brick work done

 Martin used the old bricks from the original chimney for the brick wall and hearth for the wood stove. It was like putting a jigsaw puzzle together. The bricks were different lengths, widths, and thicknesses. 

 Now to put the finishing touches on, he needs to clean it and seal it. Once it is well cured, the wood stove gets moved in and hooked up. This will be the first winter that Martin will have lots of interior work to do and an tigin will be heated.

Vintage sink

My mom has a sink that I love. Two basins with built in drain boards on each side. Enameled cast iron. How can you go wrong? When we bought an tigin 3+ years ago, I knew that I wanted a sink similar to my mom's in the kitchen.

 We have been searching for the right sink ever since. We had an opportunity to get our hands on one shortly after we bought the house, but that would have meant storing it until the kitchen was far enough along to install it. Since that was so far in the future, we decided to wait.

 Now that the kitchen cabinets are stored in the basement of the house we are living in and we have a vintage gas cook range, (and the sheetrock is done and the kitchen will go in soon) we decided it was time to get the perfect kitchen sink.

The place where we found one 3 years ago, didn't have any. We looked on Craigslist and found two that would have been okay, but then came across this beauty. The only catch....travel to Ashby, Massachusetts to look at it (2 and 1/2 hours one way). If we didn't like it....or if it wasn't in decent shape....

As you can see, we got it. It came with the cabinet, which we will not be using in the kitchen.

Martin has plans for it though. Refurbish the cabinet, add to it, and, presto, turn it into a dining room hutch for the dinnerware.

He can do whatever he wants, I have my sink.

Bricks for the hearth

 When we were cleaning out and removing the unwanted and unusable items from an tigin during our first year of renovation, Martin saved the old bricks from the chimney. The chimney was only held together by the creosote! Then he chipped off as much of the old mortar as he could and stacked them in the yard.

 This summer, I was volunteered to clean off the bricks a bit better and bring them into the house and to sort them into piles. A lot of the bricks were obviously seconds; they were different lengths, widths and thicknesses. Some had holes and hollows in them.

While I was pulling them out of the pile in the yard and moving them to the house, I discovered one garter snake, seven snake skins, a vole nest, and a cache of acorns (not counting the various cocoons, spiders, dead bugs, live bugs, etc.)

After cleaning them off, I tried my best to organize them in stacks of good, okay, and doubtful in terms of usability. 

We are going to build a half brick wall in the corner and a brick hearth for the wood stove in the above picture,