Man, goings-on is a weird word. It just never looks or sounds exactly right. Anyway, there have been a number of these so-called goings-on lately. Here’s the lowdown on what’s been keeping me busy…

By now you know that the cob bed has been completely removed, but the wall has been replastered, and the floor redone as well. Just yesterday, I finished oiling the finish layer of the floor, so now it is curing. I can’t remember how long I waited last year for the oil to cure, but it must have been at least a week. Most of the past month of work on the house has been waiting – waiting for both layers of the floor to dry, for plaster to dry, for oil to cure. The actual work has been quite quick and simple. But we should finally be able to move back into the house very shortly.

The mud room is advancing. We’ve got one new door in place. It’s a pretty nice reclaimed solid wood door that I cut an arch into and fit into a modified door frame. We just finally got a knob on it. Once it’s oiled it’s gonna look really good. The cob wall of the mud room is at head height or higher, and we’ve got a nice triple-glazed (!) window sash buried in the wall above a couple of shoe shelves. This mud room is very shelf and hook-heavy for shoes, jackets, and other small items that frequently come in and out of the house. It’s not too far off from completion. I’m happy with this little addition so far.

As for the kitchen construction… we’ve been seriously slowed down recently because the truck in our vehicle co-op has been out of service. But last week, we finally got our fourth and final load of urbanite for the foundation, including a huge five foot long piece to use as a threshold for some French doors April and I picked up. Speaking of doors, damn are they expensive. We get our doors usually via donation, or at a place called Bayview Building Supply, which sells windows and doors that they get through big auctions. The doors are mostly all new, essentially, but they’re not sold as such. I don’t exactly know their story, but their doors are cheaper than new, but definitely not terribly cheap. I sure do have a hard time plunking down money for doors and windows, although they are an important investment… especially in this climate with our cold winters. I did talk about possibly building some doors earlier, but I decided against it.

To finish it off… I have some sad news. Recently, we destroyed the cob oven. Woe! It was a tough choice, but unfortunately the weather here has been incredibly wet (again) this year, and we’ve been having very scary and large amounts of surface runoff coming quite near to the foundation of the house. We wanted to dig a swale, and unfortunately, the oven was right in the path of where it need to be dug. So it had to go. The integrity of the foundation won over baked bread. Gah. Well, I guess it was always going to be a temporary thing, but I had at least hoped the oven would last a couple of years.

Well, that’s about all for now…