Springtime. One way or another.

Never mind the fact that it's actually snowing outside as I sit and write this. (It's the end of March, people. WHAT THE HELL). I'm thinking about fresh greens. Because it's the end of March, people, and that's what you do. 

One of the most compelling parts of the property that made us lose our minds is the greenhouse. A full on, proper-panes-of-glass, walk in greenhouse. The north wall is made of double-thickness brick, to absorb the sun's heat during the day and cast it back into the space. I was still harvesting greens and other vegetables out of the greenhouse after Thanksgiving last year. 

All I could think when I saw it was: Let's see the goddamned deer get to my tomatoes NOW. 

Honestly, I've barely even thought about a garden in our new space. The snow is still more than a foot thick on the ground outside, and everything is pretty dormant. Plus, my brain-space has been more than occupied between the new gig and trying to keep up with the renovation of the actual house. That and trying not to slip and bust my ass on the way out to the car every morning. (It's not easy looking graceful on black ice when you're wearing ostrich skin cowboy boots). 

But the other day I saw a new seed display at the hardware store, and it reminded me that in other parts of the country, people are not just thinking about growing things, they can actually see the dirt where they intend to put it. 

The inside of the greenhouse was a mess. The brick wall is actually covered by a grape vine - lovely white grapes that the previous owner plucked and handed to the kids to eat as we toured the property last summer. That's because the inside of the greenhouse actually gets too warm without something to diffuse the radiant heat from the brick, and the greenery of the leaves acts as a perfect balance. 

There were leftover tomato plants poking up through the center table, and straggly bits of wilted cabbage on the ground to be raked and cleaned up. But even with all the snow and ice we accumulated this winter, the greenhouse was lovely and intact. Even scraping off a little bit of snow from the sloping roof allowed enough sunlight through into the interior to warm it up above freezing, and let the remainder just melt right off. 

Yesterday, with a clear blue sky, the temperature outside was around 30 degrees when I stepped into the greenhouse. Inside, it was over 70. 

I started raking and sorting, and quickly shed both my outer coat, and then my sweater. I was down to a t-shirt in no time, and reveling in the warmth. It's no wonder the snow didn't stay long on the greenhouse roof - it is incredibly efficient. I could have probably gotten out and planted in the greenhouse a couple of weeks ago, even with thicker snow still on the ground. 

The greenhouse cleaned up pretty quickly - I pulled out all the detritus of last summer and swept the paths. The two long edges have felt paper down to keep the weeds out, and the center patch of soil - about 40" wide - is surmounted by the chickenwire frame above. It's perfect when the tomatoes come up, offering a great support trellis. 

I hadn't planned extensively on what to plant this year. Given that we only moved in last October, I don't know the property well enough to have developed an overall garden plan. There are plenty of grapevines, raspberry canes and blackberry vines to keep me busy. Plus 30 or so blueberry bushes and a smattering of fruit trees. So I figured I'd limit my annual vegetable planting to keep things manageable while I get my head around what might go where. The previous owner had a potato patch, as well as several squash varieties going behind the barn, and I'll probably do that as well. Maybe I'll go crazy and add beans or peas to the mix. But all other vegetables this year will come from the greenhouse. 

I had picked up a couple of packs of spinach and arugula, and thought I'd try my hand at starting tomatoes from seed, since I was beginning the season a bit early. Some of the seed I put into the egg carton cups with a bit of fresh soil. Others I planted underneath the framework, along with all the greens. 

After my previous pleasure at what a simple cold frame in the garden could do to extend the season a few weeks, my pleasure at getting into the greenhouse and having all that delicious room to grow things literally a month or more before I'd otherwise be able to get my hands dirty is positively visceral. 

From my initial simple list, I've added peppers to the ambition for this year, and probably one or two other staples that would be out of reach due to such a short season after The Winter That Will Not End.  But right now, I'm just daydreaming about what those first tomatoes are going to taste like, and discovering that I'm suddenly a bit more patient with the melting snow than I was before. 

The favorite thing I've ever written: "This is my meat room."

Despite my Southern roots insisting that Spring should be springing, there are still deep piles of snow covering most of New England. But they're a little less deep than they were a week or so ago, and have retreated from the edge of the roads. And our days are as often as not getting up over freezing. The plants may not be blooming here yet, but you can just about imagine a moment in the future where they might. 

All this good weather has made us impatient to watch the progress of the house. While the destruction & demolition took weeks and about 8 or 10 dumpster-fulls of debris, the new walls went up quickly, and the house is taking rapid shape as it returns to a single family farmhouse from its long stint as a boarding house. 

Some of the work still takes a bit of creative imagining. To move the stairs to the basement from the back of the house to the center (and get them out of the way of the kitchen), we had to cut through the floor, and a few walls, and required a couple of turns as you descend, so that we could avoid cutting a hole through a 250 year old brick foundation. This took a bit of creative partnership with our local building codes guy, and several staircase drawings on the floors and walls of the intended area, but the stairs just make more sense now, and I can now go visit my prosciutto without walking all the way around to the basement door on the back of the house. 

(That blurry fuzz ball in the bottom left is our pup, George. She's just turned a year, and her herding instincts have kicked in. All of the work at the house has provided her plenty of opportunity to boss her flock [all of the rest of us, plus the contractors, plus any stray rabbits, squirrels or low-flying birds that near our property] around.)

Hey look - a space where a kitchen will go! 

There's another new set of stairs - we moved these from the opposite side of the kitchen, and opened up the whole space. The total size of the kitchen will have grown by about 50%, plus an extra foot and a half of head room. No more hobbit kitchen! 

The whole floor you're looking at is new. It's about 5 inches higher than it used to be. And about 100x more level. It's just sub floor - and it's not plywood. Because if you are looking up at it from the basement, you don't want to see modern construction in a 1780's farmhouse. So it's all wide pine boards. On top of which we will put the actual floor (which will also be wide pine boards).  I think I mentioned that the crew that we're working with (Morse & Doak) is kind of fanatical for these kinds of details. Which helps. Because when they ask me questions like "What kind of lights would you like?" I say things like "um. Electric?" and when they ask, "Where do you want them?" I respond with things like "I was thinking in the ceiling. Probably." 

Don't get me wrong. There are a few things that I care passionately about in the renovation. It's just that for many parts of it, I am happy to go with the flow. (And by "flow" I mean "Whatever my Bride decides"). 

Let me introduce you to one of those things I care passionately about: 

This is my meat room.

It's just off the mud-room entrance (that's the new concrete poured over where the hot-tub used to be), and that door will be a sliding barn door, behind which will stand a row of freezers & refrigeration. All of that beef & pork we store each year?  It goes into one of our two upright freezers that lived in our basement. Or into the spare fridge/freezer that we used to leave in the garage. Now, I'll have a room conveniently located near the kitchen (plus a place to put recycling bins and a few other things). 

You can have the rest of the house. This is my room. 

You can see the original sheathing of the house along the back wall, and one of the lights into the basement. This whole back of the house was a separate barn, extended and connected over time. The actual level of the house floor is about 30" higher than this new concrete slab, and figuring out how to use this space was a bit of a challenge. Until our design consultant came up with the freezer room idea.

That's right. We actually hired one of those guys you see on TV. Because what the hell would you do with the lean-to add-on space formerly occupied by a drop in hot tub big enough for a small village? I wasn't clever enough to come up with "meat room", and I the idiot buying freezers to jam into spare bits of our basement. 

Thank you, design guy. You are a genius.

This space right here that my Bride and the pup are in is my closet. Mine. All mine. She has her own on the other side of that plywood stiffening wall that looks almost the same. (Except hers doesn't have a window in it, and does have a chimney going up through the middle of it). 

The aforementioned Design Guy had originally drawn up a giant master bedroom, with a large-ish walk in closet. Our simultaneous reactions during the review of the updated house plans was "We shouldn't share a closet." 

(Actually mine was "Hey look! A Meat Room! Oh. And we shouldn't share a closet")

We gave up some bedroom space, and created two almost-but-not-perfectly-equal walk-ins for a his/hers, thing. And given that for the past half-dozen years in our old house, she's insisted that her closet was the same size as mine even though the realtor PROVED MATHEMATICALLY THAT IT WAS LARGER, I claimed the one without the chimney. SO SUCK IT.

A whole lot of our house still looks like this.

Old stuff. New stuff. Sistered stuff. With some support that will be hidden away once it it's all put back together. An an unfortunate amount of wallpaper that needs to be removed and destroyed. 

But the beautiful part of this picture is the plumbing. Glorious new plumbing that will bring hot water at a decent pressure from the top of my head to the bottom of my adorable man-feet. 

When we moved in, the only shower with decent pressure was one wedged into a corner bathroom above the boarders' stairs. To get to the shower, you had to walk past a large, dubious hole in the wall where the plumbing had been run. All of which was beyond one of the upstairs shared kitchenette spaces. 

I am excited about plumbing.

We've been picking up our appliances and other finishing touches as we go, and storing them here and there around the house until we're ready. 

This is our bath tub. It's in the library. But eventually it will move upstairs.

Probably - I do like to read in the tub. 

(You're welcome for that mental picture).

My Bride, meanwhile, is planning out the things she considers important. Like: where is the coffee maker going to go. (answer, there's a space next to the stairs, so she can hit it before she even makes it all the way into the kitchen.

The cabinets are under construction, and the floors are ordered. The plumbing and electrical is mostly run, and we've fixed all the holes in the roof we could find (for a house that's >225 years old, and a patchwork quilt of expansions and add-ons, there were surprisingly few). We've conceded to the building inspector a number of windows we have to replace. And on the tail end of this never-ending, science fiction winter we've just come through, we've probably over-engineered the amount of heating and insulation we're putting in place. 

And while we'll still have a list of projects a mile long that we'll want to tackle, we can, at least, start to see the shape of things to come. And the shape is starting to look pretty good. 

Next up: floors! 

And we call the snow shovel "Back talk"

One of the consequences of a construction project is a lot of spare wood lying around. Piles of it. Buckets of it. And this is Maine. We don't waste anything up here. Certainly not anything burnable. Because it was -13 degrees here this morning when I walked the dog.  And things I can burn for precious warmth are treasured commodities. 

Another consequence of Maine winter is a lot of indoor time. We have a 12 year and a 7 year old sharing the same house. Which sometimes leads to noise. And noise is not nearly as treasured. 

Our contractors (who are, by the way, fantastic), are all fathers. They understand that sometimes, a little manual labor is the perfect educational aid. We explained the situation, and made a special request. They were happy to set aside the scrap for us, and label it appropriately. 

A little too much indoor time? A little too much sniping at your younger brother? A little too much whining about what your sister said? A few too many questions about what I asked you to do the first time? 

We have the answer for all of that.

This pile is in the wrong place. Please move it over there.

All of it.

Neatly.

Until you're done. 

I feel warmer already.