Bethel Farmhouse

You'll NEVER guess what I'm working on NOW. What? Oh yeah fine, yes it's still the front porch.

Pretty sure this will go back to being the source for corn chips and diet coke when Granny's kicks the bucket...

Cold kickin' it Liberty style

Today's quiz... what do you think about the wisdom of the above sign (that says "live bait") in front of a supermarket and deli?

And just in case it all burns to the ground.

Past the gnarly parts and into the detail work....

Getting there... we're movin' on up....

Porch insanity, installment #89. At least I'm building stuff now instead of breaking things, guess that's a sign of progress...

Ah, so why does Wyde dominate everything? As mentioned, Porch Madness 2010® is in progress. What's it looking like? Lots more to go but we're in the "building" rather than "annihilating stuff with a sledgehammer" stages now. But the sledgehammer stages had some excitement as this photo demonstrates. Stop, it's hammer time:

More Wyde, yo. Not only do they know me there by now they're starting to tell me to enjoy my weekends more and stop spending the entire time with a power tool in hand. I don't know how to tell them, that's what vacation feels like for me. Sort of how a construction worker upstate might think a weekend of shopping in NYC is a vacation. ;-)

The porch madness will never end. But Wyde Lumber is super fantastically amazingly awesome. Old school, and they've got everything. There will be a lot more Wyde to come...

I've talked enough about Granny's. They sell food and beer and supplies there. I should prolly stop ragging on them.
43 minutes ago · delete

I'm tellin' ya. Something about "Granny" and her place just makes you go hmmm....

Porch is getting madd CRAZY serious by now. Crazy super-serious. Expect more porch installments in the near future.

Dude, I'm TELLING you this place is a little weird.. swear....

Granny's is kind of a odd little place. On one hand it's great to have a "real" grocery store open up in walking distance. We're pretty out there. On the other hand, it's run by a guy who wears leather jackets in summer and looks like a non-speaking character in the Sopranos... and they have very strange selections of stuff. Like 9 brand of cereal, but 2 of the 5-6 big ones everyone buys. Or diet coke in giant bottles and tiny ones, not normal ones. I got this feeling he ain't never run a supermarket before. Nice guy though.

This is when the front porch work *really* got serious. It involved routing out a gnarly colony of carpenter ants. But nobody wants to see that photo. So instead here's a view FROM the front porch taken early in the morning as I was getting ready to start working on it. There has to be some kinda long term payoff for all this work right?

Besides the fact that the finish was a mess and flaking off, the front door has bothered the hell out of me for some time for a few reasons. Most importantly it never really closed properly, had split a little and was too wide up top and would mash against the edge. Fix it time involved routing out a channel on the top for some mending plates, which requires some glue, screws, and of course the steel plate...

A heat gun for gettin' the old paint off, so the new paint can do its thing. It looks sort of like a hairdryer, though if you tried to use it for that you'd melt a gaping hole in the side of your head. Oh, and brushes, rags, sandpaper...

Yeah yeah... brushes, rags, sandpaper... painting is a joy I tell ya.