Miscellany

Another round of applause goes to Joe who came and installed the glass door surround on our shower this week. I caulked it and we let it dry and tonight I had the privilege of TRYING IT OUT! Works great! It's so exciting to be finishing up this room. 

Doug thought our address was pretty fun since the "55" part seems like a speed limit. So he went online and found just that: a speed limit sign that included our whole address. He decided that right over the mailbox would be the most amazing spot for it on the planet, so here it is. Held on with super-strength Velcro and all. It does set off our red brick house that looks like so many others in the neighborhood and should help anyone trying to find our address!

I guess I should be one to talk since I ordered a cool new fruit bowl that makes us just that much more like the really cool kids. It's pretty big, but nice and sturdy and entices us to eat fruit. Yum!

Glass and rocks

The glass door to our new shower arrived yesterday! We opened the box on our picnic table on the patio to make sure all of the pieces were in great shape. And they were!

We bought a couple of Spiderman-climbs-buildings suction cup thingys to help us pick up the glass panels and carry them safely to where we need them. 

We carried a couple of the glass panels into the house that needed to be attached to a metal edge piece with clear caulk and let dry. It reminded me of all the movies where workers are carrying a huge panel of glass across a street and a car crashes into it. Luckily, no cars between the porch and Doug's office! 

 Here they are after attaching. We tried to let them dry as perfectly upright as possible. 

On another front, I decided that once I finish the door refinishing and painting, I should have some time for a little garden. There wasn't a spot set aside for that already, so we picked one just in front of the backyard gate.

When we dug down a just couple of inches, we hit rocks. Lot of rocks. We took turns digging them out down to about 6-8 inches. Below is a little rock path to the garbage cans that Doug has built from all of the rocks that have been dug up in our yard. About half of the rocks you see here came from my little 4x4-foot plot. So crazy!  We'll have to start putting some in the garbage each week now because there's just nothing else to do with them. 

Here it is in all its glory: 3 tomato plants and a cucumber! Even with three bags of topsoil added, the dirt only came to barely above grand level because of the massive rock removal.

At our old house we had too much shade and icky bugs to ever have a decent garden though I tried for quite a few years. We'll see. I love to till and plant the garden, but after that it gets boring, so my goal is to be more diligent and have a great crop!

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Never fear, though, I'm still working on doors... Below is the first panel for our bedroom closet, sanded, patched, and painted with a primer and two coats of brown paint. These panels are a few inches wider than the regular doors and therefore too heavy for pivoting screws in the ends and pivot, so I'm having to paint them one side at a time then wait to them to dry and it's taking a lot longer. 

Replace it, fix it, whatever.

Uh yeah, we're super-cool and retro now. We needed a hair-cutting chair/step stool and this fit the bill perfectly. Especially since it's a replica of the beat-up one we dumped when we moved.

It's nice to have a stool to sit on as you prep food and such on those days when you don't feel like standing up the whole time.

I promise I did look at a bunch of more modern designs, but they didn't fill all of my requirements so why bother. Hope it lasts as long as the other one did!

  

I seem to have worn out my nice, happy palm sander, so had to get a new one. The dust-catcher has been falling off for a while, but now we've added jiggly sanding that doesn't really work and the sandpaper clasp gave out. I went a step up to a DeWalt and hope it will have a very long lifespan. So far, I must say it does seem to be a better machine.

So I finished refinishing (was that redundant???) Doug's office door and now just have four big closet panels to go. I can do this! (Even though my enthusiasm has waned considerably.)

But wait, now that we're just starting to wind down on a bunch of this stuff, what happened when I pulled our new dining room table out from the wall last week. This!:

 
Yup, it pulled my new paint off right down to the drywall. The bigger holes are about 1 1/2 inches wide. More proof that I WILL NEVER BE DONE SANDING.

Good-bye April, Hello May!

Bathroom #2 

Here's a little before-and-after corner. My helper glued the vertical piece a little low, so needed to be filled in a bit.

 

Ta-da! Sanded, painted, and caulked!

Once the caulk dried, I used the nail gun to attach the baseboard trim. 

We installed the shower head and replaced the plastic toilet seat with a wooden one that even closes without slamming (who knew???) All that's left is to add a shower enclosure so we can actually take a shower. We're looking at a glass one, but we'll see. So excited to have finished this room otherwise!

 

The Trim

While I still had the nail gun warmed up, I attached the trim above the closets. Here is what they looked like without the trim. 

And below, with the trim. I used what was left of the baseboards for this as we needed a little width to cover up the existing gap. After cutting these, all we had left of the baseboards was a couple feet of length, so am delighted we could use what we had. 

Of course the nail holes had to be filled and paint touched-up (there are always a million steps to finishing ANYTHING).

I decided to put a little 90 degree corner cap of the trim on the end, similar to the design on the end of our blinds. They were so easy to cut with the miter saw and then I glued them on with wood glue and clamped until dry. I like the way they turned out!

The Yard

Meanwhile, Doug got a fun toy in the mail that is a leaf blower/vacuum with lots of attachments, including one that can reach up into the gutters to blow them out. It also has some little wheels so you can roll it along. The storm had dropped a bunch of yellow seed things, so he thought it would be fun to vacuum the road! 

I think I might have already mentioned the bark mulch he put in the empty ground section, but we got some flowers for the raised planters that look really nice! Doug has put a lot of work into fixing up the outside. Getting there!

 

Oh goodie, now I get to refinish FIVE more door panels...