Well, maybe not half, but I made some progress on upgrading the home network this weekend. I removed 3 switches upstairs and replaced them with 8 port Gigabit switches. It appears that I might need to replace some cabling, too, but I won’t know that for sure until I replace the switches and router in my office. All of the switches I picked up are power saving units, which are reported to drop power consumption when it isn’t needed. I also pulled out the old Shuttle PC from the upstairs computer desk. I had stopped using that PC for any testing almost a year back, but finally pulled it on Saturday. The next steps are to swap out the router and switches in my office and I’ll also move the old Gateway Media Center machine from my office to upstairs. If I don’t get to that this coming weekend, I’ll do it over the long Thanksgiving weekend.

Due to the rain we had on Saturday, there was no leaf mulching to be done on Sunday. Our yard isn’t bad at all, but my parents’ yard is loaded with leaves again and will take a few hours to clear. Hopefully, it will be dry next weekend so that I can get that taken care of.

Not counting the floor, that is. I finished painting today and I am pleased with the way it looks. I replaced the light bulbs in the fixtures in the hallway and on the landing with compact fluorescent bulbs and I’m not sure that i like it. I like the lower wattage, but we generally don’t use those lights much at all anyway. The problem is that they take a minute to warm up and get to full brightness. I may have to revert to incandescent bulbs. My choices for bulbs were limited because both fixtures use candelabra tips instead of the standard screw tip. We’ll live with it for a bit and perhaps we’ll get used to it.

I put a LAN jack in the wall downstairs for the counter between the closets for the water meter and the gas meter. I’m planning to move the laser printer from my office to down here for Pennie’s use. I have a D-Link print server to plug into the LAN jack and the printer will plug into it. I would have liked to have put the print server in the closet, but the parallel cable for the printer would then have to have come through the wall as I couldn’t also put the printer in the closet.

Although I didn’t actually goof off this afternoon after the painting, it was still a more relaxing afternoon. I didn’t visit the forums, either. Tomorrow or Sunday may work out better for that. I probably should have mowed the lawn today after the sun came out, assuming that the weather forecast for the weekend is correct. They are predicting rain tonight, more rain tomorrow afternoon and rain again on Sunday. Hopefully the rain will hold off until late tomorrow.

We’re missing Pennie and are all looking forward to her return on Sunday and hoping that her cold gets better quickly. She’s been feeling pretty miserable since Tuesday. When she called today she said she wanted to come home already, but everyone thought it best that she not drive that distance (and time) while she was still pretty sick. Perhaps another day or two will let her feel much better.

I got an early start today on the project. I fed the dogs just before 9 and got right to sanding the landing ceiling. Then I spread out the drop cloths again and started on getting a coat of paint on the ceiling. Next up was the wall paint and finally, I got the trim painted. I have to give the walls a finish coat tomorrow, but then it is basically done. Well, except for the stairs and the floor. I’m leaving the carpet in place for now. Removing it and stripping the blue off the stair treads will have to wait for another spurt of energy.

The dogs behaved themselves very well today, I’m pleased to say. Of course there was the usual whining from Razz, but other than that, they were great. I’m spending the rest of the evening with them before we head up to bed and I collapse. I think I’ll try to take it easy on the last day of my vacation tomorrow. Perhaps I’ll spend some time trying to catch up on the forums that I’ve ignored for a week now!

I started the working day by sanding the ceiling of the hallway and stairs. The landing and the sloped ceiling heading to living room needed another coat of drywall compound, so that was next on the agenda. Technically, the hallway ceiling could also use another coat of drywall compound, but I’m going to take a gamble and leave it as is. If we hate it after I paint it, I can always give it another coat of compound and then paint it again since it will be flat white. I think that the little bit of roughness actually looks kind of cool now – like aged plaster. Doing the sanding and second coat of compound took a few hours. At 2:30 I headed out to see my parents and then stop at both Home Depot and Lowe’s. I needed a gallon of paint from Home Depot and I had a whole list of stuff to get at Lowe’s, of course. I was also able to take advantage of a 12 month 0% financing deal, which is always excellent. I got home just in time to feed the mutleys and then get myself some dinner before cleaning up from today’s work. The dust was kept to a minimum with the shop vac sanding attachment, but there was still some dust and drywall bits to clean up. The agenda for tomorrow is to sand the last part of the ceiling and then get a coat of paint on the ceiling and walls. I think that’s a reasonable amount of work to plan for. I have a conference call to join at 2 PM, so that will give me a bit of a break. It is my vacation, after all.

I’m sure that I won’t accomplish everything that I’m thinking about for this weekend, but I’m still glad that it will soon be the weekend.

With a whole week of rain, I know that I have to mow the lawns at our house and my parents’ house at some point. I’m hoping that I can do that Saturday. The current forecast calls for more rain tonight and tomorrow evening. If that is true, I’ll be fine with the lawn mowing on Saturday. Of course, I need to go grocery shopping and there will be time spent doing work for the office each day. For the rest, I am planning to install Windows 7 on another PC, configure the Acer laptop for Pennie to use during the week, and get the new batteries into the two uninterruptible power supplies. I am considering decommissioning two computers, too. They are both older and spend most of the time sleeping, but they get used for testing on occasion. If I move them out of their current locations and turn them off, I can still bring them back online when I have testing to do on either of them. I also want to replace the router with a new D-Link Gigabit router I purchased a few months back. I have been having to power cycle the old router with increasing frequency lately to restore connectivity. We’ve been using the old router for about 8 or 9 years now. If I replace that router, it also means that I can move the HP Laserjet downstairs to the basement and hook it up to a print server since the old router has also been the print server for many years. I’ve got a LAN printer in my office now, so the old printer moving downstairs will make it easier when Pennie needs to print something out. There are, of course, oodles of other things I’d like to get done, too, but I won’t list them here. Perhaps the most important thing I’ll need to do is get more sleep and that might impact my ability to get everything on my list checked off!

I decided to leave work early today and head down to Ikea in Elizabeth. Unfortunately, the Paramus Ikea didn’t have the sofa bad in stock any longer, but it was in stock in Elizabeth along with the chair. I was considering a cheaper (less than half the price), slightly smaller, curved back chair, but it just wasn’t comfortable. The chair I got is excellent, as is the sofa bed. Shopping at Ikea is always an interesting experience, but today I knew what I wanted, so spent no time browsing. I filled out my little “shopping list” and went to the information desk to have the pieces reserved downstairs. I then made my way downstairs to pay, which went very quickly. Waiting for the 4 boxes to come out was where I lost a whole lot of time. I think I waited a good 1/2 hour, probably more, considering that I had walked out to get my car and move it to the loading area while I waited. I knew that the sofa bed was going to be hard to handle, but since the box was wrapped in plastic, I was able to muscle the 180 pound box around okay. They want the carts to stay out of the parking lot, so there is a pipe railing between the platform and the cars. Ad to that a 6 foot sidewalk to the curb. I had to hoist the boxes over the railing and then into the car. Thank goodness for the plastic, which made the heavy box slide up and over the railing and easily slide into the car. The chair was pretty big, too and I slid it up to the roof. I spent a good 30 minutes or so securing the box to the roof and also making sure that the tailgate wouldn’t fly up and open for the drive home, which was mostly highway for about 40 miles.

I made it home fine and let the dogs out before bringing the boxes inside, unpacking them and setting them up. Both pieces have removable slip covers that can be washed and these were packed in separate boxes – 1 for each piece. They went on easily, too. I did have a problem with one of the chair legs in that the bolt wouldn’t screw into the mounted nut in the chair frame. I ended up replacing it with one of my own. The legs aren’t really adjustable or self-leveling, so on our uneven floor, the chair wobbled a bit until I put extra slider stick-ons under one of the legs.

The dogs got to check out the furniture after dinner. They were all sniffing like mad.

This evening I won’t be doing much down there at all. I will wipe down the grout again and I’ll do a few other minor odds and ends before heading to bed. We’re getting closer!

Somehow I thought that I would get much more done than I did yesterday. In retrospect, I actually got plenty done, I simply planned to do more.

The dogs and I got up at 8, having gone to bed around 1in the morning, so that wasn’t too bad. I started the day slowly, spending some time at the computer before and after feeding the mutleys their breakfast. The first project I tackled was to put the insulation in above the steam pipes in the lowered ceiling area. As I stood on the step-stool and reached into the spaces between the joists, poking my head through the ceiling grid, I thought that this would have been so much easier if I had insulted before enclosing the pipes. Ah, well.

After completing the insulation, I took a shower to get the fiberglass bits cleaned off. Then I headed outside to clean up the Coleus from the flower boxes, as they had succumbed to the cold from late last week. The porch was covered with leaves from the wind and rain of Saturday, so I decided that the best way to clean that up was to use the leaf blower. It worked quite well, but I sort of felt like my neighbor from the “loud” family who was leaf blowing the driveway early last week after 9 at night. He also has the habit of regularly leaf blowing his porch, though he hasn’t done that lately.

I moved on to painting after that and spent a few hours getting the balance of the trim painted. I still have to finish the insides of the window in the laundry area and the window near the entrance, but they will both wait for a bit. I hadn’t yet completed the painting and it was already time to get the dogs fed, so I took a break before I used the roller to paint the underside of the pipe soffit. Once painting was done, I headed back upstairs for my own dinner and to connect to the office to get the Sunday reports taken care of. Shortly after 9 I grouted the tile in the orchid area. The grout needed to sit for about 20 minutes or so before being wiped down, so I spent that time cleaning up and putting a few items away. Wiping down the tiles to remove the excess grout and work the top layer of grout smooth was harder than I had anticipated, but it went fairly well. I think my grout lines might be a bit too concave, but since the floor isn’t for walking on, I doubt that it matters. I stepped back to admire the work and headed upstairs, ostensibly to get ready for bed, but I decided to sit at the PC to scan the newsgroups, since I wouldn’t be checking them again until this evening. Of course, that meant that I was in bed around midnight. I must get to bed earlier tonight!

So,what didn’t I accomplish? Well, I thought that I would have all of the air conditioners out of the windows. I had also anticipated putting books on the bookshelf, which would have been a start to cleaning up the workroom, which is currently overloaded with stuff that is screaming to be organized. It is much easier to get around in there, but it is still crowded. No trouble, though, since I did get most items on my mental to-do list taken care of this weekend.

I’ve been planning to paint the trim, but I haven’t gotten to it yet. I think I’ll get that done tomorrow. I was pretty busy on Friday, my Birthday , and Saturday. As you can see from the pictures, we’re coming into the home stretch. I installed a few bits of trim, finished the orchid shelves and the 4 doors in the basement, put the handles on the cabinets, installed the corner edge on the laundry platform, put in a second vent in the pipe soffit, and put in a ceramic tile floor in the orchid alcove. Yes, another thing I’d never done before and it didn’t go badly. I did need to buy a blade for the Roto-zip to cut the notches out, though. I can’t grout until about 5 PM Sunday. Sunday, besides painting trim, I also need to put the insulation up in the pipe soffit to block some of the heat from getting up into the ceiling. It can go out the two side vents and the vent I cut into the underside.

The basement has been pretty much cleaned up. Now I need to get the books out onto the shelves and get my workroom cleaned up. I also need to put the drywall up in the furnace enclosure ceiling, but that will wait. It will help mitigate some of the heat that is up in the ceiling when the furnace is running.

Looking around, I’m very pleased with the way it turned out. It will look great with furniture in place!

The doors and orchid shelves have been stained this evening. I’ve got fans on in the basement and 3 windows cracked open to draw the outside air through and cut down on the smell of the stain. I also closed the folding door at the top of the stairs, but that darn smell still makes it up through the house. It should be pretty much gone by tomorrow afternoon at the latest and most certainly once I’ve covered it with the first coat of polyurethane.

I finished sanding the shelves, supports, and the 4 doors this evening. Then I vacuumed them all and, finally, I wiped them down with a tack cloth. By the time that was done, it was already 8:30, so I’ve decided to delay the staining until tomorrow evening. It sets me back a day, but that should be okay. The shelves will be dry by Friday afternoon and the orchids can come in Friday night or Saturday. They are doing fine in the greenhouse at the moment.

I forgot to mention that the Roomba arrived yesterday. I hooked it up late last night and let it charge. This evening I sent it scurrying about for a few minutes and it did a god job cleaning some dirt and dust from the areas it visited. I’ve got drop-cloths on the floor and the saws are still set up, so it is foolish to program it to start cleaning already, but I’m thinking that it was a great idea to get this thing to keep the basement fairly clean once the dogs move back down there in a few weeks.

Last night I spent a few hours finishing up the orchid shelf supports and then I lightly sanded everything with the orbital sander. Since there are so many small spaces, I’ll need to sand a bit by hand this evening before I wipe it all down with a tack cloth and apply a coat of stain to the oak and also to the 4 doors in the basement – pantry, workroom, bathroom, and closet. If I don’t get to staining tonight, that will be on tomorrow’s agenda. With 2 coats of polyurethane needed, that means that they will be done on Friday, but the orchids won’t be able to be brought in until Saturday. If I can get the staining done tonight, I can bring them in Friday.

I just made a quick punch list of things that remain to be done. I should get most of it done on Friday and the balance this weekend. A few small items aren’t on my list, but these can be done at any time. For example, I need to use the small leftover pieces (most are 1 foot or so strips, 4 feet long) of drywall for the ceiling in the enclosure for the furnace. I can cut the pieces in the workroom and carry them to the enclosure to be screwed into place and the dust will be kept to a minimum or I can set up a drop cloth and the horses directly in front of the furnace in the entry area. I also need to figure out some sort of trim for the pipes where they pass through the walls. The pipes are larger than the stock flanges that can be picked up in the store, so I was thinking of cutting some pine into rings to fit. I’d then split the ring and attach it to the wall around the pipe after the ring was already painted.

The winter home for the orchids will be finished later this week. It would have been nice to have it ready by this weekend since it got to the freezing point last night and the night before, but they are okay in the greenhouse. Frost would kill them, but an hour or two just below the freezing point is okay.

I spent the entire day working on the alcove. I started with the trim for the window and up at the ceiling level. Since the walls are concrete block, I needed something to attach the ceiling angle to. I picked up white PVC 1x4 trim, figuring that it would reduce painting and also hold up against moisture better. There really isn’t all that much moisture there, but we do mist the orchids during the winter. Next I climbed up a ladder into the space above the alcove, which is the underside of the stair landing to the second floor, and attached insulation to the underside of the floor and interior wall that is actually the back of the closet and dead space under the stairs. I figure that this will keep the stair landing a little warmer.

The ceiling was next and it went together pretty quickly, as it is a very small space. I moved onto the oak after that, starting with the 4 vertical supports. I cut 2x2 blocks and affixed them to the 1x4 vertical pieces, spaced 6 inches apart. These blocks are intended to allow the shelves to be moved to different levels as needed. They will support the shelves at each end. After getting the verticals into position I realized that I had a flaw in my design as the opening into the alcove was smaller than the back. I had to block out the verticals, spacing them away from the walls, or the shelves would not be able to pass through the opening, negating the moveable idea! Later I also needed to add a 1x2 to the face of the 2x2 as the shelves were able to slide back and forth between the supports and could fall down. I probably should have blocked the vertical supports further from the wall, had I thought it through properly. In fact, with the trouble I had attaching the right hand supports to the wall due to the fact that my 2-3/4 inch screws wouldn’t reach through all of the wood to make a good bite into the concrete block, a better design would have been to attach 1x4 pine to the walls and then attach the oak to it, making the verticals into columns. As it stands now, I plan to add a piece of 1x3 to the front face of the verticals to cover the gap left by the blocking.

Once I worked out the vertical supports and attached them to the wall I started on the shelves. They came out great. I used a 1x6 for the front and 1x4 for the sides and back. There are 2 pieces of 1x2 going front to back near the top and 8 lengths of 1x2 making up the deck. I left 1-1/2 inch spacing between the 1x2s that span the length to allow for more air flow.

This evening I’ll add the 1x3 pieces to the verticals and sand everything down before applying a coat of stain. Tomorrow evening I can get a coat of polyurethane on the, perhaps two coats in the same evening. On Wednesday I will attach the lights underneath and hang one fixture from the ceiling grid. At that point the shelves are ready for the orchids. I still need to do the floor, but I can do that after the orchids are on the shelves above. I’d like to do a ceramic tile floor. Home Depot had a nice tile that was $1 per square foot. I need about 18 tiles, so that’s not a bad price. I need to get a piece of oak for the sill at the opening, too. That will probably cost more than the tile!

I’ll have an extra day this coming weekend since I took my birthday off from work – Friday. That should allow me to get the last of the little things done, like putting in the cabinet handles, painting the trim and the underside of the pipe enclosure, adding insulation above the steam pipes running through the enclosure, and putting another vent in the side of the enclosure. Who knows, we may even get out to buy some furniture for seating! The end is in sight.

I took a few evening off from basement work this week and I may take this evening off, too. I’m considering doing a little trim painting or similar, but it depends on my energy level. I’m no longer feeling like I will fall asleep at my desk at work, but I’m still a bit tired, so I think that a little time off is a good thing.

I spent a few hours setting up the media cabinet yesterday evening. It looks pretty awesome, if I may say so! The TV appears to be sitting on top of the cabinet, which I did in order to hide the wires and that worked out great. The adjustable feet I put in on the 4 legs worked out great, too, since I needed to adjust the right front and left rear to level the cabinet once it was in place. 

It took a little longer than I expected because I had to snake a whole lot of wires internally to the battery backup unit which is inside the bottom of the cabinet and there are a whole lot of wires. I didn’t test the DVD player, but I’ll actually be switching the wires from it to feed component video to the TV. There is an audio connection from the TV to the receiver for the surround sound. The other glitch that I ran into is that I was unable to configure the VCR. I will be able to take care of that this evening, since it occurs to me that I hooked it up to feed the cable signal through the VCR to the antenna input on the TV, so the TV needs to be tuned to channel 3 when you want to use the VCR tuner! Duh! The issue is that the TV doesn’t have enough inputs and the older receiver doesn’t mix video signals very well. Trying to switch everything through the receiver is a nightmare, hence the reason for my coax hookup. Since I typically use the video out connections, I completely forgot about the channel 3 requirement!

I plan to do a few more odds and ends downstairs this evening before heading to bed even earlier than I did last night, if possible. I probably won’t start on the orchid alcove until Friday evening or Saturday, but there are enough smaller things to take care of daily.

I tried something new last night after snapping the pictures of the basement project status – I took a video that’s about a minute long. I’ve never used the video capabilities of my digital camera before, so I apologize for the zooming. I did know to keep it at a minimum, but I probably should have avoided it altogether.

Update: Yes, I know that the sound is simply a bunch of hissing. I had no clue that the camera has sound capabilities! 

I’m very pleased with the progress at this point. It was another busy weekend, culminating in the unveiling of the floor. Okay, it was actually just an uncovering, but Pennie’s comment that it was like unwrapping a huge Christmas present was pretty accurate. We haven’t seen the floor, except in some little areas when we peeled back the paper covering or when the paper was torn and needed to be replaced or repaired. The floor managed to come through the construction with no damage, which was the reason for the paper.

Starting on Friday evening, it was a cabinet door weekend, for the most part. The first step on Friday was to get the doors spread out and wiped down with a tack cloth. Then it was on to applying a coat of stain. On Saturday afternoon, I cleared away my work table and set up 2x4 pieces on the horses and also the 4 chairs in order to raise the work surface up and then I spread the doors out once again. After a light sanding, the first coat of polyurethane went on. I used a water based polyurethane made by Cabot and it was great stuff to work with. It dried to the touch within 90 minutes, so I was able to flip the doors and get the other side of all of them finished. I took a break to get some work done for the office, have dinner, and grind the veggies for the dogs. And then I repeated the process – sand, poly, flip. I went to bed about 1:30 and let everything dry overnight.

I let the finish set a little longer on Sunday by starting the day by clearing much of the orchid alcove. I had the router table and a variety of wood pieces sitting in there. I put the little router table in my workroom (which is painfully overcrowded still with the freezer and many boxes in there!) and took the lumber out under the porch that I wasn’t expecting to use for the rest of the finishing touches.

The 19 cabinet doors (16 cabinet doors, the water meter closet door, and 2 doors for the media cabinet I built last week) were hung by 3 PM and they look fabulous. When Pennie remarked that she had never imagined that they would look so good, I felt really proud of my workmanship.

After a short break I set to work on clearing out the rest of the wood from the orchid alcove – lots of oak pieces and the oak I intend to use for the orchid shelves themselves. (I have a basic design concept in my head – I need to sketch it out and match the materials needed to what I’ve already got on hand. I know that I’ll need more oak 1x2 material and probably some other oak pieces, too…) Then I applied a thick coat of Dri-Lock masonry sealer paint to the lower wall inside the pantry where we do get some seepage when it rains very hard and the floor and walls of the orchid alcove. I have another quart of the stuff to use for a second coat in the pantry, but the alcove didn’t need the second coat as it doesn’t actually have a water problem. I just wanted to seal it before putting in the flooring over the base. A quick dinner was next and then I put a finish coat of white enamel on the flat parts of all of the baseboard molding and door frames, plus the columns. I’ll still need to do the underside of the boxed in pipe/beam area and all of the brushed parts of the baseboard and window trim.

It was just after 8 PM when I invited Pennie down to assist in removing all of the paper that covered the floor. As I hope you can see in the pictures and the video clip, the appearance is amazing. In the near future I plan to post some before/after pictures to compare what it used to look like to the finished space.

Still to do, close to the order in which they will be done over the next week or two:

1. Floor, ceiling, shelves in the orchid alcove
2. Purchase and install another vent for the pipe soffit
3. Paint the rest of the trim
4. Install a few short pieces of inside corner molding.
5. Insulate above the pipes as they pass through the length of the soffit to keep the heat from spreading out into the ceiling cavity.
6. Move stuff from the workroom, including the freezer
7. Purchase and install cabinet knobs/handles
8. Use leftover drywall pieces to apply a layer or two of drywall above the furnace.
9. Purchase sofa/seating and move the dog crates and Pennie’s desk downstairs again.

Yesterday evening I put up the outside corner molding at the laundry area ceiling drop-down. It turned out quite well. I still have a few pieces of trim left to put up – short inside corners and some flat molding on the seams on the pipe soffit. Neither is critical, so that will wait.

I moved on to finishing up the cabinet doors after the trim was up. I had to cut down the 1/4 inch square pieces of oak into little 2 inch or so long pieces and glue them into the spaces on each of the door backs. Since I had routed the entire length of the vertical pieces, the stiles, there was a space between the edge of the rails and stiles that needed to be filled. I set all the doors aside to dry and moved on to sanding the face frames of the cabinets. I used the finishing sander hooked up to the shop vacuum for most of it and then sanded some tighter spots by hand. This evening I’ll be sanding the doors and the media cabinet. Then I need to mask off any place where oak meets the wall paint with some delicate surface painter’s tape.

Hopefully, the sanding will go quickly. If it does, I’ll wipe all of the oak down with a tack cloth and get the stain applied. My fingers are crossed that I can get that accomplished this evening because 2 coats of polyurethane will require an overnight drying and light sanding between coats. If I don’t get the staining done tonight, the polyurethane won’t be finished until Saturday. I guess that’s okay, but it would be real nice to get the doors hung Saturday afternoon and get started on the orchid area by painting the waterproofing paint on the floor and lower walls so that I can put the floor in on Sunday before moving on to the ceiling and shelves.

I am thrilled with the way that the doors turned out. I cut the pieces. routed the edge, drilled the pocket holes, and put them together on Saturday. This morning I cut the oak plywood and set the panels in place. Then I moved on to building the media cabinet that will sit under the television.

I had a plan drawn out, but no measurements yet. So, I measured the components and the distance from the floor to the bottom of the television and marked up my sketches with the measurements. I then assessed the pile of oak that I had on the floor to determine the exact material that I would use. The receiver was a bit deeper than I had expected, so my plans for joining a 1x12 and a 1x4 went out the window and I decided to join a 1x12 and a 1x8 to make the sides, 2 pieces of 1x12 joined (with a little bit of one piece cut off to make it narrower), and the shelves made of 1x12, 1x8, and 1x4 material joined together to make up the difference. I was short some material, so I needed to run out to Lowe’s to pick up 8 feet of 1x12, 6 feet of 1x8, and a 2 foot by 4 foot piece of 3/4 inch oak plywood for the bottom.

Once again the pocket hole jig was a great joy to use. It made joining the pieces of lumber together very easy. I didn’t have to worry about glue seeping from the joints making it impossible to get a good stain and it was pretty much instant gratification – no clamping overnight for the glue to dry. The complete kit for the pocket hole jig, drill bit, clamps and extra screws cost over $200, but I think it was worth every penny.

Pictures of weekend 17 progress are uploading as I type this. Evenings this week will be spent sanding, staining, applying polyurethane, priming the last little pieces that I didn’t get to on Friday, and putting up the last little trim pieces. Pennie will help by getting a coat of white enamel on the trim during the week. If all goes well, by the end of next weekend the cabinet doors will have been hung and I’ll be well underway to completing the orchid alcove.

In fact, I told Pennie that I thought we’d be uncovering the floor this coming weekend, too. So close! I had better get to bed now, though, as it is already after 11 and tomorrow I’ll be back to work and that means getting up at 3:45 in the morning!

Yesterday morning Pennie called and told me she might be coming home as early as tomorrow, Friday. I haven’t heard from her today, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed that her plan has been solidified and that I’ll be seeing her tomorrow afternoon.

I left work before lunch today to meet the furnace guy for the steam boiler’s annual tune-up. He did a nice job flushing out the boiler and cleaning everything out. He gave it a thumbs up and also gave me some tips to keep it in good shape. Basically, I’ve been doing the right thing by flushing it a few times each heating season, but he suggested flushing it monthly.

After he left, I got changed and started working in the basement. First up was installing the drawer next to the sink. That actually went quite well. It works and it looks great, even without a handle yet. Then I cut and installed the oak plywood ends on the upper cabinets and that went very well. Since it was then 6 PM, it was time to feed the mutleys, who were, of course, starving and letting me know! I had some dinner myself and then headed back downstairs. I vacuumed up the sawdust and got ready to start priming the trim. I have some outside corner molding that needs to go around the soffit enclosing the pipes. I laid that out on the horses and painted it first. I’ll put the finish coat on once it us up, but the primer was easier to do before I cut and nailed it. Then I started the trim near the entrance. I made it to the first column and ended up priming all of the columns before doing any other trim. They look great painted white! I wrapped up at 9:30 and took the dogs out.

I took tomorrow off in anticipation of Pennie’s arrival and will spend the day making cabinet doors after putting up that corner molding. Even if she doesn’t come home tomorrow, it will be good to have another full day to work on the cabinets. I can continue the painting in the evenings, since that’s kind of tedious and doesn’t require a lot of set up or clean-up.

I feel like the end of the project is in sight. I expect it will be a few more weeks now. :-)

Mixing up some putty and filling the joints in the columns and remaining trim was the evening’s task and I accomplished it with two batches over 2 hours. Tomorrow it gets sanded down.

We’re going to bed early tonight since I’ve been staying up way too late for some time now. I am getting up an hour later than usual, but I’ve been off-setting that by staying up longer than and hour later most nights and much later on the weekends.

First of all, today’s photos of Amaya were posted by Pennie to her Flickr account and I snagged them for re-posting here. It was great to actually see some pictures of her.

I picked up an absolutely awesome device today for 9.95. It’s a rubber/neoprene attachment that fits on the shop vacuum hose and reduces the end to a cone with stepped down diameters. The smallest diameter fits perfectly over the tube coming from my orbital finishing sander where there’s a small and ineffective dust bag usually attached. This evening I sanded the columns down using the attachment and the shop vac running and the dust was kept to a bare minimum. That’s awesome! I needed a bit of a break, so I only spent about an hour or so in total downstairs this evening. I was going to mix up some putty and fill holes, but decided against that for now. I’ll do that tomorrow evening and sand again on Wednesday and start priming the trim on Wednesday or Thursday evening. In fact, Thursday will be a decent day to take care of it since I’ll be home all afternoon. The furnace guy is coming for the pre-winter tune-up between 1 and 3 in the afternoon.

So, no pictures of progress this Monday evening because sanded columns don’t look much different than un-sanded ones unless you look real close!