Race against winter

We’re now in a race to see if we get all the siding up before real winter arrives. We managed to get the most difficult and dangerous part of it done over two days: putting up the siding over the one story roof.

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Now we’re continuing past that section and are nearly halfway done with the whole house. The weather has been challenging at times; it’s been down in the 20s some mornings, and we’ve had an occasional dusting of snow. But we were fortunate to have a couple of very warm days this last weekend, so we were able to paint some more siding.

We also scrambled to put together a hearth pad before the stove itself arrives this coming weekend.

We looked at pre-made pads, but they were expensive ($600 or more) and didn’t quite fit our floor with its posts along the wall. We decided to make our own, not only to save money, but to make something that would fit the actual orientation of the stove and would look less artificial. This was another learning process since we’d never done tiling before. Our first attempt at mixing mortar wasn’t a total success, and it came out a little too dry. As a result a few tiles weren’t stuck down properly and had to be pulled up and redone. The lesson here was to make the mortar a little bit on the wet side, because it dries as you spread it. We did manage to do the grout job successfully. We’ll put a wood trim border around the whole thing after the stove arrives.