Several people have told us that we must hike up to Nichols Ledge -- and they've all said how beautiful the views are. And, in fact, we'd seen a photograph taken from the ledge in a book of Vermont photos our friend Peter Floyd gave us. We'd been meaning to do this, of course, but unpacking, coordinating contractors, cleaning, and so on have seemed to be more important. Finally, we took a break today and went hiking.

The trail to Nichols Ledge lies off our road about 2.5 miles from our house. Timothy, Karen, and I walked; I carried Clara in the Baby Björn. The weather was perfect for a gentle hike through the woods -- upper 50s, probably. And the leaves! You can see something of the views we had in the pictures, of course, but it was much more magnificent than the pictures show! There were some muddy bits, and some spots where it was awkward with Clara on my front instead of my back, but it was less than half an hour before we reached the ledge.

At the top, we stopped to rest, take lots of pictures, look to see if we could see our house (we couldn't, but did spy a farmhouse belonging to a family only about a mile from our house), and to chat with the other three people who arrived a little while after us.

Karen and I -- and even Timothy -- have done some hiking, though I'd hesitate to call us "hikers." We've hiked up above the tree line in New Hampshire, Newfoundland, and Austria -- much higher than this ledge. But the view here down over the ponds, over the flaming red, orange, yellow maples (much brighter than the photos show) and the green conifers, was one of the very best I've ever seen.

Our next-door neighbor went up in a plane and took some pictures of his house, and (of course) got ours as well. His is the house and outbuildings with red roofs; ours is diagonally across the field from it. We own a rectangle back from the road including about 30% of the field, back a little ways into the forest.

The last photo shows downtown Cabot. Many of the buildings in the near right are parts of the Cabot School. The second building on the semicircle is Timothy's building (pre-K through 2nd grade). You can see the Cabot Union Church, the town green, the village store, the post office, Masonic Hall, hardware store, and -- in the top left -- the Cabot Creamery.

Another picture of the school bus just after Timothy has boarded. The view seems so different from day to day!

A small series of pictures of views from our house this afternoon.

The photo of our house shows the "L" from the back: the wall with the deck is going to be completely re-done, as you'll see in later photos.

Timothy and Karen had a lot of fun playing softball with a very big ball. Timothy got several home runs.

Another series of pictures of views from our house this afternoon.

The indoor photo shows the room (the living room) with the deck that you can see the outside of in October 5th's pictures. The last view shows why we're re-doing the back wall: we'd like to see this view from the living room!

Karl and Michelle sent us this photo of their new daughter Kara, now three weeks old.

I was going to take a day off from photography, but I thought you'd all want proof that we really do get snow this early here! These are night shots taken with a flash with automatic settings (1/30 second, f-stop 1.8 for both; ISO 100 for the first, 278 for the second; digital camera).

We got about 2" of snow last night. None stuck on the roads. Later, we heard that another high section of town got about 5". It melted everywhere by the end of the day, though.

This morning I got some dawn shots of the western view-to-be from our living room and bedroom.

Here are the final "before" shots of the living room. Then we see Matt and Lee beginning to take off the siding and pulling out the (woefully inadequate) insulation.

Work continues. From the old timber framing (see especially the slanted beam on the right side of the first picture), Matt could tell that the building was first put up no later than the 1850s or so. The "square rule" became regularly used in the 1830s and was pretty much universal by the 1860s; it enabled builders to use precut pieces rather than custom-cut each piece to fit in its particular spot. We'd heard this part of the house was built in the 1830s, so this is nice corroboration.

In the second picture, you can see the stairway (we'll be taking it out) up to our bedroom.

They've gotten the living room wall and staircase out today and reframed it for the new windows and doors.

What an absolutely beautiful day! It was in the low 70s all afternoon, with lots of sun and a gentle breeze. Wow! Timothy pointed out the sunrise when we got up -- and I just had to get the camera out.

Today was the Apple Pie Festival in Cabot: apple pie contests, cider making, craft bazaar, hayrides, etc. We had a great time! Here are some pictures from the hayride; the view is out over the Cabot Creamery. The farm in the background is the Bothfeld's -- they're not far from our house.

Karl and Michelle sent us a photo of their new daughter Kara, now four weeks old.

Work continues. One double-hung window will fit in each of the smaller spaces; a pair of French doors will open out on the deck in the central, larger space.

Work continues. Through a mix-up in communication, we lost the three-hole bench in our indoor outhouse to the carpenters. We have the lids still, and most of the bench -- which we'll try to figure out a good place to store, just for the historical interest.

On the other hand, they've removed clapboarding on part of the house where we'd all assumed we would find rot - and found that really only the clapboards need replacing. Yea!

Work continues. It turns out that there won't be room for the stairs to descend from the indoor outhouse through part of the back porch down into the basement/garage as we had planned. The new plan is to use the outhouse as a closet and to take out the old back porch. The back half of the back porch will now be stairs going to the garage, while the interior half of the porch will now be an alcove in the living room. The new closet door will open on the alcove side, rather than onto the main part of the living room. A half-glass door will open from the alcove onto the top of the stairs, while a small double-hung window will open north. This way, we'll actually be able to see views to the north as well as the south and west from the living room. This is probably a better plan than we'd originally had, so we're happy we've been forced to make this change.

Timothy, Clara, and Karen raked up some leaves while I painted the porch door dark green. Later, I caught some good pictures of Karen and Clara.

Again we hiked up Nichols Ledge today, this time with our friend Clara, who came to stay with us on Tuesday. She's helped a lot with projects and with kids -- and it's been great having her around for interesting conversation and company. After our hike, though, we drove her into Montpelier to catch a bus, as she's next going to visit another friend who's at Marlboro College. It's amazing how much the view here has changed since October 1!

Here's a picture of Clara before the contractors arrive for the day. Just look at all those teeth!

Work continues. You can see the new work I mentioned on the 18th, with the back porch now reframed and the dry wall between the old back porch (now "alcove") and the rest of the living room now punched out. They've built the new stairs to the garage!

Work is progressing upstairs, too. The framing for the new windows in our bedroom is complete. While the carpenters have been doing this big stuff, we've been pulling gray-painted plywood off the beautiful old floor in the front "bunk room."

The old stairs from the kitchen to the cellar need to be removed so that the old furnaces can be removed and to ease the work of the guys dealing with installing drainage and a better (i.e., non-dirt) floor in the cellar. Here are a historical shot of the stairs before they were removed -- and one from our pantry with the stairs missing altogether. The trash has now been cleaned up, of course, and the furnaces have begun coming out.

We're removing an old wood furnace and an old oil furnace, both of which will be replaced by a highly efficient oil boiler in two or three weeks. But that accounts for only the old (1790s) Cape part of the house. The newer (1830s) part will be heated by a masonry stove, once it's fixed in December. For this we think we need four to five cords of wood, which has finally begun arriving this week after multitudinous phone calls beginning in August. The wood neatly stacked in the field in the second "wood" picture is about one cord. By the end of the week, we should have more than a cord of dry wood, 5 cords of "seasoned" wood (on its way to being dry), and 5 cords of green wood (getting dry for next winter).

Work continues. The electrician has been working hard on overhead lights, recepticles, light switches, conduits, etc. The studs between the living room and the old porch (alcove) have been removed, lots of insulation has been added. We're getting very excited about this project!

Halloween is coming up. Timothy made a graham-cracker house in story hour at the library this morning. All were encouraged to attend in costume -- Timothy was a bat, as you can see.

I've just added photos and commentary for September 1st and August 5th. Still working my way backwards through the summer....

Karen made us a wonderful Sunday breakfast of pumpkin pancakes. Here, Timothy and Clara are waiting patiently. A little later, Timothy helped Clara open and play with her gift.

Karen presents Clara with an applesauce cake, which seemed to be much appreciated.

Klipsi keeps me company while I work.

Work continues. Matt has just taken out the five old casement windows in the living room, which will be replaced by four double-hung windows. The temporary brace is holding up a temporary beam, which is "sistered" onto the original, inadequate header beam. Ultimately, we'll just see four windows sitting snugly in a row, secure in the knowledge that the ceiling won't start sagging. :-)

Clara's thinking about walking....

I've just added photos and commentary for September 6th and 22nd and October 6th and 13th -- all pictures of our new niece, Karl and Michelle's daughter Kara.

The last two days have been pretty incredible. Yesterday, the insulation team arrived in the afternoon and began drilling into the sides, tops, and bottoms of most of our window cavities to see whether they could blow cellulose in; today they finished up most of the job. Our window frames are now nice and snug -- but what a mess they caused in making them so! Cellulose was flying everywhere: from the nozzle of the sprayer, of course, from some of the other holes that had been drilled, from over ceiling beams (and down onto everything), and even out through the clapboarding outside the house! We've cleaned up much of it, together with all the shavings of drilled wood....

Last night's moonrise was awfully nice. Here's how it looked from the front of our house.

The woman who's taking our old furnaces also came yesterday with a crew of three or four male helpers to haul it away. It took about two and a half hours to remove it; estimates of the furnace's weight range from 600 to 1,000 pounds. The cellar looks almost empty without it! She'll be coming back tomorrow to remove the (much lighter) oil furnace and humidifier.

One of our carpenters is away this week, but the other has continued working quickly on the renovation of our living room. The new windows and doors (most of them) should arrive for this either on Friday or next Monday. We're very much looking forward to this being done!

Our plumber came today, too, to remove the old kerosene-fueled hot water heater that we had been using when we first moved in. (We're now temporarily using an electric hot water heater that was already hooked up.) A friend of ours will be taking it away tomorrow to fix (he hopes!) and use in a new home he's building. The plumber also removed some old copper piping used to bring kerosene to a heater that has subsequently been moved; this will help the carpenters immeasurably in their quest for building us the perfect living room.

But that's not all! Today we also had two people here digging a drainage ditch and sump in our cellar. This is mostly pretty uneventful work, but today they had rented a huge power saw (not sure of the technical name) for cutting through bedrock. We have quite a lot of "ledge" in our cellar (and garage), which we fully intend to leave alone; but channels had to be cut for the drainage ditch. The ground-up rock instantly transmogrified itself into huge clouds of dust that hung in the air such that breathing was nearly impossible. We had previously plugged up the now-useless air ducts to the first floor, fortunately, but there are enough cracks in the flooring -- and there's a big enough gap in our kitchen's basement door -- that large quantities began hanging in the air of our house, slowly settling onto every available surface, joining the cellulose and wood shavings. At least it's just good clean 2,000,000-year-old rock dust!

But wait! There's more! The 3-man crew from Window Masters also arrived this morning and began taking windows out of our house, removing the putty and grouting from the outside, removing each of the six small single panes, routing out channels for one new large double pane, and overlaying that with new muntins (pre-painted dark green, our new outdoor trim color). In the meantime, they also installed new jamb liners in the window frames (incidentally covering over two of the four holes in each frame drilled by the insulation team earlier). Thus, our old windows in their original sashes are now double-glazed "simulated divided light" double-hung windows -- that tilt in and pop out for cleaning and painting, etc. Cool! Window Masters will remain here for the rest of the week and will return for more work on Monday (through, maybe, Tuesday).

Tomorrow, almost exactly the same cast of thousands will show up again to continue their work. The only real change will be that we'll swap the plumber for an electrician. Oh, and of course both the furnace-removing woman and the hot-water-heater-removing man will show up, too.

In the midst of all this, of course, we had to celebrate Hallowe'en. I waited here for long-legged ambitious trick-or-treaters (there were none) and got a little work in on the side. Karen and the kids went down to the village to do some trick-or-treating; this is, apparently, what all of the hill-folk do on Hallowe'en -- to the extent, in fact, that the Girl Scouts solicit donations of candy early in the month to give to village residents for passing out! (As Ethan Allen said, "The Gods of the hills are not the Gods of the valleys.")

Karen, Timothy, and Clara then went to a party in the Cabot School gym, where a good time was had by all. The Powers That Be [PTB] really want the littler kids (under 6th Grade) to get home early, so everyone who's at the party (6:00 - 7:30) signs in. At 8:00, the PTB give away ten prizes -- but the catch is that you have to be home to receive their phone call! The Mueller-Harders were indeed home, and Timothy has won a prize. He'll find out what it is when he returns to school on Tuesday.

So here's our house as it looked this evening. Timothy designed the Jack o'Lantern; Karen carved it. We painted the door and the window boxes dark green a week or two ago. When we get to it, btw, the clapboarding will probably get painted a medium or medium-light gray.

I just realized that I didn't get a picture of Timothy in costume. He was resplendent as Georgie the Ghost -- and was the only ghost at the party.

I'm quite sure that this is the first Hallowe'en I've experienced where it was snowing. Very odd. It felt more like Thanksgiving. More anon.