Christmas Lighting

We decided the escape the indoor work and do a little fun stuff outside so we put up some Christmas lights.

Thanksgiving Demolition

Stuart and Marianne, Tyler's parents, are visiting us for a week. We have started working on some kitchen remodeling with them around to help. We took out the wall between the kitchen and dining room. To do this, it required removing the cabinets from the wall and re-wiring some outlets. We will now work on putting in some beams across the kitchen to hold the load and framing in the new doorway.

Atlanta House

With all the flooding and hurricanes in Atlanta, the crawl space/basement of our house there flooded, ruining the hot water heaters. Tyler flew there to check things out and install a new sump pump.

Our Little Helper

We've had lots of "help" from Poppy with our projects and I thought her footprints throughout the house were pretty cute.

The demolition has begun!!

We busted into our first wall in the kitchen/dining room remodel. We started off small but before long the new doorway should be in and the old one patched. All that is done so far is turning the octagonal doorway into a rectangle.

Wainscoting progress

We are slowly getting around the dining room adding wainscoting and it looks great. It takes a long time to do each panel so our goal is one panel a night on average.

The dry sink is progressing...

I finished sanding it down and put two coats of stain on to match our fir throughout the rest of the house. It now has the first coat of urethane and needs to be sanded down before the next coat.

Sanding Down the Maple Top

When we were up in Bellingham a couple of weeks ago visiting an architectural salvage store we came across an old dry sink / kitchen counter that is made of maple put together with trunnels that run through locking it all together. The overall dimensions of the piece is about 60 inches by 30 inches. We are planning on cleaning it up and putting it in the laundry room over the washer and dryer. Below is a quick 10 minute rendering of the laundry room that I did to see what stuff will look like (you can also see in this the cover that we are working on for the HVAC system).

Here are the progress pictures of the work that Kristen has been doing on the piece. Once it is all sanded I think that we will put a coat of stain and urathane on it.

Paneling in the dining room

Now that Kristen has picked out the color for the dining room I have started working on putting in the paneled wainscoting. We are trying to get all of this done in the dining room before Thanksgiving so that when Marianne and Stuart are here we should be able to eat at the table without all the clutter. Only one of the panels is finished at this point but the other should be coming along this week.

The panels themselves are not true panels because the flat back portion of the panel is the actual wall. Here is the sequence of how these ones went in:

The wall is textured under the paint so the first thing to do is skim coat the surface with joint compound to smooth it out. This seems like it would be a big hassle but it was rather easy to get
the wall flat again.

The chair rail is put on the wall and coped to meet the molding around the door frame.


The existing baseboard is removed and reinstalled shimmed out 0.25 inches. This is done because the rails of the panels are 0.25 inches thick and the baseboard cap has to go right over it.

The rails and stiles are added between the baseboard and the chair rail.

Inside the rails and stiles a trim piece is added. The joint compound bucket is holding a paint stick that is applying pressure to the trim piece while it drys.

The location of the electrical outlet on the panel was going to be an issue so a hole was cut in the center of the panel. I hit a stud and a water pipe so that was not going to work out. The final solution was to move the outlet to be baseboard.

Pavers for the back area

In addition to putting in the new garden bed between the house and the garage we will be putting in pavers in this area to tidy things up and keep from tracking too much mud into the house. I could not decide which paver I liked better at the stone center so I picked up three samples and brought them home to look at for a couple of days. We decided on the larger of the three but we might end up doing some pattern of the smaller one around the edge. It will still be a little while before we begin this project (next spring?) but it is nice to know what we want to use.

Filling in the Moat

On Sunday we had another nice day so we took the opportunity to start to fill in the "moat" that we dug last week with the stone wall. We started by lining the hole with some landscape fabric to hopefully keep silt from getting underneath and around the blocks. On top of the fabric went the peastone gravel that was tamped down and made level. On top of this went the base course which was set into place with a rubber mallet. We still have to pick up a couple more courses of stone to finish things off before we can work the soil and plant the hostas that have been waiting for a long time to get into the ground.