Open Letter to Our Steep Roof
Posted by Laura-Jane - Whimfield in House, Projects on 04. Sep, 2008 | 12 Comments
Dear Steep Asphalt Shingle Roof,
For fifty years, you’ve been ignored; you grew weathered and ugly.
For fifty years, you’ve been leaking your teary sadness into the attic.
But, in 2008, we came into your life. We heard your silent cries and vowed to do something about your misery.
So we stripped you bare. Exposed you, naked, to the [...]
Dinner at the Old Mill
Posted by Laura-Jane - Whimfield in House, Projects on 29. Aug, 2008 | 7 Comments
Person 1: “Let’s have gourmet pasta for dinner, shall we?”
Person 2: “Pasta sounds good, but there’s one problem.”
Person 1:Â “And what problem is that, pray tell?”
Person 2: “Our one and only pot is upstairs in the attic catching rain.”
Person 1: “Oh. Right. Corn flakes for dinner?”
Person 2: “I’ll get the bowls.”
Shingling a Steep Roof is Not (Quite) as Scary as it Looks
Posted by Laura-Jane - Whimfield in House, Projects on 17. Aug, 2008 | 9 Comments
When we purchased our home, we knew that the roof was ancient and leaking.
Even I, who knew little about home renovation when we first moved in, could tell that the shingles were drastically deteriorated. Although I suppose it doesn’t take much to recognize that if a windy evening means that you’ll wake up to roof [...]
Places to Sleep
Posted by Laura-Jane - Whimfield in House, Projects on 06. Aug, 2008 | 6 Comments
This afternoon I wrote about places to sit; now I tell tales of places to sleep.
Our house has three bedrooms. All three rooms have been stripped down to the studs. Two bedrooms are still in stud-form: one bedroom is packed to the seams with our stuff, since we haven’t unpacked anything but the necessities since [...]
Fun With Numbers: Hybrid Car Edition
Posted by Cameron in Projects on 05. Aug, 2008 | 14 Comments
This post was written by Cameron!
I’d like to introduce a new series here at Whimfield: Fun With Numbers. Often during my research looking for new ways of reducing our cost of living, I crunch numbers. I often find it fun to come up with different statistical scenarios, crunch the numbers, and see how things pan [...]
Low-power server
Posted by Cameron in Projects on 02. Aug, 2008 | 5 Comments
This post was written by Cameron!
One of the main goals we have with our house is to make it as cheap as possible to live in. With the cost of electricity being the most expensive in all of Canada here on PEI ($0.19 kw/h + $30 per month flat fee), we are looking for ways [...]
Simple Wooden Shutters: How To
Posted by Laura-Jane - Whimfield in House, Projects on 10. Jul, 2008 | 7 Comments
We made shutters out of CHEAP lumber in a couple of hours! You can too!
We bought a bunch of 1×4s (which look like standard 2×4s that have been sliced depth-wise). A 12 foot long piece was $2.69.
First, you cut your lumber! Very, very, very easy if you have a mitre saw, which is the greatest [...]
Scaffold Me
Posted by Laura-Jane - Whimfield in House, Projects on 08. Jul, 2008 | 7 Comments
There are many projects that are half-finished and strewn about the house and yard; such as, hmm, let’s say for example, the roof, the crawlspace, the vegetable garden, the gutters, the piles of debris and old appliances, the attic, and, now that I think about it, every single room in the house–every room!
Alright, that being [...]
Carnegie Hall
Posted by Laura-Jane - Whimfield in House, Projects on 27. Jun, 2008 | 3 Comments
Good morning,
Our house is a tiny two-storey, three-bedroom box.
Upstairs there is a hall that leads to all three bedrooms. When we moved in, the hall looked as follows.
The hall actually looks pretty cute in this photograph. Unfortunately, the plaster was crumbling off the walls and was very damaged. So…we removed all the plaster from the [...]
Dry-Walling The Living Room
Posted by Laura-Jane - Whimfield in House, Projects on 04. Apr, 2008 | 3 Comments
Our latest accomplishment has been taking the living room from original plaster walls to blank-”dry-walled”-slate.
This transformation included the usual insulation, etc.
However, the living room had the added feature of requiring us to drywall the ceiling, which, as you can imagine, was rather eventful. After a few false starts, we built a simple “dead man” tool [...]
