The family barn raising was only a week this year and was plagued by very rainy weather on two days. The Northeast has been suffering a very wet summer. The hidden benefit to this is that the pond, which last year was very low, is almost full now. Full is 17' 2" and it is presently at 17'. We tried to work less hard and play more. Play included a visit to Stony Brook for great swimming on Monday, an abortive trip to the Yuengling Brewery in Pottsville, PA (substituted with a visit to a great tree house in Scranton), swimming in the pond, a baby shower for Andrew and Julia and various excursions in the environs. Projects around the Cottage included the women sorting through the cupboards and boxes of items at the Cottage and getting rid of things that weren't needed and consolidating the boxes into the eaves upstairs. This was a major improvement, though it wasn't until everyone left that we remembered that there was a 3' X 6' table that could replace the 2' X 3' table in the kitchen (the only counter space). The above shot shows Andrew and Bob building a temporary lean-to on the north side of the cottage over the area which will eventually be living space to store the wood that is presently in the horse shed (which is needed to store our new tractor). That took much of a week, also with the assistance of Julia's PhD compatriot, Joe, who came for two days. The second-to-last day we all moved about half the wood into the covered space which has withstood the serious rains we've been having ever since.
Meanwhile, Beren and Calder put in the remaining floor joists in the tree house and attached most of the pie-shaped floor to the tree house. There is still a little work to do on the floor, but we hope to have the tree house (re-christianed the Cottage), complete in 2010, the 100th anniversary of the Cottage. Even my 82-year-old mother climbed the 30' up to the tree house when the floor was installed to check out the work.
On their last day, Andrew, Julia and Markus did the framing of the entry hall on the subfloor that had been constructed last year by Markus and our cousin John Mark. After they left, Bob, Markus and I installed the door (which cleared up a lot of floor space in the living room where the door had been stored). I put black plastic over the side wall, Markus installed a temporary corrugated steel roof, and Gary cut the plywood over the door. It is pretty waterproof now, particularly with the addition of expanding foam at the junction of the roof and the wall.
The main work has been in enclosing the basement. At this point we have finished installing the subflooring for the deck. We started with about 16 feet square of unattached subflooring to sit on. It's now all glued and screwed down to the left corner. We have insulated the subflooring in the garage, installed 12 lights, installed the washing machine (we can now get clean laundry at the Cottage), begun the installation of the pressure-treated plywood to the exterior walls, built out the corner to line up the corner of the porch roof to the porch and begun the process of enclosing the garage. I have painted the subflooring.
I have also done a lot of maintenance. I weed-wacked and removed all sorts of trash trees around the frog pond and hand trimmed the hedge (though it is uneven). I've also replaced roof shingles where they blew off in the severe weather last winter. There is still an amazing amount of work to be done, but progess is being made. Unfortunately, Bob and I only have two extra weeks to work here, so there is only so much that we can accomplish.
I think we managed to balance work and play better during the barn raising, though there wasn't enough work for some folks. The road to the Cottage is in really bad shape in many places, particularly down on the flats and we need to do some serious digging of trenches and work on shaping it. Even so, last night Bob and I saw two black bears running down the road in front of us on the flats. The thunderstorms have including great high clouds and lightning. We've seen some movies (Harry Potter and Julie and Julia), we've eaten out a few times, we've been to the Triton Hose Company Carnival (for potatoe pancakes, funnel cakes, BBQ'd pork, steamed clams, antique cars, games of chance), etc.
Today we went to Pottsville, PA (about 90 miles from Tunkhannock) to tour the Yuangling Brewery (the oldest brewery in America). It's in a brick building stuck on the steep hill side of Pottsville, a coal mining town. The brewery includes caves dug into the rock where the beer was stored before refrigeration and a real close-up look at the bottling (though it was canning today) process. The brewery is owned by the fifth generation of the same family and employs only 50 persons to produce 600,000 barrels a year. There are two other breweries which each produce 1.5 million barrels. We ate lunch at the Dutch Kitchen (recommended by Jean and Michael Stern's Road Food).
