We have now been working on our house since July of 2010. With any luck, and the helping hands of our family and friends, we may almost finish this project by July 2011! Rowan and I keep chipping away at finish work around the house. Here are the photos with some commentary of our work and also what has been accomplished during my dad's 2 week visit.
We have been plugging away at getting the trim in the house finished. It seems like a never ending job as all of the wood must be primed first and then painted again with the finish coat. This task will be perfect as the weather here gets warmer (into the 90's) as summer comes. Working inside is where we will want to be.
We are having a hard time getting the outside of the house painted. We had almost 12 inches of rain in May so it was nearly impossible to paint anything outside. It was raining almost every day. We decided to start priming the cedar trim inside the front porch so we can at least start the finish painting inside that space soon.
I finished staining the two 4x8 ft maple bookshelves for the living room and worked on building them in and attaching them to the wall.
We will add on to the shelf unit ourselves by building in more shelves to the right and over the doorway. This will end up being our library wall in the living room.
Our last bit of outside construction was to get the steps to the side door built so we could stop leaping from the door to take the garbage out. We kept having to remind ourselves to watch that last step, it's a looloo! Our builder built this out of cedar for us between rainstorms.
My daddy came to visit us the last 2 weeks of May. Just in time for all of the exciting weather you have seen in my last post. We did have a couple of sunny days in a row, so he got to work putting the sealer on the new cedar steps to the side door.
Our daddy wish list was long, so we got right to work on assorted projects. Here we are adding some extra shelving to the service porch/wash room.
Rowan assisting dad on the table saw.
We also had dad help us do some improvements on one of our rental properties. He helped us install an exhaust hood over the stove. Being the expert sheet metal man he is, the job was done with exceptional quality. We definitely had the man in his element.
This next project was really cool. We decided to save some of the original framing timbers from the house as the demolition was under way. I saved back a bunch of 1953 douglas fir 2x6 boards from the original roof structure. They were in such perfect condition, we couldn't just throw them in the dumpster. We thought we might build a piece of furniture out of them down the road. Well, when dad got here we pulled all of the nails out of them and took them out to the lumber mill where we had our wood floors and trim made. They planed them down for us and they came out just down right beautiful. We brought them back home and decided to make a dining table for our new front porch out of them. Here are the photos:
Dad, Rowan and I with a nearly finished table. He worked right up to the last minute before we needed to head for the airport to send him back to California. Rowan and I will have to trim the board ends on the table and route the edges and legs and do the finishing.
Rowan doing the sealing and weather proofing
It took only 24 hours after we finished the table for us to try it out for a memorial day cook out with our neighbor Alex as our first guest at the table. It is going to be a perfect addition to our new porch and a nice piece of history from the house to eat off of.
I will end this post with a picture of a very happy cat. This is Fergus showing you how content he is in his new and improved house. :o)
More food and travel coming next..............
