We kind of blitzed our yard on Tuesday night in an attempt to make it look like we do more than sleep at our home. The “For Sale” sign next door was starting to make me feel bad about our curb appeal.

Anyway, after mowing and weeding and sweeping the driveway (it’s acorn time again), wanted to cut the pieces for the pocket door trim for the family room. While he set up the saw and measured things, I took the time to snap a few photos of pretty things (that were suddenly visible after weeding and picking up all the fallen branches).

These first two pictures are for . I looked at what we’ve got going on in our front garden, and these are the two I thought you might want to commandeer. These were the “tamest” of the bunch – everything else looked wilder and quite… rustic. Probably not what you were going for.

Catmint, which has grown a lot, and has these cute purple flowers.

I don't know what this fern-like plant is, but it does have yellow flowers that appear mid-summer (you can kind of see them at the top of the picture).

I had some fun using the macro mode to capture the beautiful blooming Stargazer Lily plant that gave me.

Beautiful blooms!

How close can we get?

She added these leafy plants at the bottom of the pot, and they have such pretty coloring!

Another close-up

I also took “final” pictures of the yard project I worked on while I was laid off. I’ll share those tomorrow. It’s a good thing I took them Tuesday, because it’s been cloudy ever since. Not good picture-taking weather.

Well, this post is about a week overdue. The thing is, I don’t really use my home computer for anything other than watching TV and doing homework. But, since it seems as though they are only making negative progress on the budget and I may be out of work for a while, perhaps I should get better at posting from home.

Anyway, I wanted to show you all our furniture.

Ta-da! (Also, note the immaculate carpeting - the cleaner we had come out did such a good job removing all of the stains, even the black spray paint. If you ever need a recommendation in the Twin Cities area, let me know.)

It’s all from Craigslist (four different sellers), and we got it for a steal! Everything is nearly new in condition. The coffee table is Room & Board, and though it’s about 10 years old and lived in a family’s basement for a while, is unmarred. There are three drawers in the opposite side that are perfect for holding remotes and video game controllers. I need to find some baskets for the bottom shelf. There’s a table behind the sofa that we bought specifically for to sit on. I need to make up a little cover for it so that it is soft (and washable).

The entertainment system is all set up.

On the left there is all of the "stuff" for the entertainment center. One day we'll have a door on it, but we're not at the door-building stage yet.

So, if you remember, I had said that there was a story about the furniture that would excuse me from taking timely pictures. You will not believe what we had to do to get that couch into the basement. The old sofa was a two-seater, and quite bulky. We had to remove the stair railing and some doors to get it into the basement. Well, that was nothing compared to what we had to do last week. The sectional is in two pieces, a two-seater and a three-seater. The two-seater fit down fine. The three-seater, however, just would not fit. We had house guests over, and the boys tried everything they could, switching angles and rotating things and what have you… and nothing worked. We removed the stair railing again, and a piece of trim from the doorway, but it just wasn’t enough. Then, we got a crazy idea. We weren’t sure if it would work, but it wouldn’t hurt to try.

First, we had to empty out the pantry. Completely empty out. Removed the shelves too, and the doors.

For reference, this is one big sectional.

Bet you didn't expect that. We didn't either. It seems it was added at a later date (probably by the previous owner, not the first owners, since the tile goes all the way underneath), and was really just wedged in that space (and secured with a few screws). The trim was actually attached to the pantry, not the ceiling, and the whole thing was sitting on a base. Fancy!

Removing the pantry meant we could get the sofa down the stairs, but even then there were complications. We had to remove a light fixture at the bottom of the stairs, and it was a tight fit overall.

Thankfully, the sofa is incredibly comfy, and perfect for the space. I’m not sure our house guests who helped out think it was worth all the effort, but we do. We’ll have to cut it into pieces to remove it some day, but now we know a few things. 1) The pantry is removable. 2) Our next sectional (when this one wears out / once is no longer with us to scratch up our furniture) needs to be in three pieces – two love seats and a corner unit.

Just one more picture for you:

It looks like a functional room now! And it is! We've used it every day since getting the furniture down there. The living room is put back in order too, and things seem to be returning to normal.

I do have more pictures and updates to share, but I figure I should spread them out a bit.

This weekend, we installed the ceiling in the family room. If you remember, I really wanted this part of the project completed. It helped that we had all of the supplies except for the actual tiles – we’d bought the framework ages ago, shortly after installing the ceiling in ‘s office (which is the same). Once we decided we liked it, the system went on sale and we bought everything (except the tiles) for buy one, get one free. We saved a bundle.

The last pictures of the family room I posted had the window boxes installed, but no ceiling. Thursday night, we figured out what to do with the pocket door (which needed to be dealt with before getting to the ceiling), and Friday night we executed our plan.

It looks like drywall, right? (The piece above the door opening.)

We're just going to pretend it's drywall.

I also primed the window boxes, which is why in these photos they actually look worse than before.

We had gotten everything ready Friday night, so by Saturday morning, we were ready to go. By lunch, we had installed the border and most of the framework. After lunch, we finished the framework and and after dinner figured out the tiles with lights.

A good day's work.

By noon Sunday, we had the first two rows of tiles installed.

This included a tricky outside corner (for which the company had *no* instructions whatsoever, so we made it up ourselves)...

...and these two tiles, the smallest in the whole room. (For reference, the rest of the tiles are 2' x 2'.) The light is reflecting oddly in this picture - there's no white splotch up there at the ceiling. Weird.

Here's where we quit Sunday afternoon, as Prince Charming went to a movie with his dad to celebrate Father's Day.

This is all we had left at that point (while the installation isn't hard, it is dirty, and I had no interest in having to take yet another shower Sunday night, so we saved the rest of the work for Monday).

If you look this way, you can see what a huge difference the ceiling makes! It does make the room feel more enclosed ("claustrophobic" would be an exaggeration), but it also brightens it up, as the white reflects much more light than the wooden joists.

Monday night, Prince Charming finished up the last two rows while I put a coat of paint on the window boxes (they're not photo-worthy yet, but they're getting there).

Which means the ceiling is done!

There's one tiny little tile we need to fix in this picture, but you can't tell, and I'm not going to point it out, and we'll fix it before anyone will ever see it. But I'm calling it done anyway.

All things considered, while it took a lot of time, hanging the ceiling was not that hard. True, did most of the work (he cut the tiles), but he agreed that it was an easy project. And such a difference!

Next up? Hanging the speakers and getting the entertainment system ready. I also need to move the books out of the “library” and into the cupboards in here, so that company can come and use that bathroom. It seems as though it might rain all week, but hopefully it will clear up by the weekend so we can use the power tools outdoors.

Warning: none of the pictures contained herein are pretty.

When I said I had no plans for the weekend, I guess that was misleading.

What I really meant was: there are tons of things to do, but none of them are scheduled. If I had said there was yard work to do, it would have inevitably rained. If I had said we were going to work on the family room, well, who knows what tragedy might have befallen us to get in our way. I wasn’t trying to be coy, just… protecting myself from Murphy’s Law.

At any rate, we did make some good progress on the family room this weekend. wrapped up the finishing on the face frame for the built-in, so on Saturday, we installed it.

Voila! The nail holes are even filled with putty. So, while technically we still need to make doors and shelves, and trim it out, this is basically it. And doors and shelves aren't urgently needed (since this storage is basically new, bonus storage).

I feel the need to add that we have the pieces for the other built-in mostly cut to size. Hopefully, since those are a little more standard in size (instead of very wide, very deep, and have the largest unit on top rather than on the bottom), they will go together faster. There are 6 base cabinets and three top shelving units, with a center support beam in there (the only part of the plan we’re unsure about). They’re quite narrow (only 12″ deep), and the shelves will be permanent instead of adjustable.

I have gotten it into my head that we need to install the ceiling, or at least as much of it as we can. I think it will make the room feel much more finished. In order to do that, however, we needed to frame in the windows. We got two out of the three of them done this weekend.

Have you ever tried to take pictures of windows? Terrible situation. I could not get the colors adjusted right in these pictures. My apologies.

Window #1

Window #2

Why yes, they are identical. They’ll look much nicer once everything is painted white. They’re virtually identical to the one in office, except that the trim will be different.

They took us two days and two trips to Home Depot, but they’re done. And we’re that much closer to being able to install the ceiling.

The one we didn’t get to?

The egress window. It took us forever just to remove the old frame. Apparently, whoever installed it planned on it never being removed. It was adhered with this silicone stuff that was still gooey, so every time you tried to pull it up, it would just glue itself back together. Blech.

And, though we didn’t do any work on this wall at all, I think it looks good, so I took a picture while I was down there.

This is where the TV will be mounted. The shelf below is for one of the speakers. You can see the connectors for the front corner speakers too, and our numerous, beautiful outlets for power, internet, and sound.

Apparently, I’ve shared a nearly identical picture before, but the old one didn’t have the shelf in it, just the brackets. We’ve cleaned up a lot, too, though you can’t really tell in this picture. The tarp that was covering the entire floor is gone now, replaced with some drop cloths that can be easily washed and stowed when not in use. We’re ready to have the carpets cleaned, finally, and then we can move the new couch out of our bedroom and into its permanent home, and start setting our house back to normal. We have house guests in July, and would like to have this project mostly wrapped up before their arrival (not including doors for the built-ins, and maybe some other details I’m not remembering right now).

Since it rained all weekend long (3″ in 3 days), we didn’t get any yard work done (but the grass seed we put down the week before sure is happy, and the rain prevented the birds from eating it all, at least temporarily). Instead, we put our efforts into some very minor home improvement projects.

This is what was left after replacing all of the interior door knobs that were original to the house. Not more than 2 were alike. And they were all hideous shades of gold, except for the basement bathroom, which had one side in a gold-and-black design and the other in shiny silver, I kid you not.

Unfortunately, since all of the doorknobs we were replacing were original to the house and were therefore installed 50+ years ago, there were some complications.

Of the 10 doorknobs we replaced, 9 doors had to be removed so we could re-bore the hole. They were all approximately 1/8" too small. Our kitchen looked like this for a good part of the weekend.

Also, we couldn’t figure out how to remove the pins from the hinges, so we had to remove the hinges from the frame instead.

Now, none of the interior doors have inappropriate handles. (There was a closet that locked from the inside, and several bedrooms with keyed locks.)

Also, they are no longer hideous. Granted, they're nothing special, but compared to what they were, they're gorgeous.

Sunday we fixed the last exterior door (from the garage to the patio). If you’re keeping track, that’s 5 exterior doors that we have, all visible if you’re standing in the kitchen. Seriously. The garage-to-patio one had a really old doorknob that was a pain to lock and unlock, and there was no deadbolt. We fixed that. Feeling quite secure, all things considered.

Also, the face frame for the built-in is now painted and has been drying for 48 hours, so we can probably start putting poly on tonight. Four coats of that – I am not looking forward to it. Then we did all the math and calculations required to plan out the other built-in. Considering all the scrap we have left from the first built-in, we only have to buy 1 piece of plywood and two sheets of beadboard to complete the whole thing. (Well, not including shelves and doors, which we’re not doing just yet.)

And, if that wasn’t enough, we finally finished up this project, a year and a half after starting it.

This is where we started in November 2009 (mostly - there was trim on the inside originally, I just forgot to get a picture before we ripped it off). I should mention that this door was in no way airtight. Also, I hate red doors. I don't need my house to be all feng shui.

This is what it has looked like for the last 18 months. Isn't this door pretty? I just love it!

It took us until this weekend to finally do what needed to be done to wrap this one up – patch the plaster and re-attach the trim on the inside. It didn’t take us all that long, so we’re not really sure why we didn’t get it done before now. I realize that I should have a picture of it actually completed, but I don’t have one of those. It looks… exactly like you’d expect it to look, with the exception of some spots that need to be painted. But, that room needs to be painted anyway, and it’s not really that bad. We’re currently … discussing color options.

This is my top choice. I found 5 nice pale yellows, but this one is the one I liked best. Two of them were too close to the trim color.

doesn’t like it. He thinks it’s too bright, or light, or something. His argument is that the room gets a lot of sun. And he’s right. But, he’s also the one who said that the living room (the room in question) and the dining room have to be painted the same color, along with the hallway that’s there. And the hallway and dining room are dark, dark, dark.

You’d think I’d suggested this:

Yowza! That would be bright! And wrong.

Perhaps it would be helpful to note that his previous house seemed to be decorated in this color scheme:

An approximation, of course. But there was a lot of grey. A blue grey, a green grey... Darling, I love you, but grey is not a color that I want to surround myself with.

[Evidence here: living room / dining room / kitchen, loft, master bedroom, spare bedroom when I moved in, spare bedroom after painting, bathroom with color scheme I helped with, and the exterior which apparently used to be blue. He chose to paint his office at our current house blue too.]

I’m sure we’ll find something eventually, though I’m not sure how. There aren’t any “darker” or “duller” shades of yellow that are anything close to acceptable. And the color currently is a boring, blah, let’s-paint-it-neutral-to-sell-it tan (and they did a crappy job). The bedroom is rust, so that rules out orange. Anything in the red/pink family would be vetoed by either (no pink) or myself (no red). The exterior of the house will be painted blue, so that’s out. Purple probably wouldn’t be appreciated. And the kitchen will eventually be green. That leaves a very small selection of colors, and I really don’t want a boring neutral.

Anyway…

I also picked out some other paint chips while we were at Home Depot.

For the kitchen... after we refinish all the cabinets, of course. And I can't finalize my color choice until that's done, since they may change in color slightly.

OK, I didn't pick the top two - I just saw them on Glidden's site and thought the basement bathroom could be cute in one of those colors. The bottom one, Tropical Surf, is what I want to paint my office.

If the government shuts down, I could have some time on my hands in July. I could get a lot of painting done, depending on how long we’re not working. I’m trying to see the silver lining in the uncertainty of being a state worker. How am I doing? I definitely could get my office repainted, since it’s small and I’ve already repainted it once, and it only needs a bit of prep. The basement bathroom is small, but needs a lot of prep work due to peeling paint. My bathroom is really small, and could easily be repainted, but I was thinking I’d do it the same yellow as the living room, dining room and hallway, so we need to find some consensus there. That only leaves the kitchen (which has to wait on that cabinet refinishing project), and the basement hallway and spare bedroom (these are on schedule for a remodel to remove the hideous wood paneling). Oh, and the exterior of the house. And the fence needs to be restained. Details, details.

Murphy’s Law implies that if I pick out all my paint colors and get all set to paint the first week of July, the legislature will end up passing a budget and I won’t have to deal with a shut down.

I was supposed to post this yesterday, but didn’t get it finished in time. I should have something later today about sewing, though I don’t have pictures yet.

You know, the digging for the irrigation system we did on Sunday? (I had a headache from noon to about 9 pm that day, and two doses of Advil barely put a dent in it… I was crabby.)

Since I was getting caught up on photo taking yesterday, I decided to get some shots of all the work we did.

This is where we ended up before the snow fell last fall. did some more digging a week or two ago, but I didn’t get a shot of that. (Basically he connected that little trench I had dug to the larger hole near the deck that he had dug, and then continued a ways into the yard.

Through the yard...

Trenches out to where the sprinkler heads will be. (Some day, that spot on the right will be a strawberry patch, with maybe a raspberry bush for fun. That part on the left, well, there aren't any official plans, but those bushes are likely to be ripped out for more vegetable gardening. But not this year.)

Around the corner.... (On the right, where that pile of dirt is, is where we're placing an outdoor spigot. There's another trench to be dug on the left, going into the far corner - a decision I began to regret once I started digging it and realized exactly how far that was.)

Prince Charming made it almost to the fence! (I only did those two side-trenches and started on the diagonal corner one. He worked a little faster/harder than I did.)

To be fair, part of my time was spent doing a bit of pruning. Pardon the old picture, but it’s the only one I had of these trees.

Two years ago, shortly after we moved in. Most of that green in the background is weeds, but don't focus on that. See those weird spindly trees? They continued to sprout new trunks from the ground, and they looked even weirder after two years of neglect. (I wasn't sure what to do with them... they were so strange, and it was a very low priority.)

Well, all those extra trunks were in my way, so it was time for them to go. If I was going to crawl around, digging through the rocks and black plastic, I wasn’t going to tolerate getting branches stuck in my hair every time I moved.

I should have taken a proper “before” picture, but I didn’t. I did get this “after” one, though.

I swear, I only cut off the bottom branches that were truly extraneous, and the dead stuff. They look even worse than they did before (though no weirder).

Look closer at that one in the back. This is all that's left after I trimmed off the dead stuff. This might be the saddest tree I've ever seen. Worse than Charlie Brown's Christmas tree.

I wasn’t too careful when digging in that area, and may or may not have cut through several tree roots. Let’s be honest, these trees aren’t doing any good here, and if they were to die of their own free will and fall over, they won’t hurt anything. They can’t weigh much. And I’m all about getting rid of the ugly plants, even if they were purposefully planted. (Cases in point: multiple rose bushes, multiple dying shrubs.)

I’m not sure when we’ll get more work done. went to a movie last night, and when he came home we spent the rest of the evening (2 hours!) replacing the rest of the exterior door locks. Part of that involved removing a door from the frame and using a drill press on it. Should have gotten a picture of that. The big thing is that we are now properly locked, and I have a new key on my key chain (bringing me to a grand total of 2 keys). It’s almost like we own this house or something.

At any rate, I have plans tonight, and again on Thursday, so I’m not sure when we’ll pull out the shovels again. We have more side-trenches to dig, and then we can start laying the tubing and assembling. We did all the testing on Sunday to see which shapes were appropriate and exactly where to put the sprinkler heads. Throughout this process, I have to keep reminding myself that we are saving a ton of money doing it ourselves, because this is really not a very fun project. But think of all the vegetables we can grow next year!

now has shelves in his office! He’s been working hard on these for the past… two weeks. Very successful (and non-injurious) use of the biscuit joiner was involved.

Shelf 1. There's a television monitor that goes underneath it (the black mount and the white electrical outlet), and that cabinet on the right is the gas meter, for reference.

shelf 2 - under the window, which is the temporary resting spot for his new clock (his first Etsy purchase!).

You can see the detail work here, and the excellent job he did at finishing. Our favorite brand of stain, General Finishes, just upgraded to a "new formula," and he said it is even better than it used to be. Very exciting (if you can get excited about stain).

We figure that finishing the ceiling (the last of the wires have been placed) will take about an hour. He also has to make shelves for the closet, though the frame is already purchased (Connections from the Container Store), and then it really is done! And the stuff in the hallway will have a home again, and he can use it as he intended, and… we’ll have completed a project! I can hardly contain myself.

[Editor's note: I didn't take any of these pictures, and the only assistance I provided on the creation of the shelves was a bit of stabilizing during the biscuit cutting and an extra hand during the gluing/clamping process. He did everything else.]

Sidenote: “Gold Coast” sometimes refers to the area of Australia that is right next to Brisbane, which is currently under water.

Additional sidenote: A bunch of these pictures turned out blurry (again) – a dark basement is still not an ideal place to take pictures, no matter how much you lighten it up. And I’m apparently not very good at standing still. I swear I pressed the focus button though!

So, I finally have pictures of the newly painted family room! After some patching and a bit more paint on the trim last night, we’re declaring this paint job done. I’m just going to share the pictures and let them speak for themselves. I did try to get the color consistent in all of them, but I see that one or two are off a bit. The majority of photos depict the color correctly, I think (which, again, is Gold Coast White by Glidden, of which we only used one gallon, though be bought two).

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For those of you not as familiar with this room, I’ve got some before/after collages you can view here.

You can see we also got outlet covers on most of the outlets (most of which are re-installed), and the wires for the front speakers are all set up (we’re still missing two connectors that weren’t in stock). We had to order covers for the Ethernet ports, and those should arrive soon. That really helped a lot, getting those covers on. It seems much more finished (to me).

Next up? Checking out the quality of plywood at Menards, and finding baseboard and painting it. Have you looked at the selection at Home Depot? There are two choices, literally, and one is the boring personality-less flat front that is elsewhere in the basement and will be excised eventually. Which basically leaves me with one option, in two different heights. I am not at all excited about this. (There are a few more options if we looked at MDF, but does not like the dentability of that material, and for a baseboard, I’ll agree that durability is important.) But I seem to remember that perhaps Menards had more options, so I think I’ll have to check that out while we’re looking at plywood.

Personal opinion for baseboards – shoe or no shoe? In looking for pictures/advice, I found out a few things. One, most pictures of the baseboard/carpet combo didn’t have a shoe. Two, you should install baseboard, then carpeting, and then the shoe (if you were installing all three of those things). Three, most pictures of baseboard on the internet are shown next to gorgeous hardwood floors (not helpful). So, I’m thinking (flow of consciousness here) that since we will eventually replace the carpeting in this room (once we’ve finished remodeling the rest of the basement), perhaps we should just do baseboard now, and then after we get new carpeting (in a few years), install shoe. OK, the more I research on the internet, the more I realize I have far too many decisions to make. So, I’ll just go back to my original question, shoe or no shoe?

Well, not really. Regardless of the inappropriate title that means you now have a lovely 80s song stuck in your head, let me share the progress we made the last few nights.

(Sorry the photos aren’t so good – there was a lot of drywall dust in the air that made it a bit… fuzzy down there. Hard to edit that out.)

Here's where the pocket door lives. We moved the light switch inside the room (it previously sat on the opposite wall, outside the room), and removed some of the paneling in the "hallway" which we'll be remodeling a few years from now.

After having some trouble with one of the built-ins (which involved having to remove newly installed drywall, move the walls, and re-install), the entertainment built-in is now looking more like something permanent. There's no drywall inside because it will be filled with cabinets, in case you were wondering.

Though it took two tries, the rest of the doorway/hallway and corner of the other built-in are now drywalled.

When we opened up the door opening, we found a can of mountain dew and a set of keys perched in the gap in front of that top block. You can just imagine, with five boys, how that might have happened.

Much better!

And the other end of that built-in (the library), and the attached wall, have drywall.

It's a tight little space, but it's insulated and big enough to stack firewood (or Duraflame logs until we fix the air intake issue with the fireplace).

So all that’s left is the left-front edge and top frame of the library. Shouldn’t take more than an hour tonight.

Once we’re done drywalling, we can add insulation to the library (because it’s an exterior wall, though the previous owners did not have it insulated. The top half will be covered with beadboard (for the back of the bookshelves) and the bottom will be cabinets. I was going to include some stock pictures of the beadboard and trim, but I can’t find any good ones, so you’ll just have to be patient.

There probably won’t be much visible progress over the weekend. I have tomorrow off, but does not. The next immediate steps are the corner beads, taping, and mudding, which are really his realm, and there’s that whole 24-hour dry time between coats thing. But hopefully sometime next week I’ll be priming and painting. That should be exciting. (Or horrifying, if I end up hating the color. Not the time to worry about that though.)

Remember that basement remodel? Here’s where we left off last (walls prepped, one wall framed, pocket door hung).

We framed out the rest of the walls.

And we framed out the built-ins.

We installed new lighting (so awesome - you have to see it in person to understand how wonderful it is); Kevin helped. A lot.

We ran a new circuit to the room (since it was shared with several other rooms and the situation was not good) and put in a reasonable number of power outlets (7 instead of 2) and Ethernet ports (4). I installed all those metal plates you see there that are protecting the wires from being hit by a drywall screw. I have amazing hammer skills. We also ran the line for the speakers, though it's very hard to tell in the pictures.

And then we added insulation (by the way, the air compressor is way too powerful to use to staple the insulation in - we had to do it the old fashioned way with a staple gun and a hammer).

This room will be so much warmer now! Previously there was only insulation in the ceiling around the outside, and the wood paneling was sitting basically on the cinder block walls. We now have a proper 3 1/2" of fiberglass keeping the cold (or heat) out.

There was a little more playing around with the weird electrical situation.

To the left of that partial wall will be a built-in that will house all of the entertainment system (except for the TV, which will be mounted on that wall beneath the window to nowhere).

And last night by 7pm, we had 80% of our drywall done!

I learned how to attach drywall, and got pretty good by the end!

Next up is finishing the drywall, which is 5 small sections (none wider than 5 feet) that frame out the built-ins and the doorway.

is still at home today (I’m back at work), his last day of vacation (that was consumed mostly by jury duty, unfortunately). I’m not sure what he’ll end up working on, drywall, taping, shoveling the driveway – such a fun list! Tonight we’re taking a short break from our Home Depot shopping trips to go to the MOA and do some after-Christmas shopping. And I have to make a pie. And then it’s more… of the same.

If you were curious, I finally decided on a paint color. It’s a pale, warm yellow from Glidden (whose name I can’t remember, and none of the paint swatches on their website look right). Yellow was my initial instinct, it being a dark basement with a short ceiling, and after playing around with blues and grays, I finally found a yellow that approved of. I’m told that the mudding process will take several days at least (blame the 24 hour drying period between applications), so maybe we’ll get around to painting by next weekend. Then we’ll be ready to start building the built-ins, and we’ll learn all sorts of new skills.

Remember last week when I told you to use your imagination? Well, if that activity taxed you, have no fear… pictures are here!

Patching....

Surprisingly nothing to patch here. See that big hole? It took a lot of work, but the entire door and frame were removed. It's a beautiful (surprisingly large) 36" opening!

Primed. Looks so much better already, right?

More primed.

Wall built, pocket door hung, and framework for built-ins started.

Isn't that a beautiful door? It will look even cuter when it's painted white (it's a good thing we're painting it - the bins we used to prop it up for cutting it down - about 3" in height - left some ugly marks on one side).

Sorry that the pictures aren’t the greatest quality, but even during the daylight hours we’re lacking in light in the basement. Why?

We had a small snowfall this weekend. Ahem. Blizzard.

Surprisingly, 16+ inches of snow quickly fills up window wells, especially when the plastic covers you bought to protect them are sitting out in the garage, uninstalled. We're smart like that.

It's hard to tell exactly how much snow fell at our house because of all the weird ways wind whips around our property. But, we're 5 minutes from the airport, and they reported 16.5 inches, so I think that's a safe bet.

The deck is even stranger. There's a small strip on the side there with no snow whatsoever.

...but most of the deck looked like this (until we raked the snow off of the roof - now there's a pile that almost touches the roof, because there was a ledge of 2+ feet up there that needed to be dealt with - ice was already starting to form).

From the front door. Where'd the stairs go? (The other front door was even worse, but the pictures did not turn out.)

So, as you can see, we were busy this weekend. Friday night we went to the Timberwolves game, which was actually really good. For first quarter it didn’t seem like it would be that way, but then people started to show up (the stands were probably 1/2 full at tip-off), and then we started winning, and it got exciting for the next three quarters.

Saturday we started to hang the pocket door frame (the wall was already up), and then we tackled some of the snow in our driveway so we could go out to Home Depot for more supplies. We stopped at REI for more winter gear and the grocery store for firewood, so we made the most out of our short trip. The Rav performed beautifully.

After cutting down the door, we installed it, and discovered a rookie mistake we’d made in our initial framing (of course one of the walls wasn’t straight). So Sunday morning we took it all down, fixed the part of the frame that wasn’t plumb (importantly, it was the part that the door closed up against, so there wasn’t a nice seal between the two pieces before fixing it), and re-installed everything. Then we built the two side walls for one of the built-ins (this one will hold the electronics and DVDs, and who knows what else – it’s a big space).

After lunch, we spent an hour and a half shoveling. Our bobcat-driving neighbor (not the next door neighbor with the chainsaw, but a different one) had stopped by on Saturday once it stopped snowing and plowed for us, but there was still the front walkway, the steps, and some pile-up in front of the garage. Oh, and many, many feet of snow on the roof that needed to come down. I was very thankful for my new winter hat and mittens, because it was 5* outside, and that was as warm as it was going to get. (It was -8* this morning while I waited for the bus.)

is on jury duty this week, and I’m feeling quite tired from the shoveling, so we may or may not make progress tonight. Maybe we’ll give ourselves the night off. Maybe not. In my off time this weekend, I did a lot of reading and a tiny bit of ironing, and four loads of laundry. Not exactly the crafting I had in mind. I decided that I need to set the ironing aside and do some actual sewing (perhaps that sounds strange, as most people would procrastinate on ironing, but I like to have it done and out of the way, and it makes me a bit twitchy thinking about that pile sitting there, wrinkly, waiting for me).

Stay warm!