Update August 19

Back to the grind.

Well, not so much a grind, but a gentle scraping.

Both of us felt the itch yesterday to finally start working a bit again. We're feeling pretty motivated to work on the kitchen, but have just been so tired. That changed yesterday. I think a couple of nights of decent sleep has helped significantly.

Between stints of real estate work (that has picked up in activity a bit, by the way), I painted and caulked more trim in the bathroom. Word of note: when caulking with 100% silicone, guaranteed waterproof, non-paintable caulk, caulking two porcelain surfaces at their joint is a breeze. Run a bead of caulk, wear a glove, dip the finger of the glove in water, and run the finger along the bead. It leaves a nice, smooth edge, and you didn't get it all over your fingers. You may have to use a paper towel on occasion to get the excess, but overall, the process goes very very well.

However.

When caulking with aforementioned caulk between painted drywall and porcelain, completely different outcome. Let's just say, when you're showering at my house, don't look at the top edge of the tile in the shower where it meets the drywall. Most people will be too short to see it, but I know it's there. Ugh. That will be the ugly spot of the bathroom for sure. And, of course, since it's not paintable, it's not cover-upable either. Sigh.

I also got to work on the corners and walls in the kitchen, rasping down the edges and sanding everything that hasn't been primed already. If it's been primed and still shows ugliness or bumpiness, I'm having to add an extra layer of mud to it, trying to feather the edges. I won't say our sheetrock job is the best, but I have seen sheetrockers who have done worse. Fair to midlin' is what I'll call this. Luckily, a lot of it will be covered up by either backsplash or cabinets, so maybe the areas that show won't be quite so obvious. Today I'm gonna try to go back and sand and rasp some more. If we can prime and paint and maybe hang upper cabinets this weekend, I'll be thrilled.

Once Rich got home, he was itching to work on something, so we set ourselves to working on connecting the sink in the bathroom vanity to the drain pipe (he'd already run the water lines). Discovered we were missing a piece (of course), so had to make a run to ACE at 7:34 (they close at 8:00). Got home, and then watched Rich install it all (can't help here, since it's all very close quarters). Tested the lines, ran the water, and voila! we have a working sink!! Then we decided to go ahead and install the toilet as well. Fairly easy overall, with only one area that I tiled a bit too close, so using a glass cutting wheel and the backside of the adjustable wrench as a hammer, Rich was able to crack just part of the tile and get it out of there for room to install taller bolts. Yes, we have all those tools. You'd be amazed the little gadgets we have accumulated over time. It's quite impressive, if you think about it.

So before 10 pm, we had a working, beautiful toilet and working vanity sink and faucet. I quickly ran around and got soap, hand towel, air freshener, roll of toilet paper and put them all in there so we actually have a full, working bathroom! Lots of things to still deal with, like altering the drawers to accommodate the innards of the vanity so that it still looks like a working chest of drawers that just happens to have a sink on it. Still have more painting and caulking to do, need to shim and caulk around the toilet (1960s floors could never be leveled . . . gotta love that!), need to find hardware for the towels, install the niche, install the cap rail and cove moulding along the top of the trim, need to create a little extra block around the inlet pipe (nipple, for those plumbers out there) so that the escutcheon plate fits propertly over the hole, install a mirror and remaining trim and caulk and paint it all, install cover plates, etc. Still tons to do, but you can do a number, wash your hands, and shower, all in the same room now! YAY!!!

And we don't have to walk a quarter mile to the only sink to wash our hands if we need to.

Aah, the little things in life.

For a break earlier, I also got out the "floorplan" that we've devised. It's not to scale, exactly, but close enought to get ideas on how we want to handle things. We've referred to it when doing the planning and it's worked out quite well.

The reason I brought it out is that we really enjoy sleeping in the back of the house. We will still experiment by sleeping in the original master bedroom, but we think we might end up wanting to move the master to the back of the house. It is SO quiet back there at night that you can hear your heart beating. It was never that quiet in Stepford, since we lived on a main street. So I re-worked the plan to see if it would be possible to move our room back there.

There is no bedroom in the house that's all that big. Or the layout with the windows prevents good furniture placement. The original master bedroom is small (10.5 x 13.5), with a very small closet for two people (smaller than the other two closets in the other two bedrooms) and akwardly placed windows that prevent the best furniture placement. Our office is quite a bit bigger than the master (11.5 x 14.5) but it's at the front of the house, with no direct access to a bathroom. Originally, we were going to build the room in back for Barbara (our semi-retiree), because it was going to be 9.5 by 12.5. Still small, but totally workable for a single lady. I'm hoping to convince Rich it can be our room instead. Since all the clothing storage can be accomplished with the closets instead, we wouldn't need much furniture. We didn't have much in our bedroom before, just nightstands, rocking chair, armoire and a bench. No dressers because it all went in the closet. So if I can convince Rich that the bedroom will be an adequate size for what we need, we may move it to the back. His concern is re-sale, of course--that no one would want a master bedroom that small. The other one isn't much bigger, so my thought is, we could configure the bath in a way to connect to the original master bedroom if a potential buyer hated the MBR back room set up. It would be easy to convert back. We'll see how it goes. . . . lots of thought and planning has to take place.

I have some work I need to do, then I'll work on the house, then I have to show a house/possibly write an offer tonight. Busy day, but it's progress!