Weekend Warriors

The days have been very busy, the weeks jam-packed, and the weekends have been our time for cranking on our house. We've been doing so much house work on Saturdays and Sundays that by the time Monday morning rolls around Joe and I are exhausted from our weekend. But life goes ever onward and by Wednesday we're usaually feeling pretty good (just gearing up for another weekend). Well, it's been quite some time since I've posted any updates, but alot has happened in the meantime. Most notably our electric heaters have been installed (hooray! we actaully have a bonified heating system now!) and the old wood fireplace torn out (what a beast that thing was). Also, our friend Jordan Williams sanded down and restained the wood in the upstairs bathroom (that turned out to be a much bigger (and messier) project than origanlly anticipated). We also tore out the old pink toilet from the upstairs bathroom and discovered hidden treasure- a pair of white gold hoop earrings which had been lost in the pipes, what a surprise! We've added a door between the kitchen and laundry room to block out the noise from the washer and dryer and also to prevent the cold air from the garage from seeping into our main living space.

Today we started our next big project: remodelling the living room fireplace area. We purchased a new wood stove to replace the huge, old, ugly, and nearly broken one. Our new wood stove is a beautiful model from Vermont Castings in a lovely reddish brown color. To showcase the new wood stove we needed to cover over the existing brick that is so ugly and has gaping vents. We decided to cover it was a nice tile overlay. But first we had to knock out some of the bricks on the bottom to make the hearth level then frame up some built-in "shelf" knooks. Once the old hearth/fireplace area was framed up and leveled, Joe, my dad, and our friend Chris began drilling hardy-backer cement board over the brick so that we can apply the tile to that. The project is not nearly finished but we've accomplished the big important step of getting started. One can now begin to imagine how lovely our living room will look once the project is complete.