Business as usual...

I'm "working from home" today, sitting at the new desk area in the kitchen, which I love. There a great view of the backyard - snow coming down right now! Close proximity to the food. The optical mouse even works on the granite. No need for a mouse pad. What more could you ask for?
There's some new trim for the above window being stained in the garage as we speak. Odds and ends like that are about all we've done for the past few days. With the floor done and the appliances in their forever homes, there's no more sense of urgency here. I guess we are also anticipating the door making process which is sure to be slow and tedious.

Here's close-up view of the backsplash. As soon as that trim is installed, we're putting it up around the desk area too.
The slate floor is done as well. True to form we sold the extra 100 sq ft of slate to a nice family from Boulder for $100. That's a little less than we paid for it but I did sort through every single box and select the nicest tiles so... I think they deserved the discount. Grouting that stuff was no fun, let me tell you, and I'm not 100% sure that the grout/mortar wasn't a contributor to my mysterious allergic reaction. I do love the results, but seriously, for the time and energy and buckets of water it took to get that stuff clean, I don't know if I would do it again.

Over the hump

Despite lack of blog posts to serve as proof, work on the house has been progressing at the speed of light!! Ok, not that fast. BUT, I will get my appliances back and in their rightful positions, not the living room, THIS WEEK. Maybe even tonight. This is huge folks.

The biggest hurdle we jumped was the slate floor. We spent one entire weekend, all day both days, putting down the slate that I bought off Craigslist, hmm, over a year ago. It has sat there peacefully in the laundry room ever since. This was tough work... joint pain, back pain, muscle pain, you name it. In fact it took several days for us to recover, but we were determined to be done by Sunday night. Here's a shot of me right at the end of the process. (p.s. You can even see evidence of a mysterious allergic reaction that had moved up to my face by the end of the ordeal. So yes, monday morning was spent getting a benedryl shot and steroid pack.)


Allergy or not, I enjoy the tiling process. You get to work with mud. And, its all about appearances, rather than small details like if your grout lines are absolutely perfect. That doesn't really matter. You are going for the overall affect here people. August hates it for the same reasons. Thus, for once, I got to play the role of worker and August got to be the assistant.


Since then we have grouted the kitchen area only, because the grouting ain't so fun. But, in order to speed that appliance install, we did get it done where it counts. The latest effort is the backsplash. I found some glass tiles in a hurry and because we are tile experts now, we bought them Sunday, installed them Monday, and grouted them Tuesday. Tonight, Wednesday, we will clean them off one more time and then install the range in front and never take it out again.