Blog de Puree

First race in five years and it wasn’t pretty. I’ll start with the ugly. The ugly: I got smoked by 40 to 50 year-old men in the class bracket that started after mine, who rowed past me like I was out for a leisure row. My balance and course awareness sucked and my left forearm [...]

It’s been a long time since I’ve rowed competitively–the fall of 2001 to be exact. I placed third in the novice single class of the New Hampshire Championships. I haven’t been rowing all summer for nothing, and tomorrow I return to competition at the Slocum River Regatta in Dartmouth, Mass. With this 2 mile race [...]

A busy day for the electrician today. There are wires everywhere and Randye thinks she may have heard him cursing out the old wiring setup. Boxes for outlets and light switches are in the walls. He’ll be here tomorrow as well to hopefully finish his roughs so we can move on to the next phases.

It was decided Thursday that the electrician would come on Friday and possibly finish his work on Saturday. The team from Perry Brothers Construction also kept busy with a number of items as the rough nears a possible completion and we move on to the wall and cabinetry phase. On Thursday, they built the basic [...]

Yesterday, I was schooled on the water by one of the better rowers at my club. We did one-minute intervals and I was able to stay with him for the first three or so. After that, he just smoked me up and down the river. It was pitiful! Even moreso because he is in his [...]

Well, the electrician never showed today to do his rough work. Supposedly he’s the Marblehead electric inspector too. Either he was too busy or Marblehead is on the struggle status. Our contractors were none too pleased either, but hopefully we’ll see him tomorrow. On the up-side, the Amesbury plumbing inspector came by and gave us [...]

Carpentry and piping and strapping, oh my! A lot of small things were taken care of in the kitchen yesterday. The crew put down sub-flooring in the kitchen, which basically amounts to plywood on top of the original floor beams. They also fastened the strapping to the kitchen and dining room ceilings so that we’d [...]

Well, not really, but it sort of looks like it. Randye and I put some tape lines on the floor on Saturday to get a feel for where the island, cabinets and refrigerator would be placed, as well as to make sure our final granite measurements and placement of the kitchen radiator were correct. It [...]

The crew finished up the second week today with the weather wrap on the back of the house and sistering up the kitchen ceiling joists with 2×8 joists. The added joists will allow us to install the ducts for the Miele hood and the ceiling lights. They’ll also provide added support for the office upstairs [...]