Summer may be ending but the house stuff continues

My little boy is officially back in school! Since he's a full-week student, we enrolled him in a combination of PreKindergarten and Junior Kindergarten this year. So hopefully he'll be ready for Kindergarten next year. Although I think this year is going to be more challenging for us than for him since we're the ones who have to keep these class schedules straight! So far we had to attend 2 welcome day celebrations and 2 parent orientation sessions. By the time B is done at this school he will have attended almost all of the classes that they offer!

The long weekend enabled us to do some more work on the house. Three coats of cherry stain and three coats of varnish later and the front door almost matches the red windows. And you can see the supports are now in for the new front deck.

The masons worked on laying the bluestone on the front steps of the kitchen porch. It was so nice to finally cover up all that concrete!

And I absolutely love our new side door into the garage. The hinges were salvaged from a junky screen door that we're throwing away and the handle was the original one that went with the previous door. Two coats of black paint on the hardware and voila! It looks wonderfully medieval! Now if we can only find garage doors to match this, we'll be all set!

Fun with widgets...

I found this fun little widget on another blog today. Check it out!

Get this widget!

Time for a construction update

I'm long overdue for posting some updated pictures of the house, but for good reason. I've been busy working on staining the front door for the past few nights and I think after 3 coats of cherry stain, it's finally at the color that I want it to be. The first 2 coats made it look too similar to the cedar and I didn't want the door to just blend in with the siding. But when I finished up last night it was too dark outside to take a picture of it, so I plan on doing that tonight.

As for some other renovation updates, here is a picture of our new copper fountain that is embedded into the stone work between the two garage doors. J is so proud of this find!

Here is a view of the finished stone wall on the side of the house.

And this is the front kitchen porch. That kitchen door is the next on my list to get stained. Let's hope the dry weather holds out for this weekend! And hopefully today the masons will be putting the stone on that archway. The steps will also be covered with huge slabs of bluestone.
And you're probably wondering what that cute little cedar box is on the side of the house. Well, it's our carpenter's ingenious solution to hide the ugly looking electric meter! The front panel slides down so the electric company can still access it, but last year they replaced our old meter with a digital one, so they really won't have a need to open the box. Have I mentioned lately how much I love our carpenter?! He designed and built that box in one day.

Dreaming of the sun, surf and pina coladas

My desktop wallpaper is this gorgeous scene from Belize with sparkling turquoise water, white sand and huge palm trees blowing in the breeze. This morning at work I spent a solid minute staring at it imagining I was sipping a pina colada... Is that a bad thing? That must be my subconcious telling me I need a vacation. Unfortunately I still 3 months and 3 weeks to wait until we head down to our very own tropical vacation (according to the cute little ticker at the bottom of my blog.) Bleh - that's much too long to wait!

This week has been quite the downer week - here's why. J did not get that manager job he had applied and interviewed for in his own department. A fellow co-worker (who was a former manager) got it instead. But his director assured him that they will be grooming him for the associate manager position which if all goes well, he should be promoted to in about 6 months. Yeah, we've heard that song and dance before so I'll believe it when I see it. I was so ticked off when I heard all of this that I went out for a 4 mile run and hubby and B went out for a walk.

As far as the home renovations are going, the carpenter is back (he was framing a house for his friend for the past 2 weeks) and is making some solid progress on the siding. The masons are pretty much done with the front of the garage and that side wall of the house (despite the fact that they were there all weekend.) They still have a few things to finish up and when they do I'll take some more pictures to post up. Last weekend I spent some time staining the front fiberglass door. Hopefully that will be done this weekend. And let's just say it's a good thing that the garage doors will be getting replaced too. This morning one of them lost it's wire cable which then proceeding to get stuck in the track and jammed the whole door. In the midst of trying to get it un-stuck and re-wired, the entire spring on the door snapped off and flew to the back of the garage. Not exactly what you want to be dealing with at 6:15am! So now there's one door that's propped open with a bucket and until we get the spring re-attached, isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Is the weekend here yet?!?

I'm an Auntie...again!

Last Thursday afternoon we were pleasantly diverted from all of our construction craziness when my sister-in-law called to announce the arrival of their second child - James Eric. So we stopped by the hospital (along with the entire family) to see them, my neice, and their new bouncing baby boy. Here are some pictures of my neice being a bit overprotective of her little brother when one of her other cousins wanted a turn holding him.

It was just by chance that I managed to capture this adorable moment.

And just so you know, there hasn't been much progress on the house due to all the rainy weather we've had for the past week. I'm really hoping that we're done with this rain for a while so they can get moving again.

More pictures...

Ok - I finally got around to taking some more pictures yesterday, before it started raining thankfully! Our carpenter is zipping right along with the cedar on the back and it's looking great.

And here you can see B followed me out with his jar of bubbles.

Walking to the side of the garage - these are the windows I reglazed and repainted.

A view of the front kitchen porch.

Front view of the garage.

And a view of the garage/side/front of house.

New Bar + Old Friends = Good Times!

I spent all morning Saturday staining yet another box of cedar shakes - 4 boxes done, 2 more to go! And it's a good thing that I started early because by 1pm, the sky was black and thunder was rolling on through followed by torrential rain. But all that hard work paid off as I managed to get everything done and put away while the thunder was still in the far western area of the state. That was it for the work outside that day, which was ok since I plans to get together with my old high school pals KC, Chel and sj (Look here for pictures) at pre-opening party for a brand new bar that will be opening up at the end of the month in the capital city. A friend of ours entered into a partnership with 2 other guys to open up a new bar/club in the former Trout Brook Brewery building and althought they definitely have their work cut out for them, the character of the place speaks for itself. There are 2 rooms, both with stages for live bands and a bar in each room. Dark wood everywhere, paintings on the wall, ornate lighting fixtures and even an old whisky cask above a mantel where there used to be a suspended floor for elevated dining. I remember having a holiday luncheon for work up there once! There is also a full 2nd floor that will be able to accomodate 100-200 people once it gets all cleaned out and spruced up. Turnout on Saturday was pretty good for an invitation-only event. I'd have to say at its peak there were at least 250 in attendance. Not bad for a first night!

Now on to the fun stuff... The night got off to a bit of a slow start, but a few tequila sunrises and a buffet dinner later, we started eyeing the available men for my now very available BFF Chel. She zoned in on one in particular, forever immortalized as "baseball hat guy" who we discovered much later as being engaged. Bummer! One of J's collegues from work however became enamored with Chel, but based on her reaction, I'm thinking he's not quite her type. In all it was a very fun night. Both bands that played were really good and I'm looking forward to heading back down there at the end of the month for opening night!