With the kitchen work mostly done, we’ll be repainting the rest of the house next. But before we do that, we need to spackle areas where the old paint has chipped. The hole in the ceiling is one of a few old vents that are no longer used. We took them down and will be filling the holes with drywall.
With the installation of our new dishwasher, the kitchen project is more or less complete. We still have to install hardware on the cabinets, but we’ll be holding off on that to first prioritize some other projects throughout the house.
More progress on the kitchen renovation—We now have countertops! The new lighting has also been installed. At this point, we’re just waiting for our dishwasher to be delivered, and that’ll be a wrap for this project!
Our cabinets arrived a little over a week ago, and are in the process of being installed. The room is finally starting to look like a kitchen again! Tomorrow the countertop installers will be taking measurements, so we can get that process started too.
We finished painting the walls and ceiling and then installing the new floors in our kitchen. It’s incredible what a difference these two small changes make to the look of the room. In a couple of weeks the new cabinets should get delivered!
The kitchen renovation project has come a long way since my last post about it. After we removed the old cabinets and backsplash, not only did a lot of the plaster come off the walls, but we also discovered that the sink’s drainage pipe was cutting one of the corners, getting in the way of where we wanted to put one of our new cabinets. The old cabinet that occupied that spot had been built around it.
We already had a contractor agree to update the electrical outlet locations and install the new cabinets and appliances, so we asked them to move the drainage pipe back into the wall too. When they took apart the old cast iron pipe, they found it had corroded to the point where it was about 90% clogged. And so some more extensive pipe replacements took place, along with clearing out the pipe to the sewer as far as the snake would allow.
Of course, this led to needing to remove and repair an extensive portion of the walls too. They ended up also spackling and priming all of the walls and ceiling when all was said and done. This made things quite a bit more expensive, which I don’t love. Nevertheless, the contractors did a great job every step of the way and ultimately, once the kitchen is done and we’re moved into the house, we’re going to be happy to have made all of these improvements.
Now that the walls and ceiling have been primed (twice!), the room is ready for us to paint it. We already have some paint picked out, and will be working on that this weekend. Hopefully next weekend we’ll be able to put in the new floors. These things are easy enough to do ourselves, so at least we’ll save some money that way.
Another couple days of kitchen demoing down. We cleaned up since this photo was taken, but I forgot to get a newer one. The walls may be 3 layer plaster, or something similar, which I guess wasn’t uncommon in the 1940s. Next step will be figuring out how to address the exposed parts so we can paint.
Today we started demoing the kitchen in our new house. Excited to be starting the renovation process, and to see it all come together. Some of the cabinets we’re removing have been there since the house was built in the 1940s. The space is small but our design will make it a lot more functional.
A recent visit to one of my favorite places, Cornell’s Botanic Gardens.
We went camping in Maine this past weekend, not far from Acadia. What a beautiful place! It was the furthest up the east coast I’ve been. Maybe next year we’ll go all the way to Nova Scotia.
I feel so lucky to be living in the finger lakes again.
Happy half-birthday to this sweet pup!
I’ve always been interested by rail travel in general, but particularly in the history of rail in New York City. In many ways, that history is tied to the names of the neighboroods and institutions, dating back to the wealthy families that once ruled the city. This article is a fascinating account of Penn Station, Madison Square Garden, and how the two became enmeshed. It’s a more modern history—the current iteration of Madison Square Garden broke ground in 1964—but the beats of the story remain the same as they did in the Gilded Age.
The Fight Over Penn Station and Madison Square Garden newyorker.com
Read: www.newyorker.com
Foggy Wallkill, November 2014.
Square Louise Michel in Paris, France. June 2016.
Tree limbs, January 2015.
Wallkill River, August 2014.
Long story short, I’ve moved my website to Micro.blog. The path I took to get here, however, was a long one.
For a long time, I’d wanted a section of my website where I could quickly and easily add short thoughts as they came to me. The process I had for adding posts just wasn’t quick though: My website was hosted on github pages, meaning it had to be a static site. Adding a new post meant creating a new file, adding my markdown to it, pushing that change to my github repo, and waiting for the site to update. That process had a lot of friction that disincentivised me from adding smaller posts to my site.
So how was I going to solve the problem? My first idea was to embed a twitter feed into my site. That solution was simple enough, except I didn’t quite feel safe posting much of anything on twitter. Any time I made a foray onto the feed of my twitter account, I saw a lot of awful things written by some awful people (and maybe some bots). On top of this, I hated using twitter because I also saw a lot of ads everywhere I looked. Finally, after all of twitter’s recent history, I came to the conclusion that these issues would only get worse. I ended up deleting my Twitter account. So much for that idea.
Not long after, most of the people I did like following on Twitter moved to Mastodon. After some investigation I found a lot to like about Mastodon: No ads, and the process of joining a server is just complicated enough that it seems to have (for now) kept the masses away. All I saw was the posts made by the people I wanted to follow.
I pivoted my original idea to embedding a Mastodon feed on my website instead. It still wasn’t exactly an elegant solution, but it worked. I made a proof of concept and was pretty happy with it. Before I got any further though, I found Micro.blog.
Micro.blog ended up being exactly what I was looking for. I can easily add longer and shorter posts, so I no longer need to embed things I’ve posted from somewhere else. Adding photos is also as simple as just adding a post with a photo in it, and I have a dedicated photos page that they’re all automatically added to. I can still build and style my website to look and work exactly how I want it to. I can add my own url. I can use MarsEdit, a rich text editor on my Mac, to easily write and add posts (like this one). The cost for all this was comparable to my GitHub Pro subscription, which I paid for solely to run my website from a private repo.
One of the best features, however, is that Micro.blog uses ActivityPub, which means it is interoperable with Mastodon. In addition to following other Micro.blog users, I can follow and be followed by Mastodon users. By making a Micro.blog account, I’ve been able to replace my own website, twitter, and instagram, while gaining a fully functional Mastodon account.
Learning to build a website from scratch and host it myself was a really good experience, and one that I recommend to anyone learning web development. Long after the learning phase though, the time I spent tinkering with the tools I used grew to be a lot greater than the time I spent actually posting to my website. Ultimately, I’ve found that the tools don’t matter, as long as they get out of the way and allow you to create the things you want to make.
Autumn in the Mohonk foothills, Hudson Valley, November 2014.
These cold nights ain’t so bad
