Mean Irene

Glenlochan and the boathouse and our oysters all survived Mean Irene with flying colors.  No damage except for a few branches down in the front yard and some rain that came in the front of the house on both levels.  Here's a quick view of the branch clean-up ahead of us:

Unfortunately, our Richmond yard did not fare as well, but we were extremely fortunate that our home and cars were spared.  A large part of a tree came down right on our front porch during the first half of the storm.  Here's a view from our front door during the storm:

And here are a few other shots of the clean-up ahead of us.  The yard and driveway are so covered with branches and leaves that you cannot really tell where the driveway is.

We are also completely without power, as is most of Richmond, and the reports are saying it could take up to a week to restore power.  Minor inconveniences, really, in light of what could have happened.  We hope that everyone in Irene's path fared as well.

No More Attic Floor (And a Job for Amee!)

Rob's been working on his own during the week to clear the attic of all ducts, electrical wiring, mechanical units, and floor boards.  Yes, floor boards.  When I arrived out at the house on the weekend, there wasn't anything left of the attic, including the floor - you can see all the way to the roof now (which leads to some potential interesting design possibilities for raised ceilings in the renovated home...).

All of this work in the attic led to an interesting find - a pile of old keys just fell out of the attic while he was working.  There are some interesting ones in the mix.

As he removed the attic floor boards, Rob had stacked all of them in a nice neat pile outside.  Not.

Each board was also chock full of nails.  My assignment was to remove the nails from each and every board and stack them neatly so that someone (probably not us) could use all this nice, rough cut lumber.  Rob even bought a nifty nail belt for me to wear for this particular job.  I actually suspect that he was just giving me busy work to keep me out of his way in the house, but I wasn't about to complain about being out in the sunshine, sans tyvek suit and face mask, and taking out my frustrations on the wayward nails and boards.  Of all jobs to date, this is the one I've enjoyed the most (notice the smile).



 Several hours of pounding and stacking later, and the boards were nail-free and in neat piles by size.

By the end of the day, my new nail belt was quite heavy with used nails and I was convinced I'd missed my true calling to be a carpenter. 



Boathouse Blues

On a recent weekend out in Urbanna we made an unpleasant discovery about the boathouse while checking on our oysters - the floor was collapsing and the previous owners had left a lot of junk in the boathouse that was literally spilling out into the water.

We had to get the junk out of the water or risk littering and inviting a visit from the marine police.  Unfortunately, because the back half of the pier is deteriorating, the only access to the boathouse is via the water.  Luckily, Rob was game to jump right in, fully clothed.

The water was warm (like bathwater) and the jellies stayed away from him long enough to do a clean-up operation.  He pulled out the junk we could see floating and more kept following out behind it.

After about 45 minutes in the water on both sides of the boathouse he had handed all of the junk to me (I was nice and dry on the sturdy front half of the pier) and then we had to secure the floating floor.  Tide was low and the waterlogged wood was too heavy for me to get it up out of the water, so we settled for securing it to the strong part of the pier for now.  Clearly the boathouse will need a renovation of its own in short order.

Oyster Update

We've been oyster gardeners now for just shy of a month and we had no idea if our oysters had survived, died, served as food for a predator, or how they were doing.  Although we religiously flip the oyster bag over each week as we were instructed to do, the heavy growth of algae (which we were told to expect) makes it impossible to see how the oysters are doing.   So, on a bright sunny August day, we decided to pull them out, cut all the cable ties, and take a look.  Here's the algae covered float:

It was very suspenseful as we opened the bag...and much to our surprise, the oysters not only survived, but they seemed to be thriving in the water by our pier.  Here they are in the bottom of the bucket while we attempted (and failed) to get the algae scrubbed off the float:

In case you need to have your memory jogged as to our starting point, here's the size of the oysters we put in almost a month ago:

And here's where we are today - not bad at all!

And the Walls Came Tumbling Down

We've been working on a multi-month project - the demolition of the plaster and drywall in the house.  In many cases, the walls and ceilings (as we had previously discovered in at least one room) were 2 and 3 layers thick, which did not lend itself to easy demo.  With help from a lot of people, we are "down to the studs" at this point in the main house and all that remains is a lot of insulation that needs to be removed.  The demo work was an absolute mess, and the weather this summer has not cooperated.  It's been a record hot summer and we just can't seem to catch a break from the humidity and heat index  - often well over 100.  In any event, here's some pictures of this long and involved (and hot and sweaty) project. 

First a few "before and after" shots.  Here's an upstairs bedroom:

The upstairs game room:



And the downstairs study:

The next few "stud shots" will illustrate the scope of this project.  With the walls and ceilings gone, you can see right through the house.  Here's two shots of the downstairs:

And one of the upstairs:



Of course, that much drywall and plaster weighs a lot, creates a big mess, and uses a lot of dumpters (5 and counting).  Here's a few shots of the debris created as the walls and ceilings came down:

The front yard at its worst:

And, finally, as you can see, we've made significant progress in the past few weeks getting the yard cleared and the debris into our revolving dumpsters (and I'm sure our neighbors appreciate us getting this done!):

We're Oyster People Now

Yup, we are now oyster farmers.  We "planted" 1000 baby oysters by our pier this past weekend as part of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation Oyster Gardening Program.  The oyster population has been severely compromised in the Bay for decades now, and the Foundation works to restore the oyster population as one aspect of Bay clean-up.  A single adult oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water a day - that's a lot of water cleaning by a 3 inch oyster!

A combination of over-harvesting and diseases introduced by Pacific oysters have taken its toll on the Bay oysters since the 1960's.  The oyster gardening program was developed to enlist citizen assistance in raising oysters and replenishing the oyster population.   We will grow these babies for 1 year at which time those that survive will be mature and able to reproduce.  (The goal is to produce oyster baby-making machines.)  The mature oysters that we return to the Foundation next year will be planted on one of over 100 protected oyster bed reefs that have been started in the Bay, safe from harvesting, to allow the oysters to reproduce and their offspring to be spread throughout the Bay.

I'm not exactly sure what we were expecting when it was time to receive our 1000 oysters after the seminar, but the small net bag that fit in my hand was not it!

Baby oysters are very, very tiny.

As you can imagine, oysters this tiny are tempting food for a lot of predators.  As such, we have to provide a habitat that allows the oysters to be suspended in the water column with room to grow, but protected from blue crabs and the like.  So, we opted for the "mesh bag" habitat, which is then attached to floats on each side to suspend the oysters in the water.  Here you can see Rob attaching the floats to each side of the mesh bag:

Once the floats were attached, as instructed, we placed the oysters in the bag...

gave the bag a good shake to spread out the baby oysters and maximize their exposure to the water (which provides them food and oxygen)..

and tied off the top to keep them inside the bag and potential predators outside:



Once they were safe and snug in their new home, we placed them in the water and secured them tightly to our pier.

Oysters can pretty much care for themselves - as we were told, growing oysters is really just one step above having a pet rock!  We'll need to flip the float once each week, clean off any algae and sediment to maximize the oysters exposure to the water (and their growth), and check the bag for baby blue crabs that sometimes get inside and eventually could grow big enough to eat the oysters.  (As they told us, if that happens, we'll have no oysters left but one big happy crab in our bag!)

A few fun facts we learned at the seminar:

• Oysters can be out of the water for several hours or even a day, but if you put them in a bucket of water, they will die very quickly because they will deplete the oxygen in the water.
• Oysters can survive being frozen in ice in the winter, but they can die if exposed to the winter elements outside of the water.
• Oysters reproduce externally (the egg and sperm are released into the water and hopefully meet up).
• Oysters are either male or female, but they can change sex during their life cycle.
• Oyster shells are an important part of water habitat, so returning shells (even sans the oyster) is good for the Bay.  Oyster shell driveways were very popular (but not good for the Bay) and we still see the remnants of the old oyster shell driveway at Glenlochan.

A final look at our oyster farm, below.  Stay tuned as we report on survival and growth rates!

Good News, One Step Done!

Finally, a bit of good news.  Because our house sits in a designated federal historic district, all changes to the exterior of the structure require approval from the Urbanna Historic Review Board (after notice to adjacent property owners and publication in the paper).  Although we were told our HARB hearing on our plans for the house (scheduled for July 6th) had been postponed until the 20th due to an anticipated lack of a quorum of the Board to function, there ended up being a quorum that night.  We weren't there for the hearing since we didn't think it was happening, but apparently all of our design plans for Glenlochan were approved with great support from the Town!  We are super excited that this step is out of the way.  Next steps include building permits and final construction blueprints.  Check out the conceptual design of our home (front and back) below, thanks to the talents of our architect, Chris Riddick.