Adventures in Porch Renovation

           So we have this beautiful, three-sides-of-the-house wraparound porch, more than eight feet wide, with recessed lighting, two sets of chairs on either end, and a beautiful pine paneled ceiling. It was the feature that first drew me to the house. It's wide enough for Eva to ride her bike back and forth on. It's great.

            I had a few big projects lined up for this year, to be finished before the first snow:

            (1) Stain the rear deck;

            (2) Build a woodshed beneath the deck;

            (3) Fill said woodshed with firewood;

            (4) Remediate the high radon count in the basement;

            (5) Stain and urethane the porch ceiling.

I've always wanted, as part of my big wraparound porch, to have a maritime-looking ceiling of richly stained reddish gold, gleaming brightly with a shiny finish. And I was going to have that by snowfall this year, by gum.

            The house has a number of other minor problems, the worst being the radon and bad or absent flashing on the two exterior doors from the kitchen, leading to the deck and the porch. The deck flashing is fixed, and hopefully the carpenter ants living in the formerly wet wood are no longer so happy. Soon enough we'll have an exterminator come make sure. But when we had the deck flashing repaired, the carpenter looked at the deck itself and remarked that it needed preservative.

            "I know," I answered. "I plan to let it dry for a few more days and then stain it."

            "You should pressure wash it first," he told me, "that'll allow the stain to seep that much farther into the wood."

            "I don't want to get the wood any wetter than it already is,though. It's been raining quite a bit for the past few weeks."

            "The mold and mildew which grows on the wood impedes moisture from leaving. The wood will actually dry more quickly if you pressure wash it first."

            Now that remark struck me. I wouldn't have guessed that. (Too bad I hadn't asked around and gotten that advice last year, when I tried to stain the deck at the farmhouse. A month later, the pigment was peeling off the moldy, still-wet wood.) I snooped around a bit online, and asked a few other carpenters, and got confirmation of what he'd told me. Pressure washing is the first step in rehabbing wood that hasn't been preserved in a while.

            So I went to the local hardware store that Saturday, rented the pressure washer, brought it home and got ready to work. I figured two days would be enough. On day one, I'd tackle the deck and the beams along the base of the porch, the unstained ones that support the floorboards, and which you can see from the yard. On day two, I'd zip through the porch ceiling.

            That afternoon I got going on the deck, a little later than I'd hoped, but still, making good progress. The pressure washer was a gas-powered motor running an air compressor and merging the compressed air with water from our garden hose. Three hours on the deck and I was done. An hour on the porch support beams and I was done with those. I was feeling pretty good about myself when we sat down for dinner.

            The next day was Sunday, and Kate was taking the kids to church, to be followed by an afternoon cookout. They'd be home by about four or five, by which time I figured to have the porch ceiling thoroughly washed. After perhaps a week of drying, it'd be ready to stain. Kate left and I fired up the pressure washer and got to work.

            The first thing I noticed was, washing something over my head is a lot more awkward than washing something under my feet. Specifically, I was getting soaked, and very cold. Perhaps it was just inexperience, or some native stupidity shining through, but it took me over an hour to work out a comfortable angle to hold the wand--the long metal rod that the combined air/water mix came shooting out of--at which the wood would be cleaned, and I wouldn't get soaked. But by that time I was already soaked, so the first day was kind of a loss that way.

            The next issue had cropped up within the first five minutes, however. I had assumed that the job would be quick and easy, a light pass of the water jet over wood that wasn't very dirty, as it wasn't exposed to sun or rain, and wasn't walked on. Except, the opposite was true. A few quick sweeps back and forth with the wand showed the wood to be a bit lighter, but when I slowed the wand down to change direction, I noticed that the wood was far cleaner, looking a bright golden-orange, there. And pretty quickly it dawned on me: this wood, not sanded, with plenty of roughness to trap dust and mold spores, was even dirtier, for being rough, always in the shade, and protected from rain which would pelt it and wash spores away. The porch ceiling was not a quick, easy cleaning job. Not at all. On the contrary: it was going to be a long, slow, tedious, neck-straining, sore-shoulder job.

            And worse than that: after an hour and a half, the pressure washing stream failed. It just stopped. But the motor was still running. I let it sit idle for a few minutes, and then tried again. Still nothing. I started getting a bad feeling, turned off the motor, shut off the hose, went inside the house, and tried the kitchen faucet.

            Nothing.

            I went down to the basement bathroom, and tried that faucet.

            Nothing.

            I went to the water pump, and turned it off and then back on.

            No sound of water rushing in.

            Then I realized the main limitation of using a pressure washer: you need lots and lots of water. I'd been running the hose at full blast, pretty much, for four and a half hours that day. Of course I'd killed the well. In retrospect, it was pretty stupid of me to not anticipate this.

            So now I had to sheepishly call Kate, tell her I'd killed the well, and ask her to buy several gallons of bottled water on her way home. She graciously did this, and even more graciously didn't scold me when she got home. We had dinner, she eating patiently and I in morose silence. I couldn't shower, which probably wasn't all that necessary since I'd been dripping wet anyway, but it left me feeling even more dissatisfied.

            I got up early the next morning and the water was back on. Encouraged, I made the morning coffee, and once Kate had taken off with the kids for Eliot's preschool, I got to work again on the porch. I figured, two hours a day and no more, and I'd have the porch licked in three more days. That was three more days than I'd planned on, but as contingencies go, I could do worse.

            And I did do worse. After an hour and a half, the pressure washer stream failed again. I turned the motor off, shut off the hose, and checked the kitchen faucet.

            I'd killed the well again.

            Since it was earlier in the day, I was hoping that the water would come back by evening, and Kate would never know.

            No such luck.

            So the poor woman was now heading into her third day without a shower. I was better off because I'd been drenched both days, even though I was shivering cold. But now I was looking at an increasingly impaired well, less than halfway done with the cleaning, with lumps of wet sawdust covering the side of the house.

            See, that's what a pressure washer can do, so you have to be careful with it: the stream of water can actually cut wood, so you have to keep it moving at all times, or it starts to dig a channel into the wood you're aiming at. If you were to look closely at the wood I'd cleaned, you'd notice many areas where I'd slowed down with the stream and gouged the wood a bit. But that's what leaves the wood so clean: the pressure washer was actually removing anywhere from one-sixteenth to one-thirty-second of an inch of wood, exposing a clean surface underneath. And it did look good.

            But the washed-off wood, sort of a lumpy paste, settled wherever. On the walls of the house facing the porch. On the railings. On the floor. On the grass. On me. It was a mess. A really, really, ugly, bad mess. And it was only halfway done. And now I had to wait for a few days, plainly, for the well to recover before I could get back to work.

            In an ugly state of mind, I brought the pressure washer back to the hardware store that afternoon, having rented it for two more days than I'd planned, and knowing that I'd need at least three more. Also knowing that I had to wait a week, with the porch area looking like a disaster zone, unable to use my hose to clean anything off. I was feeling pretty discouraged. And even though Kate valiantly continued to make no complaints, it wasn't until the following evening that our water returned sufficiently for her to take a small shower.

            I had plenty of other things, like the woodshed, to work on in the meantime. But I was still brooding over the porch. A week later I went back to the hardware store, got the pressure washer and brought it home, this time with a grim determination to finish the job. An hour and a half maximum, every day, until I was done. That was the plan.

            Except that I made it only an hour and a quarter on the first day before killing the well again. Now this time I was ready--I had ten gallons of water in jugs in the basement--and Kate had gotten a shower that morning. But I still couldn't believe how low the well still was. I started feeling grateful that I hadn't killed it altogether. But I decided I'd have to wait one full day before trying again. So, two days later, I tried again. One hour got me across the entire front of the porch, with only a small section of wraparound remaining, and I didn't kill the well this time. I could taste it now.

            The next morning I got up, calmly confident, and got to work. Forty-five minutes later, the job was done.  Three killings of the well, one full week of rental (Kate was right: it might have been cheaper for me to buy one of those things), and one horrendous mess later, the entire porch ceiling was clean It was a warm yellow with a reddish grain, just inviting a good coat of stain and then some preservative. But seeing as how the wood never saw sunlight, and only ventilated on one side, I wanted to let it dry for at least two weeks before applying stain. So I got back to work on staining the deck, and the floor beams, and getting the big pile of wood out of the driveway and into the shed.

            An inspection job fell through, and I found myself with two addtional weeks at home. Where I'd assumed that I'd be rushing the staining/urethaning job in October, with days barely warm enough for work, I now had four straight days of 70+ degrees to do it. And I did.

            First I taped and tarped off the house and railings. Sort of like the pressure washing, what I'd assumed would be a quick job was very slow. Instead of three or four hours, it took me twelve or thirteen. Then I rented the spray gun. Unfortunately, urethane is too gluey to spray, so once I was done with the stain, I was going to be using a brush. Forty-five minutes with the sprayer and I was done. The work went so quickly that I didn't have any time to improve my technique by the time I'd finished. And that meant I left stripes all over the ceiling, where I'd stopped sweeping the sprayer in one direction, and started moving it in the other direction. So I had a red-and-purplish zebra stripe effect.

            When Kate got home she either put on a brave face, or honestly wasn't very concerned, because she looked at the red-and-purple stripes and said, "Hmm, yeah, I can see them ,but they're not too obvious." I think she was trying to make me feel better, because later she suggested rolling some paint thinner over the purple parts. I agreed, and I tried, and it sort of worked: the stripes were a little more blurry, not quite as sharply defined. But they definitely weren't gone.

            So I figured, somewhat desperately, that once I'd put on the urethane, the urethane itself would even out the tone somewhat. I was really, really hoping this. I mean, urethane does darken wood! Especially the oil-based stuff, which I was using.

            So now started the most difficult and annoying part of the job, by far. Yes, the pressure washing was annoying, but mostly because I kept killing the well, not because it was difficult. If I'd had a water truck instead of the well, I could have done the whole job in one afternoon, or at least by noon of the next day. The machine was doing all the work. I was just aiming it. And the staining was even easier than I'd expected, which is why I wound up screwing it up so badly.  It almost made me angry that it wasn't tougher.

            But urethane is too thick for sprayers (well, for ordinary sprayers you can rent from the hardware store, anyway. Maybe there's a super-duper one out there that can handle it--I bet NASA or the Air Force or Navy has a few). Anyway, I was going to have to brush it on. I was hoping that the job would take four hours, or even six. Two coats--though the instructions on the cans recommended three for outdoors--in two or three days.

            Put on my painter's hat (a ratty old Iron Man cap), my crappiest jeans and sneakers, and one of the T-shirts that's really old and holey which Kate hates. And long rubber gloves. Then I got to work.

            Pretty soon it became clear that this was more like an 8-to-10-hour job. Craning my neck back--the ceiling is a hair over seven feet tall, so I can reach it without a stool, but not without leaning back and arching my neck--and relying mostly on my stronger right arm, I went slowly along. I didn't quite finish the entire porch on the first day--8 hours left me with about ten feet undone, but it was 6 PM and I was getting hungry.

            I was also covered in urethane, to the point that my clothes were beyond salvage. So I dumped them all in the back yard, got a shower, and picked out another set of expendable shoes and T-shirt for the next day. I was up and at it by 8:30 AM. It was a Saturday, and Kate took Eva and Eliot out for the day, so I was on my own with my Felger & Mazz sports podcast, a brush, my ratty clothes, and six gallons of urethane. It's gluey stuff, and especially with the second coat, it can be hard sometimes to see which portions you've already brushed, and which you haven't. I had to walk in circles sometimes, looking at a patch of ceiling from several different directions, to see if it was more or less reflective than the area around it.

            But mostly I was just getting progressively stickier and more sore, even as I made steady headway. Several times I thought about putting the brush down and do the remainder on Sunday. But I knew I'd curse myself as a lazy slob, and worse, that there was a decent chance I wouldn't bother to finish the job. I knew pushing on now was my only guarantee of finishing.

            And I did, though not before Kate and the kids came home. I'd been hoping to be done, feel like a boss, clean up and have the shining porch ceiling ready for them to see when they walked up. Instead, the porch was still a mess of tarps and tape, plastic was still all over the front of the house, and I was a sweating mess dripping with curses and urethane. But I was almost done.

            And when I did finish, and decided against doing a third coat on Sunday, and pulled down the plastic, I didn't feel like a boss, but I did feel relieved. I'd finished the job, we'd have a warm, inviting porch that wasn't growing moldier by the day, and I hadn't even killed the well a fourth time. And you know what? The urethane did even out the stripes. If you look hard, you can still see them. But they don't slap you in the face like a neon sign saying "INCOMPETENT!"

           Now I've got my force-field-of-inviting-warmth porch . And I've also got my outdoor slippers-on coffee comfort station. Home improvement, accomplished.

The Road to Fryeburg

           Kate and I, as I mentioned in my Catching Up post, have bounced between several addresses over the past few years. When I met her in August of 2008, I was living in a condominium at Hamilton Harbor, an area south of Wickford, itself a village of North Kingstown, Rhode Island. It was an old factory building featuring brick walls and gigantic windows and a loft-type interior, all of which pleased my bachelor self hugely. But then the economy tanked in 2008, I lost job after job (including being laid off three weeks before our marriage), and holding onto the condo became an increasingly difficult challenge.

            In April 2010 I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis--an annoying chronic inflammation of the colon--and a few weeks later landed in the ER when that inflammation led to a perforation in the colon. I was probably a few hours away from needing a colectomy--getting the whole thing removed--but I responded well to steroids, the colon cooled down--i.e. the inflammation went down--and was soon after able to resume living normally again. (Except for the  steroids I was on for a few months, which gave me an inhuman amount of energy. I averaged about 45 minutes of sleep a night for the next two months.) The most significant single event during my 3-day hospital stay, however, was Kate's mother looking me in the eye and telling me I needed to declare bankruptcy.

            Those weren't words I wanted to hear, of course. I'm all the more thankful now that she told me, though. That kind of direct honesty is one of the finest shows of love that can be. I swallowed the idea--it was bitter--and began thinking of ways to not go bankrupt. Even facing the possibility, me, a bank president's son, was humiliating enough, but I didn't want to crush my credit rating for the next seven years and deal with the awful bankruptcy laws recently rewritten to so favor the banks. I was determined to find a way to avoid it. So we sold our car--a Toyota 4Runner that we both loved--and downgraded first to a jalopy old Dodge pickup, which was about to break down a month later when Kate used her (much better than mine) credit to buy a new Corolla. We could manage the payments, and we found over the next four years that Corollas are the most boring, but probably the most dependable, and among the most economical, cars on the planet. So we had some quick cash to stave off immediate disaster, but I still had some other debts to deal with.

            That summer was the summer of the Deepwater Horizon, and I spent several months of it offshore, looking for plumes of oil in the water with sonar. It was a fascinating and awesome project to be involved in--the awe in proportion to the extent of the devastation--and I made lots of money. But that money was mostly going toward settlement agreements for a credit card and a few personal loans, and pretty much nothing toward mortgage payments on the condo, which at this point were 3-4 months in arrears. We had moved up to Kate's mother's and stepfather's home in Greenwood, Maine--a farmhouse we would occupy a few years later--and paid no rent, while I funneled all my earnings into settling my old debts.

            That left the condo, which I was trying to sell, and would have, for a tidy profit, had the buyer not (correctly) balked at the ridiculously high monthly maintenance fee. So we were left with a short sale, which was far better than a foreclosure. And having sold almost all of our furniture we limped off to one half of a duplex on Coolidge Street, about five miles down the road from our old condo.

            I have fond memories of that home. I forgot the wound to my pride from having to leave my prior home, and found raising our new child Eva--since Kate was working and I wasn't--to be a bigger challenge than any job I'd ever had. Learning to respond to, and care for, a little child who has very little power over anything, and has only her feelings as a means of influence, was an experience I'll always treasure. I got to know my own daughter, and I'll always be grateful that I wasn't working for those several months, and we had the chance to go down to the beach on walks (we lived about a mile from a scrubby patch of shoreline), or throw rocks at puddles (her favorite pastime), or just lie down and let her climb all over me like a jungle gym. The house was forgettable but our family wasn't.

            Soon enough after that I was sufficiently recovered mentally to start plotting the next steps in my stalled career. I decided pursuing acoustics and seafloor mapping at UNH made sense--it was more or less an extension of the seafloor geology I'd been working on at URI--and offered better prospects of a commercial career on the other side. But Kate was now pregnant with Eliot, and wouldn't hear of being marooned in an apartment while I spent days at school. It was pretty hard to deny her that--chasing Eva around while not pregnant or caring for an infant was work enough, as I'd learned--so our compromise was, we moved to within easy driving distance of Kate's mom and father-in-law. That meant Rumford Point.

            I've joked with Kate's mother--I now call her Ma--and Dave, her stepfather, that they're the subprime Trumps of Oxford County. Their business over the last several years has been buying distressed homes, rehabbing them, and either renting them out as budget dwellings, or selling them again. Dave had rehabbed a building in downtown Bethel and turned it into a Korean restaurant, Cho Sun, still successful and run by his son Brian. Ma had gotten her start in real estate buying a small one-bedroom cottage in the tiny enclave of Rumford Point, a village-in-miniature on the northern bank of the Androscoggin River, where Route 232 crosses on a rickety old bridge (now being replaced). A few impressive old homesteads are there, along with the decaying remnants of a few more, and a handful of tiny little homes. Ma had bought one of the tiny little homes, her very first real estate purchase, and more recently she and Dave had bought its tiny little neighbor, at 1750 Route 2. And that's the home Kate and I moved into in August 2011.

            Not much more than a week after we moved in, Eliot was born. Kate had shown signs of pre-eclampsia during latter stages of her pregnancy, and the hospital induced her. He shot out of her--she describes the birth as far more painful than Eva's, because of the speed--and now we had a son. He was very small--less than five pounds--and Kate wanted him right next to her almost all the time, especially for sleep. And now, as we settled into our new little home next to the river in Maine, we had a new little member of the family with us too.

            Our house measured perhaps 25 feet on a side, with a dug-out basement, and a mostly-intact barn attached behind, and features a 1/2 acre yard which showed evidence, the more I tended it, of once having been a gardening work of art, with perfectly placed shrubs, flowers and trees, and a beautiful little garden patch nearly as big as the house. The barn was the treasure, but also the liability: one corner was rotten and starting to fall down, and there was a large gap in the siding there. Not long after we moved in I began forming ideas of tossing a slab beneath the barn, rehabbing the interior into a post-and-beam bedroom/dining room/upstairs great hall. Big old barns have lots of potential, provided they're not falling down. But we had more immediate concerns, so Dave and I spent one Saturday racing to patch up the huge hole in the siding of the barn as Hurricane Irene bore down on us. We finished up and put the tools back in his truck just as the first drops were starting to fall.

            The family who lived there before us numbered 7: two parents, one son, and six(!) daughters. In a house of four rooms, where the bathroom was so small that it didn't have a sink. Seriously, the bathroom had a toilet and a shower, but to wash your hands or shave, you had to go into the kitchen. Eva had the bedroom, where the six daughters had slept. Kate and I were in the former living room, which was just big enough for our king size bed, the bassinet, two bureaus, and a bookshelf, and where the son had once slept on the couch. The small room in the middle, without windows, became Eliot's nursery, and had once been the master bedroom. (I'm not sure even a double bed would have fit in there.) And then there was the kitchen, almost as big as the other rooms together, which connected to the barn, and was really where we lived in that house. One corner with two love seats and the computer/TV became the coffee nook. The other corner became Eva's toy patch. Our table was in the middle and the rest of the place was ringed by shelves and counters. It was actually a bright and cheery little house, but we didn't have a woodstove and the electric heating cost more than our rent.

            As we were moving up--and Kate being pregnant, I did 95% of the work, and I was pretty glad to be moved in--I remarked to her that I felt like my life was taking a big step backwards, moving to a tiny town near the decayed remains of Rumford Falls, dozens of miles from anywhere. Kate of course started to cry immediately, as that part of Maine is where she grew up, and the house next to ours was the first one her mother had ever owned. My words were cruel but my pride was wounded at still being economically in retreat. But once we'd moved in, we began making a home of the place. I never entirely repented of my initial proud reaction, but I came to genuinely love that cute little home, and have an affinity for the arresting beauty and older-world charm of Rumford, in its several town centers.

            My first two jobs were to clear out all the brush on the front side of the house, and to clean up the dump behind it. Anyone who's moved into a moderately old New England home, or even just near one, has dealt with middens. Piles of trash left in strategically hard-to-see places, which in modern days, are composed of hundreds (or thousands) of bottles and cans. They're downright hazardous to people walking and living there. And this was a spreading pile of garbage and old metal debris, twelve feet by twenty feet, neatly tucked in the corner formed behind the house and the barn. Every week I made a point of taking some more trash for pickup. And slowly the pile went away.

            We were making our way through our first winter in Rumford, with me chasing down to Durham, NH two or three times a week, when Kate's mother told us in February that she had good news: we could move into their cabin in Greenwood, a larger home with wood heating and closer to her and Dave, that March, during my university vacation. Only Kate and I weren't so sure this was good news. Moving into the cabin, and staying at the same monthly rent (for now) in a nicer home, was good. (All this came about because some of their renters had washed out, and we were taking someone else's place in a more expensive property. It was a cash flow thing. The subprime Trumps have had their share of washouts to deal with.) But, moving, with three weeks' notice, in March, with an infant and a toddler, wasn't so good.

            But we decided we were game and went for it. Three and a half weeks later we were in the cabin, and had a big, haphazard pile of firewood in the driveway, and we were reasonably happy. The cabin was bigger, though it was certainly darker--the windows were smaller and far more scattered, and the place was surrounded by drooping pines and firs--it reminded me of Shelley's tomb in Ravenna, with the weeping firs around and overhead. Or the opening scene in Hyperion, deep in the shady sadness of a vale. Despite my distaste for the darkness, we both greatly preferred a hot wood stove to electric baseboard heating. I didn't see the same long-term potential for us to expand this house like I had the little one in Rumford, but I had no doubt we could be happy there for two or three years--basically until Eliot was big enough to need a genuine room of his own.

            Once springtime arrived I could start addressing the exterior. I never came close to doing that cabin's yard the justice it deserved. (Dave and Ma now, having moved back into the cabin, have mostly resuscitated the yard to its former beauty.) But one thing I did attack was the garage. At that moment, spring 2012, it was pretty much a tiny closet, with an even bigger mess behind it. See, Kate's mom has had several incarnations of a small farm at her houses through the years, including such animals as chickens (lots of chickens), roosters, ducks, rabbits (lots of rabbits), llamas, and a goat. Or two. I'm pretty sure the garage had served as a stall for the goat.

            Whatever the animals were that had been in there, their stalls were pretty much intact from the day they left. Sawdust, scat, everything. I meant to use that garage as a woodshed and workshop, which meant the goat scat and sawdust had to go. So I cleared out the skis and bikes and everything else in the front of the garage, got my shovel, and got to work on the sawdust and scat. It took me two and a half days, but I got that place cleaned out. (I counted wheelbarrow loads--I think it was 36.) After a week of that place airing out, I started building a wooden frame to hold the wood pile, next to my work bench. Soon enough I had a nicely stacked store of wood and a modest work bench. And of course Kate had added her touches inside the cabin, including the pillowed and lighted nook in the window at the rear of the kitchen, and we had ourselves our new home.  Eva had her own bedroom in the middle of the cabin, and Eliot his on the converted porch in front of Eva's room, and Kate and I managed to fit our king sized bed--now a handsome log version--into the master bedroom. It didn't leave space for much else, but so what? We love that bed.

           As spring became summer, the cabin's charm grew to its maximum. Warm evenings, when the rest of the world was ten degrees hotter, beneath the trees and next to the pond we were cool. In the late afternoon and evening the pond was a mirror, a second sunset from below. And even though our attempt at a vegetable garden was a disgraceful failure, still, the place was lush (too lush!) and peaceful. And as Eva's play (to a lesser extent Eliot's) began to move outdoors, it was good to have a credible outdoors for her to move into.

            In January of 2013 I was diagnosed with PSC, and what was already a rather dark home became intolerably, oppressively so, as I staggered with the new reality that my liver is a slowly sinking ship, and I can't assume my own longevity. I didn't necessarily associate the diagnosis with the house, but I came to hate, viscerally, the shadows and low windows of the place. Even the cool summer evenings with the sunset on the pond, like a bayou, couldn't make up for the angry panic I found myself in that winter. I knew I wanted to leave, and when we got the chance, once again care of Kate's mom and stepdad, we jumped.

            The move was to the white farmhouse, also in Greenwood, which they'd bought four years earlier. It turned out that they liked the cabin better, and now that we were there (and finally paying them a fair market rate rent), they wanted to swap. So, in May of 2013, we did. And we made a handshake agreement to buy the farmhouse, perched on the side of Noyes Mountain, once we were ready. The house is attached to an old barn, and has about 2.2 acres of sloping land and a small pond. We had the pond deepened, started clearing away some of the overgrowth (my tastes in landscaping are a little different from Ma and Dave's), and we began plotting what changes we were going to make on the 150+ year old house.

            Of course, my first course of action, other than some outdoor trimming, was another cleanup job. More animals. They'd kept a chicken coop in the ground level of the barn, and now that the chickens were gone, I wanted the coop gone too, so we could put down some pebbles and use the space as a garage. So, like before, I ripped out the wood, got my shovel, and started hauling. Only the chickens had been there for more time than the goat had been in the other garage, it seemed. Because it felt to me like there was twice as much sawdust and scat to haul. Maybe it was because it was raining, and maybe it's because the much-fresher chicken scat smelled worse--a whole lot worse--than the goat dung. Because our whole yard smelled like sulfur and urine for the next three days after I'd spread that stuff out below the pond. (On a related note, the clover and grass now grow phenomenally well there.) Once again, after airing it out for a few days, I had my woodshed. Of course, the Subaru barely fit in the ad-hoc garage--we would tap the foundation of the barn with the front bumper, and that's how we knew we could close the overhead door behind it--but we had a reasonably convenient winter setup. As long as you didn't mind a long, narrow staircase between your car and the living room.

            By the time we moved into the farmhouse, Eva was a talkative, active little girl who happily turned whatever room or house she was in into her own imaginative kingdom. Eliot was walking, but his demeanor to this day is quieter and milder than his sister's, frequently content to follow along with what she's doing, or quite capable of simply disengaging from people and focusing on something by himself. But our two kids began at once claiming the bigger, draftier house as their own.

            For my part, I came to admire how shrewdly farmers in years past built their homes to maximize the sun's effect, and minimize the weather. The house faces southeast, with eight windows drinking in sunlight, and is on the southeastern slope of the mountain, shielded by the mountain itself from the northwest wind. If we'd wanted to, we could've put thirty solar panels up there and just about gone off the grid altogether. That, and the pond and the sun-bathed acreage were the best aspects of the house.

            Of course, rehabbing an old house and barn is generally an expensive proposition. Though Kate and I were happy there--despite the several dozen mice (to the point that I resorted to poison that winter)--we were becoming fearful at the amount of money we'd need, on top of buying, to update everything we wanted to. And this didn't even include the repair work the barn foundation needed. Putting a large building on a mountainside, where gravity pulls the soil downhill, comes with inherent drawbacks. The barn was without a doubt the weakest point of the house. The previous owners had already put two buttresses in the barn foundation, but that wasn't enough. More work remained to be done. Even so, despite the increasingly dire condition of the barn, that place had an awful lot of good about it.

            I'm something of a survivalist. I believe that peak oil--the increasing scarcity of supply, and resulting increase in cost of oil--and global warming form two pincers which will do increasing damage to the global economy as years go on. (Peak oil already is. Crude oil (actual crude oil, not the crude-plus-condensate figure used nowadays) production very likely peaked in 2005, and that, plus rapidly increasing demand in China and India, led to the huge price spike in 2007 which produced the global recession we're still in. With oil never likely to become as cheap as it was even in 2002 again, our economy will never recover to what it was before. So I place great value in having a well-insulated home with good gardens and access to ample water. (A good library doesn't hurt, either.) In terms of gardens and access to water, the farmhouse could not have been better.

            But we wanted a newer home, with fewer nagging issues to fix. One night in late December 2013 found me searching online through some real estate listings, and the third I came to was a gorgeous house with a big wraparound porch in the town of Fryeburg. I got the feeling right away I'd found the place. Kate saw the picture, and as we looked through the rest, she got the same feeling. Two days later, we walked in the door with the realtor. The house was cold--it was January 2, and it was heated only to 60 degrees--but even so, Eva and Eliot came charging in, took off their coats and shoes, ran upstairs and began charging through all the rooms, playing. It was at that moment that I knew we'd found the house we wanted to keep.

Catching Up

Writing a series of quickish posts right now, so that my topics don't all run together, but I can still get a sense that I'm laying out a bit of a foundation to start my storytelling on from now and going forward, since it's been more than two years since I posted much. My liver condition and the potential remedies deserved its very own post--my panicked reaction to the diagnosis and the several months it took me to recover a sense of normalcy were the reason I stopped posting--but now life is going on. No episodes of itching, no crippling pain, no loss of work. Every now and then I feel a twinge along my ribs which makes me wonder, but so far so good. And we'll be trying that homespun remedy before the year's out.

Since then Eliot and Eva have of course continued growing up. There are lots of times when I miss my parents, but some of the most obvious come when I'm looking at my own kids wondering, "Was I that way? Or were either of my sisters that way?" Because Kate and I have a 5-year-old daughter with a loud mouth and a powerful will who loves drawing and animals of all sorts, but especially dogs and horses. I look at her and think, "In a lot of ways she's like the stories I've heard about my own mother as a girl. But she's also a lot like my own memories of my older sister Lisa." And that's one reason why I want not to curb Eva's assertiveness as a negative "she's just a bossy older sister", but cultivate it as leadership. Because my sister Lisa is a real leader even though she rarely seems to recognize it in herself. Though there are those times too, when Eva is screaming about needing to draw one more picture of a dog in sunshine, at 10:30 at night, when I'm thinking, "Shut UP and go upstairs!"

Eliot is a confounding kid sometimes--well, all kids are sometimes confounding--but this little guy, especially so. And more intensely even than Eva, he makes me want to query my parents about just how difficult, or not, I was. Was I really as moronic a mama's boy as this little guy is? Like, if he knows Mom is in the house, he won't let me do a damn thing for him. Not one--well, except maybe for bringing him some lemonade or crackers with peanut butter, or putting on a Thomas video. But sometimes, not even that much. And then when Kate leaves, and he knows she's gone? Damn kid will let me spoon lunch into his mouth (since he doesn't really love eating, either).

He's a manipulative little goofball with something like comedic genius. Watching him, and knowing what I do about myself and other friends who like (or are professionals in) the performing arts, I've come to the conclusion that most actors and singers are intense introverts. We have to be, to create the feelings and ideas which we communicate. And Eliot is absolutely such a quiet, shy, unrevealing person who will suddenly come out with something heartwarming, or hilarious, or both. Like last night:

Eliot: Mommy, where's Daddy?
Kate: He's working, honey.
Eliot: Is he in Trinidad?
Kate: Yes, he's in Trinidad.
Eliot: But we're not in Trinikid!

Or, several months ago (it was summer), walking up in a hat to Kate and her friend Jenn, who were sitting on the porch, and saying,

"I'm Santa Claus. I come in peace."

He's three. He's been joking and messing with the whole family since before he was one. Kate's friend Carla, herself (along with her husband) a longtime theater performer, was playing with an infant Eliot a few years ago, and noticed his reactions, at four months. "He's got a good sense of humor," she noted, before the little guy was half a year old. And so he's proven Carla's observation thoroughly right. I look at that sensitive little doofus and wonder, "Was my dad like this as a tyke?"

Kate's carrying #3. We don't have a name for it, like Starbuck for #1, and....I actually forget if we had a name for #2, or not. With my PSC, and with Kate having had a few complications carrying Eva and Eliot, we've been a little edgy about her progress this time around, but after two days' nausea forced her to the ER to get an IV drip to rehydrate, Kate's largely been managing. I'm in the field again--well, sort of, being in Trinidad but not on a boat--so I'm only getting phone and e-mail reports about her mild nausea while still eating decently.

We bought a new house. Not quite new--it was built in 2007--but it's been barely lived in since then and compared to the 170-year-old farmhouse we spent the previous year in, this house is brand spanking new. New windows which don't leak, new roof which doesn't sport a moss garden, new foundation not made of dry-laid rocks (though with a corresponding radon problem the old houses don't have), new insulation which means one woodstove keeps the entire house cozy, with no drafts. Oh, and the gigantic wraparound porch which I've always wanted.

We've done plenty of work on it so far this year (might be another post by itself, if I can make it funny enough), and of course there's lots more we want to do in the future. Laugh if you will, but I'm convinced that peak oil (we're at it now, or maybe even a bit past) and global warming will combine to make the economy chronically sick, and our lives increasingly difficult as the years go on. So I want a house that's robust, where we can grow enough food and fuel to, if not entirely maintain ourselves, certainly contribute susbtantially to our own maintenance.

Now Fryeburg, like most of New England, was once all farmland. Most of the forest in New England is second growth, being no more than 100-150 years old (and sometimes much younger than that). A quick walk through the woods looking at the old stone walls will convince you quickly if you don't believe it. So I hope to clear most of our trees out (Kate and I have a few minor disagreements on just how complete the clearing will be), to expose some garden area, and also to make room for other trees, fruit and nut-bearers. Apples, pears, plums, cherries, walnuts, and hazelnuts. Not only are they beautiful. but they've got crops. I'd love a front yard full of those things! It'd make sitting on the porch with an early morning (or, more in line with the Sutherland family schedule, mid- to late-morning) cup of coffee, staring at the eastern light over the mountans and through the trees.

The lawn you see in that picture is pretty much brown by September--it parches badly. The garden plot in the middle of the yard is so dry that only a few tough vegetables, like carrots and tomatoes, will grow there.  So I want to put a bunch of trees there, whose taproots will penetrate the gravel fill without a problem, and also so their shade might actually help the garden plot produce more. But the main garden will be out back, where there's no gravel fill and the too-swift drainage won't dehydrate the plants.

So that's my master plan for the sort-of homestead, as well as replacing those wretched clapboards with some vinyl, much more durable and in a color not quite so bland. (I think the name of that tone is actually Bland. Or maybe Bland/Blah.) I'm going for colonial red with white trim. Red, baby!

Now I've got plans beyond the homestead, of course. I'm not turning my back on the world at large, building a nest and hoping everything else ignores us. Every once in a while, yes. Like when I'm building the woodshed or fixing eight years' neglect of the exposed wood around the house, but not all the time. Kate and I managed to accomplish all, or nearly all, of our top-priority projects this year, so we have a warm, dry, not-getting-quickly-moldier-and-more-ant-ridden house to live in through the cold months. Next spring, with restored warmth and a (hopefully) restored bank account balance, we'll tackle the next set of challenges. Or, rather, I will, while Kate lugs #3 around while taking care of  #1 and #2.

Da Poop

Very long time with no post. I guess that summer in 2012 got busy enough, since I was finding lots of work as a freelance surveyor. But then, in January 2013, I got some very unpleasant news that left me not wanting to post, as my genuine feelings about it were too dark to want to share immediately.

I was diagnosed with a chronic degenerative liver condition, primary sclerosing cholangitis, which is associated with other digestive/autoimmune conditions such as ulcerative colitis (which I was diagnosed with in 2010), Crohn's disease, and others. Digestive diseases remain largely a mystery to modern medicine. Comparatively little is known about the human gut biome--it seems to come in three general forms, known as enterotypes, very loosely analogous to blood types--but all digestive disorders seem to be linked with, if not caused by, disturbances in the biome.

In my case, in 2007, as I was working aboard a filthy catamaran doing offshore sampling work, I came down with a series of painful skin infections, cellulitis produced by MRSA, which required aggressive antibiotics. Since I didn't take many probiotics while going through six or more courses that year, my digestive system was probably ravaged, allowing for my normal biome to be invaded by destructive interloping bacteria which have produced the conditions I deal with now. Of course, there's the possibility too that I already had lurking digestive and autoimmune conditions which were brought to light on the boat, in the form of my skin infections--a distinct possibility since as far as I know, I was the only person ever to react so badly to working on that floating toilet.

So the primary sclerosing cholangitis--PSC--is part of my package now. It's a frightening disease. It proceeds with the body building up fibrous blockages in the liver ducts--why is still a mystery, but research is zeroing in on an autoimmune response, almost if the body thinks it's allergic to its own liver.  These blockages cause bile to back up within the liver, slowly destroying it. The median is 10 years after diagnosis for a person with it to need a liver transplant, or die for lack of a new liver. As of now there's no cure. PSC recurs in 35% of transplantees.

The only measures those of us--it's a very, very rare condition--can take are simple dietary measures. Above all, reduce fat intake. So now, though I still like cheese and the occasional pizza, no pepperoni, no sausage, no bacon, no butter, no peanut butter, nothing deep fried, no heavy cream or whole milk, and I avoid most processed and pretty much all fast foods. I take a few supplements like milk thistle (anecdotally good for the liver) and fish oil (correlated with longer prognosis in PSC).

In Europe, where regulatory wheels move somewhat more quickly, a few potential drug therapies for this condition, which mediate the body's autoimmune attack on the liver, are on the horizon. The small community of PSCers is watching those tests avidly. A doctor in California, Kenneth Cox, will shortly be concluding a double-blind trial evaluating the effectiveness of the antibiotic vancomycin in treating the disease. Most of the PSCers in the online group I'm part of are skeptical. That's a healthy attitude, but this is one of those cases where hope is stronger than skepticism in me. There's also the (much) more distant, but still conceivable, therapy of growing our own replacement livers in a laboratory, but that type of procedure is still barely in development.

So far I've had no symptoms, nearly two years after diagnosis. PSC generally involves episodic pain, if an infection develops within one of the blocked-off liver ducts, or if cancer develops there. The main symptom is jaundice and severe itching, caused by the bile trapped under the skin causing irritation. The itching is severe enough to cause insomnia, but I've read that UV therapy and acupuncture are effective remedies. So I do have those in mind should I need them.

But there is another, more traditional but possibly very worthwhile, treatment for both the colitis and possibly even the PSC: fecal microbiota transplant, or FMT...or, as I call it, a poop enema. It's a technique long known to animal husbanders helping farm animals with digestive disorders. Take the poop from a healthy animal, with its healthy gut microbiome, puree it, and squirt it right into the sick one.  A number of years ago this technique was found to be almost 100% effective in treating a specific type of colitis--Clostridium difficile (C.diff) infection, a very nasty bug which resists all drugs (hence the "difficile" in the name) and kills if not treated. But a dose or two of healthy poop drives the bugs away, in nearly all cases. I'm not much of a conspiracy fantasist--I tend to roll my eyes, or do less polite things, when confronted with them--but I do believe that in this modern world of ours, many things are dictated by corporate profits. And since nobody makes much money off of recycled feces, it's not hard to understand why this procedure remains off to the side in treating a wider range of digestive ailments.

But there's a group in Australia, The Centre for Digestive Diseases, which researches exactly this topic, and explores FMT as a remedy not only for obvious candidates like ulcerative colitis and Crohn's (reasonably well established by now), but more exotic ailments like PSC (there's a small but hope-inspiring body of data that FMT helps), and even conditions like multiple sclerosis. It's immensely reassuring to know that hard science is being done on this, and that the results contribute to my hope. There's even a blog, by a gent living in Spain, which provides more anecdotal evidence and procedures.

Since mainline medicine is largely unaware of or skeptical about FMT, most folks who pursue it in the US do so at home. It's not illegal, but anyone trying it must be careful to use sterile enema equipment and rigorously cleaned pureeing equipment (i.e. a dedicated blender) and, above all, take feces only from a cleared donor. That is, a donor who's taken sufficient blood and stool tests to show that he or she has no dangerous conditions of his or her own to pass along. Once that's all done, and once you have your procedure, then go ahead and do it. Kate will serve as my donor, and I plan, once  done with this job in Trinidad, to have my colonoscopy in December and then proceed with the FMT. Not your traditional Christmas gift, even in the sense of my wife giving me a big load of crap at the holidays, but hope and life are two pretty tremendous gifts.