Tales from the Attic

It rained today. Insistant, spring-like rain that does such good for the yard and the garden, but not such great things for the roof.
Of course we haven't re-shingled the roof yet, and after the blistering high winds of the winter it is in worse shape than ever. I took the dog for a walk the other day and found 2 of our shingles in the field across the road, if that is any indication of the winter winds we had.
Before the snow came, I went up onto the roof and caulked everywhere I thought might be a problem - around the vents, the flashing around the chimneys, anywhere the shingles looked particularly worn. Even so, we had a very obvious leak at the beginning of March - a leak we thought we fixed. Today I heard the familiar thwock thwock sound (I know thwock is not a word) above the living room ceiling. Anxious to divert it before it leaked through the ceiling, we boosted me into the attic.
I have been in the attic once before (when we lost the chimney to high winds), but I was a bit more apprehensive this time (memories of the bat in our basement came to mind and I imagined a flock of bats suspended from the rafters). I was relieved to find neither bats nor super-sized spiders. I was especially relieved to find only two leaks, around the vents of course, that could be contained by buckets.
A momentary diversion to some back story: last spring and early summer I watched a starling ( or perhaps many starlings) dart in and out of a hole in our soffits - a hole that was there when we moved in (the Mrs. Previous Owner said it was left over from a dismantled hydro meter). Not wanting them to nest in our attic again this year, a couple of weeks ago, Max stuffed the hole with some 'snow blanket' from the shop out back (a spun polyester we use for work).
Back to today. While I was up there I decided to try and find the nest - we didn't want any birds trapped in the attic if they had already started nesting. I shone my flashlight across the attic (of course it was on the exact opposite side of where my leaks were), expecting to see an abandoned nest perching on the rafters. Instead, I found the outside wall of an extraordinary feat of engineering - a veritable Starling Condo complex. Of couse I didn't have a camera up there, so you will have to imagine:
They have built a domed-shape wall out of mud, straw and insulation from our attic. It is located at the very end of the attic - where the peak of the roof is met by the vertical 'wall' between that joins the slopes (the area inside the triangle, if you will, between ceiling and slopes) . It completely encapsulates the hole that leads to the outside. As far as I could guess it is about 3 feet wide at the base, and perhaps about 2 1/2 feet high. It almost looks the back of a miniature Adobe house. On all sides it seems to be tight up against the attic floor and the "wall". It is HUGE, in comparison to the size of the birds.
Not being able to see inside the nest, I have to wonder - do the starlings live communally, or have they subdivided that half of an adobe structure into individual suites, like a honeycomb? Perhaps it is one big nest where all the eggs are brought, and a nanny is left to guard them. None of my bird books describe the nesting habits of the starling in detail, so a more in-depth search is called for.
I haven't thought about dismantling it - part of me even thinks that we should open the hole up and let them use it again. The whole of the structure is over the soffits or the front porch (ie they couldn't nest through the ceiling) and the structure seems so completely contained that I'm not sure any hazard to our health would exist. I think that I'll have to do some reading.
I was also relieved to see no evidence of bats up there - perhaps I'll build a bat house to keep those guys out.

High Speed Country Style

I work from home a lot, and so high speed internet feels as necessary to my livelihood as my brain. AFTER we signed the papers which confirmed our new ownership of our country home, I discovered that high speed in the country isn't perceived as a necessity and is therefore pretty tricky to acquire affordably. I suppose I should have spent more time reading Harrowsmith magazine, because Tom Cruickshank wrote an editorial on just that topic quite some time ago.
It was an annoying struggle just to find out that I had very little hope for high speed to begin with. I won't bother to elaborate on the fruitlessness of dealing with our utility companies in my search for hookup ( 3 confirmations it was possible using various methods involving wireless, 3 visits from technicians, 3 announcements of failure due to barns /trees / silos in the way), or the frustration in dealing with 20-year old customer service reps who assured me that being billed for high speed despite my lack of such was because in fact I SHOULD be able to receive it....
A call to a local cable / phone / internet provider had resulted in the announcement that EVENTUALLY there would be cable and internet access to my area, but the hookup fee would be about $2000 because they would be running the lines out to our end of nowhere just for the few of us living out here (who were just silly to be living out here anyway, was the implication).
I ended up with dial-up for the short term but when I realized that just downloading my emails would take about 1 1/2 hours, I bit the bullet and got satellite. It was expensive to install - paying for the dish and the receiver and the guy to set it all up, but the monthly rate has been almost on par with cable or phone high speed. The service itself has been OK - a few glitches during blizzards, but not moreso than our satellite TV. It also offers up what I've been calling "high-ish speed", but it's better than dialup. Unfortunately, I also had to sign a 3-yr contract.
So you will understand my dismay when I noticed the trucks bearing the logo of the local cable/ phone / internet company on it, working alongside the road. It turns out that they are running the lines out here, after all (and without my $2000). Slowly they have worked their way out to our house.
On Wednesday there was a knock on my door and a young man in a safety vest announced that he needed to install a conduit to my house (for my eventual hookup, I guess) and was my leachbed in the way?
The conduit was installed in a couple of hours without any digging on our property at all. They have a digger which basically tunnels underground, parallel to the surface, and it seems it pulls the conduit that will eventually hold the wiring with it. The machine itself is remarkably small and quiet. Apparently this is how they have been installing the conduit down our country road ( I had wondered not only how there was so little digging, but how they could be installing it during the height of winter), just burrowing under the ground from driveway to driveway.
I haven't yet received any fliers telling me about the wonderful new service soon to be available in my area, so I'm not sure when I'll have to call the satellite company to break my contract. But it seems to be my luck that we chose to buy in an area which is close enough to 'bedroom community development' that the rural folk have even been noticed. Of course, it could also mean that the developers are eying our end nowhere as possible subdivisions in the future, so that offers up a whole host of other problems. In the interim I'm sure that there will be plenty of families with home businesses and kids (who up to now have relied on antennaes, dialup or satellite for their pop culture) who will sign up so with any luck I won't have to remortgage the house to pay for the service.

Spring brings familiar faces

When we first bought this place, we dealt mostly with the Mrs. She had some tips and suggestions about things in general (although not nearly enough as it turns out) but stumbled on the killdeer.
After we moved in, I noticed that a pair of robins were building a nest on the ledge outside the master bedroom window. When I mentioned this to the Mrs. on a day she had dropped by to pick up some mail, she lit up and said that the robins build a next there EVERY YEAR. She mentioned that there were these birds... and here was the stumble - she didn't know the word in English for what she was trying to describe. These birds that ran up and down the road every year. In my mind, she was talking about the ROAD, the country road that runs in front of our house. I couldn't imagine what she was thinking, so I offered up 'pigeon' and she agreed that was it. Every year the pigeons run up and down the road.
Not so. Every year a pair of KILLDEER (or what I think to be killdeer because according to the 2 books about bird identification that I've been given, there are many types of pipers and other similar birds that might be expected in our region and they all look similar) run up and down our DRIVEWAY. Last year I hated to mow the lawn, for fear that I might run over their nest. By the end of the summer, the adults (with their scrawny 4 offspring) seemed to be hunkered down mostly in the ditch. But this year, there are three adults, and they are keeping pretty close to the parking area. It's still too early to be mowing the lawn (and so to educate them about danger), so I'm a bit worried that they might nest somewhere we don't notice, somewhere in the way of the riding tractor.
Right now they seem to be mostly hanging out near the 'lake' that encompasses 1/5 of one side of our front lawn (a result of the winter thaw and the gravelling that we did in November which has dammed up the water from running over the driveway). They seem to also like the deep grooves the bobcat (and later the snow plow) have made in that part of the yard. It seems like good eating and drinking in that area for a killdeer. But they blend in so well to our winter-killed brown grass that it is hard to see if they've nested or not.
I suppose that it is a matter of watching out for them (or the absence of one, which might indicate a hidden nest) and perhaps leaving off the mowing in that area (which would suit me fine) until the red clover takes over. I'm planning on over-seeding the clover in a week or two, which might eliminate the need for mowing all together - the clover made a huge indent into the grassy lawn last year.
I'm pretty enthralled by the visits from last years' friends, or from the decendents of those parents of last year. I wake up every morning and pull the curtains back, hoping to see the beginnings of a robins' nest on the ledge. How do they know to return and carry on, year after year? But it's a complete bonus to have these signifiers of the approach of spring - the killdeers running, the robins nesting, the other wildlife emerging after a long deep winter. It may likely snow again before May, but at least we know here that spring is settling in.

My New Pantry

Technically we do have a cold cellar. However, with the spring thaw, we've also realized that it is a leaky, damp cold cellar. All of our carefully hoarded jams and jellies and sauces and flours (mine, for my gluten-free baking) were either sprouting moldy lids or worse, were completely soaked. The cold cellar clearly needs of a bit of a reno job. But what to do with our dry goods in the meantime?

We had a closet in the upstairs hallway area that I primarily used as The Dumping Ground... a place to throw the hat or coat or pair of boots one was too lazy to put away properly. It was pretty much a luxury - we do have proper coat closet. So, it has become our pantry.

Converting it was surprisingly easy. I tore out the existing coat hooks, filled the holes and painted. I left the "hat" shelf, which became the top shelf of the new storage area. Max cut some excellent shelves (3/4" plywood was all that we had on hand, which is perfect, considering the weight it has to support) and some 'brackets'. After the paint had dried I just went in, screwed in the braces, lay in the shelves, and started to load it up.

What a huge difference. It's remarkably convenient for cooking - being able to just turn the corner from the kitchen and find a jar of pickles, or some beans. It has also improved our shopping - where in the cold cellar it was "out of sight, out of mind" (ie lets just buy more in case we don't have it at home), now it's easy to take a peek in and figure out what we really need to replace.

I know that people who have lovely kitchens with pantry cupboards already as part of their layout might raise some eyebrows and ask why the big surprise. But I've never had such a kitchen and The Homestead's kitchen doesn't even come close to having sufficient cupboard and storage space. Hence the cold cellar and the mud room. So it's been a luxury to have access to our dried goods.

We are a couple that cooks at home mostly, and Max in particular is an adventuresome cook. We typically have a lot in stock. And now, we only have 4 or 5 extras of everything, and they are dry, accessible, and they look surprisingly reassuring all lined up and ready to go.

Not Quite Noah's Flood Part 1

I've become a bit afraid of wind and water. Strange, since I love to sail. But when it comes to our small homestead, these two forces of nature now seem a bit intimidating.

Over the Christmas holidays, wind tore shingles off our house and sheared off the top part of our furnace chimney stack. Now that spring is approaching and the weather is periodically surging above zero, water has become the new struggle.

I heard on the CBC the other day that the "Greater Toronto Area" has experienced 17 freeze-thaw cycles. I don't know how many such cycles our area has experienced, but since our weather is tempered by both Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, I have to think we've had at least that many. I know that the ground is thawing because I can see the evidence over our septic holding tank - it is much soggier there than I have ever noticed. And the sump pumps have been going non-stop. And, most troubling of all, is the water in the basement.

I thought we had a leak in the water softener, because the water in the utility area seemed to be leaking from the softener. "The Culligan Man" came to check it out and couldn't find a problem. But the weather dipped down into the minus tens and no more water appeared, and so it seemed that the problem was another mystery of our strange little house. What that really means is that our basement leaks.
The layout of our basement would be considered strange to a visitor - the 'finished' part (ie the family room) is in the half of the basement that has no windows. The 'unfinished' part (which means that it has lovely concrete walls and floors and even some studs in place but no drywall) is bright and sunny thanks to the 7 windows that face north, east and south. But when the house was built, someone made the unorthodox decision of scattering the utilities around that area so that the furnace, oil tank, water pump, water softener, water heater and sump pump are all in different places and all near windows. This of course makes finishing that part of the basement more challenging. At least this was my first thought.
Now, having witnessed the pockets of water mysteriously appearing in strange places in the basment (which means not necessarily connected to an outer facing wall) I think that once this part of the basement was finished and the previous owners had discovered that the basement leaked. So they ripped out the flooring and drywall (leaving the studs!) and left that half looking as if it had never been finished. Then they sold the place to us.
I've pretty much figured out where the small drips find their way in to the basement, where the water then pools in some other, low-lying area. My brother-in-law, who does home renos, says that there is a new water-proofing system which can be done from the inside - it doesn't prevent the water from getting through the foundation but it does prevent it from getting into the drywall or flooring. It costs a fraction of what an exterior trenching/waterproofing does, and can be retrofitted or exanded, should the need occur.
The 'Culligan Man' assures me that most houses in this area have leaky basements, although that doesn't give me a lot of comfort. I do, however, know that my grandparents' house floods in the basement every spring and 70 years later my grandmother still walks on the boards that bridge the wet spots - her house is not falling down yet. Our leak problem is then just another add-on to the "HOUSE TO DO" list.

I can't believe that so much time has passed since I last posted. Life just got away from me.
I went to vist my grandmother for a week somewhere along the line. She's 96 and still living in the house she's lived in for at least 70 years. She puts in a kitchen garden every year, and grows enough potatoes and carrots that she is still eating them in February. In talking to her about my plan to try and grow my own food, I asked her when she plants her seeds (she lives in a different zone than I do) and her response was "when the soil is ready". I asked her how she knows when it's ready (hoping for some kind of useful clue that would help me understand my soil) and she looked at me like I was a bit slow and said that she just knew. And I realized that she has spent her whole life depending on that garden and the food she grew there. She fed her children with what she and my grandfather cultivated out behind their house. They hadn't had a lot of money, but even more than that, she was a farmer's daughter - it was the way you ran a household. Raising fruits and vegetables, canning and freezing, putting by for the winter is just what has always been done.
Which of course made me think about what our relationship with food is nowadays. How most people don't know what a freshly-grown tomato tastes like, much less how to go about growing one. How did we get so far away from nourishing ourselves?
So of course lately things keep coming back to how excited I am about trying to turn our little homestead into a lush, thriving personal supermarket.
In the meantime, the snow is melting (and so the basement is flooding...), I planted some red pepper, onions and leeks (and I gave in and bought a heating mat because I'm afraid the house is too cold for the seeds to germinate) and it is definitely the mud season. Once again I appreciate our sump pumps.
Spring is definitely on the horizon.