March Winds

It was pretty windy today.  I came home to find a large branch had blown onto my garage.

I knew this branch was dead, and was planning to remove it this spring.  Fortunately there was no damage to my house.

Mario needs a haircut.

I also knew there was a large hole in the base....

What I didn't know was it was infested with termites.

My neighbor Todd came over with his chainsaw and we had it cleaned up in about an hour.

Baseboards

Katie's blood test came back - she's avoided the "Betis" which is a relief.  Her dad has type 2, and her sister has gestational diabetes.  We've been mildly concerned given some family history.  She continues to run elevated blood pressures in the Dr's office, but at home they're normal which we've been charting.  After measuring her belly, the Doc indicated it was "perfect", but I am unathorized to share photographic evidence of my wife's bodily perfection.  Her sister loving refers to it as the little basketball belly.

I had several late nights at work this week again - I left the operations side so I wouldn't have to work so many hours and late nights...  I guess I'm happy to have good job, but hope we hire some sales assistants soon to help with all the busy work.  I ended the week with some sort of stomach bug that made itself known in the middle of my Whopper dinner at Burger King Friday night.  I'll skip to noon on Saturday where I got out of bed and downed a bunch of ibuprofin and got to work piecing in all the baseboards.  I'm feeling much better today so Katie and I got them painted and installed.  We're obviously getting better at the whole remodel thing - our first house didn't have baseboards for 3 years.  In fact, we installed the final baseboards right before we sold it.

Whoa - action shot - I should have warned you all before hand.  To save everyone some time with inquiries - yes, I really do move like a ninja version of Chuck Norris as illustrated.  Check out the fire hydrant Jason - that might come in handy with my son on the way.

No, Chuck Norris wouldn't wear a respirator either.

Katie and I, unsatisfied with anything labeled "baseboard" at home depot created our own 2-part base.  The good news is that the top portion requires ripping, sanding, and priming before being cut, fit, and painted...  Now I can spend the week filling nail holes, sanding, and touching up.  I really enjoy remodeling in general, but specifically I do not enjoy every minute detail.  Next up - wainscotting in the 2nd bath, and drafting plans for the custom wainscotting in the nursery.  With a little luck and lots of hard work we'll finish the upstairs before May!

Home stretch?

I was in Denver last week for work - I made sales calls Mon/Tues, and was at a tradeshow all day Wed.  I made it home at midnight Wed night, and proceeded to work 13+ hours on Thursday, and 12 hours on Friday to try and catch up.  At this point all the burning issues have been addressed, but there's still a mountain sitting on my desk.  Oh well, I know it will be there in the morning.  I did manage to take the weekend off, and I turned our front lawn into my paint-shop for the day. 

I have a small airless sprayer that makes "short" work of stuff like this.  What's pictured is about half the door casings, and my handy setup for painting doors.

It took all day to prime, sand, and paint everything.  Katie addressed all the doors by sanding out all the paint runs and dents/scratches from the previous owner.  We ended the day by nailing up all the door casing.

Our shower walls and door were installed this week to finish the shower in our master bath - it turned out great!

I also hung the wall sconces above each sink, but ran out of light bulbs...

I installed the ceiling fan that Katie picked out.  It has a remote, tre' nice.

New hinges and door handles were installed, and the doors are ready to go back in after the door jambs are touched up.

My first-ever pocket door is installed (thanks for the help Pat!) and works nicely, though it's not flawless.  You'd think a pocket door was fairly straight forward, but there's a lot involved.

The 2nd bath has been painted (wainscotting will cover the lower part of the wall).  I'm a little nervous about the color, but history has proved my wife has an amazing gift and I know this bath is going to be fabu.

This is the 9X11 foot wool rug that Katie found at RC Willey on sale - originally $100 off.  I went to go check it out and found the floor model was the last one left, but it had a small tear.  To make a long story short, I got an additional $200 off the sale price.

I stopped at Lowes today and picked up some hot-melt seam tape for $5, and fired up the oven while Katie wasn't looking.

I used a cast-iron pan to pre-heat the tear spot, and to keep the hot-melt liquid while I made sure the tear was perfect from the top side.

It needs to be vacuumed, but the tear is on that little red flower.  I neglected to take a "before shot", oops.  You can't tell it's been damaged!

Mid-week update

Life has been really really busy!  The sales department hosted our final Fam-trip last weekend so I was partying hard with clients through Sunday.  I did manage to finish the plinths late last week though, and hung them Sunday evening.

So, all that lumber you saw stacked up last time next to a pile of sawdust turned into these really nice custom trim pieces.  As I mentioned before, they're just like the ones in our first house on Harvard Ave.  I really love the style, and you can't buy them in the store.  They really don't cost much in material, but they take a number of hours to make.

Now I'm cutting and coping trim all week in the evenings so I can spray them on Saturday if the weather is nice.  It's really looking like we'll finish end of April at this point (with a couple loose-ends).

What the heck?

I get 7 comments from you people about regarding my baby-furniture tirade, but you rarely have anything to say about my reg-alur, non-tirading posts?  I'll have to air my grievances more often as it seems this is what my public demands...

I'll take requests for my next rant here:

Let's make some sawdust! (part 3?)

Besides the staircase, the wood floors upstairs are complete!

The dresser turned out nicely - I wish I had taken some photos showing the process of installing the drawer faces, but I didn't.  The dresser still needs to be trimmed out to the wall.

The master bath door jamb is in.

As well as the pocket door jamb.

This is a photo from our first house that kind of shows the plinth above the window.  I liked it so much I'm re-creating them for this house to go above the doorways.

This is a crummy sketch, but also might give you an idea of what they'll look like.  Tonight I cut the blanks for the main body, as well as the blanks for the detail in black.  But first I had to glue up some material shown below.

Here are the blanks - there's about 36 feet of each element or component of the plinth.

I also milled some coves tonight.

The cove-milling made a good-sized pile of sawdust.  No, my router is not connected to my dust collection system.  I'm waiting for some good-old Obama stimulus $ so I can correct this problem.

My table saw is however, connected to the dust collector and it was time to empty about 10 gallons of sawdust tonight.