How much wood could a woodchuck chuck?

Last weekend Caroline (and the doggies) and I went to Woodchuck, my families "rustic" camp in the Adirondacks. Woodchuck has been in my Dad's family since before he was born. We usually spend close to a week there each year, but this year we only spent a long weekend because we are taking so much time off for the wedding. Woodchuck IS a vacation, but it is a slightly different vacation than most people take. Some highlights of Woodchuck:

• Delicious running cold water in the kitchen sink (hint: that's all you get.)
• A new composting toilet to complement the flush one
• Herkimer the Moose (over the fireplace)
• ~100 acres, and several hundred feet of lakefront
• 5 cabins, sleeping something over 20 people

The main cabin

The entrance to Woodchuck. You have to let everyone know you are arriving!

Of course, a component of a Woodchuck vacation is always doing some maintenance work around the house. We weren't there long, so we only got to move some fireplace wood off of the tennis court. We also have specific family traditions like blueberry pancakes, bacon and eggs for breakfast, potato salad, chips and cream cheese salsa dip, smores, nightly board games around the fire, and reading books. 

A big part of Woodchuck is being on the lake, which Ash absolutely loves. If we let him he'd swim and chase balls all day long. He hasn't been as good with come and stay lately, so we didn't let him off leash this year. We are hoping we can conquer these commands with him so that he can be off leash more in the future. Pepper, however, is perfect off leash. He stays right by your side and knows right where "home" is when you say "lets go inside!"

Ash on the dock

Pepper, on the other hand, does the army crawl (belly to the deck) whenever he feels the floating sensation on the dock. He constantly wanted to be in someone's lap.

Pepper clings to Caroline for dear life

Caroline and I used to stay in the loft of the main cabin with Mom, Dad, and Katie. The dogs can't really get into the loft though, so we get our own cabin!

The "Little Cabin"

Our bed

Here are some other photos of woodchuck: 

"Little Woodchuck", for the kids, but it has a cot. Caroline's Dad slept in here once! 

Looking at the lake from the big cabin

The main cabin

The bathroom is in use

Tall pines. Caroline says: "Pretty amazing when you stop and really look at them!"

A wood shed we built last year

We had a great weekend, and as always, we welcomed our warm shower when we got home! Even the doggies got baths because they were covered in pine sap and pine needles.

ANOTHER House Project??

When we bought the house (now 2.5 years ago!!!), one of the improvements that Caroline and I talked about was putting a dormer on the 3rd floor when we moved upstairs, something we planned on doing in the 5-7 year range. The dormer would most importantly add a 2nd bathroom in the upstairs unit, not required but really nice to have in a four bedroom unit. In addition, the current bathroom is on the 2nd floor while 3 of the bedrooms are on the 3rd floor. It'd be a lot more convenient to have a bathroom on the same floor as most of the bedrooms.

True to form, even though we haven't finished the 1st floor apartment yet, we decided to do the dormer early! Interest rates were really low, and house appreciation in our neighborhood gave us the ability to refinance and take money out to pay for the dormer. We won't be moving up there next year, but we will be getting enough additional rent to cover the higher  mortgage cost.

We shopped around for contractors (I couldn't do the job fast enough as I've got tenants up there), and picked a guy (Steve) who lives only a few houses down from us. After several conversations, he convinced us that it would be best if the dormer went from the front staircase to the rear staircase. This made sense, as our current staircases don't meet code (they are too short). Of course, this meant that the dormer, instead of being bathroom sized, was now going to be 34 feet long, only 5 feet shorter than the entire house length! Caroline wasn't wild about the "train on top of the house", but it does make a lot of sense to get the 3rd floor up to modern code. Plus, then we have room for the laundry and a closet!

After originally thinking that we could copy the 1st floor bathroom, we found that the 3rd floor hallway is actually 2 feet closer to the future dormer wall than on the lower two floors! This put us in to a true engineering mode, creating a scale drawing and working through all of the permutations of possible bathroom configurations. We ended up with the below design, which has a pretty long and narrow (5ftx12ft) bathroom, but also a very nice laundry area and a good sized closet. The closet may get even deeper (the depth of the stairs), depending on how it looks when everything is torn out.

There is actually another large window above the laundry which isn't in the drawing. We wanted to make sure we got enough light in to the hallway.

After a lot of ups and downs with the inspectional services department (seriously, I was told many times that I couldn't build the apartment for various reasons - all turned out to be false) we got our permit last Friday! We wanted to start work on Monday (5 days ago), but Steve had planned another short job due to the permitting delay. He started putting stuff up on Thursday, but this coming Monday will be his first big work day, demolishing the interior!

We'll keep everyone posted about the progress as it unfolds! We are pretty excited, as it should transform the house in a matter of weeks.

Hello? Is this David's road side assistance?

Sorry for the delayed post this week! Also, I've now fixed all of my "breaks" vs. "brakes" typos!

As most of you know, David and I own quite a few cars (well, mostly David). Right now we have a Dodge Dakota truck, a VW R32, a Mazda RX7, a Toyota MR2, and the Saab that David restored in high school. In our driveway currently we have the truck, R32, and RX7. The RX7 is running pretty well at the moment, though I seem to have trouble with it stalling on me that David doesn't have - I attribute this to operator error :-/ The truck was running well except I drove it to Vermont last weekend and had a little bit of trouble with the brakes. The R32 has just been one unhappy car  all around.

The brake saga with the truck began when I drove Dad downtown (in Vermont) to pick up his car from the shop (he'd had his tires changed) and we almost blew through a stop sign. He said "who taught you to drive, the stop sign is way behind us now!" I apologized and explained that the brakes were acting weird and that even when I had them 95% to the floor they weren't responding, resulting in delayed braking for me. He suggested we have the lines checked before too long. Well, after dropping Dad off I hop on the interstate to head back to Boston and both the ABS and !BRAKE! (or something like that) lights come on. Caroline experiences her heart jumping into her throat, thinks "uh oh", and calls David. David says "turn around and have your dad check the brake fluid as a first step." Okydoke, turning around. Brakes are important! Dad and I head off to the auto parts store and put over half a bottle of brake fluid in and then watch it as it leaks out of the rear passenger side drum. Woops. David and I make a last minute decision to have me stay in Vermont through the weekend and have him and Laura (my friend from IL who is living with us for the month of August) drive up to Vermont as well to enjoy a weekend at Joe's Pond. That would allow all of us to water ski and have some fun as well as allow David and my dad to fix the truck brakes. Everything worked out as planned more or less, and the truck is now back on the road and we are all one iota stronger from our water skiing endeavors.

The R32 has been slowly developing small problems that haven't been urgent by themselves but have culminated into a rather long repair list. The "icing on the cake" was when a hole appeared in the exhaust (or down pipe out of the engine I think?) and turned my car into what sounded like a go cart. The car also needed new rotors, a new fuel pump, new struts, an oil change, an AC recharge, a new fan (I don't know which one), and it could really use some body work on the passenger side (thanks to high speed winds and trash cans in IL, bad garage parking by yours truly, and some idiot in Somerville keying my car). David more or less does all of our car maintenance himself, and has said over and over again how much easier it is to work on the cars using the lift in his new swanky 15 ft tall garage. The other night while working on my rotors I caught him singing and dancing to the radio and just having what seemed to be a great time - who knew car maintenance could be so much fun! I had to wonder if he had inhaled too many car fumes or something. Anyway, this week he has changed the struts, rotors, and oil for my car. We decided to spend the money to have VW fix the exhaust because we were running low on time (we want to drive the car to Woodchuck this weekend - David's family's camp in the Adirondacks) and because it looked like it might be a huge pain for David to do. At some point we have to make a decision on which is more important to us - our time or our money. This was one case where it seemed worth it to have VW take care of it. They were also able to clear a somewhat disturbing airbag light that had come on, though thankfully was not an indicator of a malfunctioning air bag. The fuel pump repair is still on the list.

Hopefully after this round of repairs David will be able to take a breather from the cars for a bit! Though it seems he might actually enjoy his evenings in the garage :) The MR2 is currently listed for sale on Vermont craigslist because David has realized that he just doesn't have time to make this project car he had hoped it would be. I'm a little torn about whether selling it is the right move because I know he is sad about it, but at the same time having that car around means he gets to spend less time on other things he is also really interested in - like working on his go cart or going to Vermont to become the next pro water skier! We'll see what initial interest the Craigslist post brings in and then decide our next move. We have talked some about selling my car as well and buying something that gets better gas mileage and has a little bit more cargo room, but this probably won't happen for a couple more years. We both really enjoy driving my car and with all of the recent repairs it should be all set for a little while at least.

Anybody else having car woes? I'm sure my dad has a few good stories to share at least....