Cooking Like a Pro

Dinner tonight looked like something out of a cookbook, so I thought
I'd capture it for no good reason

Valentines for Daddy

Evie and I got photos for Geoff just before Valentines. It was a rough
start to the day, but the photos came out better than I thought!

Never too sick for the park!

Evie is home sick today with a cold, but the weather is so nice we
still went to the park and she had lots of fun (until she didn't).

As you enter from the foyer

What Erin likes to call the Under Kitchen, I hate to quibble, but it is more a kitchenette.

Looking back at the entrance, and the pocket door

Main room, debris strewn

"hallway" to bathroom

Art niche, and horrifying tangle of wires which belong to the three-way

Looking back at the other half of the main room and the under kitchen

Basement Progress

I know it has been an age and a day since I've last posted with any seriousness, and not the least of which was about the progress of my major project, aka the basement. The reason I've been quite is because I've been working on it nearly every chance I've had, and them collapsing with exhaustion after. I took this past week off to get some work done, and I can tell by the way my muscles have been feeling at night that they think I've accomplished a lot. I, afraid I have no pictures, because with the way I'm working, by the time I'm done for the day the light is too dim for anything decent, but here goes.

In the last week I've:

•  finished drywalling the entire main room area, ceiling included, 
• plumbed the extra water lines, 
• hung two out of four doors 
• got all the electrical rough-ins finished. 

 The doors are the most frustrating story on two counts, the first is that I hired a contractor to hang them, and he never showed up, on the plus side, I hadn't payed yet, but I really hate doors from past experience, so I had been happy to pay to let someone else deal with them. The other part of the story is that the one pocket door I hung I had prepared the opening about 0.02 m to small and had to break it down and rebuild it on the spot. Now that it is done it is a pretty cool door, but it ate most of a day just hanging it. The other issue with the pocket door is I had to cut the door's height down to fit. I cut it exclusively from the bottom, and I think it makes the door a little ugly. I have a second pocket door to hang (whose opening also needs to be fixed) I will experiment with trimming its door more evenly from top and bottom and hope it looks better.

So major task left before I finish this phase (this phase being the rough drywalling):

• hang two more doors
• 3-4 odd cut sheets of drywall in the main area
• electrical in the bathroom
• framing the bathroom ceiling
• drain stack for the under kitchen 
• drain stack for the bathroom sink
• drywall the bathroom 

That sound like a lot when I type it all out, but it hardly compares with what is accomplished. I am actually tentatively going to abandon the bathroom work other them the one wall I have to do for fire safety, and leave if to the far future.

After this is all done comes two parts I can't do my self:

• Mudding and taping 
• Trim 

Somewhere in there I will paint, and there is a shelf for the art niche I need to build and stain. After that is all done, it is electrical finalization, and inspection, and carpet. All told I'm a lottery ticket and a couple months away from being done. I suspect end of May or at the latest July, if any one wants any birthday suggestions I can point you to my local lighting store where I've picked out my ceiling fixtures. Anyways that is the update, I hacked this out on a touch screen, so I'm sure autocorrect has enhanced my normal poor spelling and grammar to near unreadable heights. I will see what I can do about pictures later.

A trip to the park

The kids and I went to the park last night after pickup from daycare. Bryan likes to have something special on each day of the week, and Thursday has been my issue for a while

-- nothing that special about Thursdays! So I decided it can be Family Fitness & Game day. It was a bit cold, but I suppose the weather should be generally improving in the future.