Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to All!

We made it. We had a lovely holiday with family and friends!

A new counter

We ordered a butcher block counter from Lumber Liquidators. We had to get an 8 foot piece, but we only have a 6 foot counter.  We were able to use the other piece for a small base cabinet that also needed a counter. The counter is cherry.

Little things

Last night we installed a vinyl baseboard on the kitchen cabinets. The previous owners installed awful tile for baseboard, and the remains of the bonding material was hideous. I sanded it down and used prestick stuff. We thought to go with brown, but decided to go with something closer to what the wood work will be. It covered a lot of sins...

And...while I was doing this, Gina was sewing curtains!!! We are really happy with the fabric we chose for one of the bedrooms...although it doesn't photo well. It looks A LOT better live.  It is much darker and not as shiny.

Multitasking projects

In a flurry of trying to get some things done before the holiday. We got some kitchen cabinets from a friend. They are the same style as our cabinets. The wood is oak, ours are birch, but the tone is pretty close. For now, they are good. We took our trailer up to Walden an brought a whole load  home. We first cleaned them in the driveway. Some of the units will be used in the basement near the bar.

Our first attempt to install the wall cabinets was unsuccessful.  Our plaster walls are 1 inch thick, so we needed longer screws. We also decided to cut wood to set the cabinets on since Gina doesn't have the biceps of Martina Navratilova. Our second attempt worked! Yay! The photo of the upper didn't turn out.

We had our chimney sealed on Saturday. They said they would be at our house between 7:00 and 7:30 am. At 7:30 am I opened the front curtain. The contractor was parked out front...but appeared to be sleeping. He slept through dog barking and Gina knocking on the window.

She went out twice. Finally about 10 after 8 I went out and BANGED on the window and yelled his name. He finally woke up. He took a few minutes to get out of his car, but finally got to work. He said he was waiting for the roof to warm up. yeah, right. Any way, he did finally get to work and we will be able to have a fire in the fireplace!

Our other task was putting base moulding in the dining room and kitchen. I purchased a new nail gun the night before, only to find out the guy at home depot pulled the wrong one off the shelf. So the job started a little later than I wanted. Amazingly it went in pretty smoothly with no bad cuts and we only had a small handful of trim left after the project. We still need to caulk and paint it...but that will have to wait. It sure looks better than the crappy void that was left after we removed the tile stuff.

Me wearing safety glasses!!!

We aslo started prepping the base cabinets for installing a vinyl base at the kickboard. We have to do something to cover where we removed the tile baseboard. 

I am using a Nextec unitool...works great but you need to have spare batteries on the charger. 

Gina continued making curtains...which seems to be an endless project. They are turning out great though.