A Bar is Born

Now that my office furniture is on its way, we needed to get the upstairs office finished post-haste. The coffee bar is now complete - 3/4" pine composite panel over 5/8" particle board sitting on some ripped 2x4s.

I sanded, Amber stained and polyurethaned. We also finished up the quarter round, trim paint, and cut in around the baseboards. The office is prepped and ready.

"Fuck it, Dude. Let's go bowling."

How do you finish off an exhausting day? MORE EXHAUSTION. Went bowling at the Sunset Lanes on Broad St. and had a blast. "Hey, this bar has bowling lanes!"

After a 70º New Year's Day, I figured we were done with Winter nonsense. Not to be, however, and we got some snow dumped on us last night. Looks pretty, though. Panorama shot and constructed by Amber:

The arch is done. We've also run wiring into the closet, and installed the base of a trapeze light in the ceiling. Once we're done with the final painting, we can install brackets and a countertop, and have a full-fledged coffee bar upstairs.

"Sorry about that," he said to the sound of a half-dozen RSS readers screaming painfully.

Tried to update my blog and got everything marked as new. GAH!

One more reason I'm writing my own again. In Zope 3. Stay tuned, if you're into that sort of thing.

Also, I've disabled comments. Blame the comment spammers.

So. Quite a weekend. We finished a whole slew of the half-completed projects upstairs. We installed one of the cabinets in the knee-wall, hung a low-voltage trapeze light above the stairs, attached a few bathroom essentials (more robe hooks, toilet paper holder, paper towel bracket, and anchored the medicine cabinets), capped the half-wall next to the stairs with a ten-foot piece of oak, and finished most of the bathroom paint.

Oh, and after we were done with a lazy seven-mile canoe trip on Saturday, the six of us pulled a dead man out of the river, and performed CPR on him until paramedics arrived. [ Update ]

So, how the hell was your weekend?

With the exception of the living room couch and coffee table, all the downstairs furniture is either upstairs or in the kitchen. Susan helped us out immensely by lending brawn and brains to the endeavor.

Tonight we'll move the couch and coffee table upstairs (it's built on a really light frame), do some touch-up painting around the house, and prepare the radiators for painting. We're using Dark Bronze Rustoleum® in a Hammered texture for the downstairs radiators (except in the office, where we did silver to match the brightwork on the desk).

Saturday, we head out at the crack of dawn for a week in Indiana to visit friends and family and enjoy the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Festival.

Since we'll be going out to Indiana next weekend, we thought it would be a good idea to get the downstairs floors refinished (except the kitchen - we'll be tiling that eventually). In order to facilitate this we've been moving stuff upstairs over the past few weeks, with the greatest push happening this past weekend. It feels like we're just moving in. As my reward for this Herculean effort, I upgraded from my Gameboy Advance SP to a new Electric Blue Nintendo DS with Super Mario 64 DS. I'm very impressed. I loved the Nintendo 64 version and it's just amazing that they've got the whole system packed into a handheld.

We got quite a lot done this weekend. After such a long hiatus, we're rolling again on the upstairs and making quite a difference. We finally got the last door hung, after doing some surgery on it. At least it's now truly square.

Had time to take some pics of the flowers in the garden, and experiment with aperture to play with the depth of field.

While we were squaring the door, a little shiny fly came to oversee some of the work. It was beautiful against the grain of the wood, and it reminded me of bbum's pics of shiny bugs.

Yesterday morning, we headed over to Matt and K.K.'s house to help install the doggie windows for their two, Sage and Simon.

Then Kinsey showed up with Cooper. David would be along in a while to help take down the two ugly trees crowding the Crepe Myrtle in the back corner.

K.K. shows off how to install the last one.

Happy puppy with doggie windows.

Kilroy was here.

The roofer came last week and patched the flashing along the chimney. Hopefully, the closet will remain dry. In celebration (and to get rid of the awful mold and mildew), we commenced demolition. Behind the right-hand wall is the chimney, and we uncovered a little of it. The outside wall (to the left) is pretty much intact, so we may leave it be.

Our contractor framed in two huge holes in the long hallway, in order to provide access to the under-eaves area for storage and to get at the AC unit. Unfortunately, they were made inordinately large. We've been at a loss as to what to do with them for a long while now. We considered doors, swinging bookshelves, panels, and the like, and finally settled on installing a wall mounted cabinet into the hole. Wall mounted since they typically don't have the extra just-above-the-floor construction.

Having made our plans, now we just needed to downsize the gaping hole to accommodate the new cabinets. They're both in slightly different states of being done.