What the Hail??

Here we are well on our way toward's actual spring and busy in our renovation work and what happens?  Crazy white stuff falls from the sky.  Really. (Don't run to look out your windows now this happened on Sunday...really.)

But, it was a nice interruption in our frenzied renovation efforts. Look - a wall with no paneling!!!

Here's 1/2 of our tired crew....

Help Us Make Fox Hollow a Real Farm

Required Renovations - Update #1

Required renovations are those that we absolutely have to have in order to move in.  It's a pretty small list, relative to the extent of work that is actually necessary and/or desired...  Basically, the list is:  Decent Working Bathroom, Zenona's Room, and Mostly De-Funked Floors.  Here's a few photos showing some progress....

Decent Working Bathroom.....floors gutted, vanity removed, new toilet purchased. Still to come - tile, installed new toilet, purchase & install pedestal sink.

Zenona's Room -- First coat of paint is on.  Still needs final coat, ceiling painted and trim installed.

This Nook in Zenona's Room will become Oliver's Room!

This other Nook in Zenona's Room (minus the beer...) will become Zenona's Reading Room / Super Fort, Whatever.....

This is the Blue Bedroom with all the black crap sanded off the plywood floor.  Not bad, not bad!  Add furniture and rugs and who cares!  See the before picture HERE .

Cleaning, Part ___? of Infinity of Course

So its been a month and we've been cleaning, dirtying and cleaning again....  It almost looks exactly the same but there are some significant accomplishments that are worth pointing out:

OK, so maybe it doesn't look cleaner, but all of the funky vinyl and 1x1 ceramic bathroom tile (?) fireplace hearth have been scraped off and since vacuumed.

But here's the big deal...a front door!  Why such a big deal? Because while we were patiently waiting to close on this property, someone took it upon themselves to forcibly and violently remove the existing door (and part of the wall, too) with a sawzall.... presumably to steal the piano from inside along with all of the house's plumbing.  Yeah, it really sucked.  It's been a gaping reminder of being violated by somebody that probably lives in our very same hollow.  But, now there's a door -- and of course a lock.

This is the blue bedroom -- the one that had the trailer-trash glue-down el cheapo blue carpet tiles.  They came up pretty easily, but left behind a black foamy stuck down mess.  We rented a big old floor sander polisher thing that Zenka wrastled with and ta-da...sanded plywood never looked so lovely!  I will post updated photos of the remarkable progress.  We will be moving in before X-mas.  We will. We will. We will.  When there's a will, there's a way!

Cleaning, Part 1 of Infinity

This is Zenona pitching in last week at the first of many, many days of cleaning and de-funking.  What are the mystery orbs in this photo??  Hopefully just dust...

Makin' the Big Move - But First We Need Water

This mess of tools, pipes, dirt and rocks is actually the spring source that supplies our house's water supply. While most modern homes in the Catskills have drilled wells, some reaching depths of 300+ feet, a spring-fed water supply was pretty much the norm back in the day. In order to make our big move to the Fox Hollow House, we have to have water. And water that doesn't run out and doesn't freeze either. Zenka has been working to bring the old water supply system back to life and, hopefully with some improvements.

The first task was to reconstruct a cement holding box around the spring source to capture and corral the water into the piping system that leads to the actual cistern. A cistern is a big holding tank, in our case an underground square concrete block thing that I was standing on when taking this photo. After the concrete was poured we had to muck out the cistern that had been drained earlier. There was buckets and buckets of muddy silty stinky slop...too gross to stop and take a photo.

The water from the newly-poured spring box will fill up the now mud-free cistern, which has a pipe leading to house's system and an overflow pipe that feeds our garden's water system (a whole different topic of needed water supply improvements we will get to before the growing season....). Our spring water has got to be some of the most pure and best-tasting water EVER! It comes from deep in the mountainside and behind our land is thousands of acres of NYS wilderness. We literally could bottle the stuff!