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.

Screens and Tiles and Bricks, Oh My!

When we arrived at the land, we were very glad to see that, before he left last time, JC had finished installing the retractable screen on the back door.

Gerald painted it green to match our trim.

It was wonderful to be able to leave the backdoor open and get some cross-ventilation. For some reason, the wasps were particularly fond of this door.

Next, we worked on tiling the corridor between the kitchen and utility room (aka "tack room"). The idea was to continue the tile into the utility room, but we ran out of tiles. We ended up 34 tiles short of the doorway.

Gerald had been able to find one upper corner cabinet, which he installed.

He used a plastic storage bin and a couple of planks to get it to the right height before attaching it to the wall.

Once that was in place, we had a frame of reference to start installing the thin brick on the kitchen wall. I "buttered" and Gerald "stuck."

Here's what we were able to get done. It changed the whole look of the kitchen.

Kinda Batty

While we were sitting on the porch one late-afternoon, something hit the deck, just missing Gerald. It turned out to be this bat. It was alive but moving very slowly.

We looked around at the underside of our porch roof for any evidence of bats living there, but couldn't find any. Gerald carried it off the porch with this fly swatter, which gives you an idea of its size.

On a Sad Note...

Gerald and I had to say good bye to our good and faithful companion during this trip.

We are still trying to adjust to life without Bubba. We miss him terribly. But we buried him up at the land, where he was so happy. We're sure that if there is a doggy heaven, Bubba is there, hunting lizards and chasing bunnies.

Wrapping Up the Ceilings

On our next trip, the focus was finishing the last of the ceilings.

We started on the guest room ceiling, which seemed like it was going to be relatively easy because it didn't involve a lot of cut outs. But we were using 16-foot long boards, which came with some challenges.

By the end of the first day, we had just finished a little over half.

We didn't have enough wood to finish all the ceilings in wood, so we decided to use drywall in the master bedroom as a couple of the walls were drywall.

We used J.D. Killer's crew again. To our chagrin, they showed up at 6:30 a.m.

Having perfected our system and gotten such an early start, we were finishing the guest bedroom ceiling at lunchtime.

Gerald started installing ceiling molding after lunch.