i'm a lumberjack (and i'm ok)
it's April 14 (yeah yeah, long time since last post) ... and there is snow on my car. snow on the ground. snow on the roof. yes, SNOW. the white fluffy stuff. yeah. i officially protest. i wish that global warming would hurry up, i'm freezing my butt off here. a whole Saturday of potential outdoor work ... gone.so a lot has happened since last time. first, fun things ...
my friend Luke set up an Over The Rhine concert at the Goshen Theater. so, we ventured north for the weekend. the concert was fantastic. one of the best shows we've seen them do. coincidentally, we also had front row seats. aren't we lucky?! i wonder who did the seating arrangements? we hung around after the show to help Luke clean up and got to meet the band! they were all really nice and happily endured our questioning. we got a picture with Linford and Karin, but it turned out really dark so i didn't think it was worth posting. after everything was closed up we got to hang a bit with Luke and Gretchen which was great. wish we could do that more often.the weekend happened to also be over of my youngest nephew
Benjamin's 2nd birthday. wow, i cannot believe how old they are all becoming (Bryce recently turned 13)! we had a great time hanging out with my mom, Dave & Agne and the boys. Agne's grandma just arrived in the 
US for a visit, so we got to see her and Agne's mom (who is living in Chicago) too! Dave & I also took the opportunity to build our new kitchen counter. Dave did most of the work of course. it was fun being back at the old Mica Shop (i worked there in high school). brought back a lot of memories. we can't wait for the new sink and top to get put in (we'll wait for Dave or Dad to come down sometime since it won't fit in the car).we've been doing all sorts of stuff around the house
of course. Chrissy was going to repaint the inside of the built-in cabinet in the dining room. that is until she realized there was old painted-over wallpaper in there ... which was coming loose. so instead, she has started removing the old wallpaper -- one of the layers came off cleanly giving us a glimpse of some of the old patterns. i wonder if she's noticed that i haven't offered to help remove it? (not a big fan of wallpaper removal.)i did finally get all the shoe moulding in. well, the
oak pieces that is. the white pieces just got painted and should go in in the next week or so. the oak turned out pretty good. i wish it would have matched the trim a bit better, but its ok (matches the floor). i included some pics of some of the
more challenging areas. i'm not sure if the radius at the bottom of the stairs will stay this way (segmented). Dave suggested maybe cutting a radiused piece out of a solid piece of wood ... so maybe someday i'll do that. i had tried bending pieces of the regular 
qtr round to no avail (including kerfing out the back ... soaking in water ... etc.). unless my goal was trying to break wet qtr round into 2 pieces, because i did achieve that nicely. and i nearly went deaf kerfing out the back with the miter saw. super fun.i've been tinkering on the upstairs bathtub also to get it ready for it's transformation into a shower. after much consternation i managed to get the old rusty drain basket out. after doing so, i stupidly kept working on a second project -- unplugging the drain line. you see, when the water is standing in the tub without the
drain basket, it leaks out and onto your kitchen ceiling, ending up on your kitchen floor, appliances, etc. Hazel actually did her first useful thing since we've had her ... she heard the dripping, thought it was rain, and started to hide like she normally does when it rains (we're still confused about that). Chrissy saw this and then heard the dripping and got me to realize what was happening. whoops. no harm though, thankfully ... except to my plumbing ego. i think i did figure out where the clog is -- in the old drum trap. tried getting into there today with no luck. i think i'll wait til Dad is here sometime to get into that, i don't want to break anything (myself included). the third project was to clean up the old water supply lines and the overflow drain. they looked so bad i thought i would need to replace them, but a good couple hours of elbow grease, steel wool, and "barkeepers friend" got them all nice and shiny looking again. the overflow coating came off a bit at the top, but the improvement overall was really shocking.the week or two of nice weather that we had was quite lovely. we got all the plants outside ready for spring ... the 43 ornamental grasses got haircuts, the shrubs pruned, grass mowed. the grass looks ok ... i'm not totally happy with it. the new stuff i seeded last fall looks much better than the areas i didn't totally replace. hopefully they'll even out in color when it gets warm again. we also cut down the random trees in the back yard (hence, "i'm a lumberjack" if you missed that). i originally thought they were all black walnut (with 1 random little maple). but my dad was here one evening and immediately noticed a difference in some of them ... they were a mix of butternut and walnut. never really heard of butternut before, but it's a fairly similar to walnut. the old man was right, again. i'll have some before and after pictures next time ... we still need to chop up one last tree and have the stumps ground out. assuming the weather gets better, we'll do that next week. we hope to pick out a tree or two, a nice tree or two, to replace them with. walnuts/butternuts are not a good tree for a small lawn. especially with a garden under them.
on the horizon -- continued work on the bathrooms, planting an expanded veggie garden, more trim work, and hopefully sink and counter installation. we're also working on planning the next set of projects for maybe this fall (siding and wall insulation). maybe we should finish the current projects first?
posted by Chris and Chrissy Miller @ 11:10 PM
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