Fixing a problem

THE PROBLEM: Most people probably would not have noticed that the porch of this house had, over the years, sagged and pulled away from the house. Previous owners had simply filled the gap with aluminum flashing, boards, and incredibly wide snakes of caulk! After all of the work and expense of re-finishing the rails and floor as well as the tedious work of putting new siding in the little triangular spaces of clapboard, Russ was not willing to let the porch just continue to sag. This photo is an attempt to show the gap. Unfortunately, I didn't think about taking the picture until Russ had already brought it in fairly close to the house- especially close compared to what it had been! THE SOLUTION: Russ gained access to the inside of the porch roof so he could get to the rafters and the front of the house. He carefully cut a hole into the ceiling of the porch roof.
He cut several pieces of angle iron and drilled holes in them. Then, using expansion bolts, he attached the rafters to the bricks on the front of the house and slowly turned the nuts on the bolts until the roof was again touching the front of the house. I'm pleased with how well the flash worked on the picture below because it is really dark up in that space! People have said that "Russ can do anything". It's nearly true. He can figure out how to do just about anything given enough time and, occasionally, some encouragement when he suffers serious doubts or gets impatient that things take too long or his first solution doesn't work. Good job, Russ!

Repairing the porch

As you can see in this picture, the soffits and facias of the porch were in pretty bad shape. The wood was rotted enough in places that there would have been no scraping in painting because there would not have been anything to paint! Russ removed the facia, the vertical boards originally behind the gutters, measured, and made and mounted new ones. Often the tailgate of the truck is handier to use than sawhorses.
After putting on new facia, he measured and cut some thin board that looks like the old clapboard used before to fit and put it over the soffitts (the horizontal boards on the bottom). Then I primed and painted them along with scraping and painting all of the outside of the porch. I still have to do the inside but that will have to wait for another day. I'm having trouble with my hands hurting and swelling again.

TA-DA!

This is the house when we bought it a little over a year ago. I took this today after Russ finished putting up the new gutter on the front. The bushes still need some attention but that may take more time than we have here.

More House Details

I tried to do this all in one posting but the photos wouldn't upload. Here is the mantle in the living room. The fireplaces in the foyer and living room are both shallow and intended only for gas appliances which currently aren't working, or even hooked up. Again, the wood is lovely! Between the foyer and the next room (the kitchen in 1910 but much too small and broken up by doors and window for today's kitchens) there is a huge cold-air return for the furnace with a bench on top. There had been a couple of wire hooks screwed into the wall for hanging hooks. I re-finished the wood, Russ put some of the tiles leftover from the butler's pantry on top, I repaired the plaster on the wall and painted. We bought some decorative hooks and Russ mounted them in boards on the walls. This serves as our "entry closet".
Here is the butler's pantry. I haven't done anyting with the wood in here and am not sure I'm going to get to it. We cleaned out the cupboards, painted inside and applied contact paper (the shelves were a little rough and it was the fastest treatment to be able to use them). I removed the old contact paper from the countertop and Russ installed this beautiful tile. You can see the design better in the above picture of the hall bench.

House Details

I wanted to show some of the little details that attracted us to this house. This little lamp is hard-wired into the top of the railing post at the bottom of the steps in the foyer. Angela cleaned it up and replaced a couple of the hanging prisms that were missing then Russ replaced the wiring and made it function. We looked for a decorative cap to cover the top of the center post that holds the shade but haven't found one. It still looks beautiful. Along the base of the staircase is this lovely wooden bench. The wood in this house has just really amazed me. I love the beauty of it once I have removed old coatings and re-varnished it.

Why Job?

I remember the first time I had a responsibility to teach the book of Job (from the Bible). There are opinions that it is just an allegory, that there was never actually a man named Job that had incredibly bad fortune. Putting that whole argument aside, whether the story is a parable or actual history, why is it in the Bible? Anyone believing the Bible to be the word of God would have to include the book of Job as the word of God. Why did He have it included in the words of history and doctrinal principles? We have been watching our daughter-in-law, among others we know and love, go through one traumatic experience after another and wondered, when is it going to get better? In the story of Job, God points out what a virtuous man Job is. Satan claims that it's only because he has such a perfect life and that if his luck were to change, Job would curse God. (I can see that possibility. There are lots of people that, when faced with unhappy experiences- even if they are a result of their own choices- will curse God.) So God tells Satan that Job is open to whatever grief Satan wants to give him. (I can see that, too. All of us here on earth- if you believe in God, you really need to acknowledge that there is a Satan, too- are subject to Satan's influence.) Satan makes life really miserable for Job. I don't want to go into all of the gory details. I'm sure most of us know people, maybe even ourselves, whose life has some pretty miserable aspects. For Job, even his friends said that his life was so bad he ought to curse God. They all try to accuse Job of maybe being deserving of such punishment. (Sometimes people will look at someone's misfortunes and wonder if they are "naughty" so God is justly punishing them.) Job searches his heart and his faith. He knows he loves God and has done nothing to offend Him. He loves God and knows God loves him. ("Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him") In the end, God scolds Job's friends for their lack of comfort and poor judgement. He reminds Job of His great power then "the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning". We all love a happy ending. Russ and I really look forward to a happy ending for those we love. We don't know when that will be. Why do we have the book of Job? Maybe it's God's message to us that, despite trials to the degree that we lose everything that means anything to us on the earth, He is there. He loves us and, if we remain faithful, we will be blessed beyond measure in the end.

Step by step...

This is the door to one of the front bedrooms. As you can see, it is pretty well damaged. It took a couple of days, but I have managed to refinish the woodwork around all the doors on the second floor. Russ had to cut in some pieces of wood to repair the damage on this door, just as he had to do with the front door. I don't know whether you can see it well in this picture, but the strip of wood next to where the doorknob should be is the repair. The wood in this house is nearly all chestnut, impossible to acquire any more because all of the American chestnut trees are gone. This wood is just breath-takingly beautiful when nicely refinished. All of the trim pieces are at least 6" wide with hardly a knot or blemish anywhere. I still have to do the doors.

Just some family pictures

This is our daughter Angela with James's daughter, Louisa when we gathered in NY in 2004 for a family reunion. This is the same two people here in Dayton just before James's family left here a couple of weeks ago.
This is Tanis, Angela's oldest son, with Kadon, Ammon's middle child- at our home in Utah. I don't have a date for it exactly but it must have been 2005.
This is our son James with my mother in April of this year.
This is Tanis with Lisa's daughter, Elliette, in April of this year.
Life isn't always smiley and harmonious like in photographs. But it's nice to have a loving family that has remained that way over the years.

Life

I wish I could know the future. I'm sure a lot of people would like to know the future. I don't want to make money from betting on something with inside information. I only want to know what direction to head. The newspaper here reported that Dayton was on the Forbes list of top ten dying cities in the US. The unemployment rate here jumped from 6. something to 7.2 in the past month. This morning we awoke to the sound of a police loudspeaker and siren noises on the street behind our house. Apparently the police were trying to get someone to come out of hiding and they were giving warning, several times over the space of 10-15 minutes. How will we ever be able to sell this house? I guess things aren't really a lot better everywhere in the world. I guess I'm glad I don't live in the country of Georgia, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, or even in Africa somewhere.
I'm grateful for my grandchildren. They seem to help make life seem real- like it can go on. I'm grateful for ice cream and sunsets. I'm grateful for cool, clean water to drink when I'm thirsty or warm, clean water to bathe in. I want to focus on good things. I can't make diseases, wars, hatred, crime, anger, greed, envy, or death go away. But I can try to avoid thinking about them. I can choose to focus on good things and try to be content with the many blessings I have. I'm grateful for my sisters and brother, my parents, my husband, and children. I look forward to a day of peace and harmony together with those I love, including my elder brother, Jesus Christ.

Status update

It's difficult to post pictures at this point because the things we're doing aren't as dramatic. We have not finished the house enough to put it on the market. We aren't in so much of a hurry as we felt immediately following Ammon's death because the reality of the unlikelihood of our being able to sell this house and recoup the money we have put into it (much less make a profit- ha ha) has set in. We still miss Ammon. It's funny. We didn't see him every day but now we think about him every day. I'm sure the time will come when we don't think about him every single day. But for now, we think about Ammon, and we think about his widow and children. We watch for developments in their grief adjustment process. We fight the urge to butt into their lives and hover over their every word and action- to comfort them and try to help them to be happy. Out of a fear of smothering them, as well as a sense of caring for other people in our life, we just continue with other things. We work on the house every day, but not at an all-out feverish pace. We are finishing up little things. The front porch and some roofing are the biggest things to finish outside. The woodwork and the highest part of the hallway walls and ceiling going to the third floor are the biggest things to finish on the inside. Then there is the basement. We're not really sure how carried away to get. Conditions being the way they are in Dayton, as bad and worse as the housing situation anywhere in the country, we don't think any little change or improvement is going to really affect whether or not we sell the house. We continue to pray that the Lord will guide us to know what to do. We know we have to do our part so we are trying to do that. The branch of the church here continues to be a bottomless pit of need. We do what we can. We are grateful for the love and support of our friends and family members. We're doing just fine.

Party time!

I know that most families these days are spread out all over the country and even over the world, like ours. But we sure do like it when we are all in one place. We try to take every opportunity to get together. Since the need to eat is the thing we humans have most in common, we usually enjoy that activity together. Whenever our eldest son, State Department Embassy Consul, and his family are in the states, we plan as many activities together as we can. Angela's house has become a favorite gathering place due to the number of toys (especially Legos) she has and the nice fenced-in back yard. We all
contribute something then all swarm in to fill her house for several hours of eating, talking, playing, and just getting re-acquainted. James's family is available only once every 3-4 years. They will be leaving today to go to Washington, DC for a couple of weeks before heading to their next post in Berlin for 4 years. It's likely that we will only get to see them if we can manage to fly to Germany.
We missed our youngest daughter's family being with us since they weren't able to come. I guess it's just not a perfect world yet. I know that some day we will all have the chance to be together as much as we want. I don't know how we'll travel. Resurrected beings don't need cars or planes I don't think. Interesting that some people have no problem with H.G. Wells or Isaac Asimov or any other science fiction writer's view of the future but if you mention something related to "religion" they scoff. How is the "big bang" theory so much easier to believe than God's creation? How is teleportation easier to imagine than resurrection?
I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Back to work

After spending several days toiling in the sun to clean up the edges of the driveway, patch holes, and sweep/scrub the pavement, we began to seal the driveway. James and Russ handled the applicators while I finished up some edging details. The sealant is to prevent plants from growing in the blacktop and to seal it against water getting in to freeze then crack it in the winter.
It's a pretty big driveway and took lots of tar to cover it. Here are the empties. We tried to wash out remnants but we aren't sure the buckets will be really usable. I hate to keep adding to the landfill. We'll be getting one more bucket because we ran out with one little corner left to do.
We have no idea when the driveway was installed or when it was last sealed but it really needed it. It looks nice now. It's a little disheartening to realize that potential buyers will never know how much work we have put into this property. They didn't see it before. Now I wish I had taken more pictures before we started work. But I guess anyone considering buying it won't care what it looked like previously. They will just want a nice house NOW.

Back to work

James and Russ are discussing the fine points of preparations for pouring the new sidewalk in the rear of the house while Louisa (James's youngest) and Kadon (Ammon's middle) are already getting to work. This picture was taken several days later showing the finished sidewalk as well as the siding on the kitchen well on its way to being done. We're getting there...............I need to get grass planted to the left of the sidewalk.