Update May 23

I finally cut my nails short enough so that I can type and I'm not typing/re-typing/correcting typos the entire time. Small success, but hey, I celebrate what I can.

I can't believe it's been 3 weeks since I wrote. We've been busy, but not necessarily with the house projects. I've been trying to drum up business so that we can pay for things, we had our anniversary, we've been battling sugar ants with boric sweetness over and over, Rich has been working a lot, and dang it, we have half an acre, a self-propelled follow-behind mower and lots of rain . . . I forgot how much yard work (and I don't mean making it prettier out there, just taming the jungle) absorbs your time. And Rich has been coaxing seeds of vegetables to become life-sustaining plants to boot. Doesn't seem to leave much energy for tackling in-house things.

A week or two ago, we re-assessed what still needs to be done with what we have on hand. No new or costly projects can be started for a while. My business has been unbelievably slow, so until I make my quota for a normal salary this year, anything that costs more than $50 has to wait. But that shouldn't stop us from doing a ton of other things around here for which we'd already bought materials.

I sat down and made a list of "finish-up" projects around the house. I came up with 46 items, and some of those come in multiple parts. Things like "finish coating edge banding and install", and "re-paint the green wall and cut in around trim", and "install crown pieces over cabinets in kitchen" (which is a multiple stage endeavor of making sure it covers all the gaps between the cabinet and the ceiling, cut to length, do a dry fit, take down, apply multiple coats of stain and poly, THEN install), and so on. After creating said list, I emailed it to Rich to read on his "off time". He wrote back that he was utterly exhausted just reading it. I think we're both feeling a bit like Sisyphus.

This past weekend we spent a lot of time working on some of these projects. We (meaning mostly Rich when it comes to the table saw because, as I've said before, I'm rather attached to my fingers) built pull-out drawers for my pots and pans cabinet and poly-coated them. I tested yet another finish on the edge banding in hopes of finally getting the right sheen on them (finally nailed the color down closely last week). We custom fitted (scribed) trim for difficult parts of the house where new, straight building meets old, wonky building. Rich built edge banding for the final corner of cabinet near the stove and I started the staining process. Rich milled new trimwork for the kitchen window. He also created the "goodie" box for the bathroom that fits in the niche that holds the keg-erator and remote for the in-shower TV. He also went around all the small openings we could find that accessed the nether-regions of the house and spray-foam insulated them. A lot got accomplished this weekend, even though it doesn't look like it. All towards the finish line . . .

And did I mention I occasionally find a "palmetto bug" in the house small enough to devour the cats, even Spatz? When I find one, my first order of business is to make sure both cats can be found alive. The Terminix guy says that a bug that big comes in from the outside, but goodness gracious, how big does the hole have to be for it to enter my home at that size??? The stories I've heard about Larry, the former owner, are hare-raising (yes, I meant to spell it that way) to say the least. From mice running rampant to dead rabbits in the house that were there, undiscovered, WAY too long, to NACTs (Nasty-Ass-Cricket-Things, see very early post) to palmetto bugs, this house had been neglected for a while. I do think we're winning, as I've yet to see a German roach or anything resembling bats in the house (unlike one of our neighbors, who hopes they'll just move on to a different house someday, but I secretly think a stain on the ceiling is actually bat guano eating through drywall), but it still feels like we haven't claimed the house back entirely from the wild. For pete's sake, when we drive up the driveway and get out of the car, the rabbits two feet from the driveway stare us down like the Terminator. It gives me the willies. Maybe we need a dog.