Category: DIY

Fixing the Foundations and Resetting the Columns Not much in the way of eye candy in this post, as it’s really focused on the practical side of maintaining all the stuff we’ve built over the years at the farm. Over the last dozen years, Mother Nature (in the form of…

A side benefit of the kitchen renovation project is that we have no end of scraps of cherry wood in the barn. Occasionally they become transformed into useful objects, such as cutting boards, bread lames, grooved gnocchi boards, rolling pins, porridge spirtles, and even cocktail muddlers. That usually happens when…

With another cold morning (including a dusting of snow), it feels like we cut it a bit close with our fall planting of bulbs. We got in just over two hundred on Sunday (mostly daffodils, with a few tulips and a handful of hyacinths). Most of them went in at…

Of all of the tasks associated with the kitchen expansion project, the one that gave me the most trepidation was figuring out how to get the 750 lb (350 kg) granite hearthstone up onto its brick masonry base. In the end, I lured Drew Dow and his assistant Jake up…

Spurred on by a batch of yummy gnocchi at my sister’s house last weekend, coupled with restacking the pile of cherry boards in the barn (waiting to be incorporated into the new kitchen), I finally got around to making that gnocchi board I’d been planning on. Actually, I made two…

One of the things we like best about the “new” kitchen is the cherry work surface on the central island. We considered a variety of surface materials but opted for this based on its appearance and feel (and there is a significant amount of data that suggests that wood is…

On a warm summer day, the liner installation went like a charm; despite some challenges fusing the EPDM on a sloping muddy surface. The younger generation was pretty anxious to try it out, so we put the hose into it right off. After asking 40 friends to come over and…