnish to seal the wood and we were ready to hang it up.

Giving it a nice finish

 And here it is in all its glory.

Checking level

Gotta admit I really love it. It's solid, it's pretty, it's got some history, and it says "Private". How perfect is that?!?

Ta dah!

And the view from the inside is just as good. Well, it will be once we have trim. That's for another day though.

Privacy!

Drywalling the garage

Okay, so this has been a long process. Mainly because it's summer and mostly gorgeous out and we really didn't want to be spending all of our time in the garage. So we kept finding other stuff to do. Plus it's not exactly fun to drywall, mud, sand, mud, sand more, mud & sand more, and then stage a total revolt against doing yet another mud/sand cycle because, you know, this is a garage,  not a bloody palace.

Smile even when you look like a bad addict

We eventually got every thing ready for priming and painting.

Buy scaffolding. It's worth it. Truly.

We decided to go with a site mix of paint because, as mentioned, garage. Bought two gallons of relatively inexpensive white ceiling paint and then poured two gallons of leftover paint into it. Not even paint leftover from this house; this was paint from the last house. So white, a sort of mushroom light brown, and a really soft sea foam-ish green went into a 5-gallon bucket and we got this:

It's a really nice grey with slightly green undertones

It went on sort of dark but completely softened when it dried. I actually like it so much that I'm thinking of matching it to use in the upstairs bathroom.

So now all of this stuff gets to move into its temporary home.

Clear the decks!

The big garage bay will act as Chris's temporary workshop until we can get the wood shop built sometime in the next couple years.

Yes, that is Chris laying on the shelf. Why do you ask?

Picked up a bunch of storage shelves from HD and will use them in the garage most likely on a permanent basis. Just what goes on them will change.

Ready for organizing

I'll add bins, layer in shelves, and hang stuff over head. This is really key for us as we have no basement. So places to store Christmas decorations, seasonal toys like skis and snow shoes, and all the other stuff that most people stuff in their basement are in seriously short supply. Anything that doesn't require temperature controlled storage is destined for out here. The rest will find a home in the closets or utility room; anything deemed not essential to continued happiness will be sold, recycled, or trashed. Awesome!

Deer!

I may have trouble in my future garden...

This little button buck and his un-photographed companion spent a lot of time browsing right where my garden is slated to be. He's cute now, but I'm not looking forward to him nipping my zucchini blossoms. Definitely a fence in my future.

Miscellany

We've been mudding and sanding the garage. Those are not interesting pictures. So here are some other  things we've been doing too.

Limes were on sale so I bought a bag of them. Some went into beer (ahem), some went into limeade, and some became lime pie. I used my brother's filling recipe (4 egg yolks, 14oz can sweetened condensed milk, and 1/2 cup lime juice with lots of zest) and the graham cracker crust recipe from BHG. A truly awesome pie.

This pie was unbelievably good. Really.

We went to the county fair and enjoyed all the nifty stuff. I saw knitting projects that made me really want to take lessons. I saw a small loom that gave me hope I may be able to stop buying shawls and start making them instead. And we saw some critters.

Chickens

This wagon team was amazing. Well trained and beautiful. A draft horse exhibition followed with log twitching, carriage obstacle coarse, and bareback Simon Says. Very fun.

Eight horse hitch

And my tomatoes are slowly coming in. This is my take on an artistic photo. If you can't eat your food yet, photograph it!

Hope you're ready for your close-up

We also had a visitor. I was sanding the garage wall and turned to see this little guy had crawled in through the bay door. He was about the size of my hand. I put him in a bucket and moved him out to the drainage ditch - I didn't want him getting run over.

Snapping turtles look prehistoric

And now I'll return to sanding. And mudding. Gotta be done eventually.

Cats and dogs

This is our cat. Our very angry cat.

Not a happy kitty

And this is why she is unhappy. We're dog sitting!

Isn't he adorable???

Contrary to the photo evidence below, the dog has not really been bugging the cat. The cat has actually been spending an inordinate amount of time making sure she gets within his sight line and then high-tailing it straight up a tree. Sometimes he notices and chases after her; sometimes he just moseys around the rocks. 

Not sure he knows she is up there.

Our dog passed away two years ago and we've been considering adopting a pup. My friend was going out of town and we offered to take care of his dog - sort of a trial run to see if we were ready to bring home one of our own.

Woof!

 He is a sweetie and well behaved.

Any birds in there?

He happily accompanied me on a long walk every morning. And a short walk every night. He's also a world champion snuggler.

Lots of walkies

But at the end of the visit we realized that we're not quite ready yet. So we'll wait another year and see what next summer brings.

Looking ahead to winter

Despite stifling temperatures these past couple weeks we knew we needed to turn the log pile into a stacked wood pile. The logs had been aging (very unattractively) next to the porch for about six months. That's good but they won't fully dry until they've been split and appropriately stacked. Leave them like this too long and you run the risk of them getting punky (that's a technical term) and rotten.

Logs!

So we rented a hydraulic log splitter and got to work.

Oooh, hydraulics

We got the splitter for 4 hours and spent every bit of it lifting, splitting, and throwing the wood into a big pile. 

Steady progress

A big pile of wood that's been sitting out for six months attracts lots of really creepy stuff. Ants, spiders, and one really cool snake skin (no sign of the actual snake).

I want hazard pay for this

Ta dah!

We didn't quite get done before Chris had to return the splitter. But the leftovers were fairly small and he made quick work of them with the manual splitter, i.e. the maul.

Leftovers

We stacked it all up and figure we ended up with 3+ full cord of wood. Pretty good. We wanted to put away at least 4 cord for this winter's use and we still have a bunch of trees down and drying that need to be bucked for the fall splitting session.  By the time we're done we'll easily have six cord split and stacked which gives us a nice margin of error plus gets next season's wood drying in advance.

Unfortunately there was a stack casualty when we got up the next morning. Looks like something tried to climb the pile and it tipped over. Argh. Hate re-doing work.

Who climbed the wood pile?!?

On the other hand, when the day starts this beautifully it takes quite a while to even notice any damage.

Just gorgeous

Drywalling the garage

We got the garage all cleaned out (the porch is, unfortunately, once again destroyed *sigh*) and set up to install the drywall.

We uncovered the garage door openings so we'd have light and to allow greater air flow. Did you realize that curing concrete floors give off a tremendous amount of moisture? Despite a moisture barrier underneath them? Well, they do. And 88% humidity sure doesn't help matters. 

Left bay holds hobby truck; right is the big bay

Once the doors were open we backed in the truck full of drywall.

Should be all we need. Well, may need more coffee.

Then we used my brother's handy-dandy drywall lift to start putting up the ceiling. Holy cow! Love the drywall lift!

Just crank that baby right up there

We picked a corner and got to work. We'd purchased a couple of rolling scaffolds when we did the framing so we had a great platform from which to work. We also have a drywall screw gun which is awesome.

Scaffold, lift, scaffold. Whew!

 It went fairly quickly and the large bay is now completely covered.

Moving right along there

We have lots of outlets and light boxes as this will be a working garage, not just a place to store cars. Which means we had to cut out around all those little blue boxes. Another handy tool was the Rotozip with a drywall bit. Really made quick work of it all. We did make sure we measured and marked first - the professionals seem to be able to "pop" the sheet and then cut cleanly around the box, but we found it best to mark it out.

Using the "pop" method. Once.

Chris is now taping and mudding. We'll do the smaller bay once this one is completed. Didn't want to move the hobby truck too many times and this seemed the most efficient way to go about the whole thing.