Six: Details, Details

In summer '92 we opened up and reinsulated the wall around the window. This clued us in again on the "country s**thouse" architectural style used in the original core of the house -- the wall was casually pieced together from salvaged scraps, many of them four feet or less in length.We found that the window's original builder (from scant evidence we surmise that he was some kind of a hippie architect named Bass) had put a box beam over it, so by reinforcing the walls and roof around it we were able to remove the interior post in front of it. That's George on the scaffolding.

Rick then spent a fair bit of the summer painting trim and shingling the outside of the house -- all but one upstairs wall was done by that winter.

In December we moved out again, this time staying with friends, and had a sheetrock crew come in and do the whole house .We also got our upstairs bathroom plumbed so Molly at last had a full size bathtub as well as her own bedroom.

By the next summer, the exterior was done.

We moved out again the following spring and had Tom Desautels back to do the interior trim and pine floors upstairs and in the downstairs study. Rick put in a white ash floor in the living room in summer '93.

In 1994 Rick added our one-of-a-kind (and still unfinished) wood stove hearth (seen here in 2001 with our new Hearthstone stove), made of wave-smoothed Stony Point shale collected via canoe and kayak from beaches on Lake Champlain.

Note the large white rock. That's what we call the Chocolate Meteorite, but that's another story that will have to wait for another Page.

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