A Quickie

Our next trip was a quicky, and I was gone for much of it. But when I returned, Gerald and J.C. had gotten a lot done.

Gerald replaced this corner cabinet in the kitchen...

With a different one he had found that had glass panels in the front (not installed here) and an "appliance garage" below. The cabinet to the left was one he had made at the shop. They matched up perfectly.

Gerald also brought up other cabinet components he had built and painted, and were ready to assemble.

He had been lucky enough to find additional tile that made a perfect match to the tile we had run out of, so he filled in the last bit. It was nice to get it in place.

Meanwhile, J.C. finished up the plumbing work and began skinning the last wall in the utility room. Unfortunately, the next day we noticed that the subfloor was wet and at least part of J.C.'s nice wall will have to come down so we can find and fix the leak.

Gerald thought we might consider using screws instead of nails so we can get into the wall more easily should something else go wrong.

Aside from that, we were busy with guests. POA VP Don Burton stopped by for lunch one day. Another day, we visited our newest property owners, Bjorn and Rachel, on their parcel. They visited us the next evening for cocktails and we all had dinner together at Rumors. The next day, Joy, our POA secretary, and her husband, David, stopped by for a visit just as we were packing up to head home.

While I worked on the glass, J.C. hung the lights over what will be our "lunch counter."

Meanwhile, Gerald went back to work finishing up our guest bathroom. He had gotten some paint the color we thought we wanted for our accent wall, but when we put it on the wall, it looked very dark.

So we kept adding "Celtic Linen," the off-white we used for the beadboard in the rest of the bathroom.

Eventually, we got a color we could live with, and Gerald finished the painting, and then finished up the moldings around the ceilings and doors.

Brickwork

Gerald and I continued the brickwork in the kitchen.

As we hadn't yet installed all the upper kitchen cabinets, we worked across and down. We really liked how it looked behind the heat stove.

We also installed this Pottery Barn cabinet on the other side of the refrigerator. It's not really a kitchen cabinet. It originally stood on a base and was meant to be freestanding, but we liked the open, glass-fronted effect. Here it is without its glass doors and panels.

Gerald had to take out the glass to paint the cabinet. Here he is showing me how to re-install the glass with a bead of silicone. That was my project for the rest of the day. Then we left them to cure until we returned.

A Mouse in the House

Living in the country, of course, means we have all kinds of critters. We mostly like them, except when they take up residence.

From time to time, we discover mouse droppings. When we do, we put out poison and the mouse droppings disappear, for a while.

Seldom is a mouse as bold as this one, who came out in the middle of the day. What made us notice is that he was dragging this block of rat poison around with him all over the house.

I presume the mouse poison did it's trick, but we continued to see droppings even on our next visit. When I went to look for the rat poison, I found the mice had already helped themselves. They had chewed a hole in the bottom of the package and eaten one, leaving the empty wrapper inside.