In this episode I will cover some of the unique doors and divider applications used in Our Country Cottage and In The Beginning, ITB month 16 sees power, paint, panels and plowing. The spec for the Our Country Cottage package called for interior doors to be your standard hollow core doors. My partner, and I must agree, wanted a more rustic solid wood door with a bit of character and cottagey feeling. And so it was. Knotty alder doors are in most of the openings, and, with black hardware, give us the look we were going for. On to the not so common ones. The master bedroom is upstairs with a clear view to the south, if you don’t block it off. The stairs run, against the wall up to a landing big enough for a double door. I originally had envisioned a large barn door type of thing that would roll aside to open up the view. That idea didn’t work when I realized, because of the roof design, it had no place to roll. Plan 2. Two sets of double doors with glass, top to bottom, French doors that is. The first set was no problem, it would open onto the landing as intended. The second set, right beside it, would open up over the stairs. The answer came in the form of a Juliet balcony. A sort of non balcony, actually. All that was needed was a railing mounted on the outside of the double door, above the stairs. I think this solution was inspired by a trip to New Orleans we had taken a couple of years earlier. We also added a few New Orleans esque design ideas to the railings going down the stairs too. We like to keep the bedroom cooler than the rest of the cottage so to that end we got the two sets of double doors with insulated, clear, glass. I have talked about the folding doors between the sun room and the living room before but I’ll just give you a bit more information. The sunroom was not intended to be heated in the winter, but kept closed off and used as an air lock. This would minimize the amount of heat required for the living room during the cold days. We needed an outside folding door, but for inside. First we went to the door/window supplier for the Our Country Cottage package. They had some gorgeous ones but wanted about what you would pay for a small German car for them. Way too much. These were the ones you see in mansions, opening up to the pool, BBQ, fire pit area. The hunt was on and we found a supplier relatively quickly at about the price of a used German car. Now because we found them we had to co-ordinate the manufacture, delivery, installation of them ourselves. We also had to supply the size details, blue prints etc. There were also a few challenges. First the folding door was to be mounted outside in. We had to do it that way because there wasn’t enough room in the sunroom for the doors to fold up into. Besides there were exterior doors out of the sunroom on both ends of the folding door, so if the door was folded it would interfere. The manufacturer was concerned with reversing the door as it was designed to seal out weather from the outside, side of the door, but when told that the door was actually being used inside they were OK with it. Second my partner didn’t want a threshold on the floor. You know, the raised thing you step over when you come through an exterior door. It was to be flush with the lower track running in a channel in the floor. No tripping hazard. This brings us to the third challenge. The floor would be cement, so the channel would have to be accounted for before the floor was poured. This flush threshold came up late, in the design process, and caused some scurrying about to make sure things could be done the way we wanted, but it worked out. Oh, and there was a screen option that got deleted, too. One more thing, the locking hardware had to be reversed. The door is in three sections, each being about three feet wide with glass top to bottom. There is a track top and bottom and two sections can be locked in place leaving the third to operate like a regular door. There were a few adjustments required, with the manufacture paying us another visit, and during construction, all three sections, were off and on a few times, once we found them out in the garage. A bit upsetting. They now work great. My partner made a draft stop thingy for the bottom of the door and put chain in it so it would stay put. In the summer we have it curled up, like a snake, at one end of the door. The next item is a room divider in the back bedrooms. The original design had two separate rooms with closets in between them, but we had reduced the size to keep the overall cottage size down which made the closet separator impractically small, so we removed the closet, separator all together, leaving one bigger room. But we kept both bedroom doors. The idea was to utilize some type of room divider. The internet is full of neat things to divide rooms, from free standing Japanese screens to heavy duty metal, powered dividers suitable for convention halls. The idea of using a garage door kept coming back to me. Easy to get and inexpensive. I had talked to out site supervisor, at the time, about the concept of using a garage door and he didn’t think it was a great idea, but we talked about it more and more and one day I showed up and there it was, already installed. It did look a bit ruff, kinda like a garage door in a room, with all the tracking exposed. As it turned out, we had some left over planking from the sunroom, or wherever, which we used to create a false ceiling that would hide the track near the ceiling and hide the whole door while it was up. The vertical tracks were boxed in ready for me to make doors to conceal them when not in use. Maybe I’ll get to it this year. For the time being, the garage door is pushed up and down into place. There are some hinged bits of wood that keep it up and hide the door completely when its up and, when the door is down, it covers the gap between the ceiling and the door. I still haven’t put a handle on the door yet relying on gripshon from just pushing on it to get it up and down. Funny story. I was showing off our garage door divider to someone, I think he had come up to do something to the generator, could be wrong. Anyway, I was pulling the door down while talking to him, ie, not paying much attention, and became aware of some major pain in one of my fingers. I looked to see what was going on and noticed my finger tip in between two sections of the door. The sections were closed, but my finger tip was in between them. Metal sections by the way, no flexing. I pushed the door up to release my finger that was now quite flat and throbby. My guest asked if I was OK and I assured him I was, trying to be cool, while wrapping this piece of jelly, that used to be my finger tip, in paper towel. He left shortly there after. After sitting down for a bit, I called my partner to make an appointment for me at a clinic back in the city. I won’t go into anymore details, other than to say, the hour and a half drive back was interesting. The trip to the clinic got me a tetanus shot and a referral for an x-ray. The x-ray revealed that I had broken that end bone of my finger. And to add insult to injury, as I was leaving the x-ray place I jammed that same finger into the door handle. I had a finger splint on so it only hurt a lot more. It was decided that it probably didn’t need surgery, which suited me fine. It does point a little off center, at the tip, though. Another interior door that is a little different, is the one leading into the hall from the mud room. The mud room is another air lock so I selected a door with insulated glass from top to bottom, to let light in from the mud room window and keep the cold out. Now, this next door thing was a total fluke. The design of the garage loft gave us storage areas with very large openings. There are two, one either side of the reading nook about five and a half feet high by four and a half feet wide. I could have had them closed in but I didn’t want to waste the room. My first thought was short barn door kinda thing but, again there was not enough room to slide the doors open. Four and a half feet is too wide for a single door to swing open, so I started thinking about cutting it in half and going saloon door style but still, not quite. At this point I was starting to put stuff in the loft. Desk, exercise stuff, shelves and a table. Also there was a table tennis table that my partners father had built. It was rather large but constructed in two pieces and collapsible. One day I was sitting in the loft trying to come up with a solution to the storage door issue, when I glanced at the table tennis table leaning up against the wall and the opening that needed to be filled. They looked about the same size. Hmmmm. I dragged one over and put it in position. The width was perfect, but a bit short. I put the other side of the table on a movers dolly and awkwardly wheeled that into the other hole. Perfect. They are still there right now. I will build a brace on the dolly so that it is more secure. To top it off, the green of the table tennis table top is not that dissimilar to the green I painted in that area. Cool. I just have my log book in front of me now, open to the page where I documented this dolly idea, brace and all, dated almost a year ago. I really have to get on some of this stuff. Enough of doors and dividers Now ITB, In The Beginning, Month 16, (Nov) This is the segment where I try to remember how Our Country Cottage, came to be. Last time I mentioned that I took lots of pix for reference purposes. Well this time, along with the pix, I am relying on receipts and invoices to verify my facts. The supplier/builder sent me copies of all the invoices that, Our Country Cottage, accumulated in an effort of transparency. Very handy, not so much for checking up on stuff, but more for details. And try to keep them in order. File folders etc, as soon as they come in. Under the heading, I’ll organize it later, well it’s later and I still haven’t. But I do have the folders in the original archive box that was created, at the time. It works a lot better than a stack of receipts. And the list of receipts from the supplier/builder was in electronic form, organized by company name, easy to go through. Month 16 started off with enough snow that I had to plow the drive. It was the first attempt at using that new blade, I had acquired before summer, on my skid steer. It worked well, and I got the job done without wrecking too much of the drive. I remember having to clear some of the snow round the front of the cottage, so that some work might continue. My skid steer has metal tracks on it, which made it easy to slide and skid sideways on the ice. Lots of fun with big boy toys. The utility room had the hot water pre-heater in it and the battery room revealed the battery box complete with batteries in it. Keep in mind the battery box is large, almost nine feet long and over three feet high at the back, housing twelve batteries weighing three hundred plus pounds each. That’s almost 4000 pounds of batteries. Just did the math. Our next visit we had carpet sample boards with us to select the color and style of carpet for the stairs. I noticed that there had been some wiring done in the battery room. The main inverter/control unit and the two charge controllers were mounted on the wall. A battery was sitting on the floor, out of the box. I also found the top caps for the poles that the panels were to be mounted to. A week later, we found all the interior doors and jams stacked in the garage and more wiring done in the battery room. And a week after that, we found people working there when we arrived. The frames, that hold the solar panels, were being assembled on the top of the poles. Yup, up scaffolding, in the snow and the wind etc. Inside the cottage, found doors being hung. It must have been about now that the generator was being run. I have a picture of the generator with the snow behind it melted. Two days go by, and the actual solar panels are being mounted on the poles. Inside, more doors are hung and some handles, too. The handles we chose are a lever style with a curl at the end. Our installer had put them on with the curl going up. Well the curl needed to go down. 50/50 chance. The kitchen area was full of boxes and lumber. The place was getting messy, mainly because work was getting done. Just hard to look at sometimes. I noticed that the propane level was starting to drop. The last visit of the month, we find we have our appliances, in the garage. Again I take pix to verify the models were correct. Inside is starting to get exciting. The kitchen cabinets, counters and island are installed along with the vanities in the bathrooms. The handles were even on. It’s really starting to come together. A hatch was installed in the mud room, leading to the utility room, complete with ships ladder. We won't have to pry up that piece of plywood that covered the hole ,anymore. The utility room had seen some activity as well. The recirculating pumps, for the in floor radiant heating, and domestic hot water, were mounted and in the process of being hooked up. Their packing box was on the floor, so I took a pic of that, too. A second hatch had been installed in the pantry leading to the crawl space. I am not sure if the stairs were there, at that time, but a regular set of wood steps would make it an easy access to the crawl space. And, yes, there was a ships ladder, leading down into the battery room. Much better than a regular ladder that had been stuffed in the hole for the past little while. Painting was also beginning. The corners and trim had been cut in. I remember our site supervisor having a few doubts about the color. I must admit, when you look at the color we had chosen next to the primed white wall, it was a little jarring. I had to keep the faith. It will look great once it’s all done. I hope. It was sometime this month that a little yellow construction heater showed up. We had tried to use a propane heater but the pressure was too low for the application, so it was a little yellow electric heater. This, about, fifteen inch cube would heat the whole cottage, letting construction and paint continue. It was at the end of month 16 that I noticed the propane level dropping faster and the first record of the time on the generator was 194.4 hours. And so the Our Country Cottage, power system slowly staggered to life, its primary components, the solar panels still not quite ready. Snow was on the ground and temperatures were falling and required everything that had to be done outside alot more effort. I couldn’t help but think of the warm summer days that had passed with little being done. That about wraps it up for ITB, month 16. This podcast the, Our Country Cottage Update, has not much to report, other than the temperatures are being sent as expected and they are getting warmer and warmer. My attitude is starting to change, too. I am starting to look longingly at the pix as I do these podcasts and am planning on calling the plumber soon. Correction for Episode 14, the section for the heating in the garage loft floor was an 8 x 8 foot square not a 10 x 10 square foot section . Next podcast, Episode#16 ITB “In The Beginning” month 17 and something else. For pictures and more info, you can visit our website at www.ourcountrycottageanarrative.com If you have any comments, questions or if you would like to be added to the “Friends of OCCaN” Our Country Cottage A Narrative, mailing list, you can email me at John@ourcountrycottageanarrative.com. Members on the mailing list will get website and podcast updates as soon as I do :). The Our Country Cottage a Narrative podcast is on iTunes, Stitcher and Google Play so you can subscribe there and get the podcast downloaded automatically when they get released. Till next time have a good one.
