Alt.End

Our beloved Powerbook crashed last night. Sealed up inside it's corrupted hard drive are all of our photos from this year, music, and lots of work in progress. I'll shop it around for data recovery but I'm not expecting much. I'll write a make-up post this weekend, when I'm feeling better about the whole thing.

Weekend Warrior

With Dawn off in NYC helping with my sister's wedding shower, neighbor Tim and I ran some electrical and put up a kitchen ceiling. Most of the credit goes to Tim who did all the wiring and cut all the paneling for the ceiling. I stood around a lot and tried my best to be helpful.

The new recessed lighting is amazing. It's so bright! The first night with the new lights I kept turning off the lights thinking it would some how dim the lights, rather than simply turn them off (oh....that's how electricity works!). When Dawn came home from NYC on Sunday she was floored with how great everything looked.

The only advice I can give for anyone thinking of trying this is to have an electrician help you. Even with Tim's expertise it still took us 5 hours. If I had tried this by myself I'd either still be working on it or dead from electrocution.

Blog Note: Next week is a vacation week so there may not be an update. In fact, I'm almost positive there won't be one.

The Battle is Won, but the War Continues

Saturday Morning 9am









Protective covering for last week's efforts








The glorious finished product.

It's done. We finished the upper cabinet renovation on Sunday. We accomplished the same amount of work in one less day than last week. Overall, the second phase went smoother than the first. There wasn't as much grease and grim on these cabinets which speed up the amount of prep time before sanding. We bought more expensive brushes this time which made a huge visual difference with the paint. It was totally worth the extra $1.76 at the register. We still had some difficulty with putting the doors back up it. We concluded that it was the difference between the new hinges & the old ones. The new hinges stood off the doors by a quarter of an inch. Double that and there goes all the space between the doors. The doors do close, however they are pressing against one another to the point where the paint is coming off. SO...if you do try this at home please consider the difference between your hardware.

We are pleased with our efforts. The new cabinets make the kitchen much brighter. Dawn is already motivated with our fledgling efforts that I got served homemade quiche one night and ribs with corn on the cob another.

I'm running electrical and putting up the new ceiling this weekend. The next post will be about that. Unless I forget to turn off the power and both my hands are wrapped in gauze. Then the post will look something like this:
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Someone's in the Kitchen ...

removing ceiling tiles...








...and painting the cabinets...










...a bright new happier color...









I should have taken a picture with the cabinet doors attached, which is what we did Sunday. If you've never tried it, re-attaching cabinet doors isn't as easy as one would think. I took us 4 attempts and a trip to home depot before we got it right. So now that we know the ropes of taking apart, sanding, priming, painting and re-hanging cabinets, we hope for the same success with the other side. I'll post pictures of the finished project.
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Halo, Sister-in-Law!
We were graced with an overnight stay by my sister-in-law, Lauren, last night. She was very excited that the XBOX was repaired. While I am very familiar with the single-player campaign I had no experience with the head-to-head mutli-player feature, of which she was familiar. It took me a while to get acquainted with the maps and the rules of the board. Once that occurred, there were frags a-flying. Frags to the face, frags to the back of the head, frags off of the ladders. With all the fragging going on, you might think there'd be no room for anything else. Oh, but there was amble room for trash talking. And later root beer floats.