Jeez the time flies....

 Its hard to believe its almost June, not sure where the rest of April and May went.   Most of the time has been spent on landscaping and planting outside - see pictures below.  We built several small rock retaining walls for planting beds and put in a mix of xeric plants as well as some herbs and annuals for the larger pots.

Crawfish boil went well this year - much smaller invite list which was kind of nice in that we actually got to visit with folks more including a few of the neighbors.  

Jauna's keeping busy with work, Scott has been working on deck plans and beer brewing plans as his work has been pretty slow.   He's currently trying to culture a yeast for a summer (saison) belgian beer.

The most recent work inside has been rocking the game room fireplace (with slate) currently about 80% done with getting the rock up.  

Still need to seal and grout... and get the mantel designed, built and installed. Additional inside work going on at the same time has been on the master bedroom vanity. The cabinet was shoehorned in this afternoon/night (it was tight enough that the sides had to be shaved down by about 3/16" on each to get it in. As typical, we scheduled the countertop measurements for this Thursday which didn't give us too much time to daudle on getting it plumbed and installed.

Random musings and progress report...

The Boy needed a haircut... so he got a bit of a trim but will likely be getting a little bit more of a real cut here in the next few weeks - he's got great Einstein like hair though (its fun for mom and dad to play with).

Have been brewing beer in prep for our annual party - the Imperial IPA had a "robust" fermentation.... very thankful it was in the shower pan.

Work on the trim for the columns continues - got the shelves up and the ply facing stained, cut and installed for the upper part of the columns. The lower pieces are cut and 3 of them are about 50% done with finishing - they have a slight taper (1/2" over about 3 ft) for a very slight kind of pyramid effect.

Not that its real hard but we seem to do a bang-up job of finding/creating new projects for ourselves.  We'd been planning these for a while but with the nice weather the last couple of weekends we were able to get started in earnest with some of the landscaping work building rock walls for some planting beds.  The large pile of small river rock will eventually be scattered along the back of the house to prevent (or at least reduce the frequency of) little muddy footprints around the house.  

Lhianna's Birthday Party

Lhianna turned six in February.  We went to a local Gymnastics gym for the party and invited a bunch of Lhianna's friends from her Kindergarten class, neighbors and other friends.  Lhianna liked the whole gym the best...watching the kids in the foam pit was a riot.

Done, Done, really done.... well almost

The hardwoods are completely done.... finally. Still will have to do a bit of touch up staining/finishing where we milled custom length pieces to fit in with the surrounds on the tile work but relatively minor altogether.  Finished up with the second closet (to the right in the first photo) and the catwalk where we used some of the remaining travertine tiles from the woodburning fireplace surround (second photo).

We found several pieces of furniture off of craigslist that were right in line with what we were looking for and got them for reasonable prices (definitely vs. new).  They were all in very good shape and we managed to get everything moved in before the snow hit on Sunday.  We've still got a bit of trim to knock out, most of it is ready to go with the big exception being the columns to either side of the den.  We have the lumber but it'll require a bit of work to get it milled down and stained/sealed prior to install (hopefully within the next month). 

Deck planning has started but with any luck (doubtful) we'll get some of the master bathroom done before we tear the deck down..... stay tuned.

The end is in sight (at least for the hardwoods)

Work continues on the hardwoods (picture #1), particularly the tricky part of wrapping the sections of tile around the hearth (picture #2) and side entry (picture #3) and then matching the lines up in the hallway to parallel the wall with the closets relatively close. Ended up running different widths on the west side vs. the east side as the widths were about 3/4" off between the two (picture #4 from the laundry room).

It seems to be going a bit easier now but its taken a good bit of time and dry fitting to make sure all of the joints match up as we had to do some custom milling on quite a few of the pieces. If you compare the pictures from last week to this week you can see where we had to fit in several just to the left of the picture by the wood burning stove.

Also got most of the trim milled up and stained to wrap the structural beam in the game room but its still sitting down in the garage waiting to be installed (more pictures of that later).

Hardwoods continued

Hardwood installation continues at about the pace its been going at (maybe 20sqft/hr), we're getting better with controlling the adhesive so we don't have little dabs of goo (outside of Carson marking most everything he touches) but keeping all of the joints nice and tight has proven to be challenging (still). Clamps in a variety of configurations seem to be consistently the best way to pull in any bow/warp in the wood.... although the 8" wide boards are a heckuva lot hard to massage into place.

We finished up the family room on Sunday (the pic with then smaller pile of hardwood flooring) and got some trim put up in the dining room and knocked out quite a few of the really long runs from the family room to the den/away room last night. We'll have to do quite a bit of dry fitting around the tile on the side entry and hearth to ensure tight fits but have it close enough now that we should be able to get most of that done without putting any additional strips down for a bit.

Semblance of Normality

The latest deadline for action was super bowl Sunday as we had a few folks over for the game.  The game room was the biggest milestone and its fully functional but not quite done as the rock on the fireplace is still waiting in lieu of the hardwoods in the family and dining rooms.  

Heres a shot into the dining room and kitchen from the family room, you can see the hardwoods and a series of progression shots of the kitchen from original mess to latest (2/4/08).