Thursday, August 22, 2013

Everybody has one of these, right?

Well I fear that the neighbors are going to start talking about us behind our back...  Celia just bought an authentic embalming table off Ebay.  It came out of an actual funeral home in Mt. Sterling, IL that was relocating.  I haven't done any research but my guess is that is from the 1920's-1930's.
The big question everyone is asking us is "What are you going to do with an embalming table?" 
Initially it will be a Halloween decoration.  Our street is THE place for trick-or-treating.  Last year we had 1500 kids come by.  We plan on using it in the yard for some sort of gory display.  After that, we might try to incorporate it into our house decor. I think it fits pretty well considering our house operated as a funeral home from about 1935-1975.  It definitely would be a conversation starter...


Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Bevel Wood Siding Details

After the bees were removed, I was left with a rather large hole in the side of my house.  The damage included pieces of trim, clapboard siding, and crown molding.


Fabricating the trim pieces were pretty straight forward.  I used scrap pine that I had laying around for the edge boards and some preasure treated pine for the 2x3 sill.  The bevel (clapboard) siding turned out to be a bit of a challenge.  First due to the size I needed.  My siding has a 3" reveal (4" board size).  The big box stores don't carry a very big selection of bevel siding.  They only had 6" and 8" available.  I finally found some in-stock at an old-school lumber yard - Sheridan Road Lumber.  Very nice people and they were able to load me up with 10 qty 10' lengths of the cedar bevel siding.
Of course since nothing on this house is simple, I couldn't just cut this material to length and tack it up.  Instead, my existing siding features a fancy beaded edge.  I had to hunt down the proper router bit and setup my Shopsmith for routing.  Here you can see the before and after:


The crown molding has been the other big challenge.  The molding is a pretty common profile, but it is 6.5" wide.  Corsaw Hardwood Lumber had been asked to make a custom set of molding knives.  Then the unthunthinkable happened... My father died. This has been devastating to my family and has put everything on hold for some time now.  We are now getting back to working on some projects.  Its been several weeks now with no word from Corsaw's so I guess I will have to find someone else.  

Water Heater and Bees Update

In my last post, I was whining and complaining about how much daunting work I have ahead of me.  I am happy to report good progress since then.

1.  Hot water heater has now been installed.  It was a pretty big project to run electrical, vent, water pipe, and gas lines.  I am quite happy with how it all turned out.  The performance of the unit is top-notch too.

Old worn out water heater

Misc water pipes that were removed

2. The bee removal is done too.  We purchased a 30' scaffolding tower and hired a beekeeper to remove the bees.  I spent all day playing assistant and we removed an estimated 60,000 bees. 




New trim boards with coat of primer


It feels really good to have all of this done. So good in fact that after 1.5 years of paying mortgage payments, we have finally moved our family into the house.  We still have a lot of work ahead of us.  Immediately, I have to close of the huge holes  in the side of the house...  then I have to get back to working on the kitchen...