distillery doors

I can't remember why we started looking at doors so early in this whole project. That and the sink for the bathroom. The sink was the first thing we bought! More on that another time though.
So. The doors.
We found this awesome door on line called a speakeasy door. It was a heavy wooden door with a small window that had a metal grate over it. The ones we found on line were anywhere from $2,000 to $4,000. We went to Lowes and they did one of those estimates on their little computer design program, and when we got to the end of that process, the door was $4,900! We did look at some other entry door styles, but by now we've got our hearts set on this door.
Ok, we need to get creative, cause we are NOT spending that much money on a door. Besides, we need 2 doors!
Could I faux paint a plain door? Probably, but still not happy with that idea. Then I looked at our refrigerator, which we had covered with thin wainscott wood strips.

Maybe that would work, but would it hold up to outdoor conditions? We decided to do a 'practice' door on the back of our garage. There is a plain steel out-swing door that was just painted. So we bought some pine wainscott and I stained it with exterior stain and applied 3 coats of spar varnish. I think we did that in September, and it still looks great.

it looks pretty cool! even with that ugly door handle.

 We figured we give it a try for the distillery doors.....

We had to buy fire rated exterior doors that open out. These are steel insulated doors with the wire mesh in the glass window. Not very attractive...

We decided to go with the cedar wainscott instead of pine, we thought it might hold up better to the elements.

We laid out the panels and pre-cut everything to fit each door. I numbered and labeled the back of each piece so I would know which door the pieces went to.

The tongues did not fit into the grooves on a lot of the pieces, so Vince just cut the back edge of the groove off so they would butt up against each other. The front part of the groove still overlapped the tongue.

I put 1 coat of exterior stain on the back and 2 coats on the front, then 3 coats of exterior spar varnish. I also put 2 coats of dark brown exterior paint on the doors to help protect them just in case any water may get behind the wood, and if any of the door was not covered by the wood, it wouldn't be as noticeable.

We glued the strips of wood onto the doors with Gorilla brand glue, then put some heavy weights on there to hold it down while the glue set up.

We bought some fancy trim and cut that to fit around the window.

Stained, antiqued and varnished. Then we glued them to the doors.

Now to start the details! We bought these furniture tacks and Vince drilled tiny holes so the wood wouldn't split while putting them in. We added a dab of glue on the back of each tack for extra measure.

Drilling out the holes for the knob and deadbolt.

We got this garage door kit at Home Depot for $35.00. We had found some faux hinges on line but they were about $35 each! So we decided to go with these since the one kit would do both doors.

 

I rubbed a little metallic copper paint on them to add a little character.

Vince had to chisel the wood out from where the door handle goes, the door was too thick for the latch shaft. We did not have that problem with our 'test' door on the garage. The deadbolt was fine.

The finished door, installed on the tasting room entrance. We are looking for a cool dragon doorknocker to put on it.

This the one on the distillery entrance, Vince put one of the door pulls on for a doorknocker.

We are really happy with the way they came out, they ended up costing about $650 each by the time we got done, not including the latches (they were $130 each). I think they will make a great first impression when people come up!

Distillery part 5: what we got for Christmas!

Christmas eve day, 2015
It is 60 degrees out at 9 am!
Daryl comes to dig the trench for our electric supply to go from the pole to the building.
Alan Young, our well driller comes to work on the well.
My brother Dave, who is home for Christmas, comes up to help Vince and Daryl's son Derek put the conduit over the electric cable.

It is so warm out that the guys end up working in their t-shirts!

This is the wire being delivered a few weeks ago. NYSEG told us what kind we had to buy, the sample we got from the field engineer, Paul Blakelock, was a foot long and weighed a pound! Vince looked up on line how much it would cost- $13.00 per foot. And we needed about 300 feet. Holy Crap! So he looked around some more and found a place in NJ that had it for $2.85 per foot. WTF? I think we should go into the electric wire resale business! So Vince ordered 400 feet just to make sure we had enough, because the wire has to go up the pole 40 feet, and we weren't exactly sure where we were putting the underground vault for the transformer yet.

Here's a little plug for Daryl. If anyone in the area ever needs excavation work done, he is the guy to call. We call him the "bulldozer whisperer". The first thing he ever did for us was dig our pond, and we wanted an island in the middle of it. He said he'd never done that before, but what the heck, he was game for anything! That was 15 years ago and since then he did the excavation work for our house, garage, Mom's trailer pad, he dug our 2nd pond, and did Vince's parents place when they built their house. He is excellent at reading the land and figuring out drainage so we wouldn't have any water issues. He will work around trees if you want to save them if it is at all possible. And on top of all that, he is a nice guy!

By the time I got out there, the trench was dug up to the creek and the guys had that much wire in the conduit.

Vince and Derek, Vince gluing sections together. They were gluing 10 pieces of conduit together, then sliding it on to the cable. The conduit comes in 10' lengths. So they were sliding 100 feet of conduit at a time. It got stuck on some small rocks a few times. Not fun. Vince said it was like wrestling a 400 foot anaconda!

The trench started filling up with water once Daryl got near the pond and creek. It had been raining for a few days before this, so the ground was really saturated and the creek was running pretty good.

Daryl's getting ready to dig the trench across the creek. They thought if they could divert the water it might keep more of the creek bed from washing out while he dug in there.

We save everything, so this recycled tin is from a shed that was on the property when we bought it in 1998. Vince had it out in the "you never know when you might need it" pile.  It came in really handy today!

It worked! They put the cable down in there and Derek is putting some dirt on there to keep the pipe from floating up. He actually got down in the water and stood on the pipe to hold it down!

It made a great waterfall! Eventually we will put some stones in there and make a real one so it doesn't wash away the dirt covering the wire.

They got the hole for the vault in and finished the trench up to the building. The wire from the vault up to the building is a smaller size than the giant wire coming from the pole.

Before the trench can be filled in all the way, we had to put caution tape in there. It is supposed to be a red caution tape that is specific for underground electric cable. Daryl forgot to bring his, so they sent me down to Greene's to buy some. They only had regular yellow caution tape, so I stopped at Greg's Variety and they had red tape that said 'Danger'. Since it was after noon on Christmas eve, I didn't have a lot of time to run around and look for the correct one, so they just used both of those together and we hope it will be approved! (it was)
Vince was resting and sweaty and I was cold. All I was doing was watching and taking pictures!

Now he's filling in the rest of the trench. As he pushed the dirt back in, the water just gushed up out of there and ran down the side of the road. It's a good thing they had put in a drainage pipe under the end of the road- the water hit that pipe and went under the road and out the other side!

While Daryl was filling in the trench, Dave and Vince started putting in the grounding rod for the electric service to come into the building. There were three 4' pieces of copper rod that had to be driven into the ground (mostly rocks and gravel surrounded by a little dirt!) Vince finished getting the meter box wired today (the 26th), we are almost ready for the rough wire inspection!

These pictures are from before Thanksgiving when Alan first got there to drill the well. He had a major delay when his engine quit working one day, he thought it was the fuel pump, but when they put a new one in, it didn't fix it. It turns out that it needed a new timing chain and gears.... Since he had already started drilling, he couldn't take the rig to the shop to get the engine fixed, so he had to pull the engine out and take it to get it fixed. Thankfully the weather was so mild, it would have been even worse if had been below freezing! He had it back in the rig last week and hit water at 135' on the 24th. 10 gallons a minute! yay!

So it was a Merry Christmas for us! Water and an electric line! Ho,ho,ho, kersploosh!

P.S. We have since been approved for our rough wire inspection and electric service hookup, now we can insulate and sheetrock....and get the water hooked up..... and get the heating system going.........to be continued!

frosty morning

When I got up on Sunday morning and looked out the window, it was so foggy you could hardly see 100 feet. After I woke up a little, I noticed everything was frosted! 

Frosty fog! 

I knew there would be some cool stuff out there, no pun intended!

So I put on my long johns and a bunch of layers of warm clothes, grabbed the camera and went out. Before I even had any coffee!!

the frosty fairy was hard at work last night!

 

 

 

 

 

this is what the crystals looked like on the edge of the metal frog

this is part of the farm machinery that was in the weeds on the hill that was cleared off for the distillery

rosehip on the wild rose bush

I walked around for about an hour, but my fingers started to get numb, so it was time to head in for breakfast and COFFEE!!!!

distillery part 4: the real work begins!

On Black Friday, the weather was nice enough so that I could get the porch posts stained. I didn't think I would be able to get to that till spring! We still need to add some decorative details to the porch, but that will have to wait till spring.

We went shopping on Saturday for electrical supplies- wire, outlet boxes, lights, etc. Vince got some of that stuff put in, then we started figuring out what materials we were going to need for the interior walls and ceilings. The original plan was to put wafer board on the distillery side for the walls and ceiling, but the code officer said we could only do that if we painted it with fire proof paint.
Welllll.....fire proof paint is $350 for a 5 gallon bucket and we would need about 5 buckets, so we opted for fire rated sheetrock (65 sheets that are 8' x4') instead.

Yuck, that is a lot of seams to tape and spackle! We hate taping and spackling, and are not very good at it either!

The tasting room side, which I consider my side because I will be painting and decorating it, will have sheetrock (32 sheets that are 10'x 4')walls and a wood plank ceiling (100 boards). I've got a lot of ideas on how I want to paint the walls, and I want to do a mural of a dragon on one wall, I think behind the bar area would be good. And I want to put a small wall mounted fountain in there. I can't wait to get started on the fun stuff!

Here is the truck full of boards and sheetrock from Greene's Ace Hardware in Whitney Point. It really is "the place with the helpful hardware man"! Well, many men and women, really, they are great there, and we like to support our local businesses when we can. Their service is awesome!

Vince hooked up some shoplites to the generator and got right to work. This is how it looked at the end of the day, December 5th.

We are so happy with the way it looks! Just wait till the shutters get put on, the flower boxes are full, and the landscaping gets done.