The Summer is Passing Just Too Quickly

I know I have been neglecting my blogging duty this summer but the garden has turned into a monster. It has taken over my life and all my other projects are sitting on the sidelines.


Here is what my garden looked like at the beginning of the season.

This is what it looked like two weeks ago.

I rush home from work to plant or harvest the vegetables. The tomato plants are growing like weeds and need to be tied up once or twice a week until two weeks ago. The last two times I pinch off any where from 1 to 1-1/2 feet off the tops of the bamboo stakes and they need to be pinch off again this weekend. If I do not check the tomatoes daily I start finding cracked or rotten ones. I have two 2 x 3 ft trays in the basement filled with ripen tomatoes and other smaller tray just for the cherry tomatoes. Last year I was lucky to get any tomatoes since the weather was cool and wet but this year the weather been hot and wet. The whole garden has been working overtime this year.

The green beans are producing a gallon size bag or more each week since July 1st. The green pepper and eggplant crops are going to be excellent this year. My pea pods production was ok but not great due to the early hot weather. I have a good summer crop of beets and carrot but the spring sowing was poor.

The two zucchini plants (one black & the other yellow) did well until three weeks ago when the squash bore killed the yellow one and reduce the quantity of the black by three fourths. The squash bore killed off all my winter squash vines in the last two week but I did get some pie pumpkins, acorns, Waltham butternuts and delicata squashes. Earlier this summer I was eating zucchini pizza (used in the crust and topping), lasagna (zucchini replaces the noodles), zucchini provolone, zucchini & eggplant casserole, zucchini quiche, zucchini strudel, zucchini rolls in tomato sauce. The best new zucchini recipe was the zucchini strudel. The filling was made of shredded zucchini, feta cheese, cottage cheese, eggs, mint leaves, parley or cilantro and something else I do not remember. My favorite old recipe is the zucchini quiche.

Now I am eating many different dishes with tomatoes: tomato pie, chili and yellow tomato soup. Later this week I will make a new recipe using eggplant as the noodle in lasagna. The eggplants are ripening and now I am looking for new eggplant recipes to use them up.

I was spending some of the summer making dilly bean, dill pickles and pickled beets. I started canning tomato juice and this weekend I will be canning whole tomatoes. I have a refrigerator full of Genoese basil to make pesto and basil ice cubes which I hope to tackle tonight.

The garden maybe a lot of work but I still enjoy doing it. Another reason why I have not been writing a blog is the little free time I have, I spend reading mysteries this summer. I have been reading the Commissario Brunetti Mysteries by Donna Leon set in Venice. The books are different and the endings are not what I expected. So this is what I been doing with my summer until mid August.

Anatomy of a Chair

I have been taking an upholstery class at the local technical college since 2006. I collect old pieces of furniture and redoing them. This blog is about a beautiful wing chair I found on Craig’s List last spring. A wonderful lady decided to post it for free since the chair needed to be completely redone. I believe she inherited from her family, and thought she find the time to reupholster it but never did. When I saw it on Craig’s List, I knew this was a really find. The chair is from around the turn of the century 1890’s to 1900’s. It was upholstered in black mohair with a floral pattern mohair on the inside back and one side on the seat cushion. There was a braided cord running along upper edge of the arms and the seat cushion. The seat cushion was stuffed with down. The cushion was missing but the seat cover was kept with the chair, the past owner knew you need to keep it to use as a pattern for the new cushion. The old seat cover had a feather attach to the inside. Here a picture of the chair when I picked it up. The chair may look in bad shape but if you ever upholstered a chair, you know the bones are good.

The tools you need to remove the old fabric are leather mallet, tack lifter, staple puller, and pliers. The place to start removing the old fabric is the last piece attached to the chair when it was new. This is the dust cover on the bottom of the chair. I also took a lot of pictures at different stages in the deconstruction. They came in handy when I was trying to remember how the chair should go back together.

The center picture is how it looked when I first brought it home and the first two pictures in the upper left are close up of the carvings. As I stated to take a chair apart you remove the dust cover first. Be sure to mark all your pieces as you remove them and save all the horse hair and cotton padding pieces too. All the old pieces will be used as a pattern when putting the chair back together. Once the dust cover been removed, move on to outside back followed by the left and right outside arms pieces.

Now I started removing the right and left inside arms pieces. Both the inside and outside arms were made from two pieces sew together. The upper arm or wing section is one piece and the lower arm is the other. The arm on this wing chair had another piece I will call the cap. The cap is the arm rest part on the lower chair's arm. There were hints of a braided cord wrapping around the cap. After I finished removing all the padding on the inside arms and back, the springs in the back were removed from the frame. Do not remove the springs from their backing wait until it is time to remount the springs on the new backing. The picture in the lower left hand corner shows the back springs.

Finally it is time to put off the seat and nosing off the chair. The nosing is the fabric covering the front bottom of the seat area. The seat also has springs in it. These seat springs were wrapped and sewed in cotton fabric as a single unit and attached to the broken webbing.

I made sure all the tacks were pulled out of the chair's frame and then filled the many holes with wood filler. Later I sanded down some of the high area created by the wood filler. The chair's finish was cleaned with a 3 in 1 solution. Now it is ready to put back together.

Last Summer’s Unfinished Project, part 1

Last year I was planning on painting the house. The paint has been popping off the house since I brought it. It is especially bad on the back porch since the PO did have a hot tub setup there. I decided stripping off all paint off, it was the only option I had. I did not want to repaint the house again in other two or three years. When I brought the house, I was given the option of buying the hot tub for an extra $1000. I did not want it and I need the $1000 dollar for other things. I am glad I got rid of it since the exterior paint would probably be in worse shape than it is.

I did not start the project until after July 4th, all my time before then was spent gardening. I decide to lower my expectation and try to just paint the back of the house last summer. I define the back of the house as the exterior walls of the three season porch and the back wall of the proper house.


I first started stripping the three-season porch wall with the screen door. It took me until the first week in November before I finished working on that one wall. As with any project there is more work than you planned for. I torn off several corner clap boards because they were badly cracked. As I was removing them, I found several more that need to be replaced too. It took me a little while to learn how to cut the corners so they line up correctly.

When I finished with the clapboards I made the decision to replace the threshold and the latch side of the door frame. The latch side had been drilled in so many times that the only way to put on a new door latch on was to replace it. I spent the last five year trying to keep the door from blowing open in a heavy wind since the latch would never hold. There was many a time I wedged a chair under the latch to keep in closed. The threshold was original made from a stair trend and I used the same.


The windows to the porch are panes of sliding glass and there are no screens and storm windows to keep the bugs and weather out. I build two of the three screens need several years ago but did not install them. The window did not have a lip which the screens could lay against. I was waiting until I stripped the window to put in a lip for the screen. I did get the one window done on the wall I stripped last fall. This winter I found that I made a mistake when putting in them in; I should not have put one on the bottom of the window. The water now cannot drain out and sit behind the lip. Later this spring when I take the plastic off the screen, I will need to drill drainage holes in the lip and hopefully this will work or my window sill will rot. I hope someone else will read about this and learn from my mistakes.

I started the paint job by using a pressure washer to clean the house and remove any loose paint. Then I used a heat gun to remove the remaining paint. If you are using a heat gun to remove paint made sure the setting is on low if your house has lead paint on it. Lead can vaporize at the higher heat setting. Wear the proper air and face mask. I also found that I needed to wear leather gloves, long sleeves and pant when working with the heat gun. I did burn myself with it while wearing shorts.


After removing the paint I sanded and caulked the clapboard. Hint I should have caulked the clapboard after priming it first. I read by priming it first you protect the wood if the caulking fails. I finally got to start painting the wall with primer and then painting the clapboards with exterior paint. Then I finished it off by doing the trim.


If you look at the door opening you will see the screen door. That will be talked about in part 2.

What did you do this weekend?

While my weekend was full with the usually cleaning, laundry and preparing lunches and breakfasts for the work week, I did get to work in the garden. Saturday’s weather was in the 60s with a brisk wind perfect for hanging out the laundry. I have actually been able to hang the laundry out most weeks since mid-March.

I started to weed the gardens and stone paths. I try not to use herbicides in my yard. I keep the weeds down in the gardens by just weeding and mulching. The stone paths weaving through the gardens I weed. Another technique to keep the weeds down is to boil your dish water and throw it over the stones. I do occasionally use herbicide on thistles, dandelions and creeping Charlie. I brought a dandelion and thistle weed puller but it does not work very well. When I am done my yard is full of holes and the weeds usually return. Using the tool makes it harder to pull the weeds out the second time because of the holes created from using it.

Sunday, I did more weeding in the stone paths; three fourths of the job is done. I spent time rototilling the herb garden. If you go to the Garden Design, the herb garden is the large garden behind the patio on the right side. I transplanted parsley and some Swiss chard that survived the winter. I also dug up my rhubarb since I wanted to move it. The rhubarb never did well when I transplanted here from the last place I lived. The plant would produce some leaves but they would die and never grow large. When I pulled the plants from the ground I found that they had crown rot. I did some research last year trying to find the problem and crown rot fit the description. The only thing to do is throw the plants out and start over with new one. I prefer Canadian Red Rhubarb; I can only hope the nursery's bare root section still has some.

I start sifting the compost piles and got two wheel barrows from it so far. I spread one wheelbarrow over the north side raised bed that I will be planting Monday. I did plant the middle raised bed on April 4 with pea pods, black Spanish radishes, breakfast radishes, Spinach, Detroit Red Beets, Dragon Carrot and Nantes Carrots. All the seeds germinated and I cannot wait until I get to start eating them. The raised bed to the north, I will be planted with yellow pea pods, Giant German Radishes, mustard greens, more carrots and beet.

I hope your weekend was just as productive.

Moisture and Water Problems Part 3

As I said in part II my goals were to:
1. Paint the floor in the sewing room and in the unfinished basement with Watertite paint
2. Hang the drywall in the unfinished sewing room closet where the oil tank was. This involved waterproofing cement wall, insulate the wall with Styrofoam, hang drywall, and install a closet organizer.
3. Repair exposed cement walls and paint them with Watertite paint.

Here is what I completed over the winter.

I did get the floor painted in the sewing and craft room except for the floor space in the unfinished closet.

The unfinished closet is still in its unfinished glory to my chagrin. As you can see there is a lot of work to be done before I can drywall it.

Lastly there is the unfinished basement, this is largely undone except for half a wall along the south side and a small portion for the floor in front of it. I have three exposed basement walls that need cleaning, patching and painting.

My biggest problem in doing the work was the curing time required for each step. When I started I have no idea it would take so long. First I would wash the walls and floor with TSP and wait a week for the wall to dry with the dehumidifier turned on. Brush off loose cement and paint with a wire brush then chisel open cracks along the wall. After completing the wall preparation, I mixed up the hydraulic cement and fill in the cracks and holes. It takes a week for the hydraulic cement to cure before any painting can begin. The preparation time usually would take two to three weeks because I would keep finding new areas which needed more work. Then I could finally paint but after reading the direction for Watertite paint, I found they recommended at least three possibly four coats of paint. I found it took three coats for the floor and four coats for the walls. The walls required more paint because the surface was grainy and full of little pits. Once the painting was done you should at least wait a week before moving anything on the newly painted floor.

Another reason it has been taking soon long is the unfinished section is mainly storage. After reading many of your blogs I have seen many pictures of basements being cleaned up this winter, my basement does not look much different from those before pictures. I have been going through my storage area trying to reduce it but I think what is left are heirlooms and Christmas decorations, so I am not throwing these out. So it comes down to where can I find the space to move them, so I can work on the next wall section.

To sum it up the basement project is done until next winter because I need to start working on another unfinished project from last summer. What project is that, PAINTING THE HOUSE.

A Craigslist Find

Look what I found.



I found this by accident. I responded to an advertisement for a drafting chair. I have been wanting a drafting chair for my cutting table for ages. While looking at the chair the lady who was selling it stated that the other items in the garage were going to be for sale in the city garage sale. I saw this desk and ask what she wanted. We closed the deal on Tuesday, made arrangements to pick it up Thursday. It needs some work but I am ecstatic to have it.





By the way I also brought the drafting chair.

Moisture and Water Problems, Part 2

I may have solved the water problem but does not mean that the moisture problem is under control. I define moisture as humidity not standing water. I might not have water in the basement this year but my house has always been humid. Some people might be thinking the house is to air tight but this is a house build in the 1930’s and still has no insulation in the wall. When you touch the outside walls they are ice cold and you can feel the drafts coming out along the floor and baseboards. I would think there would be plenty of holes for the humid to escape. I will admit that I do need to put in a vent in the bathroom and kitchen. The bathroom is on this summer's To DO list but the kitchen will wait until I remodel it.

So what could be causing the moisture problem in the house and basement? After talking to a long time residents, I found out there are springs in the area and beside that there is a creek running through the property behind mind. So all the water draining through the ground passes the house and toward the creek and with the possibility of springs in the area the ground water is close to the surface. Here is a picture showing what happens, when we have a heavy down pour in back of my house. This happens at least three or four times during the year. Last year I saw a waterfall from the creek to the tree showing on the right side.



The walls in the unfinished basement have the paint popping off the wall from the water vapor passing through the walls. The areas are also having a white power building on the wall as show in the photo below. I started to clean the exposed cement wall with a wire brush to remove the loose cement, paint and mineral build up on the walls. I brought wire brushes that I can attach to my drill, it did a good job. After I removed all the loose material I covered area with hydraulic cement. Hopefully this will reinforce the wall and stop the moisture from traveling through the walls. Any cracks found in the foundation also were filled in with the hydraulic cement. After all that, the walls are covered with a waterproof paint.



My goal was to finish the basement over the winter but there are always delays and of over estimating what you are capable to get done. The complete to do list was:
1. Paint the floor in the sewing room and the unfinished section with Watertite paint
2. Finish drywall the closet in the sewing room where the oil tank was. This involved waterproofing cement wall, insulate the wall with Styrofoam, hang drywall, and install a closet organizer.
3. Repair exposed cement wall and paint them with Watertite paint.

The next post will show what I finished.