With 2020 spent primarily in global lockdown, many factories were then behind on production and often short staffed when they were finally able to reopen. The limited supply meant high costs for materials… just in time for us to do a major project…

With this as our outlook, we decided to take it as easy as we could on projects that required capital and save up for the project that needed to get done- our porches. 

So what did this look like? 

It looked like learning new skills that we’d be able to use later on like rebuilding dry-stack stone walls on our property, 

And ‘tiling’ our upstairs bathroom floor with groutable peel-and-stick tiles

And it looked like ordering cinder blocks instead of cedar boards for vegetable gardens

And learning to glaze windows…

Our mini bathroom project will no doubt be redone with higher quality materials in the future, but for now, this allows us to use our bathroom without the possibility of getting a splinter or damaging the subfloor with water. We removed the little patch of linoleum floor, and removed all the staples from what we guessed had been carpeting? Yeah, didn’t make sense to us either. Leveled the floor a little, and then laid out the tiles from the threshold in doing our best to keep them lined up and evenly spaced. Using spacers did not feel like a great option as the tiles were so thin and did not stay upright. Once the tiles were down, we grouted them, cleaned off the excess and sealed the grout in. We also took this time to clean the radiator and paint it. The bathroom still looks like an 80’s trip but we did our best to tie everything in and make it usable. 

Our garden beds will absolutely be redone, once our landscape plans are complete. Growing our own food is part of our long-term vision and we’ll find a way to incorporate vegetable garden beds into our sloped property as doing raised beds has been a game-changer. We filled the bottom of the beds with logs and sticks from our property, and then filled to the top with the soil that was removed from our electrical trenching in the front yard. These beds have lasted us a few years so far; we did have to rebuild the bottom bed twice, as I had not properly leveled the ground and gravity took it. As the bottom logs and sticks start to decompose, we’ve added a mix of compost and bed soil each year to keep the soil full and nutrient rich. 

In September 2021, we tackled our first round of window reglazing. The room we call the parlor, had significant issues retaining heat, at least in part, due to failed glazing. One of the windows had a 3/4” gap from the frame to the glass. So we were lucky that Matt’s dad had done glazing before and could help us through it. We also took the oportunity to install spring bronze for added weather stripping. We got the 2 windows reinstalled in October 2021.