So maybe I was a bit harsh last time when I said that nothing had been done to the house since last we'd checked on it. I just downloaded my photos, and saw a few things worth mentioning.

They sealed up the western wall (which had huge gaps between the wall boards before. Now there's  a nice plywood layer on the exterior and a Styrofoam layer on top of that (see below):

With all of these insulating layers, our heat should be free. Plus, though it's hard to see in the photo, a roof gutter has been installed on this side as well. Another step towards victory over the water in the basement.

A couple of questions for the world at large-- feel free to comment:

1) What's the difference between the Styrofoam and the Tyvek? I'm too damn tired to go searching the web for the answer... doesn't someone out there in blog land just know this?

2) Now that we have a white gutter, does that mean we have to have white trim? I kind of wanted to have a color since the rest of the exterior will be that gray Nantucket-looking cedar shingle, but I worry that it will look insane with the already white gutter. We saw a house with a similar color situation up the street, and their trim is black, which Josh loves, of course. He says it's really chic. I was hoping for something more cheerful, but I may lose out as cheerful might equal insane, in this instance. Any thoughts?

So not a hell of a lot has happened vis a vis construction in the past week, causing my husband Josh and me to fall into a bit of a funk when we checked out the house on Saturday. To try and lift our spirits, we took the three second drive down to Azurest beach (pictured above) which is where I learned to swim as a child. It always makes me feel better to be there, even if it's freezing cold and the conversation still centers around contractors, lack of funds, feelings of being overwhelmed, etc.

Sag Harbor, in case I haven't mentioned this before, has historically been a summer haven for African Americans lucky enough to consider spending time at the beach in the first place. Most of the  village's beachfront property is black owned, and divided into three adjoining developments: Azurest, Sag Harbor Hills and Ninevah-- as kids, we used to have all kinds of ridiculous rivalries based solely on where we lived. Those days are long over, and the once private areas are now officially part of the village (except maybe Ninevah) I even read an article in the local paper about how "hot" the real estate values are in these areas. My how times have changed. This is a topic that warrants much more attention... maybe during the slower construction weeks (like this one... aaaargh!!!!) I can go into more detail about the area and its singular history.

Thanks to global warming, winter has been slow in coming this year, but it's finally gotten cold in our neck of the woods. I was relieved to see that the house has a winter coat as well-- in the form of Tyvek, that white wrapping that you always see on houses under construction. Curious about what the hell this stuff actually is, I went searching on the web (instead of finishing an article for the April issue of the magazine) to see what I could learn.

  Turns out that this paper/fabric/film combo material was invented by DuPont in 1965 and is basically a near impermeable protective sheet that is used for all sorts of things. I now remember going to a club once where you had to put on Tyvek suits over your clothes and then you entered into a giant food fight free for all. When it comes to construction, it's used as a protective membrane to keep heat inside and driving rain out. Amazing that this this sheet of what looks like paper can make such a difference to the structure of a house. And save us loads in energy bills as well. It's a miracle we managed to survive our first two years in this place, what with the lack of insulation, much less the absence of this miracle material. Ah the things you learn when you're supposed to be working...

Now I admit that this is not a really attractive photo, but to me it looks glorious. This is our basement yesterday afternoon. Granted, it hasn't rained in a few days... but there was a fairly serious rain mid week, and even the rudimentary trench that has been dug around the house seems to have helped quite a bit. What has also helped a good deal, I am sure, is the newly installed half round roof gutter. Here are two photos (Actually, I took many more, because I am now the type of person who gets really excited by this kind of thing, but I'm sparing you all this voyage into my insanity.) Oh and the above link is to a great site filled with all sorts of technical info on the structure of houses. Great procrastination...

Here you can see how the gutter is set up to guide the rain off of the roof and down into the trench (which then diverts the water into the street). This may be obvious to most of you, but I have never given this type of drainage issue one split second of thought before now.

Here's a detail of the part where the pipe moves from one section of the roof to another (aka where I start to drift off into insanity, taking multiple photos of a drain pipe. Sheesh.)

Now we need to test it all and see how it works when it really pours. I've just checked the weather, which looks pretty dry for the next little while. Good for building, I guess, but I'm secretly disappointed. I suppose this little story will just have to sit tight for a bit until Mother Nature hooks us up with a good soaking. Till then, read this little tidbit on French drains, and call yourself informed.

So right now I'm hoping that we haven't just built ourselves a huge problem underneath our house, but I can't be sure. Back in the happy days, before the renovation times, when we still had grass in our yard, we had no basement, and hence no water problems. Now we have a basement that fills up every time it rains. OK it doesn't fill up, but there's definitely water down there. Putting the roof on did improve things significantly, but after every rain, we have wet walls and a tiny indoor pond. Note how unhappy my husband Josh looks as he tries to usher the water down the tiny drain and sump pump that is in permanent residence down there.

The solution? Hard to say. We seem to have a grading problem, meaning that water runs down a hill straight into the basement through the place where the foundation meets the floorboards. What we're trying to do right now is dig a trench around the house, thus tricking the water into heading down a different path, onto the street. Maybe this is called a French drain, but I'm not sure:

Click below to see more about this and perhaps to offer us some advice...

OK. Another snag. We've just gotten the window estimates back from Marvin and it's going to take them ELEVEN WEEKS to deliver our windows to us. Which is a huge drag as we were planning on more like 6 to 8. I have yet to speak to our contractor about this... Thus far, I have just been practicing deep breathing exercises while my husband works himself into a frenzy. Lucky for me, Josh has left town on a job and won't be back for a few days, during which time I will have hopefully learned to meditate and be well on my way to achieving ultimate happiness. But until then, we are also trying to figure out with our window/door salesman Tim, who I still love, just what, exactly, the hold-up is about. Maybe we can come up with a fix that's a little bit better than 3 months.

My mother sent me this link from Money magazine about home renovation that I think is oddly apt.

Hey I just found this photo from back in September (9/19, to be exact). This is what the western wall of the house looked like before it was shorn of it's tar and god-knows-what siding. (see previous post) How much cooler does it look now? It's almost a shame to put shingles over it...

They've taken off just about all of the old shingling now.... revealing the bare bones of the house in all of it's glory. It's kind of too bad we can't just cover this stuff with a really thick piece of Plexiglas and call it a day. It'd be the coolest house in the 'hood, for sure. Although my poor neighbors-- aka my parents-- would probably have a fit. Not to mention the Historical Review board. Though we may have an argument if we say we're exposing the true history of the house. Anyway, how great is it that you can see the outline of an old roof on the first floor? I wish that there were photographs of what this place looked like in the late 1800's... we haven't turned up any, though I haven't really looked very hard. They didn't have Google Earth back then.

Here's a front corner, where you can get a better view of the west wall... Our architect Carl hypothesized that the front building might once have been a barn with a wide door (where one of the windows is now) and a hayloft above, which would explain the gaps between the horizontal planks on the upper level. Hay needs to breathe, evidently, so haylofts were often semi-open structures. We do know that the front part of the house was moved to it's current site sometime around 1840 (give or take a decade) and that the structure was actually built around the beginning of the 1800's. I love this stuff, and find the wooden siding to be incredibly beautiful. I took tons of photos... Here's one more-- a nice note to end on as you can see some of the new construction inside...

Yes we have finally finally decided on windows. I know you are all relieved. A long journey, to be sure, and I have learned that I tend to make things far more difficult for myself than they have to be, but whatever. We have seen the light and are ordering Marvin's true divided light, six over six, double hung windows for our whole house. Or more accurately, for 2/3 of our house, as we already have 6 windows IN PLACE!!! (see above photo of a thrilled me standing in front of the old window in the new dormer in one of the bedrooms upstairs.) Our architect Carl was right... it makes sense to match the windows we already have, and Marvin is the only mainstream company that still makes the damned things. And can deliver them within a reasonable time frame, at a reasonable-ish cost (though there have been skeptics-- we'll see how it goes). Now granted, single pane glass is less energy efficient, but these babies come with storm windows (and screens!) so while we will have the hassle of seasonally changing the outer layers, we still reap the benefits of extra insulation when we need it. Plus it'll be a fun family chore that will bring us (both) closer together as we climb the ladders to put in the storms on the second floor.

The path to this decision was a long and winding one. Click below to hear about it for yourselves...

Right now I'm too brain dead from an exhausting day of mishaps and meetings to really go into what's happening currently with the house. We left our car out here during our absence, so we took the bus... oh no wait... the Hampton Jitney... to Sag Harbor and walked to the house from town. Very cool that we can actually do that. We hopped in the car this am to go eat breakfast, sat at the bar next to a guy that the waitress clearly hated (which sucked for the general vibe of our meal) and then jumped back into the car to check out windows at the nearby Marvin dealership. But the car had other plans and decided not to start. Some kind of electric short, we are told by Jack, the trusty mechanic who picks us up and conveniently has my parents' 20 something year old stationwagon at his shop for us to borrow. So now our car is at Jack's for the next, oh, week or so, while we drive the old diesel wagon which accelerates from 0 to 60 in about a minute and a half. Sigh. I shouldn't complain. At least we got back on the road and over to Water Mill to check out windows. I'll get into that next time, because right now I'm too exhausted to do anything but complain. Even though everything is going along relatively smoothly and my husband and I are still speaking to each other.

Sometimes the whole thing is just too much to take.

One thing I do continue to do, though, is to look at other people's stuff and consider it for use in my own place. Like the cool fence pictured above that belongs to a friend in California whom we visited before heading back to NY after our end-of-year break. Sure it's not very mid-1800's feeling, but it's actually easy to construct and looks really cool. We have to fence our entire garden in, so maybe something like this is our ticket.

Any thoughts?

We got back from the west coast early this am, but my mind is still in sunny California. On New Years eve, my husband Josh and I took a break from our fellow vacationers (we shared a house with a group of friends) and drove into the hills behind Santa Barbara with nothing more than a vague desire to check out some beautiful scenery. We climbed some slopes, saw an impressive dam (the Bradbury dam, to be exact) and then turned down the road to Los Olivos (pictured above) in search of a cup of coffee. Little did we know that we had stumbled upon one of the area's finest spots for wine tasting. Once we recognized our good fortune, we rose to the challenge and visited several tasting rooms to sample the goods.

Boy did we hit the jackpot. We slid into the Tensley Vineyards tasting room right before closing time and had the great fortune of meeting Joey Tensley, the most easygoing and low key vineyard owner you'll ever encounter. By the time we'd finished falling in love with everything we tasted (especially the desert wine) we found ourselves ordering a case to be shipped back home, especially excited to learn that the tiny number of bottles (often under 100 cases of each wine) are being sipped by diners at Per Se, Jean Georges and  Gotham Bar and Grill (three of the best eateries in NY!)

Anyway, run don't walk. Buy some wine from these people. You won't be sorry. I promise to get back on point and discuss renovations in the next post.