Rural Renovation Records and Revelations
Our journey through time with a 1786 Cape Cod in rural Vermont.

One part of my plans for the house include the addition of ceiling fans throughout most of house. Although we have a fairly short summer, this past year there were several days where I sat in front of a box fan trying to stay cool. One thing I never plan install in this house is any sort of air conditioning. A/Cs are too expensive, horrible energy wasters, and just aren’t needed here. Ceiling fans can make a huge difference in the comfort level of a home. While not consuming a significant amount of electricity.

So why would I even think of passing op a contest to win a couple of fans? Even if we are currently gettingour first snowfall of the winter? One Project Closer in conjunction with The Home Depot is currently holding a contest to win a ceiling fan (or two) in the form of a $175 gift card. Now that’s a great deal! 

If I do manage a win, and can get two fans that’ll take care of two of the 10 or so rooms we need fans in. The bedroom is a first priority. Hopefully by the time we would actually need fans for cooling we’ll have moved upstairs to a real bedroom. The second would either go into the office or den.

Have you entered for your own chance to win yet? What room to you need a ceiling fan in?

Here in Vermont it feels like winter is knocking on our door. Just the other day we had flurries of snow blowing most of the day, and with a cold front moving in full of rain, the forecasters are saying there is we may see a little snow again next week.

Since I moved up here late into last winter, there was a lot of snow built up on the roof. I was able to easily clear most of it, but there is a large valley area that was a huge block of ice. I was worried about damaging the roof more than it already was, so all I could do was make sure I cleared any new snow soon after it fell, and slowly knock the ice away as is slid downward over the warming weeks at the end of winter.

One thing I am considering is picking up a snow rake. The front of our house where the metal roof isn’t too much trouble when it comes to snow. With its very steep pitch, and southern view, the snow quickly slides off as soon as the morning sun hits it. The backside however will gather snow all winter long if I don’t climb up on top to clear it off. 

I found this tool called The Avalanche, but I’m not sure if it’s really cut out for the job. Our metal roof is pretty sharp along the bottom edge, and I think it would just shred the plastic sheet that the snow is supposed to fall onto.

Maybe I just need to get a standard rake.

Any thoughts? How do you remove snow from your roof? If you even have that kind of problem that is.

Yes, I really just typed OMG. 

Shalom and I stopped at the Windham Historical Society last weekend after visiting the Heritage Festival in Newfane. I’ve been meaning to stop in there to see if I could get any information about our house, and since they are closed all winter I thought it was a good chance to get in there before it’s too late. 

About all the woman there could do was provide a stack of photos from our town, but we were able to find one photo of our house that’s about 100 years old. The unfortunate part is that the only option she had for us to get a copy was to bring in our camera and take a picture of it. Of course we didn’t have ours, so I have another week to get down there before it’s too late.

The lightbulb goes off.

After drooling over that photo for a while, on the way home I remembered that our neighbors once told me they had at least one old photo of our house. Our neighbors are the pastor, and his family of a church just down the road. The church recently celebrated its 200th anniversary, so they collected many pictures from the area. So today I decided (after cleaning up the mess from our firewood pile) to walk over and see what they had. Below is what I found. It’s not the same exact photo we saw at the Historical Society, but it’s from almost the same location, with a slightly different angle. I’m assuming they are both from the same photographer.

Our house in all it’s glory.

Please click the image to see it full sized!

The picture was taken from what now is a beaver pond, but used to be part of a farm’s field. I’m not 100% sure if this side of the road was part of “our” farm, but the brook that feeds the beaver ponds runs right below the road, at the bottom of the hill.

What have I learned?

What really has me excited is that the photo shows what the original porch looked like, wrapping all the way around the front of the house. The porch no longer exists, except for a small section alongside the road. From what I’ve heard from others, the porch was torn off only within the last 10 years or so. I’d love to rebuild it, because Shalom has become addicted to buying rocking chairs at the auction, and we really need a place to put them. It’ll also help reshape the house. Right now the front facing roof looks out of place. It’s very large, and throws the proportions of the house off. Also note the tree in the middle of the porch. The tree is no longer there. I don’t know which went first, the tree, the porch, or maybe the tree took out the porch, but I really like how someone obviously wanted the porch, but didn’t want to cut down the tree to build it.

We also have now confirmed that our garage wasn’t always positioned as it is now. The far left of the house in this photo shows a blank wall. After repeatedly shoveling out the snow that was plowed in by our town road crews, I wanted to put the garage doors on the North side of the garage. (Basically just around the corner from this photo.) Now I have evidence to prove that doing so would help bring our house closer to its original look.

Bigger and better!

One thing we’ve always know is that our house once stood on a working farm. I’ve had all sorts of ideas for building a barn. Whether it’s for actual farm use, or as a workshop, there have been plenty of ideas in my head. What I never envisioned was a barn as large as the one behind the house in this photo. Did you view the large version? If not you probably didn’t even notice. Look closely above the house. Just to the right of the tree in the foreground you can see the barns peek sneaking into the shot. Now my mind is really running wild with my dreams of a barn!

Comparing

This is a photo I took in May. You can see what I meant about the garage doors. Also, there is a new chimney on the road-side of the house. The cookstove chimney has also been relocated, amongst many other small details. The final image below from April shows the big ugly roof. A porch along that side of the house would definitely help out. 

Anything else?

Please share other changes you notice. I’ve been looking over this photo quite a bit to find things, and have a good list going, but what else do you see that has changed? Share with us in the comments below.

I’ve spent too much time trying to figure out if I should post these rainbow photos on the house blog or my personal blog. I’ve decided I’m just going to double post it.

The middle of this summer here in Vermont was filled with rain. For about a month we had rain almost every single day. Right as all the rain was ending, and giving me a chance to get back to working outdoors, I spotted this great rainbow that framed our house.

I just figured I’d share the images with all of you. Be sure to click the images to see them larger, or check out the full gallery.

I found this over at Charles and Hudson and thought it was a funny way to bring back the neglected Rural Renovation blog.

Weird Al is probably any homeowner’s worst nightmare for a repairman, but at least he can make us laugh.

I’ll Repair for You by Weird Al

Normally the house is pretty quiet, even with two dogs, two cats and a potbellied pig; there isn’t much noise at night except for the TV and an occasional car that drive by. Tonight that was not the case. The two cats usually hang out in the “formal” living room, and suddenly tonight there was a commotion. The cats were banging into things and practically screaming. This of course got the dogs barking and running around trying to figure out what was happening. 

I ran into the living room to see what was going on. The first thing on my mind was the pig got loose and was running around the house, but there’s a double paned glass door keeping her in her room so that couldn’t be it. Then I saw it, well I didn’t really see it at first, I felt it fly right by me. Yup there was a little bat flying around in circles giving the cats some much needed exercise. 

Eviction:

Since the bat was pretty active and would land (is it landing even if it’s on a ceiling?) I took out a sheet and blocked the doorway into the dining room. Then I got some photos and video (the important stuff). I originally tried getting the bat to fly into a laundry hamper, but even my smallest bit of bat knowledge told me this was stupid as they can sense an object in their path. So I grabbed an old kitchen trash pail that was left by the PO’s. It had a lid on it which I knew would come in handy. With the lid off, but in my other hand I waited until it finally took a break. I slowly lifted the bucket up to the ceiling and the bat dropped right in. Slid that lid on and off we went to the backyard for more photo ops, and off he went to go take care of the horrible black flies we’re having here in Vermont.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get a good enough view to see exactly what kind of bat it is, but I’m assuming it was a little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus), or maybe a very fortunate Indiana bat (Myotis sodalis) which are endangered and lucky I’m not the type to kill an animal.

Got any animal “visitor” stories of your own? Please share!

More photos are available in the gallery, and on my blog.

The cats’ version is in the Pets Blog, HERE and HERE.

Last week while Shalom and I were taking a scenic route home from Curtis’ BQQ, I quickly slammed on the brakes much to her surprise. I threw the car into reverse and backed into a driveway where there was a sign and a table that said, “Free Stuff”. This is very common around here. I often see things put out for others to take. 

Normally I wouldn’t pay much mind to such a thing, but as we were flying by there was just what we’ve been looking for on the ground besides the table. Two shutters! If you’ve looked at any of our previous house photos, you may have noticed that there was an imbalance on the front of our home. 

For some reason there are two shutters missing. I was hoping to find them after the snow melted, but unfortunately they are nowhere around. After a closer look at the siding, it’s obvious those two had been missing for a long time. There aren’t even holes in the siding where the shutters would have been mounted. (Another PO mystery.) 

They never exissted.

The existing shutters are the black plastic “decorative” type, and so were the two that I found for free. The “new” ones are a little bit shorter than the rest, so I’ll have to play “musical shutters” to make everything look symmetrical.

Sweet Pea checking the new shutters out.

Normally I wouldn’t repair something half way, but the house will look much better for the time being. One day the front of the house will get a full makeover, and the plastic shutters will be a thing of the past, but for now free will do! The weather forecast is indicating rain for the next week, so I’ll try to get these up over Memorial Day weekend. 

Have you ever “found” a home repair item for free? Tell us about your great deals!

Shalom was here for a long weekend that created quite a large amount of content to post. From Lawn Mowers, to shutters, new picnic tables and more! 

I’ve got a few other projects I need to take care of first, but I’ll try to cover all the fun house stuff as I can. Make sure you check back for all the updates.

I took a quick little hike across the road the other day since the mud is finally disappearing. I’ve been dying to get down there and see the beaver network better, especially since the neighbors are back from their winter retreat and I fear they are going to damage the dams. I’m told they have a history of doing so. What I didn’t expect was a new view of the house that I’m sure many have never seen. 

Click photos to view large in the gallery

Here’s one with the beaver lodge in the foreground.

I really enjoy this area. I hope it doesn’t get damaged. Every time I look out upon the wetlands there is something new to see. Even though it’s not ours, we are welcome to enjoy it by the property owner, so it also serves as our “extended” property.

Any thoughts on what I should do to prevent them from trapping the beavers, or knocking down the dams? Please help.

I’ve finally completed upgrading all of the blogs to the latest version of WordPress! I’ve been doing one at a time for the last week, along with burning all of our feeds with FeedBurner. 

FeedBurner: FB is a great utility for bloggers, and readers alike!

Our Web-based tools help bloggers, podcasters and commercial publishers promote, deliver and profit from their content on the Web.

FB (recently purchased by Google) can help you track subscribers to your RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds, and promote growth to your blog by encouraging subscriptions and by making subscribing easier. Readers may easily subscribe using a number of different offline RSS readers (NewsGator, NetNewsWire, etc), news services (MyYahoo, Google, MyAOL, etc.) or even via E-Mail. 

Readers, If you aren’t already using RSS to help get updates from your favorite websites I strongly suggest you read this article from google/FeedBurner about RSS. Then come back and subscribe to our blogs and all of your other favorite sites too!

WP Upgrade: Although a couple of our blogs were running version 2.5 of WP, I now have all of them upgraded to the most current 2.5.1. (Ok Shalom’s Blog isn’t upgraded yet, but she hasn’t been posting, and I don’t want to introduce a new admin screen to her until she’s ready to blog.)

WordPress 2.5, the culmination of six months of work by the WordPress community, people just like you. The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost entirely a result of your feedback: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.

I’ve always recommended WP, but the latest releases of WP have really stepped things up! Most of the upgrades are in the admin area of the installation, so if you are already running WP your readers should not see much change. If you aren’t running WP, now is a great time to make the switch.